Yet it was to be a strange departure, full of small unforeseen elements — I mean the messenger being a hunchback in a silver suit, a flower in his lapel, a perfumed handkerchief in his sleeve!
And the sudden springing to life of the little village which had for so long tactfully ignored our very existence, save for an occasional gift of fish or wine or coloured eggs which Athena brought us, folded in her red shawl. She, too, could hardly bear to see us go; her stern old wrinkled mask crumpled into tears over each item of our slender baggage. But ‘They will not let you leave without a hospitality’ she repeated stubbornly. ‘The village will not let you go like that.’ We were to be offered a farewell banquet!
As for the child I had conducted the whole rehearsal of this journey (of her whole life, in truth) in images from a fairy story.
Many repetitions had not staled it. She would sit staring up at the painting and listening attentively. She was more than prepared for it all, indeed almost ravenous to take up her own place in the gallery of images I had painted for her. She had soaked up all the confused colours of this fanciful world to which she had once belonged by right and which she would now recover — a world peopled by those presences — the father, a dark pirate-prince, the stepmother a swarthy imperious queen….
‘She is like the playing-card?’
‘Yes. The Queen of Spades.’
‘And her name is Justine.’
‘Her name is Justine.’
‘In the picture she is smoking. Will she love me more than my father or less?’
‘She will love you both.’ There had been no other way to explain it to her, except in terms of myth or allegory — the poetry of infant uncertainty. I had made her word-perfect in this parable of an Egypt which was to throw up for her (enlarged to the size of gods or magi) the portraits of her family, of her ancestors. But then is not life itself a fairy-tale which we lose the power of apprehending as we grow?
No matter. She was already drunk upon the image of her father.
‘Yes, I understand everything.’ With a nod and a sigh she would store up these painted images in the treasure-box of her mind. Of Melissa, her dead mother, she spoke less often, and when she did I answered her in the same fashion from the storybook; but she had already sunk, pale star, below the horizon into the stillness of death, leaving the foreground to those others — the playing-card characters of the living.
The child had thrown a tangerine into the water and now leaned to watch it roll softly down to the sandy floor of the grotto. It lay there, flickering like a small flame, nudged by the swell and fall of the currents.
‘Now watch me fetch it up.’
‘Not in this icy sea, you’ll die of cold.’
‘It isn’t cold today. Watch.’ By now she could swim like a young otter. It was easy, sitting here on the flat rock above the water, to recognize in her the dauntless eyes of Melissa, slanted a little at the edges; and sometimes, intermittently, like a forgotten grain of sleep in the corners, the dark supposing look (pleading, uncertain) of her father Nessim.
I remembered Clea’s voice saying once, in another world, long ago:
‘Mark, if a girl does not like dancing and swimming she will never be able to make love.’ I smiled and wondered if the words were true as I watched the little creature turn over smoothly in the water and flow gracefully downwards to the target with the craft of a seal, toes pressed back against the sky. The glimmer of the little white purse between her legs. She retrieved the tangerine beautifully and spiralled to the surface with it gripped in her teeth.
‘Now run and dry quickly.’
‘It isn’t cold.’
‘Do as you are told. Be off. Hurry.’
‘And the man with the hump?’
‘He has gone.’ Mnemjian’s unexpected appearance on the island had both started and thrilled her — for it was he who brought us Nessim’s message. It was strange to see him walking along the shingle beach with an air of grotesque perturbation, as if balancing on corkscrews. I think he wished to show us that for years he had not walked on anything but the finest pavements. He was literally unused to terra firma. He radiated a precarious and overbred finesse. He was clad in a dazzling silver suit, spats, a pearl tie-pin, and his fingers were heavily ringed. Only the smile, the infant smile was unchanged, and the oiled spitcurl was still aimed at the frontal sinus.
‘I have married Halil’s widow. I am the richest barber in all Egypt today, my dear friend.’ He blurted this out all in one breath, leaning on a silver-knobbed walking—stick to which he was clearly as unaccustomed. His violet eye roved somewhat disdainfully round our somewhat primitive cottage, and he refused a chair, doubtless because he did not wish to crease those formidable trousers. ‘You have a hard style of life here, eh? Not much luxe, Darley.’ Then he sighed and added, ‘But now you will be coming to us again.’ He made a vague gesture with the stick intended to symbolize the hospitality we should once more enjoy from the city. ‘Myself I cannot stay. I am on my way back.
I did this purely as a favour to Hosnani.’ He spoke of Nessim with a sort of pearly grandeur, as if he were now his equal socially; then he caught sight of my smile and had the grace to giggle once before becoming serious again. ‘There is no time, anyway’ he said, dusting his sleeves.
This had the merit of being true, for the Smyrna boat stays only long enough to unload mail and occasional merchandise — a few cases of macaroni, some copper sulphate, a pump. The wants of the islanders are few. Together we walked back towards the village, across the olive-groves, talking as we went. Mnemjian still trudged with that slow turtle-walk. But I was glad, for it enabled me to ask him a few questions about the city, and from his answers to gain some inkling of what I was to find there in the matter of changed dispositions, unknown factors.