Two Is Lonely

  ‘What the hell were they being so aggressive about?’ asked out of the men who had received snip-snapping fingers right under his nose.

  ‘I think that was the local equivalent of “get yer ’air cut”,’ commented one elderly Englishman, who looked as if he echoed the sentiment.

  The crowd dissolved into the noontime glitter. I dissolved too, back to the remains of my lunch. I felt this was the most discreet thing I could do. I left John with the others, aware that the incident had made him almost one of them.

  I saw no more of him for four hours.

  I spent the interim doing nothing at all constructive, other than trying to rest my state of mind. To be precise, I sat in the sun on the wharf, watching the play of sunlight on the sea and the gentle, breathing motion of the fishing boats, half-hypnotised. I had used this therapy in the past—staring out of the back window of the shop at the solitary tree in the yard, or, more happily, sitting in my own back garden minutely observing the barely-detectable opening process of an evening primrose. The semi-conscious play of the senses sharpens some part of the mind which works involuntarily, like the digestion, and, also like the digestion, works better when the body is inactive. This idle afternoon in Hydra did more for me than the whole frenetic week that preceded it. By the time I saw John’s tall figure bounding down the whitewashed steps which led up the steep hill, something, somewhere, had fallen into a kind of pattern of acceptance. I had hardly been thinking about Andy so far as I knew, but he quietly rose to the still surface of my thoughts, smiling and saying, ‘It’ll be all right.’ The visit to Israel became a sort of academic portal I had to pass through to reach safety and certainty which lay on the other side. Knowing it lay there, I felt as contented as if I had reached it already.

  John came loping up to me, panting and grinning, and threw his extraordinary length down in a chair at my side. I had moved out of the café into one of the outside tables, but apart from that I had hardly stirred. My coffee-cup, thrice refilled by an amiable and unimpatient waiter, sat in front of me, plus a bottle of white wine, half-empty, and a glass.

  ‘Have a glass of wine,’ I said, feeling somnolent and too lazy as yet to hear the news he was clearly bursting with.

  ‘Wine? Great, I love wine. And I earned it! You want to hear?’

  He gulped the wine, and choked.

  ‘What’s this awful stuff?’

  ‘Retsina.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Think of it as pine-wine. Then you’ll like it.’

  John pushed it firmly from him. ‘I think of it as toothpaste-wine,’ he said. ‘It smells like what they put down the gents in Leicester Square. Anyhow, who wants to drink a pine-tree? Give me some old-type grape juice wine.’

  I signalled the waiter. Laughing had woken me up.

  ‘Come on, then—tell.’

  ‘Well, I found him.’

  I straightened. This was news indeed, and far more than I had dared to hope for.

  ‘What! Where?’

  ‘I mean, I found where he is. Only he wasn’t there just then. He gone swimmin’ off the rocks. We went there too—they took me—Janie,’ he broke off, ‘you want to know something? They’re great, them kids, them hippies. Just great. I thought they’d be like the kind we get in the club where I play, which is mainly just street-sweepin’s, don’t have nothin’ in their heads, just pop and sex and maybe a bit of politics some of ’em, all the tearin’-down kind of politics, nothin’ buildin’. But these lot’s different altogether. Didn’t you see it? They’re against plenty, but they’re for, as well. You know what they for?’

  ‘Love or something, isn’t it?’ I asked, with a sardonic note in my voice because I was now impatient to hear about Chris.

  John stopped short and stared at me. ‘I don’t get you,’ he said in a hurt, puzzled tone. ‘The way you said that . . . like you thought believin’ in love was funny or stupid somehow.’

  ‘Oh, John . . .’ So often he did this, putting me in a position of feeling I’d been cynical and derisive about something that we both, actually, felt the same way about. It was always hard to match John’s utter simplicity and lack of worldly veneer about basic subjects. Words which had been lost to the language through becoming embedded in layers of irony fell from John’s lips new-coined, without apology or quotation-marks.

  ‘I didn’t mean it as it sounded,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Chris.’

