6

Patricia Barwing had trained herself to experience with full awareness the moment of unclouded sincerity which always comes just after waking. It is a moment difficult to grasp because thought all too quickly drives away feeling, and if there is a struggle, sincerity is already lost. Now, lying on her couch with her knees drawn up and her face in the pillow, she knew first that it was evening and that Peter was not at home, and then that she was not really as unhappy as she had thought before falling asleep and that the idea of suicide, which had been with her all day, did not come from her deepest self. She turned over with a sigh and opened her eyes. The ticking of the wrist-watch close to her ear made her look down. Nearly seven. Time to go down and eat.

From where she lay she could see the yacht anchorage of Williamstown and the entrance to the river. The sea was choppy and a light rain was falling but the light was still clear. A dredge was lying hove-to a few hundred yards off-shore. Closer in, their own boat, a cabin-cruiser with its superstructure shrouded in tarpaulins, was riding at anchor. Moisture was dripping from the wine-coloured leaves of the creepers that covered the bluestone walls of the house.

She felt chilly but the heaviness had gone. Her eyes took in the details of the room one by one: the Chagall print of the old Jew playing his fiddle with the snow-covered gables of the Polish village behind him, the photograph of Lorna, her sister, in the Cornmarket at Oxford, her own costume sketches for Peter’s production of The Trojan Women, the escritoire and the white shelf beneath the bay-window where she kept her own books, mostly on art and oriental cooking. This was her study; she did not have a bedroom to herself. It was her favourite room, but she was fond of the whole house. It was bought with her own money and they had spent as much on repairing and remodelling it as a new one would have cost.

It was Sunday and the maid’s half-day off, but there was no hurry about anything. She had only to warm up the food which was waiting, ready. She wondered how Peter was getting on. He was in town, speaking at some Greek Independence function. He had been drinking before he went out but he never got really drunk. Perhaps it would be better if he did. He was in what he ironically called his heroic mood, as usual when he went among Greeks. It was apt to bring his youth back to him.

Great merchants barter

The people like cattle

And smile in the market,

But here in the passes

The guns are speaking …

If he got too worked up Susan would know how to control him—if she was with him. Susan was the one who could talk to him without making him feel upset, where she herself had to use a certain look to send him a warning, and he resented it.

Peter believed in words, not in hints or the implied. It was his way. To him the word ‘argument’ meant a discussion, to her it meant a quarrel. Patricia was tired of arguing. But it was better now; at least they no longer heard the milk cart clopping by at half-past three every morning while they were still lying side by side and he was trying to get her to be objective—as if that counted!—and telling her over and over again that he loved her and that nothing unalterably bad had happened. He had given it up only because lack of sleep was wearing him out, too. In all these months the unseen milkman on his cart had become to her like a ghost out of childhood.

Of course he loved her, and the business with Susan was nearly finished. If ever she did kill herself it would not be because he did not love her, but because it was simply too tiring to go on living. Only a woman could understand what it was to be so tired, even one like Susan. She was the most tiring part, worse than Peter, with her unbearable compassion. Compassion or not, it had taken her a year to go to bed with Peter, a whole year of struggle that had nearly driven the poor girl mad. It was a pity her parents had taught her the spiritual beauty of chastity but not what a man really was, nor how easily a woman could destroy him. Now at long last Susan was getting free. She had taken up some new kind of psychology to save herself by the skin of her teeth. But what would save Peter, split and suspended between a girl and a wife, too scared to decide for himself, arguing and analysing like some unripe boy? Yes, of course he loved her, not knowing what love was. She could reassure him that she loved him also but how could she explain that she did not need him any more? She had seen it clearly two nights ago, for the first time, and then the idea of suicide had come. All her life she believed that a woman could lose the will to live when she was no longer needed. Now she knew that it was not like this: the will to live depended not on being needed but on needing someone else. She no longer needed Peter—he had talked her need to death—and therefore she no longer needed herself. ‘I don’t need myself,’ she said softly into the room, trying out whether it sounded silly. There was no self-deception left, and without it life was too cruel. Was there anything that had a meaning?

Alone with the sea and the house it seemed to her that, possibly, there was an answer to the question which would come to her in time. She had never developed the habit of thinking a problem to its conclusion because Peter would do it for her. If it was not too late she would have to think this one out for herself. What did it really mean, not to need? Complete freedom? But what was that? If one was completely free, what was one free for? Could there be a purposeless freedom? Surely, since the idea of purpose already imposed frontiers. When the realisation had come that she did not need Peter, nor anyone else, and perhaps not even herself, terror had seized her as nakedly as when, in the grip of scarlet fever in her father’s big house in the Western District, shortly before her eighth birthday, she had faced the thought of eternity. The panic was beginning to abate now. A person who needed no other was responsible to himself alone. But did this, maybe, leave one with a responsibility so absolute that no mortal woman could carry it?

