‘No, I am not able to do such a thing,’ said the police chief.
‘I do appreciate that there is a certain amount of hostility against me.’
Tsouderakis eyed him with an expression the other read as either irony or contempt.
‘Hostility, you think? Mr Langstreet, you come to this quiet little town, you interfere in everything. You build things, you destroy things. You behave as your father has done. Now you have the place in a ruin and you think there is some hostility against you?!
‘Let me tell you, Mr Langstreet, there is some hostility. There are many men in Kyriotisa who would like to kill you! No, you cannot stay with me. I will advise you get out of town, go. Stay away.’
Langstreet saw that his hand trembled as it rested on the table. He withdrew it to a place of concealment on his lap.
‘I know our plans have gone wrong. My motives are unselfish, I can assure you. I hope to see Kyriotisa flourish. We’ll soon get going again. I have the money – ’
‘Oh yes, you have the money. That gives you a right to mock our religion? To do what you will with our lives?’
He flinched as if from a blow. ‘You misread the situation. I know – “You have the time, we have the money”. But I am using my money to try to benefit you. You must believe that.’
‘So why has it all gone wrong? You came in such a hurry. And, to explain, that expression is about watches, not time. It is a question of possessions. You thought you could buy up all Kyriotisa. It has angered people. So I advise you – get out of here!’
Langstreet drained his cup before standing up. ‘Very well. Thank you for past support. I do understand you are disappointed. I will try to put things right.’ He extended a hand.
Manolis Tsouderakis turned his back on it.
‘History repeating itself,’ said Langstreet. He nodded politely to the woman standing wiping her hands on her apron and left by the way he had come, into the alley.
At this stage, I had covered the north-east region of Crete, where most of the tourists stay. I had covered the Palace of Knossos. The Tourist Board of Iraklion had been helpful and provided me with photos for my book, as well as many brochures from which details went straight into my laptop. So I had moved westwards. I was staying in a pretty little hotel, The Lovos, in the Italian quarter of Hania.
Just for a day, I was taking it easy before doing the trip over the mountains southwards to Kyriotisa. It was not a visit to which I was looking forward.
Although self-pity has no part of my make-up, I wished life could be simple. In fact, I wished that a pleasant lady would enter my squalid room – naked except for maybe a bottle of vodka under her arm. I wished it so hard, I almost expected it to happen.
Nothing for it but to take a stroll. I had got talking to a nice French woman tourist. A certain mischievous expression about her lips and eyes had attracted me to sit at her table. We were seated at one of the pleasant restaurants which line the harbour front. Her name was Anne-Marie. She was on her own and staying in a hotel near me. A pretty and cultivated widow in her early fifties – my ideal. Sturdily built, with an immediately endearing swell of bosom under her blouse.
‘You are a writer! Oh, that is so so romantic!’
‘Not the way I do it.’
‘Will you put me in your next book?’
‘Mmm, depends how interesting you are…’
We were growing more intimate – she was admitting that her husband had run off with a young Netherlands boy, later committing suicide – and her pretty violet eyes with their false lashes were filling with tears – when I saw a familiar figure walking along the front. Was it? Yes, it was!
As I rose, making hasty excuses, Anne-Marie grasped my wrist. It was a firm, determined, clever grasp, so that for a moment I was back at university, playing cricket for my college, with a firm, determined, clever grasp of my bat, as I went in to score a century or a duck.
‘Let’s meet again. You interest me! My life is like a book!’
‘Good – I long to hear everything. Hotel Lovos, Room 5.’
‘D’accord!’
‘Wiedersehen.’
Hurriedly, I went to catch up with Kathi Langstreet.
Although she gave me a smile, her face was lined and became grave and distant. I suggested that we sat at one of the café tables and talked.
She looked at her watch. She had managed to hire a car to take her to Kyriotisa. It would come for her in an hour. Nevertheless, she joined me at a gingham covered table, perching her behind on the edge of the chair. She sat looking out to sea, occasionally biting her lower lip as I talked.
After the waiter had served us two cappuccinos, she broke into what I was saying.
‘I worry so about Archie.’ She then told me a long story about the family finances. She had discovered that her husband had taken out a loan to pay for the expenses of Cliff and Vibe’s wedding. This worried her greatly; they had never needed loans. She suspected that Archie had squandered a small fortune on the venture at Kyriotisa, rashly lending money here and there for which it was extremely unlikely he would ever receive any return. She protested that she was not a materialist; but to face old age in penury was a cause for anxiety. Finally, she looked me in the face and asked, ‘Can’t you do something?’
I shook my head. ‘Archie has to act according to his character.’
Taking a packet of Carters from her handbag, Kathi inserted a cigarette between her red lips and lit it with a gold lighter.
‘I didn’t think you smoked, Kathi.’
She said, shortly, ‘I’m acting out of character…’ She exhaled and continued.
‘He’s such a good man. I admire Archie very much. He only wanted to leave his mark. He wanted to erase any bad local memories attached to his father’s name. That’s understandable, is it not? His character is extremely moral. Moral in a good sense.’
‘Kathi, I’m no judge of these things, but Archie has turned the Anna cult – if you can call it that – into something spurious, something too big for its boots. He’s built a theme park over a religious matter. Okay, he meant well. But he’s, well, overambitious, wouldn’t you say, to put it mildly?’
