2

That evening, towards the end of the first period, Willey gave his class a written exercise to do. While he waited he cast an eye over the list of names. Four years now he had been teaching classes of Greeks and the names still had not lost their booming quality: Electra, Aphrodite, Sophocles, Miltiades, Antigone. Though the boom was fainter now.

The present incumbents of these legendary titles sat before him in varying degrees of concentration. Almost nothing, as every teacher knows, so much distinguishes people as their attitude to instruction. … Abandoning the register he looked from face to face, pausing finally at Miss Triandafyllou, a pretty, clumsy girl of about sixteen whose eyes had a lustre always that seemed close to tears. He enjoyed watching Miss Triandafyllou. In his pity for her the essential unchastity of his thoughts could go longer unchecked. … Now under the stress of composition she shifted sharply in her seat and parted her knees, disclosing a tunnel beige-walled at first, closing at the white join of her thighs beyond the stockings. Palms together as in prayer could be inserted there, moved softly inwards, still without touching. As always, his imagination recoiled before the actual infliction of pleasure; he looked away. He knew all possible movements of a girl’s legs, below the desk, within the confines of skirts lighter or heavier; the startled movements of virgins in response to some itch or cramp; slower, more monumental shifts of others, adjustments it seemed to a heat between the thighs. …’ Some day, he thought, I will write a poem from the viewpoint of the teacher-voyeur, full of sharply realised visual imagery, with an existential flavour as of gates never opened. The whole redolent of a solemn though furtive anguish. It ought to be good, he told himself. The poetry of perpetual tumescence. Other men would assist at the ultimate surrenders of all these legs, that much was certain. And a very good thing too.

Outside, beyond the window, he could sense the quickening life of the city, the beginning of evening. The sun would have lost its fierceness now, the light would be softer, yellower, but not hazy. The long crest of Hymettos, no longer estranged from the city by the sun, would be settling nearer for the sunset embrace. The streets would be filling, it was the time for ouzo, the little glasses rattling on the tin tables, the clear liquid clouding as the chips of ice melted in it; the interminable Greek conversations over the glasses, malicious, acute, animated without extravagance, shallow until it was realised that the awareness of being alive in the promising evening was being continually reaffirmed. Just as the strollers who would now be filling the streets, moving slowly, talking loudly, watchful for eccentricities, seemed aimless only until it was recognised that they formed a procession of celebrants, the exactions of the day over.

Willey felt suddenly a rush of love for this city of his adoption. H Aθευα ηας. I wonder why it is, he thought, that I, forty-three years old, of no distinction, disgraced in England, precariously employed in Athens, with a fiancée I can’t afford to marry, should experience almost invariably at this hour of the day, a feeling of optimism, a feeling of coming into my kingdom? Inexplicable really. Well, if you put it that way, he could imagine Olivia saying, in the tone of one making concessions.

It was a tone she often used. She would be at home now, her day at the Embassy School over. Home in the little flat in Kolonaki with the parquet floor and the green-tiled Turkish stove and the colourful lambs-wool rugs. She would have been out to the kiosk in Kolonaki Square to get a Telegraph and might be reading at this very moment of the doings of royal children, with her slippers on, pink-trimmed fur edges and a pom-pom. Her kind, heavy face intent. He liked always to know if possible where Olivia was, what she was doing. Her possessions and observances were essential to his knowledge of her. She was a woman, moreover, not easily detached from her chosen setting. Marrying her, which he wanted most of the time to do, would mean a placing of himself somewhere down in the midst. …

The bell rang for the end of the lesson. ‘We will go through the exercise after the break,’ Willey said. He affected not to see the upraised hand of Mr Rallos, whose questions were always veiled grievances, and made for the door. As he was crossing the hall to the little staff-room where his coffee, always prepared at this time by Nikos, the porter, would be waiting for him, a tall, broadly smiling, rather dishevelled person rose from a chair and came towards him.

