Daniel and Rosie returned in the spring of 1928 and in some ways it was the mirror image of their outward journey. They were back on the SS Derbyshire, which had recently been refitted and smelled of fresh paint. As before, Rosie was seasick until she had been at sea for several days and, as before, the smell of turmeric and perspiration drifted across the sea as they passed Bombay. They suffered the appalling heat of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Bertie was miserable and grizzled continuously. At Port Said Rosie and Esther once again fell ill with gippy tummy, leaving Daniel to walk the sordid streets alone, fending off the little boys with ‘feelthy pictures’ of their ‘sisters’, and others with their blobs of shoe polish, who at all times seemed ready to pounce on his feet, so that his progress resembled a dance.
They had travelled out to Ceylon with optimism in their breasts. Rosie and Daniel had come to know each other very much better and to find that they had a great deal in common. Daniel had finally had the opportunity to bond closely with his little daughter, and they had made friends with a distinguished Egyptian gentleman, Ali Bey, from whom they had occasionally received an elaborately eloquent letter in a beautiful hand that had clearly benefitted from having learned to write Arabic first.
This time, however, Rosie was feeling guilty, but obstinate and helpless, and Esther was in a constant rage about having had to leave behind her beloved Singhalese ayah, Preethi, and the sweet-natured Tamil servants, the beautiful garden, and the pet mongoose that belonged to the Bassetts. She was still not at all delighted by her new baby brother, now a year old, oblivious to anything except his own sensations and appetites. She was still inclined to ask: ‘Why can’t we just put it back?’ On this melancholy and ill-tempered voyage, Daniel was having to look after the infant as well as Esther, as long as his wife remained too seasick to move.
Daniel was angry and resentful, but not because of having to take care of the children. He had loved Ceylon, and had prevised a wonderful future for himself and his family, thinking that one day he would be master of an entire estate, and dreaming of setting up an aerial postal and passenger service with a small flotilla of floatplanes and a fleet of motorcycle combinations. Just as a golfer cannot help looking at the landscape and thinking of how it might become a golf course, Daniel was incapable of noticing any morsel of flat land without thinking of how it might make an airstrip.
He was also galled to the bone about having to leave Samadara. He had grown tired of being virtuous when there was no reward for it, and tired of having virtue thrust upon him by force of circumstance. He had, in a fit of pique coloured by a kind of loneliness, finally dropped his principles, and understood that sometimes a married person needs to take a lover if they are going to have any kind of romance or intimacy. He had vivid memories of his old friend Fluke advising him to find a ‘dusky maiden’, or at least to find a wife in France, and Samadara had lived up to all the sumptuous reveries that white men have about native girls. She had indeed been sweet-natured and sensual, and, above all, lovable. Daniel had given in to an impulsive desire, had quickly grown to love her, and it was all too bitter to have to leave her behind. He would remember his own guilt and her grief all his life, as she sat on the floor of the little house that he had arranged for her, hugging her knees, tears streaming silently down her face, biting her lip, looking up at him pleadingly with her huge brown eyes. He had turned out to be just another damned Pinkerton, and he hated himself for it.
He frequently wished that he had been able to send Rosie home without it being automatically assumed that Esther and Bertie would be sent with her. Other men sent their wives and children home. He could not have borne to be apart from Esther and Bertie, however, and being with Rosie was the price he had to pay. They had enjoyed a few months of blissful marriage in Ceylon, but now it all seemed like the kind of rose-tinted dream that comes upon you just before you wake up. He often found himself leaning on the ship’s rail, looking out to sea, muttering ‘damn, damn, damn’ to himself. He felt that he wanted to get in a fight so that he could burn off some of this anger and disappointment, and he could hardly help but treat Rosie coldly.
In place of Ali Bey, Daniel made friends with a young Greek gentleman in a tight black suit with shiny patches at the elbow and knee, who had been employed to serve as ship’s doctor. Just like Ali Bey, this man had become enchanted by Esther, and always took the opportunity to chuck her under the chin and pat her on the head whenever they met on deck. ‘Pretty koritsi!’ he would exclaim, and ‘Filakimou!’