Peter would be only too glad to discuss it all, but in the process he would generalise the vitals out of the problem and drive her to despair. The truth was that he didn’t know and was afraid himself, and that was why Susan had become so important. Everything she said seemed to him profound and moving, and yet it was often only the intuition of a talented and self-centred young girl, still not sure of what life was about. At twenty, some girls still liked to sit on the floor and rationalise the universe from the tenderness of their emotions. She had done it too, at Susan’s age. ‘But, thank heaven,’ she thought, ‘ours wasn’t a good Christian home. We did not torture ourselves with such exalted ideas. Nobody preached Humility to us.’

Invigorated by a strong dislike that had outworn jealousy, Patricia got up and went into the bedroom. Here everything spoke of Peter. If a bed could have a personality it bore his, not hers. He still spent hours lying on it fully dressed and reading. She sat down on the edge and let her mind dwell on her husband.

Peter looked on himself as a failure, though his friends thought him a success. Studying Archaeology, first in Sydney and then in Athens and London, he had been brilliant; a young, consequential materialist and follower of Morgan. He had vigorously debated Collingwood’s views on motives in history, corresponded with Caudwell and, while still at College, had done some work on an original theory of knowledge. Of this a single essay had been published in Antiquity, where it was noticed by Gordon Childe whom at that time he admired. He had not followed it up after his return home. Gradually his main personal interest had turned to literature, to Greek drama. Unforgiving and intolerant of himself, he imagined that he was only a dilettante. In early middle age he had come to the conclusion that he had wasted his life and should have become a writer. He had adapted the Oresteia into vernacular Greek. Every year towards the middle of the winter term he staged one of Euripides’ plays at the University, and she designed the costumes. It was Peter’s greatest pleasure but it did not alleviate his fear of growing old, a fear which he had had as long as she could think back. He had celebrated his fortieth birthday, nine years ago, like funeral games, and they had both agreed to ignore their anniversaries. In a classical scholar it was ridiculous. She was three years younger and thoughts of ageing had never troubled her until Peter discovered Susan working in the archives of the Department.

His students spoke of him as youthful. They liked his lectures because they were unpredictable, and him because he was a generous examiner. He flirted with his women undergraduates whose pet name for him was ‘Koala’, because he could look like a mischievous little bear—and he had himself shown her a satirical triolet in his honour which began, He loves the student body. No doubt he had had affairs … It had only dawned on her recently that Peter had certain special tastes, certain physical appetites, which he had kept secret from her all these twenty years. He maintained publicly that every healthy University ought to have at least one underground society dedicated to the Dionysian rites. He was an adept at academic politics and such remarks made the rounds without doing him any harm. He had never before let himself fall seriously in love and their marriage had been like most marriages in her circle, neither very happy nor very unhappy.

The war had interrupted his career. He had left his postgraduate research to work for Military Intelligence in the Aegean and then for the Greek army in Egypt. Later, in 1947, they had given him a senior lectureship in Brisbane. In the beginning he had been glad to get back but now he called Australia an intellectual sewage farm. Finally he received his Professorship and an appointment to the first Chair of Archaeology in Melbourne. The money for the new Department had come mainly from her father, Sir John Cley, the grazier.

She alone knew that Peter looked back nostalgically to the war, when radicalism was respectable. He always wanted two things, and at the same time: to be a rebel and to be accepted. Ambition won out. He despised the Establishment—because it let him be a part of it. She had always hoped that they would go back to Europe one day, but he had left it too late. At least he said that he had left it too late. His argument was that at a certain stage in an academic’s career it became impossible to make a change without losing by it; your name was identified with a University. It was an excuse, and they both knew it. Europe would have confronted him with a new choice to make up his mind where he stood. In Australia it was so much easier to pretend there were no choices. But the road was not finally closed. It would in the end depend on her, to whom Peter’s future was becoming a matter of indifference. If he could throw off this idiotic infatuation … There would be no more Compassion, no more Humility, no more holidays à trois. Susan and he were held together now only by a subtle, most painful lack of trust. Neither could bear being the first to be abandoned: each wanted to be free while keeping the other a captive, which was not possible. As a woman, she foresaw that Susan would come off best. She was young. People would help her; they rarely helped those who stood in most need.

Patricia made up her face carefully but did not change from her housecoat. In the mirror the lines round her eyes hardly showed and the flesh was loose only at the throat, but she had had that since boarding school. Her nose was faintly arched and her brows high, giving her face a certain disdainful expression. People who did not know her intimately thought her haughty, and this was another thing she had had to carry since girlhood. ‘I am a cold bitch,’ she thought. ‘No wonder Peter wants someone sweet and spontaneous. Will I ever shake off that goddamned English expression?’ But, underneath, she was not dissatisfied. She looked ten years younger than Peter and her figure was still good. Nowadays, as if they sensed a change, many of her men acquaintances were making up to her. Yes, even the tradesmen … Remarkable, how men, complete strangers, responded to a woman’s state of mind! But to enjoy that sort of thing one would have to be willing not only to give but to take, and this she was not.