‘Is your name Willey?’ this person enquired with great geniality, and Willey now saw that he had fragments of what seemed vegetation in his hair.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is.’

‘Kennedy,’ the other said, and thrust out a large hand towards him. ‘Bryan Kennedy.’

‘How do you do?’

‘Mr Robinson suggested I should come and see you,’ Kennedy said, and paused for some moments, smiling. He had not consciously formed any picture of Willey from the few remarks Robinson had let fall, but found his appearance in some way unexpected, the long, burdened-looking neck surmounted by a small neat head in which eyes blinked with a nervous frequency. This head seemed like something proffered, a target perhaps, because of Willey’s very sloping shoulders. ‘He said you might be able to help me find a place to stay,’ he continued. ‘I’ve just arrived from England, you see. Just today.’

‘Oh, have you? How was the weather?’

‘Eh? Oh, not bad. A bit drizzly.’

‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of coffee?’

Kennedy was so pleased by this offer that he stopped smiling. ‘I would, old boy,’ he said. ‘There’s an old bastard over the way …’ He stopped short abruptly. Tact with Kennedy was merely another word for caution; in moments of expansion he was always completely lacking in it. It only now occurred to him that Willey and Jennings might be friends. ‘No offence meant,’ he said.

Willey glanced quickly round. Nikos and several students were within hearing. ‘Can we have another cup of coffee, Nikos?’ he said. ‘Come into the staff-room,’ he said to Kennedy. ‘We can talk in there.’ At this moment he saw Mackintosh emerging from his classroom. Typical of Mackintosh to go on teaching five minutes past the hour, he thought. We know how keen he is, without that. He led Kennedy into the staff-room, which was empty. Nikos brought in the coffee. A moment or two later Mackintosh came in and Willey introduced them.

‘Just arrived, eh?’ Mackintosh said. He was a thin man of about thirty, with sandy hair, a cold-morning, shiny face and protuberant blue eyes. He had taken off his jacket, his short-sleeved pullover was skimpy and he wore armbands. ‘I’ve only been here myself a few months,’ he said. ‘Since the beginning of the session.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Very interesting lesson, that,’ he said. ‘And very successful too, I may say. It’s amazing really. They are only a first-year class, but believe it or not,’ he said to Kennedy, ‘they have already mastered the Anomalous Finites.’ He looked with his prominent eyes from one to the other, continuing to rub his hands, taking in Kennedy’s somewhat crumpled appearance, the scraps still adhering to his hair.

‘That’s good going,’ said Kennedy. He had disliked the armbands from the start. He and a treasuring Scot like this, whose zeal was indistinguishable from self-interest, were archetypal foes, as Kennedy knew well. In a more permissive society he would have clubbed Mackintosh on sight.

‘Congratulations,’ said Willey with extreme coldness.

Mackintosh drank his coffee in a series of quick gulps. ‘I think it would be a good idea,’ he said, looking at Willey, ‘if we sent in progress reports from time to time, once a month say. Outlining the work covered and the degree of facility reached by the students. It might be helpful. I intend to suggest it to the Director.’

Feeling himself included in the conversation, Kennedy nodded his large head several times. Willey made no reply at all.

‘Well, I must get back,’ Mackintosh said. ‘I’ve got some writing to do on the board before the lesson begins. I don’t think we should take up lesson time with blackboard work if it can possibly be avoided, do you?’ He nodded at Kennedy. ‘Nice to have met you,’ he said, and went out.

‘Well, well,’ Kennedy said. He glanced at Willey’s expressionless face, divining with a perceptiveness rare in him the other’s dislike for Mackintosh. ‘Forward into the sunlight,’ he said. ‘Marching towards mastery of the Anomalous Finites.’

Willey smiled suddenly. ‘You’ve got things in your hair,’ he said.

Kennedy put up a hand to his head. ‘I went for a walk this afternoon,’ he said, ‘in the National Park, and feeling rather tired at one point … I suppose I must have picked them up.’ He began extricating the pieces.