  ‘Well, they took me to their bathing-place, but it took a long time to get there. They don’t swim where the other visitors go. They found this place of their own where no-one else disturb them. They camp there on the rocks; got a little shelter they built there, but mostly they sleep out in the open, all together, like children. They told me they don’t need to be private from each other, only from other people. They like to be with nothin’ on when it’s just them. It was beautiful, Jane. All them young bodies, lyin’ in the sun, jumping into the sea, playin’ and laughin’ and lovin’ each other. Soon as we got there, we stripped off too, and went swimmin’. I never swam before with nothin’ on. Come to think of it,’ he said with a sudden frown, ‘I don’t seem to remember I ever went swimmin’ before at all.’

  ‘So how come you didn’t drown when you fell into the harbour?’

  ‘Dunno,’ he said sunnily. ‘I suppose I’m just a natural for this water-cult thing Chris is the head of. You know about it?’ I said rather grimly that I did. I was suddenly nervous of asking him if he didn’t think the whole thing was idiotic. I could see they’d got to him. His hair was still damp, his face shining with excitement and pleasure; I could see the salt riming his jaw and his eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t you feel all itchy?’ I asked, feeling that I must find some disadvantage to swimming or I should be landed with an opponent instead of an ally before I knew where I was.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, scratching luxuriously. ‘It’s great, you feel you still got the sea all over you, even after you dry.’ He tossed back another glass of wine. ‘Ah!’ he said, smacking his lips and throwing back his head. The Greek sun fell on his upturned face. He looked, in his relaxation and contentment, like some Moorish demi-deity, satiated in all his moral senses and yet somehow sublime.

  I shook his shoulder.

  ‘John!’

  ‘Yeah, Janie,’ he murmured with his eyes still closed.

  ‘So tell me! Did you see him or didn’t you?’

  ‘I told you already, he wasn’t there. They said he’d gone for a long swim. Maybe he went right round the island. Jesus, I’m starved!’ He sat upright and beckoned the waiter. He would have been too unconfident to do that five hours ago.

  ‘What do you mean, round the island? Do you know how far that is?’

  ‘Nope. But I expect he does. Don’t worry, Janie, he’ll come back. He’s their boy, they all waitin’ for him. He often goes off like that, they said. He likes to get in communion with the sea. For that you got to go far, far out, away from the land and from all people. You got a hamburger?’ he asked the waiter.

  ‘Of course he hasn’t, where do you think you are? The Fulham Road?’ I asked testily. But to my chagrin the waiter grinned accommodatingly and left us.

  ‘They got everything here,’ said my black Neptune exultantly.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to settle down here, and be a water-hippie,’ I remarked, trying to keep the bitterness to a minimum.

  Sarcasm was always quite lost on John. ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea. Who needs London, all that pollution and all them horrible people? I never dreamed . . .’ He looked around him at the glittering prospect of turquoise, blue and white, all as pristine as if it had been created that morning. ‘No cars,’ he murmured. ‘It’s hard to believe there’s places in the world that ain’t spoilt by cars.’

  ‘But think of the silence,’ I said viciously.

  ‘Oh sure, it’s too quiet here,’ said John. ‘But I’d be with them. They make loads of noise. They got guitars, they play and sing their own music, they sho
ut and laugh . . . They let me play one of their guitars . . . they said I play great. They like me,’ he added simply. ‘They like black people and they like me specially, they said.’ He reached behind him and got his own guitar, which of course he had brought, out of its case, and began to strum. Was I imagining it, or was it a vaguely Greek air, reminiscent of Zorba? I seemed to see John fading away from me into a haze.

  I grabbed his wrist. ‘John, now will you stop this nonsense? You’ve got a job to go back to, you know you only got a couple of weeks’ leave from the club—’

  ‘Sod the club,’ said John dreamily, fading faster than ever.

  ‘But what about Chris? What about Toby?’

  The mention of Toby’s name brought him back a little; his spiritual outline became quite clear to me for the moment.

