An extraordinary night—dawn is breaking as I am writing this—have just now crept back into the house. I’ve been walking all night with Jerry Rothschild—we walked right down to the little bay on the other side of the island, where we swam in the phosphorous sea. Everything was rendered strange and magical: when I lifted my arm from the water light streamed from it as though I was some fork of heaven’s lightning. We struck out for the open sea—surprisingly Jerry turned out to be as strong a swimmer as myself, he used to swim as a boy across cold lakes in Canada—my body fell into swimming’s remembering, the hypnotic swing of arms and breath, the rise and fall of the sky and the stars. We finally stopped when we were a long way out and began to tread water: our feet cycled down upon the spinning sea, stars moving upon the surface all around us.
‘You belong here,’ Jerry said, ‘this is your home.’
His voice is deep and sonorous as if it dwells further inside him than other men’s. I floated on my back and looked up at the extravagant full moon.
‘I hope you mean the island and not the sea. I’m tired of being mistaken for a mermaid.’
He laughed, a sound rendered impossibly loud amidst the quiet murmur of the Greek sea. ‘I mean the island, madam. You belong here.’
‘Do I? I wonder if any of us do. I feel like I belong here but I doubt if Soula thinks so. Or even the island itself.’
‘The island loves you. The rocks. The stones. Thalasa.’
From my throat came a dark and bitter laugh.‘Is that remark meant as irony?’ He asked what I meant; I told him that after almost ten years David and I had finally decided to go back to Australia.
‘Why?’ he said but I didn’t answer him, diving deep instead into the waiting arms of the sea. When I came up he had already started back for shore.
When we arose dripping from the water, light streamed from us, turning us into temporary gods.‘This place makes you feel like Zeus,’ he said, handing me my dress. ‘Your clothes, Aphrodite. How can you bear to leave? Anything else will seem a half-life after this. It isn’t an easy life here but it is a vital one.’
I was slipping my dress over my head while he spoke, suddenly conscious of my nakedness. In the gleam of the moonlight I thought my body looked strong and whole, I felt again the power of my limbs. For a broken statue I felt amazingly restored.
‘Italy is beautiful, and France too,’ Jerry said, ‘but neither have the tragic majesty of Greece.’
I looked at him. ‘I know. Here you are aware of being in the cradle of creation. A place of legends.’
Behind us the mountains were black and still; I could just make out a monastery clinging to the end of a bony promontory. The silence was broken occasionally by the distant clink of goat bells, the cries of unknown birds.
In the strange luminous silence that earth was revealed as immortal, I imagined I felt the breath of the divine. For a brief moment it seemed possible to perceive the outline of existence, humanity’s arc of birth, fruition, decay. We stood without speaking, rendered sober by the earth’s air and the salt of its sea.
I was only with Jerry at all tonight because I made the mistake of dancing with Peter (the homosexual painter from Sydney). We were at the little kafenion at the cove; there was a wedding party, lyra, bouzouki, dancing. I begged David to dance with me but he wouldn’t.
‘I do not want to dance with you, Katherine! I do not want to dance with a drunk woman with smudged lipstick making a fool of herself.’
‘I’m not drunk. I’m enjoying myself. Come on, dance with me. Please?’
He leaned across the table and put his head close to mine. ‘You are embarrassing me. Stop acting like a fifteen-year-old slut.’
Anger rushed at my throat. ‘At least I haven’t been sitting there all night like a bloody corpse!’
For a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he rose from the table and promptly left. Stephanie, who was sharing our table, politely looked away but Jerry Rothschild looked me full in the face.
‘Is he always like that?’ Jerry said.
‘Not always,’ I said, ‘he’s having a bit of a hard time. You’ll have to excuse him. Anyway, I probably am embarrassing.’ I sat there, mortified by my stupid behaviour.
He looked hard at me. ‘Do you always defend him?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘as a matter of fact I do.’
He said nothing, but went on looking at me. Jerry Rothschild is handsome in a faded, effortless way; he has what I think of as Jewish good looks—a Roman nose, brown eyes, a curly, intelligent mouth. He has dark, tightly sprung corkscrew hair, greying at the temples, and looks vaguely Italian. (‘I’m a Rothschild,’ he says by way of introduction, ‘from the poor side of the family.’) He is tanned, sexy, confident with the ladies—in short, exactly the kind of man of whom I generally disapprove—too sure of himself, too proud of his reputation as a roué. Apparently the only thing he takes seriously is his work: he has already published two well-received volumes of poetry and is hard at work on another.
‘What are you frightened of, baby? Your old man? Or being alone?’ he asked.
I let the ‘baby’ pass; it was late, it was true that I had probably had too much to drink. ‘Oh, Jerry. What business is it of yours?’
‘I dig you, Kate, I really do,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘Oh, please. You make me sound like a garden.’
‘A beautiful garden,’ he said, placing his hand over mine. He picked up my hand, raised it to his mouth and kissed it.
‘I am a married woman,’ I said, snatching my hand back.
‘Spoken like a true professional,’ he said, leaning forward to kiss me. His mouth felt odd, strangely shaped; it felt like my first kiss.
I tried to break away but I felt myself falling towards him, my nipples swelling. I was kissing him but trying not to; I suddenly felt fully awake, fully aroused.
‘Come for a walk,’ he said, pulling me up from the table. ‘I promise to behave like a gentleman.’
I followed him out blindly, without thinking at all of where I was going. I was pretty drunk actually, drunk enough to be past caring.
It was only when we were outside in the air, in the night smells of the island, that I properly awoke. He was walking back towards the harbour, no doubt towards the tiny whitewashed house above the church he has rented for the past year, next to Pan and Rita’s.
‘I can’t go home with you,’ I said, stopping.
‘I know. We’re going for a walk.’ He continued up the path, turning off to take the narrow trail that led up and over the hills.
‘It’s at least five miles this way,’ I said, following him.
‘We can swim at the bottom,’ he said.
I was already cradled in alcohol’s sweet forgetting so I kept walking, turning up my head to that full and bony moon. I felt again the island’s mysteries, I felt my drunken soul begin to grow.
We walked and walked, mostly in silence, until we came to the swimming cove. Jerry stripped off and dived straight in; I hesitated only briefly and then followed.
The walk and the sea and the moonlight have completely sobered me. Sitting here writing this in the soft pink dawn of the morning I am claiming a moment’s happiness before I turn back into a mother and a wife.