Willey heard tinkling laughter from just beyond the door. That would be Miss Watson. ‘I’ve got another lesson in a few minutes,’ he said. ‘So I can’t tell you much about things in general. But I suppose it’s a place to stay you want first of all. Flats are easy to find, you know, in Athens, both furnished and unfurnished.’

‘To tell you the truth, old boy, a flat would be a bit beyond my means just at present. Until my money comes through.’

‘In that case perhaps the best thing would be Kitty’s. That’s a sort of lodging house. You get a single room that you pay for by the week. No meals. It’s quite cheap, I believe. Quite a lot of foreigners are there already.’

‘It sounds just the thing.’

‘I’ll give you the address then.’ Willey wrote on a slip of paper. ‘She’s a Greek of some sort, from Constantinople. Everybody calls her Kitty. Here you are. If you want to get in touch with me you can always do it through the institute. I am by way of being a fixture here.’

‘It really is very good of you,’ Kennedy said.

‘Not at all. I expect we shall be seeing more of each other.’

Kennedy tucked the paper into his breast pocket. It briefly occurred to him to ask this good-natured fellow for a loan on the spot, but he decided against it. No sense in rushing things. ‘Bye-bye then,’ he said. ‘And thanks a million.’ In the hall he passed Mackintosh, his blackboard work apparently postponed, talking to a little grey-haired woman with long ear-rings. He beamed at them but did not stop.

Left alone in the staff-room, Willey cast his eyes with habitual distaste over the books that lined the far wall: books containing passages for précis and comprehension; books listing idioms and proverbs; books of extracts from other men’s books; compilations of all sorts. Not an original idea among them. And always the same words on the covers, claiming to convey the essence: ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Basic’, ‘Fundamental’, ‘Concise’. From Borneo to Bagdad ambitious youth was buying them, hoping to find an infallible guide to success in the examinations. Every week, it seemed, a new version of what was essential for foreigners to know was being published. Reviews in The Times Educational Supplement; elaborate circulars to schools and colleges everywhere; royalties, of course, since there was always a few more shillings to be scraped together in Borneo and Bagdad. … And now, he reflected, Jennings’ book would be appearing soon, that chaotic mass of grammatical precept and mystical brooding. He was familiar with the contents as he had been all through the manuscript at Jennings’ request, checking for errors, departures from usage. Hours of excruciating boredom for which there had been as yet no hint of payment. He had not, however, dared to refuse. And Jennings knew he dare not. …

The bell rang for the second period. Willey made his way back to the classroom, preparing a suitable face.

Kennedy went first to pick up his suitcase from Sophy, who had been minding it, and then, feeling rather tired of walking, he got into one of the little yellow trolley-buses that left from a point near the square. He thrust the address at the person nearest to him, and was told where to get off. Small boys moved quickly along the pavement balancing trays piled high with little hoops of bread. Kennedy bought two, suspected that he had been overcharged, and sat on a low wall to eat them.

He began to review his situation. Twenty-six pounds in drachmas, enough possibly for a month if he was careful. The prospect of a cheap place to stay, but no job yet. However, he had the list of institutions. Giving Sophy lunch had proved well worth while. She had promised to look after his suitcase, for one thing. And then in the course of conversation two distinct prospects for private lessons had emerged. One of them she had actually suggested herself, a girl of her own age whom she knew wanted private lessons, rich too, the daughter of a ship owner, Logothetis by name. Kennedy had the telephone number. The other had been an item of information merely, he was compelled to admit, and perhaps Sophy would not be pleased if she knew that he intended to get in touch with the person, but that couldn’t be helped. Eleni Polimenou, she had told him, had telephoned twice that morning asking for Mr Jennings. Eleni Polimenou. Sophy had been quite indignant at his impassivity before this name. Had he not heard of Eleni Polimenou, the celebrated, the internationally celebrated Greek actress, she who had been to Hollywood, won acting awards? Now she wanted help with some play from a suitably qualified member of the institute staff. Unfortunately Mr Jennings had been out on both occasions of her phoning. He would want to handle this matter himself, since it concerned so important a personage. Mr Mackintosh she thought he would probably send. He had a high opinion of the abilities of Mr Mackintosh. Nothing, however, could be done for some days, as Miss Polimenou was out of town. She would be returning to Athens on May the 5th. … There and then Kennedy had resolved that on May the 5th he would be stirring early. Willey too, he thought, might prove a good source of private students. Things on the whole were not too bad. He ate steadily; the rolls were quite pleasant, stuck all over with little seeds. What were they, sesame seeds? When he had finished he crossed the street and set about finding Kitty’s.