Patricia went downstairs, drew the curtains, switched on the light and made herself some toast and coffee. She could write letters or look at television. She decided to look at television. They were doing a livecast from the Music Bowl and she was glad she was not there. It was the end of March but it felt more like April. Wrapped up cosily, she sat relaxed, listening to the music and sipping her coffee. Lazily her thoughts began to wander, back to England, back to school. Then they turned to the first years of her marriage and to her son who had died at birth. That, too, had seemed an unbearable tragedy at the time, and so had the realisation that she would never have children.

The ringing of the telephone roused her from her dreaming. It was Peter, to say that she should not stay up for him. He was going on with Yannis Joannides and a young journalist friend of his to the Festival Hall to hear a singer whom Yannis’ brother had brought out. He sounded calm and sober. The meeting had been a flop, the hall only half full, and instead of Greek music they had had a Progressive song group which everybody had heard dozens of times. He did not ask if she felt like coming out to join them.

She took Middlemarch and got into bed to read. Since her difficulties had started she was finding a new comfort in books, especially in the novels of Stendhal and George Eliot. It would be wonderful to be like Dorothea. She read for an hour and fell asleep over the page.

The sound of voices coming from below woke her again. It was Peter and another man. They were speaking Greek. She lay and listened, and then Peter opened the door and looked in. He was in his most cheerful mood.

‘Hello, Pat. Had a nice evening by yourself?’

‘Very nice.’ His greying hair was ruffled. It was a good sign. Whenever something took his mind off himself he drew his hand ceaselessly through his hair.

‘I’ve brought a young chap home. You would like to meet him, I think.’

‘Who is he?’

‘An artist. Come down and talk to him. He’s one of Kondos’ bright young men. He’s interested in the theatre and he’s a terrific draughtsman. He made a sketch of me and I think he writes poems as well. He looks rather lost.’

‘Another of your lame ducks?’

He laughed. ‘Throw something on and come down. We’ll need some coffee presently.’

She got up, feeling rested and not at all sleepy, put on her housecoat and went down into the lounge. Peter was carrying in a bowl of apples soaked in wine, a Barwing speciality kept for Greek visitors. Criton was standing with his back to her, warming his hands at the electric fire. The room had grown cold.

He turned and bowed formally. Her first thought was that she did not feel that she had seen him before, as she often did when she met Greeks. He had the melancholy eyes, but with something else in them, another, harder quality.

Her husband introduced them and began to speak animatedly about the concert. The Maritsa woman was exceptionally good, sensational, in fact. He hadn’t believed it possible that a Hungarian could sing Greek folk songs with so much tact and authenticity in that enormous hall. There had been wrestling too—surprisingly exciting! A much lighter fellow from America had literally made the local product look like a beginner. He had all but broken his opponent’s thigh, and for an agonising few minutes the two had been locked together, heaving and rolling across the mat like crabs. There had almost been a riot. He described an amusing and painful incident in which their young friend had played a part. The defeated wrestler, Papadopoulos, had come up to the table where they had joined Alexis’ party and somebody had goaded him into demonstrating his skill. Like a giant child who does not know his strength he had nearly wrenched Criton’s hand off. Alexis had had to call a halt.

‘I’m sure it wasn’t funny for Mr Evangelides,’ Patricia said. ‘I can’t imagine a wrestler not knowing his own strength. Did you have a quarrel with him?’

Criton flushed and looked at her, but quickly lowered his eyes. He felt a spontaneous sympathy in her tone. Patricia was leaning with one hand on the table, holding an apple in the other and her cheeks were still warm from sleep.

‘We had a misunderstanding,’ Criton said, picking up an apple himself. ‘He did not appreciate a sketch I made of him some time ago.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’ the Professor asked. ‘He’s a wicked draughtsman, you know. Absolutely wicked.’ He turned to Patricia, very pleased.

‘Did he hurt you?’ she enquired, suppressing a smile. ‘Let me see what he has done.’

Reluctantly he held out his right hand and she took it lightly into her own. It was swollen and felt hot. He winced involuntarily and withdrew it.

‘He has hurt you. What this needs is a cold compress.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he murmured, putting his hand behind his back.

‘If you let it go you won’t draw for a week. I’ll get you a basin and a bandage.’

She went out and Peter winked at him as if to say, ‘There you are. What did I tell you?’ In a few moments she returned, carrying a bowl of water, lint and a bandage. She sat down on a chair in front of him and, soaking the lint, bandaged his hand expertly. He let her do it, trying to keep his eyes from the opening of her coat where the soft lining touched the flesh and a red mark, the size of a small coin, was showing on her skin.