The doctor was then twenty-four years old and had had no medical training whatsoever, but had taught himself English in order to read and memorise in its entirety The Concise Home Doctor, a massive two-volume encyclopedia of diseases and treatments of humans and animals that he had picked up in Monastiraki market on his first trip to Athens as an eighteen-year-old. He had gazed at the strange Roman letters, the pictures and diagrams, and known in that instant what his vocation must be. This was confirmed when, in the same market, on the same day, he found a large and equally dilapidated Greek/English dictionary. From his point of view, it was triply confirmed when, having painfully mastered the foreign alphabet, he was blessed with a revelation that struck him almost like a bolt of lightning. He would never forget the moment when, in the kafeneion back in his village, he had suddenly realised that the entire technical vocabulary of medicine was Greek. It was as if he had been born with all the knowledge, and would hardly have to learn anything. He had gone out into the blinding sunshine, overwhelmed with happiness, and kissed the young Father Arsenios on both cheeks, saying, ‘Patir, for just this once, I am a believer.’
Fortunately he had a good doctor’s natural healing touch, and learned very quickly from experience what he had not learned from his books. Such was his obvious skill and knowledge that, to the very day when he perished in an earthquake, not a single person ever challenged him to produce evidence of qualification.
Having encountered Esther for the first time, and made a fuss of her, the doctor straightened up and held out his hand to Daniel, saying, ‘Dr John.’
Daniel took his hand, saying, ‘Daniel Pitt.’
‘Greek,’ said the doctor, tapping his chest. ‘You?’
‘Half English, half French. Moitié français, moitié anglais.’
‘Vous parlez français?’
‘Mais oui, bien sûr.’
‘Moi aussi, je l’ai appris tout seul, sans école.’
‘Alors, nous pouvons parler français. Ou anglais. Ou un mélange.’
‘Ou un mélange! Ha! Oui, but it is English I am wanting to practise. I learn from English book. I am ship doctor.’
‘Are you really called John? It doesn’t seem very Greek.’
‘Only for English. Real name Iannis.’
‘May I call you Iannis? John doesn’t seem right. You don’t look like a John.’
‘OK, but when you call me you say “Ianni”, no Iannis.’
Daniel puzzled for a moment, and said, ‘Ah, that’s the vocative?’
‘Vocative, yes. Klitiki. Or you call me Iatre. Iatre is “Oh doctor”.’
‘Oh doctor. I like that. I shall call you, what was it? Iatre? Come and sit with us, Iatre. We’re ready for the deckchairs, I feel.’
They sat side by side looking out over the seemingly infinite ocean, and Iannis said, ‘You know Greek?’
‘They made me do ancient Greek at Westminster. It’s one of our venerable public schools, for duffers. I really was a duffer, I’m afraid. I didn’t pay much attention. My brother Archie was terribly good at it.’
‘Is very funny, English ancient Greek. I laugh very much. Sometimes English come to Greece and go to ruins. Is talk in strange funny voice and many dead words. Is all wrong.’ He paused, and then said wistfully, ‘This my last voyage. I enjoy. Then finish.’
‘Oh? Why is that?’
‘Wife tuberculosis. She very ill. I doctor can do nothing, nothing. She not live too long. She cough blood, she turn white and she get too thin. Very sad. I very sad. Have to go home. I work in village now. I get donkey perhaps. One day car perhaps. I love your daughter. She very sweet. Poli glyka. She called Esther. Esther from Bible. No? She about seven? I have little daughter. She three only, and soon, no more mama. Is terrible. So I go home. I look after daughter. I not give her to aunties or nothing. I make her doctor like me. Only lady doctor in Greece one day! I love your daughter because she sweet and pretty like mine. Soon I go home and I take her on knee and I never go out in ship again.’
‘I’m so sorry about your wife.’
‘Yes, she very good wife. I am loving her too much, too much.’
‘And what is your daughter called?’
‘She called Pelagia. Is nice name. It mean ocean. Is possible Esther sit on my knee? I miss my Pelagia. You know she smell so nice. She only three. Very pretty, very sweet, very intelligent. Also very strong. She get angry, she stamp foot, like this, she shout, and she throw kouklaki. She very Greek. I more like Italian.’
‘Would you like to sit on the doctor’s knee?’ asked Daniel.
Esther looked up at the pleasant, handsome face with its eloquent brown eyes and beautifully groomed black moustache, and, with her thumb still firmly in her mouth, she nodded solemnly. She slid off her father’s lap and into the arms of Dr Iannis, who cradled her in his left arm and kissed her on the forehead, bouncing her a little, and saying, ‘Ah, Estherakimou.’