Her house proved to be a gaunt, four-storeyed building with narrow, railed balconies jutting out from the stuccoed façade, and a pervading smell of the urine of cats; and she herself obese and sleepy-eyed with a great curving nose and ceremonious manners. Yes, she informed him in a mixture of French and English, there was a room vacant, recently occupied by a young gentleman who had been expédié, for what misdemeanour Kennedy could not make out, except that it had been quelque chose de dégoutant. An American, of course, ce pays barbare. A civilisation sterile. Kitty’s flesh below her pink flannel dressing-gown could be sensed constantly to eddy, even when her body was at rest. There were other Americans in the house, and Germans also, but she herself preferred always the English. Monsieur was English, was he not? Ah ça se voit. The rent, payable in advance, payable, in fact, immediately, was one hundred and fifty drachmas a week. Kennedy paid and was shown his room, one of those with a balcony.

Kennedy sat some time in silence on the narrow bed. There was a kind of rustling in the room, as of cockroaches, but he didn’t mind that unduly. Unpacking would not take long, he had few possessions. Perhaps it would be a good idea to wash, there was a handbasin against the wall. As he was rising there was a light tap on the door and a second or two later the door was opened and a person in a maroon baseball cap poked his head into the room. ‘Visitors,’ this person said. ‘You got visitors.’ After a few seconds more of scrutiny he advanced fully into the room in a loping, rather rubbery, manner. His face beneath the cap wore a dazed smile. Immediately behind him followed a short young man with a bald spot, dressed in a somewhat shabby, but respectable grey pin-stripe suit. ‘I am Simpson,’ the man in the cap said. ‘This is Roland, he is British.’

‘Bryan Kennedy,’ Kennedy said, and felt his hand taken in a surprisingly vigorous, almost convulsive, grip.

‘I extend to you, sir, the freedom of this goddam city,’ Simpson said. He had a rather agreeable light voice, with an odd tendency to trail the final syllables of his words. And he was, as Kennedy now saw, in a fairly advanced stage of drunkenness.

‘That is very good of you, old boy,’ Kennedy said, somewhat disliking the other’s grandiloquence. ‘You haven’t any booze left over, have you?’

‘Sharp,’ said Simpson, who was swaying slightly, ‘sharp. I can see you are a sharp one. By God.’ He fumbled for a moment in the top pocket of his gabardine jacket which had the look of having formerly belonged to a bulkier man, and brought out a little white oblong. ‘My card,’ he said. Kennedy looked down at it. It was inscribed in gilt copper-plate with the words: ‘Ken Simpson, American Artist, Exhibitions in all the Capitals of Europe.’

‘Mr Simpson is an artist,’ Roland said, speaking for the first time. ‘Our rooms are just over the way. We heard you being shown the room. We thought we’d come over and see you had everything you wanted.’ His face creased in an anxious conciliatory smile. ‘Mr Simpson has been drinking a little,’ he said. ‘He has had a certain amount of disappointment.’ He drew confidentially nearer, emanating a faint smell of hair oil. ‘I’ve been here longer than anyone else,’ he said. ‘I’m the oldest resident.’

‘The person who had this room before me …’ Kennedy said. ‘Why was he kicked out?’

‘Nobody knows,’ Roland said, looking uncomfortable.