  ‘Toby,’ he repeated thoughtfully, and the strumming, which, to my irritation, had begun to collect a crowd, ceased. ‘Yeah, I was forgettin’ Toby. Well, but maybe I could drop off here on the way back from the old Promised Land, after we seen him. Because Jane, I got a feeling that here is my promised land, right here with them kids.’

  I was actually on the verge of saying something really spiteful, like ‘Especially that good-looking creep who called you a black bastard, I bet you’d just love going swimming in the raw with him,’ but thank God I curbed my nasty tongue that time. John hadn’t a clue what I could be like when a black mood was on me. Perhaps that was the secret of our untrammelled friendship—that, and there being no sex about it. I thought to myself then, sitting there watching John being happy and not helping me, that if there had been even a trace of sensuality in our relationship, if I had been the least bit attracted to him as a man, I would not have been able to restrain myself from assaulting him with words. Loving friendship, when it exists, which God knows is very seldom, filters out the venom and bitchery from one’s nature.

  Sarcasm, however, is something else again.

  ‘John,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your reverie, but did you come to some arrangement? Are we going to see him, if and when he returns from his aquatic amblings?’

  He looked me straight in the eyes, that look of his that comes from another time and place. ‘Jane,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t always understand you.’ It was the nearest he ever came to reproaching me.

  ‘While you’ve been doing the water-sprite bit, I’ve been sitting here cooling my heels for four hours waiting for news. And now I’m just asking. Are we going to see him, or not?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  I looked at my watch, which of course had gone wrong. ‘Must be about five or so.’

  ‘Then he’s back,’ he said.

  I rose to my feet and gathered our belongings together. ‘We’ll drop these at the hotel,’ I said. ‘Then you can take me to your leader.’

  ‘What about my hamburger?’

  ‘Sod your hamburger,’ I retorted.

  Chapter 3

  THE sun was sinking into a sea the exact colour of pink jade as we rounded the last headland and came into sight of the hippies’ bathing place. It had been a hard but rewarding walk, with the sea never out of sight, but I couldn’t fully enjoy its panoply of colours because I was too busy watching my feet. The rocky paths were steep and none too well defined once we got beyond the outskirts of the town; but the evening air was almost intolerably sweet, so laden with sharp and balmy scents that it seemed irksome to have to exhale between deep intakes of breath . . . I felt like a drunkard who resents the necessary pauses to replenish his glass. My eyes, scanning the path or the rough inclines ahead of my feet, wandered delightedly over the rocks. I never knew lichen could be orange; the pale rock-surface made an ideal background for the tufts of flowers and strange intricate patterns of thorns.

  And always, when we grew tired after a long gradient, there was the sea. We could stop and rest our legs and our eyes and savour the salt tang amid the richer, more cloying land-perfumes. I knew what John felt about the place, apart from the hippies.

  At last, from a height, we saw the bright scattered colours of the encampment below us like a rag-bag emptied out upon the rocks. John seized my hand and nearly crushed it to a pulp.

  ‘Janie! I love—’

  He did not finish. I looked up at his face, alight with rapture, the sweat on it shining pinkly in the reflected sunset. Clearly, he felt unable to set limits on what he loved at that moment.

  We made our way carefully down to the encampment below. The sudden Mediterranean darkness was falling swiftly now, and a fire of driftwood had been lit, round which the hippies were sitting. Their music and talk came up to us with the sweet flakey woodsmoke. I shivered abruptly. At any moment now I would be face to face with this boy, who might one day be my stepson. It was a fateful occasion, and I, for all my broodings and the quiet hours I had spent in the town, was unprepared. Once again I had been sending out my thoughts in a random but basically selfish direction. They had returned to me bringing a probably false message of hope and security, but suddenly my own future showed me a new facet, complicated intolerably by an extraneous responsibility for a human being I had never seen and about whom I had heard nothing that was not negative and disconcerting. I was still holding John’s hand, and I clutched it convulsively.