Afterwards the doctor had a go at holding Bertie, saying, ‘I try little baby boy. I not have boy. Boy different?’
‘Not really,’ replied Daniel. ‘Boys smell just as nice.’
‘Is not different,’ said Dr Iannis after a few minutes.
Dr Iannis dealt efficiently with Rosie’s seasickness. He talked a great deal about the vagus and vestibular nerves, the semicircular canals and acidosis. He was quite keen on the idea of bromide or chloral suppositories, but Rosie firmly vetoed the idea. He mused aloud about atropine, belladonna and strychnine, but there was none on the ship anyway. Instead he carefully packed her ears with sterile gauze, right against the eardrums, and made her drink glucose every two hours. He bound her stomach in a kind of tight cummerbund, and told her to lie on her right side with her knees drawn up.
It worked, but it made Rosie feel very strange to be almost completely deaf, and confined to her cabin. She wondered if this was what it was like in the womb. She found herself revolving the same memories, having the same obsessive thoughts, and fighting against the strange, simmering, implacable anger that she felt towards her husband, and which she knew was steadily destroying her marriage. She asked herself over and over again whether she really loved him, and answered herself as many times that she truly did.
It was all very well telling herself that her heart had become overcomplicated because of Ash, and her natural impulses thwarted by her faith, but now she began to wonder if the truth was that she did not want to have to live with a man at all. What she dreamed of was a peaceful life alone with the children. She had the terrible thought that she might even have reached this stage with Ash, if he had lived and they had married. The idea seemed utterly preposterous and horrifying, but it nagged at her nonetheless, and she lay for hours on her side, her eyes wide open, and her heart pounding.
Daniel found that he required very little conversational skill in Dr Iannis’s company. The doctor was a tireless talker, obsessed with the history of everything and anything. ‘I from Cephallonia. Is Ionian Island, not in Ionian Sea, is between Greece and Italy. Was Venetian. You know Veneto?’
‘No, but I do very much hope to go there one day.’
‘Is very good, very nice. They give music, understand. They bring kantades. Is man with accordion, man with guitar, man with mandolin. They sing in plaka and kafeneion. Is polyphon, yes? Most Greek music monophon, but Cephallonia music from Veneto. Is very pretty songs. I sing you song about ant. I sing it to Estheraki.’
Esther sat solemnly on his knee whilst he sang to her, a simple tune in march time, ideal for bouncing her on his knee. When he had finished she said, ‘Can you sing “This is the Way the Gentleman Rides”?’
‘I not know that one. Is English?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Daniel.
He handed Bertie to the doctor, sat Esther on his knee and bounced her up and down to the different rhythms of the gentleman, the lady, the soldier and a great many other improvised characters, until at last he came to the farmer, and exclaimed, ‘Down in the ditch!’ as she fell to the deck, laughing and kicking.
‘Is good!’ said Dr Iannis. ‘I try to remember, for Pelagia. She like very much.’
During the stop in Malta, strolling about in Valletta with nothing to do and nothing to say to each other, Daniel and Rosie felt as gloomy as they had been cheerful on the way out. The spring weather somehow made it all much worse, as if the rest of the world were going ahead without them. Daniel was holding Esther’s hand, and Rosie was pushing Bertie in a large cream-coloured perambulator that they had acquired in Colombo on the eve of their departure. It was only the presence of the children that prevented them from lapsing into a continuous acrimonious argument.
‘Just think, we’ll be home for April,’ said Rosie, trying to make conversation, and Daniel said morosely, ‘O to be in England now that April’s there. Have you any idea what I’m supposed to do when we get back? I have precisely one hundred guineas left. Have I got to go to Henley and beg for my job back?’
‘Well, I’m certain they would give it to you, if you asked.’
‘I’d have to go back to Birmingham. Are you coming with me this time?’
‘Oh well, I’d have to think about that. You could open a branch in London, perhaps.’
‘I’ve a good mind to rejoin the RAF.’
‘Would you?’ she asked, a little too enthusiastically.
He detected this, and said, ‘Looking forward to some long absences, then? Hoping I’ll be posted abroad?’
‘I just want you to be happy,’ improvised Rosie, and Daniel gave her a sour sideways glance, and said, ‘I believe you.’ A few moments later he added, ‘I want to live with the children. I don’t see any point in having children if you’re not there whilst they’re growing up. It’d be different if there was a war on. Anyway, peacetime in the services is a damned dry run. It’s just polishing and saluting and stamping and following procedures.’