Simpson sat down heavily on one of the two hard-backed chairs that together with a chest of drawers and the bed was all the furniture there was in the room. He crossed his legs and Kennedy saw that he was wearing the sort of shoes that basket-ball players wear, and no socks. The sole of the right one had a hole right through it and a neat circle of Simpson’s skin was revealed.

‘How did you get on today, Kenneth?’ Roland said suddenly, in a sociable manner, as though encouraging a diffident guest. ‘How did you get on down at Piraeus?’

Simpson adopted a look of sagacity. ‘They all know me,’ he said. ‘All the officials down there. I go every day. You have to keep at them if you want results. I go down there … “My easel, where’s my bloody easel, for Christ’s sake?” “Ah, Ken, hello Ken, ti canis? Have something to drink? Vino, Birra? Cognac. Americano, eh?”’ Simpson paused, waving his arms about to indicate the friendliness of the officials at Piraeus. His face, which was extraordinarily mobile, had veered from his own initial sternness in demanding his easel, to wavering, pleased surprise at such a welcome, and then to the rather frantic Greek bonhomie of the officials themselves. ‘I go down there …’ he said. ‘ “Ah! Artist Americano. No money … do not speak of money, what you take, birra Fixe, ouzo, cognac? Cognac …”’ Simpson stopped talking altogether to mime with a dazed delighted smile the courtly behaviour of the dock officials, pouring out cognac, savouring the drink, setting the glass down. It was as though he had forgotten the verbal equivalents for all these actions. Abruptly his expression changed, became angrier. ‘I have filled in the forms,’ he said. ‘That easel was made for me. I couldn’t put a value on that easel. Ten thousand drachmas.’

‘His easel,’ Roland said, ‘which has special fittings, made to his own specification, and is therefore much more valuable than an ordinary easel, has been mislaid, I trust temporarily, by the railway authorities somewhere in Germany. He has made a claim for compensation from the German authorities through the Greek authorities, but it seems to be taking a long time to come through. Every day he goes down there.’

‘It’s those bastards in Germany,’ Simpson said. They are keeping it on purpose. Someone has seen how much that easel is worth. That’s what they say down at Piraeus. “Americano good. Deutsch …”’ He made a face of disgusted antipathy. ‘ “You have drink with us; down with those fucking Germans! Those fucking Germans have stolen, yes stolen, your easel! Cognac.”’ He went through the mime of pouring out again. ‘By God!’ he said. His eyes had an unusual opacity, a kind of grey film covering a large part of the iris, and the lashes remained quite stiffly apart for long periods.

‘What I am afraid of,’ Roland said to Kennedy in low tones, ‘is that with all this delay Kenneth may lose his sense of purpose, the issues may become obscured.’

‘They sound to me pretty fogged already,’ Kennedy said. ‘I had a nap in the National Park this afternoon and when I woke up I saw hundreds of girls marching down the avenue, all in these white blouses.’

‘Bribes, they take bribes,’ Simpson said. ‘They all know me. “Ah, Americano, what you take? Birrz, ouzo? Cognac.”’ He enacted polite reluctance, shrugging assent. ‘I got a hollow leg for the stuff,’ he said.

‘Think of all the expense,’ Roland said.

‘A sort of parade it must have been,’ Kennedy said. ‘This afternoon about four o’clock. Greek schoolgirls, hundreds of them, marching down that avenue past the park, what do you call it, Amalias? What would it be for?’

‘No idea,’ Roland said. ‘They have parades quite frequently. For birthdays, and Independence Day, and the day they said no to the Italians.’

‘I’d like to think that this was the day all those girls were saying yes to someone. About fifteen they were. Marching along, swinging their arms, carrying all before them, as you might say. I swear to you, I have never seen so many lovely tits assembled together in one place. And they kept on coming. It was torture to watch them. English girls could never have put on a show like that, not at that age.’