With a bitter look, she said, ‘I know you don’t like him. The promiscuous always dislike the principled.’
It would have been better to accept the snub in silence. There was truth in what she said. But I could not resist attempting a joke. ‘You don’t know the difficulties I have at my age. It’s either chastity or adultery.’ I added, ‘Not too hard a choice, when you think about it.’
She took no notice. For a while she did not speak. With an expression of disgust, she stubbed out the remains of the cigarette in her saucer, as she launched into an attempt to explain how she had benefited from her husband’s goodness in many ways. Archie, she repeated, had always been burdened by the past, and by his father’s reputation. He really wished to make reparation. No, he was driven to make reparation. His demanding work for the legal side of the WHO had always been to that end. He had wanted to see peace and… Here she paused, before adding – peace and justice and decency in the world. He prayed for these things every night. He often made her pray with him.
‘Once the burden of the lawsuit against Nentelstam was concluded – without success, unfortunately – and he retired, he was free to take on more altruistic…’
Her voice tailed away. She put an elbow on the table and rested her forehead in her hand. ‘Oh, fuck!’ she said to herself.
‘It isn’t that, is it?’
She looked angrily up at me. ‘He’s driven. He’s all obsession. I can’t get through to him any more. You understand? He always wished to make a name for himself – to be someone big, a benefactor – just to blot out the infamy of his father’s name. It’s tragic. Maybe his father was also a driven man…’ She sighed. ‘Archie’s a man of principle, whatever you say.’
‘Isn’t it a sign of vanity to regard yourself as a man of principle?’
She i
gnored the remark.
‘Of course, I can’t help blaming myself. You know, I was weak. I think I told you that when I was young I was leading an immoral life – as Archie would see it – before I met him. By his example, I became a different person. He was abstemious, and strict with himself. I learnt that from him. I’ve tried to live by his rules.’ She glanced at her watch without really looking at it. ‘I suppressed all my wild side. I was faithful to him, always, always.’
‘Does your Uncle Antal think that’s a good idea?’
Again she ignored me.
Another little silence. Guessing at her mood, I said, ‘Now you regret it? Now you see yourself growing old, with something in you left unexpressed which could have been expressed?’
‘And if I had expressed it, then another aspect would have remained unexpressed instead. Isn’t that so?’ She glanced again at her watch. ‘I must go. Why do I tell you these things? I know you are a – well, let’s say, you are an amorous man. For some reason, to please your unprincipled mind, I don’t know, for some reason you want me to say I am now amorous, that maybe I regret not living a more libidinous life. That’s not quite the case. I’m soon going to be driven to Kyriotisa to find my idiotic husband, to live out my life as – oh, as he wishes. Because I respect him, because he needs me. Because he has principles.’
I said rather sadly – perhaps more sadly than I felt, ‘But to deny one’s passionate life, that’s not easy, is it?’
With a smile, looking out to sea again, she replied that I was trying to read her mind. And getting it wrong.
As so often when confronted by something serious, I tried to turn it into a joke.
‘You know the old chestnut about how to impress your lover? It turns on the relative simplicity of men, as compared with women.’
She sighed and glanced at her watch, but I persevered.
‘To impress a woman, a man must do many things. Compliment her, kiss her, protect and care for her, listen to her – that’s the hardest part – and adore her. Whereas, if a woman wants to impress a man, she just has to turn up naked with a bottle of vodka under her arm.’
Kathi gave a short laugh, a ha without the second ha, and said she must go. Her car would be arriving by the fort.
‘Be warned, you may find Kyriotisa in rather a terrible mess,’ I told her, adding hastily, ‘So I saw on television.’
‘No worse than our finances…’
I took her hand and kissed it in French fashion. Kathi smiled sadly at me. Then she went on her way.
I would not meet her again. Obviously. This painful reflection was brought about, at least in part, by the knowledge that I, as author, experienced what the reader of a novel experiences, but perhaps more vividly, the action, the sorrow and gladness, as I acted out in spirit every role of every character in the book.
It was not hard to imagine that Kathi would find little comfort in Kyriotisa, a place brought to disaster by ‘principles’. What do you expect?
That evening, I remained in my room in the Lovos Hotel, sobered by the thought of my departure from the scene. I had been reading the final chapter of The Victor Hugo Club, and was packing up my few possessions in preparation for an early start in the morning.
There came a knock at my door.
When I called for them to enter, in came Anne-Marie.
She was naked, and had a bottle of vodka under one arm.
About the Author
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fantasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’s books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film AI in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the International H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005.
By the same author from The Friday Project
Life in the West
Forgotten Life
Remembrance Day
Somewhere East of Life
-
The Brightfount Diaries
Bury my Heart at W. H. Smiths
Dracula Unbound
Frankenstein Unbound
Moreau’s Other Island
Finches of Mars
This World and Nearer Ones
The Pale Shadow of Science
The Detached Retina
The Primal Urge
Brothers of the Head
The Zodiacal Planet Galaxy
Enemies of the System
Eighty Minute Hour
Comfort Zone
Songs from the Steppes: The Poems of Makhtumkuli
Interpreter
And available exclusively as ebooks
50 x 50: The Mini-sagas
The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy
The Squire Quartet
The Monster Trilogy
The Friday Project
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This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2001
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AUTHOR asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
FIRST EDITION
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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