Professor Barwing had not yet done with the concert. He was full of enthusiasm about the singer. ‘You’ll have to see her,’ he said, drumming a tattoo on the mantelpiece. ‘Five feet and a bit, dressed all in black with a big yellow rose as a corsage. What a voice! What temperament! And she’s educated, knows the classics. I invited her to come and act for me, and she said she wasn’t Helen but a Captive Woman. Really, an extraordinary person.’ He addressed Criton and insisted:

‘You agree, don’t you? She’d make a splendid Helen? Dressed just as she was?’

‘Black is for Cassandra,’ Criton said.

‘Ah, you’re right. Black was their mourning colour. Pat, you see: this young man is a Cypriot. But he knows, he knows.’ He fixed him with a friendly stare, like a student who had asked an intelligent question, and added: ‘Tell us more: tell us everything. How do you live, what do you do with yourself? Don’t be shy. His cartoons are magnificent, my dear. Really magnificent.’

They settled themselves and Criton, nursing his bandaged hand, told about his work for the newspaper. Without admitting to it directly he conveyed that it bored him. Patricia, groping behind his words for what he did not say, felt that he was proud. He would find it hard to accept help unless it were offered in a special way.

When Criton had finished Peter made him show the sketch he had done of him while he was making his speech. Criton had caught him in a characteristic pose, looking at the floor with his hair in disarray. It was a rather detached piece from which one could not say whether the artist was impressed with his subject. Afterwards Peter persuaded Patricia to bring down her folio of costume sketches and spread them out on the carpet. They were discussing them, sipping their coffee. Criton neither praised nor criticised but, every now and then, held one up to study some detail, paying more attention to the faces than the costumes. Patricia found herself wishing very much that he would say what he thought of the work. When he came to a grey and black gouache which showed Hecuba raising accusing arms towards Helen, he recited:

Menelaus, beware!

Her beauty will entrap you,

She has power to enchant

Men’s eyes, to bring cities

To ruin …

Peter lay back in his chair and with closed eyes completed the passage. Then he quoted his own version, in the vernacular of the modern streets, of Menelaus waiting for his wife’s appearance. ‘The day’s arrived: how beautiful is the sunlight! Today I shall embrace Helen …’

Criton looked up, frowning.

Barwing anticipated him. ‘It’s an acquired taste, you know. Even in Greece some can’t see the point. They declare that ordinary people, who can hardly follow a word, love the original too well to have it mucked about. Euripides would have laughed at them. If you have a living language, why not use it? As they do at Epidauros …’ He swept the drawings together and placed a hand on Criton’s knee. ‘Would you consider trying your brush on a few décors for us? This year we are putting on Alcestis. Do you think you might enjoy that?’

‘Occasionally the magazines take photographs,’ Patricia put in. She wondered whether it was the right thing to have said. But Criton, heartily chewing a wine-soaked apple and unashamedly savouring the flavour of the muscatel, agreed immediately. ‘He’s not really so proud,’ she thought, giving her husband an almost affectionate look. She tried to think whether there was a part in Alcestis for this boy. Probably not. Euripides’ mixture of irony and terror would not suit him.

They talked till late about theatre and art, and as the night progressed Criton spoke more and more freely. He had at home some reproductions of Paul Georghiou, the best painter in Cyprus. He mentioned that he did not live very far, just across the river, and suggested bringing them round some time. Patricia said she would like to see them. At a quarter to two he apologised for keeping them up so late.

Patricia rose with him. Saying that she still had a slight headache and would like some fresh air, she offered to drive him home. She changed into slacks and put on a coat. In the bedroom, alone for a moment, she looked in the mirror and smiled. A few hours before she had been considering suicide.…

It was raining fairly hard when they crossed by Batman Bridge. The windscreen wiper was swishing evenly and Criton, keeping to his own side, was quietly gazing out into the wetness. Patricia felt a strong urge to look at his profile. She was driving slowly, blaming it on the slippery road, hoping that he would say something; something personal and apt to the hour, and yet she was afraid that he would. Finally she decided that it was high time to stop watching her own emotions. She tried to think of her bed which was waiting for her and of Peter who had behaved very well. There was no one who could put a younger man so much at ease. Melbourne was lovely at night, very lovely at this time of the year. Those small weatherboard houses in the plane-tree squares, with their rusty, cast-iron balconies—they had a charming, old-fashioned intimacy, and so had the wide, empty streets, smelling of autumn to come and of the sea. One could imagine oneself back in the nineteenth century.

They said goodnight in front of his lodgings. She followed him with her eyes as, looking forlorn in the swaying light of a street lamp, he walked inside, bareheaded. Then she turned and drove back as slowly as before. She put the car into the garage and stood in the driveway, letting the rain fall on her face and hands and feeling, as through a reverie, its cooling protective touch.