Simpson emerged from his preoccupation with the easel. ‘It’s the olive oil,’ he said. ‘It goes to the breasts. They take olive oil with everything. Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? I mean, think of all that oil. Bad for the skin of course, but bloody marvellous for the breasts, nourishing, fills ’em out. See the way their hair shines? Same thing, it’s all the work of the olive.’

‘I wonder if it lubricates their passages,’ Kennedy said, leering at Roland.

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’ Roland wriggled a little. His face had gone quite red.

‘Well,’ said Kennedy, ‘let’s go out and have a drink. On me.’

When his lessons for the evening were over, Willey decided to take a walk before going to see Olivia at her flat. The meeting with Kennedy, something in the other’s breezy disrespect, had unsettled him. Removing the scraps from his hair, Kennedy had somehow managed to suggest a larger life. Not a trustworthy person, however, he decided.

There was a scent of orange blossom in Kolonaki Square, though the flowers were mostly hidden in their clusters of sharp leaves; and below this immediate sweetness Willey sensed the harsher odour of the city compounded of dust and lime and cooling masonry. He crossed the square and began to walk along Scoufa Street. The buildings became shabbier as Kolonaki was left behind. At the intersection of the street with Hippocratous, in the arcade of some Ministry buildings, a young blind man was sitting on a low stool, singing and accompanying himself on an accordion. Willey stopped to listen. The voice was thin, whining, and somehow cruel too, beneath the complaint. The long quavering cadences were broken by snarling quarter-tones during which the singer raised his head with its fixed cataracted eyes and bared his teeth at the crowd. Willey was impressed by a quality of vulnerable savagery in the performance, like that of a maimed animal, reinforced by the violent but immediately checked movements of the arms expanding or contracting the accordion. It was apparently a love song he was singing. By listening intently Willey was able to make out some of the words.

The bird of love is caged in my heart, I cannot free him. The night, which should bring my joy, takes my love away from me.’

The singer inclined his head, snarling softly. The song came to an end. Several coins clattered into the tin box on the pavement. Willey put in a drachma and began to make his way slowly back towards the square. He had only gone a few yards when the singer commenced again and the song followed him down the street as though there was something still that he had forgotten to do.

Wisteria was out on the walls of the Turkish Embassy, and a little below this, at the side of the steps, a mimosa tree was covered with yellow balls of flower. From the open doors of a taverna further down the street came the smell of lemons and retsina and burning charcoal. Willey went up the steps a little way, past the Embassy. He climbed until he could see over the white blocks of apartment houses to the Acropolis and the pale sea beyond. To the south was the long, intensely human line of Hymettos, violet along the crest; so great was the clarity of the light that the mountain seemed to take its rise from just beyond the square he had left. In his mind he could see its subsequent slow tilt to the sea, the ochreous knuckles of the foothills dipping at last into the glittering waveless water at Kavouri.

Willey stood looking. He loved this time of evening in Athens, the spent, faintly luminous pallor of buildings and pavements, the purity of the sky, the pause before night came. Below him the thin leaves of the mimosa stirred briefly. Suddenly he was filled by a feeling of loneliness and deprivation and by a sort of aching, objectless tenderness. Margaret’s face came quite unexpectedly into his mind, her face framed by the school hat, sullen, not fully awake, as she said the rehearsed things: the facts arrayed exactly in narrative form, so that no real truth could strain through them, the terrible instilled resentment. Yes, on the evening of June the 8th it began, at his lodgings, I went there to get help with a lesson. … Those June evenings were cool, showering, sharp with the smell of privet and lawn from the little garden below his room, shrill with the voices of disputing children. And she had been different, in a way her flat young voice could not indicate, a different person, away from her companions; not school uniform now but in a tightly fitting skirt and a blouse partially transparent so that the skin of her shoulders glowed beneath it. Why she should have decided to come to his lodging in this way he did not know — she had never shown much interest or attention during his lessons. She was wearing nylon stockings and he remembered the faint rasp of the nylon caused by the friction of the insides of her thighs as she shifted on the sofa beside him. She had shifted continually all the time he was attempting to explain the lesson. This in fact was what he chiefly remembered of that evening, the terrible restlessness of her body which no résumé of the facts could reveal; the carelessness of her legs which he had known at last was deliberate. Only when, hardly able to see, the blood beating in his temples, he had reached and laid his hand on her, only then had her body become still, stilled instantly as though by a blow. … Yes, always during the summer term, on several occasions, I can’t remember exactly, ten or twelve times … A pupil of yours too, fifteen years of age, no isolated instance but what I can only call … No alternative but to … No possibility of a testimonial, of course, lucky to have escaped a prosecution. If you will take my advice … No thank you.