‘You probably won’t rejoin, then?’
‘Probably not. Even though it’s obviously where I belong. Though I did love it in Ceylon.’
The conversation was interrupted by Dr Iannis, who had spotted them from a distance, and came hurrying towards them waving his panama hat, crying out, ‘Ah, my friends, my friends! I show you round. I know history. I tell you history of everything. We go eat rabbit. Rabbit very good Malta…’
It was the persistent but congenial company of this Greek doctor that prevented Rosie and Daniel from quarrelling violently and falling out with each other, and they were grateful to him. Neither of them was ready to face the inevitable storm that would be the aftermath of their return, and they thought of this period as the ominous prelude to a crisis, like the condemned man who spends the night of his execution playing cards with his jailers.
As they approached the docks in Gibraltar, Dr Iannis leaned on the rail with his pipe in his mouth, and told his friends, ‘Is last time here. After, I go home Cephallonia. Here one big bordel for English sailor, like Malta, but I like anyway. I like big warships. I go see monkeys for last time. You seen monkeys?’
‘One of them stole my handkerchief last time,’ said Rosie.
‘I go see them again,’ said the doctor sadly. ‘I say goodbye monkey.’
‘If you’re going back to Greece, why not have dinner with us tonight?’ proposed Daniel. ‘We can have a farewell meal. We’re staying at the Bristol.’
‘Ah! Nice hotel! Best hotel! Beautiful garden! But Grand Hotel also good. Moorish patio! I stay in Cecil. I like reading room, many newspaper, many language. I enjoy. We eat huevos a la flamenca. Is topical. You like paella? Is rice with everything kind of thing.’
‘Like a risotto?’
‘Is better. Is more flavour. Is krokos. You know krokos? Is yellow. Is nice, is delicate.’
There was little to do in Gibraltar but walk about enjoying the life in the streets. There seemed to be meditative, sun-browned pairs of men playing accordion and cornet mournfully on every street corner, and there were acrobats in the square outside the cathedral of St Mary the Crowned, including a little girl no more than five years old, who was doing backflips and walkovers, and then handstands on her father’s shoulders. Esther was mesmerised, and wanted to watch for hours. Here began her passion for cartwheels, which was to end only with adulthood.
She also loved the slightly mad donkeys that brought their own kind of chaos to the streets, with their constantly slipping burdens and small acts of rebellion, and she had to pat the noses of every one they passed. Dr Iannis expatiated on the Genoese nature of the architecture, and the perfection of the rhythms of arches, the symmetry of the elaborate patterns on the Moorish tiles. He wanted to show them the Flemish synagogue, and Bedlam Court, because of its sash windows. He also felt he had to show them all the chandlers’ in Irish Street, and the cemetery where there was a victim of the Battle of Trafalgar, and he made them walk up to the Moorish castle above Casemates Square. In those days the square itself was not the grand piazza it became forty years later, but a parade ground. As they stood outside, Daniel looking at the soldiers wistfully, and thinking how ridiculously young so many of them were, Dr Iannis said, ‘Is place where bad soldiers hanged. Rope on neck. Bye-bye.’
‘You should have been a historian,’ said Daniel, ‘rather than a doctor,’ and the doctor looked at him as if he was mad and replied, ‘I both. A man is many thing. Like soldier poet. Like Byron! We like Byron in Cephallonia. He stay with us a long time. He two thing.’ He tapped his own chest. ‘I many thing. I doctor, I father, I historian, I traveller, I Greek, I cosmopolitano, many languages and other thing. In my country, all doctor is historian.’
‘It’s true,’ said Rosie. ‘No one is ever only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they’re at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We’re all so hard to understand, aren’t we? I don’t even understand myself. It’d be so much easier to be a dog, don’t you think? Or one of these donkeys? I just wish so much…’ She looked away, leaving the words unsaid, and the doctor said quietly, ‘Is true, is very true. I remember this to tell my daughter one day. But I know one thing, if no one love you and you not love no one, then…?’ He spread his hands apart and thrust his head forward with his lips downturned. ‘Is all life no good. Dead is better.’
