O Helena, poor imitation of a flower, you were better than nothing.
There is, or was, a small restaurant which lies below the sheer cliffs of the Acropolis on Dionysus Avenue. It is a pleasant place, with a dusty courtyard shaded by a trellis of creeping vines. The charcoal spit stands almost on the pavement, and most nights of the week they roast a small piglet whole. The odour of crackling pork lends an air of light-headed hungry gaiety to the evenings there. Two waiters haunt the place, a fat one and an emaciated one, both equally solemn, speaking an odd malapropian brand of English which adds immensely to the general hilarity. They knew me as Mr What, and the querulous quality of that appellation appealed to my self-congratulatory sense of alienation. It was there that Helena and I had our first date of the new age, on a soft spring evening in March. She arrived an hour late, during which period I was reduced to a state comparable to what I imagine must be the fury of a nerve wriggling in the black hollow of a rotten tooth. But of course, as these things will go, when she stepped with that perfect aplomb under the arch of vine leaves, and illuminated the darkness, I was all smiles and tiny attentions, the picture of gibbering idolatry. God, how it burns me now. She had dressed with care for the occasion, in a black dress of severe simplicity, head bare, no jewellery, look on this poor helpless sinner. I held her chair, but she sat down before I could push it forward for her. I never could master the fine timing required by the task. I returned to my place opposite her. I offered her a cigarette, fumbled with matches, flame, smoke, ashes, it was pandemonium. She had still not spoken, but watched me with a thoughtful calm. I said,
‘Will you have a drink?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Coffee?’
‘No thank you.’
‘How about a screw? Ho ho.’
She laid her elbows on the table and put her hands, with fingers clasped, under her chin.
‘I want to warn you,’ she said evenly. ‘If you insist on speaking to me like this I shall see no reason to remain here. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
How, how could I take such solemn crap from her, meekly, with a little simpering smile, how could I do it, how? With the greatest of ease.
Spiro, the fat waiter, came and moaned at us. I ordered some food or other, god knows what, hot twat maybe, I cannot remember. It never did get eaten. Helena puffed delicately at her cigarette. She looked really splendid, her hair newly washed and glowing at the tips in the swaying light from the bulbs above us among the leaves. A cat leapt suddenly in silence on to the table between us. Helena did not stir. Any other woman would have squealed at that sudden blur of fur, but not my Helena. I gave the animal a punch in its surprisingly delicate rib-cage, and it went away (not without a last spiteful glance) as it had come, without a sound. Helena said,
‘I came to speak to you about Yacinth.’
‘You too?’
‘Yes. Julian asked you today if you would tutor him.’
‘What could I teach Julian?’
‘I meant Yacinth, as you well know.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Your sense of humour is very childish. Well, will you do it?’
‘What?’
She looked heavenwards, leafwards, groaning.
‘My god,’ she muttered between clenched teeth. ‘You are impossible.’
‘Helena.’
‘Well?’
‘Don’t you ever laugh? No wait, I mean really laugh, just for the sake of it, not at something clever or witty, but just at the foolishness of things, you know? I’m serious. I want to know. You must have a sense of humour, everyone has.’
‘What you mean is, I must have a sense of humour like yours because you … you like me, isn’t that so?’
I put a hand to my forehead and stared hard at a spent match on the table.
‘No, that isn’t it. It’s just that, I can’t take all this solemnity.’
‘You do not have to take it, as you put it.’
‘Don’t say things like that, Helena. I’m trying to talk to you. We’ve never really talked. I want to understand you.’
‘Why?’ she asked, with an odd venom.
‘Because I love you.’
She lowered her eyes and gazed at the cigarette burning in her fingers. She had that habit, which I find dementing, of never breaking the ash before the last possible moment. A good inch and a half of dead tobacco now drooped obscenely from the tip of her cigarette. In the quietest of voices, she said,
‘He has laughed at me so often that now I have forgotten how to laugh myself.’
There was no need to ask her who he was. She dropped her ash into the waiting tray. People with that habit always do make it at the last moment, and that, for some perverse reason, drives me into an even more extravagant rage.
‘Is it that bad?’ I asked.
She made no reply, and did not look at me. Her attitude, perfectly still, with head bowed, was heartrending. I felt a terrible pity for her, a pity which was based on deeper things than the difficulty of her life with Julian. I reached forward and touched her hand.
‘I’ll teach you to laugh again.’
I said that, I did, I really did. Let us have it once more, for the joy of it.
‘I shall teach you to laugh again, Helena.’
O boy, O boy. I am slapping my thigh. Spiro laid our meal before us with such a depth of melancholy concern that it seemed that he was convinced that it would be our last taste of food. We both pawed at the stuff for a while, and then pushed it aside. The cat returned and stuck a claw into my trouser-leg. I gave it a look and it slunk away. Then I lit another cigarette, without fumbling this time. I was in command now. Nothing like a bit of pity to send one soaring above the poor lump who had merited it. I said,
‘Come to my flat.’
She nodded mutely. Was there a tear in her eye? Some hope. I put a guiding hand under her elbow.
So she returned with me to my squalid quarters, and for an hour we had some rough and tumble on the bed, while a neon sign outside the window punctuated our darkness every second second, a great red heartbeat now illuminating a smooth flank, now a bruised and bitten nipple. And what was her first question afterwards, what was it? I give it in all of its passionate abandon.
‘You’ll do what I ask, you’ll be Yacinth’s tutor?’
And what was my reply? It also quivers in the coils of erotic fever.
‘All right.’
She put on her clothes and went away, leaving me in a pulsing red and black world, a trident of nail-wounds on my shoulder, my mouth throbbing with echoes of the soft explosions of her kisses. So much for odours of hot musk.
In dreams now I sometimes see myself sitting motionless in a room, a room which I have never known in any waking moment. All my most precious things are gathered there, but I never look at them; my attention is fixed upon a flower which stands on a low white table before me. A petal has broken from the blossom, but it does not fall. It never falls, never decays. I can feel the velvet softness of the flower’s flesh, can feel the enormity of the gap which lies between the petal and the stem, am torn by the agony of separation. The petal does not fall. That is how I remember. In real time, god knows, the petal did fall, a whole cornucopia of rot and wrack came spilling down around me, until my mouth was choked with foul sodden leaves and the pus of cancerous orchids. But recollections do not decay, unless I should forget, and I shall not forget. Take these moments. Treat them with care, for they are my inheritance.