He walked slowly back down the steps. He had not thought of Margaret for quite a long time. One day he would forget her completely. … This prefigured forgetfulness appalled him suddenly as he went on, like an intimation of his death — only the dead do not bleed any more. … He emerged finally on Queen Sofia Avenue, quite close to Constitution Square. He crossed the avenue and walked past the row of little flower stalls that lie side by side against the outside wall of the Old Palace. Acting on impulse he stopped before one of these, still without definite intention, and the proprietor rose from his chair on the pavement and approached him, smiling, establishing already a shared admiration for the flowers. He was an old man and looked ill. ‘Oriste,’ he said, and Willey’s heart contracted at the brave attempt at blandishment, the word of welcome from the lined, pale face, pale with an indoors pallor, the pallor of hours spent behind the glass of greenhouses, coaxing blooms out of season, in foetid atmospheres. Great trays of gardenias were displayed on the stall, the blanched flowers closed for evening, and a bank of sharply budded roses, and sprays of mimosa. He stood before the flowers bewildered, helpless, caught in odours and colours as in a net. ‘Oriste,’ the old man said again. He must buy some flowers, of course; that, surely, was why he had stopped here. Too expensive, the gardenias and roses. Easter lilies stood in vases, but these were too ceremonial, too austere. His mind flinched from the delicate mimosa. He chose finally tulips, a dozen yellow tulips. The old man nodded, approving his choice. ‘Malista, malista,’ he said, the flowers vivid beneath his seamed face.

‘How much?’ said Willey, resigning himself to the haggling that must take place in Athens before any purchase could be made. For such beautiful flowers, personally grown, and as he could see quite fresh, sixteen drachmas. Twelve they agreed on finally, and the old man tied the stalks with twine and wrapped the bunch in silver paper.

Holding the flowers loosely, Willey went back along the avenue towards Kolonaki. Olivia lived just beyond the square on the ground floor of a three-storey family house. In the small garden of the house opposite there was a fig-tree in leaf now, the bright green buds unfurling into fans, the unripe fruit much darker, dusty-looking. He rang the bell and almost immediately Olivia opened the door, swinging it wide open with a gesture of exuberant welcome he knew so well.

‘You wretch, you said you’d be here at half past seven and it’s nearly …’ Her eyes widened when she saw the flowers. Backing into the room she slithered a little on the mat. Oops!’ she said.

‘I have brought you some tulips,’ Willey said. In the living-room he began to untie them, clumsily. He handled the twine too roughly, cutting some of the stems, and sap came out on his hands.

‘I’ll find a vase for them,’ Olivia said, disappearing into the kitchen.

The flowers had an intense, an almost incandescent, yellowness in the dim, cluttered room. Fumbling with them, standing there on the figured carpet, among the carefully arranged objects, he thought how strange it was he should be doing this, standing here, making this particular series of gestures. The flowers would provide Olivia with an image of herself that had nothing, perhaps, to do with his intention, and that was already beyond his power to amend. There was nothing, therefore, but to accept it as true. Ceaseless, he thought, the human need to shape experience, render motives acceptable. We are all artists in this respect, chipping away at life with our furtive little chisels. Why he had bought the flowers, for whom he had bought them, would never now be established. He had brought them, however, to Olivia. They were a correlative to his pain on the steps just now, with which she had really nothing to do; bridging, then, past and present, flowers for the dead and for the living.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever bought flowers for me before,’ she said, returning with a glass jug. She turned on him a face bright with pleasure, and he was bewildered again by the enormous difference between the complexity of his purchase and the simplicity for her of the token. He smiled, nevertheless, affectionately at her.