‘I’m quite looking forward to being dead, as long as it’s oblivion,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m completely fed up with the insane chatter I have to live with…I don’t mean the chatter of other people…I mean, you know, my own thoughts thinking themselves, round and round. Hopes and complaints, and things you plan to say to somebody one day…I just wish it would all stop and let me have some peace.’
‘It shuts up when you’re asleep,’ said Rosie sensibly. ‘At least, when you’re not dreaming. And then you might as well be dead. You are sort of dead, when you’re asleep, aren’t you? And then you wake up and it’s like coming back to life, being reborn.’
‘That’s what worries me about death,’ said Daniel. ‘I really do not want to go through that ordeal, and then wake up and find I’ve got to carry on living with myself, even in heaven.’
‘Well, I believe in the life hereafter.’
‘Of course you do. You still have your faith. I’m often very envious.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Rosie, ‘that reminds me. I’d so much like to go and see inside some of the churches. Why don’t you and the doctor go and see the monkeys, and we can all meet back at the hotel for drinks at seven? You take Esther and I’ll hang on to Bertie. I’m sure you can find a hansom cab these days.’
As the three of them set off towards Irish Street, the doctor said, ‘Is the same rule for wifes and monkeys. You touch them first, they get angry. You wait for them to touch you, is OK.’
At the top of the rock, they endured the astonishing insolence of the monkeys, who rifled through their pockets, throwing away anything inedible, having tested it first. Esther was completely delighted, and did her first cartwheel. The macaques were visibly alarmed and impressed, backing away and chattering, so Esther did it again.
‘Estherakimou is little monkey now,’ said the doctor.
Whilst Esther entertained the monkeys, Daniel and the doctor took in the astonishing view of Morocco across the strait, almost an arm’s length away, it seemed. ‘I been there once. I not like it. Woman, she try to sell me her daughter. Daughter only five, maybe six. I get very angry, and woman think I mad. Over there, is too poor, too much poor people.’
‘Did you like Ceylon?’asked Daniel.
‘Oh yes, Ceylon. I like. Is paradeisos. How you say? Old Eden Garden? Too many beautiful women. Men very nice, very polite. I like fruit. I like rice. Colombo too busy, but still nice.’
‘I am going to miss it forever,’ said Daniel.
Down at the baroque Roman Catholic church, Rosie parked Bertie in his pram at the bottom of the steps and paid one of the street children sixpence to keep an eye on him. Inside, she listened to the officiating priest conducting communion and sat unhappily in a pew at the back, trying to understand herself, and wondering how she could keep asking God to forgive her if it never made any difference and she never managed to change, and never realised until it was too late the difference between real virtue and the selfishness that disguises itself as such.
The following day, down at the docks, Dr Iannis kissed Rosie’s hand with elaborate elegance and then did the same to Esther, who held out her hand like a real lady, loving the theatre of it. He bent down and kissed the sleeping Bertie on the forehead, and then kissed Daniel on both cheeks and hugged him to his chest. Daniel noticed that he smelled pleasantly of cologne and pipe tobacco, and he felt a pang in his heart that he would probably never see this kind and interesting young man ever again.
Dr Iannis reached into his breast pocket and brought out his portefeuille. He presented Daniel with his card, which was somewhat grubby, but beautifully designed. The doctor noticed Daniel attempting to decipher the Greek script and took it from him, turned it over and returned it. It read ‘Poste restante, Argostoli, Céphalonie, Isles Ioniennes, Royaume Hellénique’.
‘I’ll write,’ said Daniel, ‘and I do hope that everything works out for your wife.’
‘I say goodbye to wife soon,’ replied the doctor mournfully. ‘Maybe one year, maybe two. Maybe six month. Is me and my koritsi now.’
As the SS Derbyshire left the harbour, Daniel and Rosie stood at the rail, waving to the doctor, until finally there was no point in it any more. Daniel turned to Rosie and said, ‘Too many damned goodbyes. Halfway through my bloody life, and all I ever do is say one damned goodbye after another.’
‘We’ll be back home soon,’ said Rosie, looking up at him apologetically.
‘Home? Where is home? Have I got to live with your damned mother again?’
‘Don’t call her my “damned” mother,’ said Rosie. ‘I don’t talk about your mother like that. You’re altogether too free with your damns and bloodies.’
Daniel picked up Esther and hoisted her onto his shoulders. He looked hard at his wife. ‘Well, my mother is going to give you hell,’ he said, ‘and so will your father.’