  As so often before, John intuitively understood. ‘Don’t worry, Janie,’ he said, his voice like soft soot pouring through the twilight. ‘He’ll be like the others. Even better. He’ll be different than his daddy thinks. What do daddies know?’

  The circle round the fire shifted slightly as we approached. One figure stood up and came towards us. He was tall and very thin, with narrow shoulders like a boy of twelve and thin, underdeveloped shanks. He wore ragged shorts and Japanese sandals, and a medallion of some sort round his neck which glinted from the middle of his hairless chest like a huge eye in the last of the light. His hair, stiff with salt, fell straight and solid to his shoulders. His skin was brown and he had a soft blond beard.

  Behind all this, the baby-face of the photograph was still there, the blue eyes, the snub nose, the ingenuous English schoolboy look. He looked about as degenerate as David.

  When he spoke to me, his voice was very gentle, and had his class and schooling and background indelibly stamped upon it.

  ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘You wanted to see me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, staring at him in helpless fascination.

  ‘Come and join us. I’m sorry I wasn’t here before.’

  I was just about to ask if we could talk alone, when I thought better of it. Half-cowardice, perhaps, but the other half an instinctive feeling that I would like to get to know him a little first. I was somewhat dazed, dismayed almost, to realise that my first impressions had been favourable. Expecting the pirate-exterior, the defiant, rebellious manner, this slender, vulnerable figure in the twilight had disarmed me. I had to get adjusted to the possibility that I might like him better than his father did.

  We joined the circle round the fire, and John unslung his guitar from his back and began to tune up. He was immediately surrounded by a press of people, leaving the sea side of the fire almost untenanted. Chris picked up a piece of bleached driftwood from a pile they’d collected, and began to smooth it with his hands. He wasn’t just stroking its dry, satiny surface, but poking his fingers into the little holes, running his nails along the cracks as if exploring it.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked him. A little wind was blowing up the rocks from the sea, ruffling his hair on his naked shoulders.

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘I don’t feel the cold much,’ he said.

  He must have been aware that I was watching him, but he seemed quite unselfconsciously absorbed in his piece of wood.

  ‘Seems a pity to burn it,’ he said. ‘It’s such a lovely shape.’

  He lifted it to his nose and smelt it, then licked it.

  ‘Taste,’ he said, offering it to me.

  I put my tongue to it. Smoothness and sea-flavour.
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  ‘Like seaweed,’ he said. ‘It’s more sea-y than the sea.’

  ‘Is the sea more sea-y here than in England?’

  He looked up at me quickly. ‘That’s a funny question. The sea’s the same everywhere.’

  ‘How can you say that? The sea has as many aspects as the human race.’ He went on staring at me. ‘You might as well say there’s no difference between an Englishman and a Greek.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Or between men and women.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ he said. ‘They’re a slightly different shape, of course, like the sea is a different colour here than, say, at Brighton. But these sort of differences just mislead you if you take any notice of them. There’s no essential difference at all. The sea tastes the same everywhere, unless it’s polluted, and human beings do, too.’

  ‘How do you know if a person is polluted?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘Same as with water. He tastes dirty.’

  ‘How do you taste—a person?’

  He shrugged his vestigial shoulders, still occupied with the wood. ‘Lots of ways. Sometimes with your tongue, the way you taste anything else. You can find out a lot about people from kissing and licking them. But that’s fairly primitive. The best way is to taste their minds.’

  ‘By talking?’

  ‘Talking and not talking.’

  My eyes wouldn’t leave his face, now lit only by the flickering firelight.

  ‘Like now, do you mean?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Are you tasting me?’

  He chuckled quietly, without looking at me.

  We were silent. I kept looking at him. Partly I was fascinated, and partly I wanted him to look at me; but he took no notice. He was absorbed in the wood, and the fire, and the sea, at which he threw tender glances every so often over his shoulder as if to reassure himself that it was still there, however steeped in blackness; only the faintest, almost luminous glow on the surface of the water, and the soft swish of the swell against the rocks below us, confirmed its presence now.