‘I think tulips are your sort of flower,’ he said, and realised that this was true in a way; they were orderly flowers, not fussed with leaves, having deep colours without much gradation.

Olivia put the flowers into the jug and set it in the middle of the living-room table. ‘They look nice there,’ she said. She came to him awkwardly and kissed him on the mouth. He put his arms around her, feeling comforted by the familiar angularity of her body. She was a little taller than he was, and seemed always to bestow, in their embraces, more assurance than she received. After some moments she drew away and he saw that she had made a sort of recovery.

‘Absolutely divine,’ she said, in her rapid, rather gobbling voice. ‘Where did you get them? I haven’t seen any tulips about, have you your own sources of supply? Speak, unfold your secret.’

‘Aha!’ Willey said. He gave a twist to an imaginary moustache. ‘Question me not, proud beauty,’ he said.

They smiled at each other, both grateful that the situation had become thus facetious and manageable. Later she brought out the supper that had been waiting for him, and they ate it together: chicken and rice with cabbage salad, followed by American coffee, an extravagance this last.

Willey took off his jacket and lit a cigarette. ‘Another homeless Briton dumped on me this evening,’ he said.

‘Oh Gawd,’ Olivia said. ‘Not another.’ She was engaged in knitting him, very slowly, a canary-yellow pullover.

‘I rather liked this one, though.’ He told her about Kennedy. ‘Not a usual type,’ he said. ‘Not a professional teacher at all, by the look of him. There’s a sort of unauthentic heartiness about him, rather untrustworthy, really. I couldn’t quite make him out.’

‘It’s all very well,’ Olivia said. ‘But you are always being used in one way or another by these people. It’s a case of the willing donkey. I think you ought to protest.’

‘I can’t protest too much, you know that.’ He had told Olivia early in their acquaintance about the circumstances in which he had left England. She had never directly referred to it since.

She said, ‘I just hate to see you being used like this, you are so much better than any of them. Look at that appalling book of Jennings that you had to wade through.’

‘Yes,’ Willey said. ‘Yes, I know.’ He was silent for some moments. ‘If only they would offer me a permanent post,’ he said. ‘A proper contract. I’ve been on the locally employed staff now for four years, longer than anyone else. My results in the examinations are always good.’

‘They will, this year,’ Olivia said. ‘They’re bound to. You are miles better than any of the other teachers there, and they must know it. They’re not such fools as that.’

He looked at her in silence. Her loyalty touched him as always, but it was too constant a response to be in the present circumstances very reassuring. They were not such fools, it was true; but, of course, he was useful to them as he was. He had been for ten years at that one school in England, almost his whole teaching career. Ten years unaccounted for would have been far too suspicious a circumstance, so he had had to give the name of the school to Jennings, who offered him after some days the temporary post. But he must have referred to the school. A special knowledge informed every glance Jennings gave him, every bit of hack work he was asked so politely to do.

‘If only they would,’ he said. There was a vacancy, he knew, to be filled from the locally employed staff. What a difference it would make. It would mean that he could no longer be dismissed in any arbitrary, local fashion, for a start; no more scrambling for teaching hours, courting the secretaries to put in a good word for him; no more worries in the long summer holiday. It would be a salary they both could live on. There was not much time. Olivia was thirty-six and she wanted children.

‘Mackintosh was there tonight,’ he said. ‘Teaching his first-year class. Exuding keenness as usual.’

She said quickly, ‘But they couldn’t possibly … He’s only been there two terms.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose not.’ But the fear he had experienced from the first about Mackintosh, seeing the immediate identification the other had made, between his own advancement and the progress of his pupils, reasserted itself now with the effect of a chill, in the cosy little room.