Editor’s Introduction
After Mrs Gray’s death I was asked by her daughter Hilda to edit the memoirs Alex had kept locked in a morocco writing case, behind arabesques in faded gilt, the work of some Turkish craftsman, which Grandfather Gray had brought back from Constantinople. (I should say the memoirs had soon overflowed the writing case.)
Alex disliked her married name: too banal. Her father’s polysyllabic ‘Papapandelidis’ inevitably became a boring joke. As her mother Aliki saw it. Aliki preferred her maiden name, ‘Xenophon’. Alex could not very well avoid the Gray bit, but evolved the names under which she was registered in the books of the Nile Cold Storage at the Gare de Ramleh, Alexandria, and later, at David Jones, Sydney: Mme Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray.
Alex acquired names as other women encrust themselves with jewels and bower-birds collect fragments of coloured glass. It mystified acquaintances that Mrs Gray should become, according to mood or period, ‘Llewellyn’ or ‘Diacono’ for instance, even briefly ‘Bogdarly’. It was truly amazing that she should choose to be labelled ‘Demirjian’, when her mother-in-law, one of those she hated most, had been born a Demirjian (we think). The detested Magda could resign herself to ‘Gray’ from recognising in it a kind of inverted exoticism. So each of the women was more or less content, while inwardly despising contentment and each other.
I had known the Grays for years. We were all the incongruous descendants of Australian pastoral families. Henry was a cuckoo in the Gray nest, a scholar who wasted his years drifting through the Middle East collecting objets d’art and rare manuscripts. He brought them back to Sydney and founded an antique business which his son Hilary, my schoolfriend, developed profitably later on and the grandson Hal carried on somewhat fitfully.
Hilary, another of the Gray mavericks, was got on a Levantine woman, another objet d’art Henry brought back from Asia Minor before the war broke out between Turk and Greek and most of Smyrna was reduced to ash and rubble.
Henry’s wife, Hilary’s mother, was one of those women who acquire a reputation for beauty through a flair for clothes and jewels, an arresting body, and an aggressive kind of ugliness. She had her voice, too. She had her legs, and her taunting breasts. She stopped the conversation whenever she chose to appear at some Alexandrian pâtisserie during the six o’clock brouhaha. She would have stunned the Royal Sydney Golf Club if her breeding had allowed her access.
Most of the men who ran across her hoped they might take over from her husband, or her current lover. But although Magda Demirjian Gray took lovers, there was no indication that she would leave a husband, elderly certainly, but still virile, who kept her in style. In addition, their son Hilary, to whom she was not overly attached (Magda was attached only to herself) acted as a pledge between husband and wife that could not be overlooked.
Hilary had the appearance of a slender, green-complexioned Levantine rather than a rowdy extrovert Australian with pastoralist forebears. He had moist black eyelids and curving lashes. At school it got round that he was delicate and allowances must be made for this. He was given milk at break, and was allowed to sit in the sun reading books of his own choosing (Henry James and Proust) from under an eyeshade the colour of milk chocolate.
We saw a lot of each other as young boys. Hilary was welcome at our house, after school, and for week-ends. We cut up a frog in the bath to watch its heart movement, we smoked a cheroot under the buhl table in the hall, and we masturbated together in bed. We were quick to tidy up and it seemed to me at the time my parents were unaware of any of these activities. They must have been. For the friendship was brought to an abrupt end. It filtered back to me through maids’ chatter and innuendo from the masters that my friend was an unhealthy influence: you couldn’t expect much from the union of an Australian gentleman with an Armenian? Arab? Jewess? or whatever the woman was. So Hilary and I began to avoid each other at school. His mother had never been much more than a silhouette and a perfume. She did not fit into the acceptable, that is, dull Sydney society to which my parents belonged, but went down well with her husband’s friends from the art-dealing and Bohemian worlds. (My mother heard that the Demijohn had done a belly dance on a dinner table at Vaucluse.)
Hilary and I were brought together again in the Second World War when we went over in uniform to the Middle East. There was no mention of the past, not even the flicker of an eyelash. I forget how Magda turned up in Cairo, but she did, announcing to an entourage of officers that she was there to do war work. Of what kind, nobody dared ask, and Magda merely slapped more orange powder on her cheeks and sucked on her lipstick. She became a reflection of those superb desert sunsets to the west of Mariut. Flaring her nostrils, lowering her eyelids, she suggested an inscrutable camel. But without becoming grotesque. She was a beauty by birth and of her milieu. Even Alex, who grew to hate her, had to admit it. As for Magda, she went her own way. She valued her independence and the respect of those she despised.
Hilary Gray was superficially wounded during the Syrian campaign. While on sick leave in Alexandria he met a girl, the daughter of Greeks from Asia Minor who had escaped to Egypt during the sack of Smyrna. I met the parents at the time Hilary was courting Alex. Once you got over the name ‘Papapandelidis’, they were very correct, even distinguished people, anglicised by governesses. They were distressed at the thought of their daughter marrying a man of whom nothing was known except that he came from a barbarous country, his father an antique dealer, his mother practically an untouchable from ‘Frango Levantini’ Smyrna.
I was with Stepho and Aliki Papapandelidis on the Alexandrian Corniche, across the bay the mole where the Pharos is believed to have stood.
‘It is too soon, too soon,’ Aliki was agonising.
‘Too soon,’ Stepho echoed in antiphon, his lips dragging on a frayed moustache.
Aliki was too proud to whimper. ‘People lose their heads in revolutions and wars.’
‘They are carried away into marriage and adultery.’ A wind was ballooning Stepho’s trousers.
‘Half the children born in war or revolution are unwanted. Can you not do something, Lieutenant White, to help us?’ She was looking at me hopefully, but without expectation.
‘How can I alter the course of history?’ It was what they knew.
‘Exactly,’ she said, and her husband echoed, ‘Exactly.’
These decent people, in their dark clothes of another period, another fashion – I remember his anonymous tie, her carefully blacked lace-up shoes – were enacting a tragedy, nothing major, they themselves would have admitted, but a minor Alexandrian one, on the Corniche, across from the believed site of the Pharos.
They bowed their heads. Stepho was wearing a squashy Homburg, Aliki a black cloche.
The Papapandelides did not come to their daughter’s wedding. Nor did Magda, perhaps out of discretion; she knew her place in Smyrna-Greek society.
Alex, at the time of her marriage, was a vision of camellia flesh asking to be bruised. Identical to Hilary’s, her eyelids already showed signs of spoiling. Her pale, natural lips were parted, tremulous with the emotion waiting to spill out of them. Knowing Hilary, I could not believe she was still a virgin; it was the approaching sacrament which made her tremble and visualise a future breaking open in front of her.
The ceremony was performed by a Protestant padre. Some of Hilary’s fellow officers and a batman were present. Myself the best man, on leave from my Air Force Wing at Sidi Haneish. As we came out of the church, two little Greek girls whose father kept a grocery on the corner flung handfuls of rice. It cut. I know because I experienced a few grains myself. It let loose some of the emotion Alex had bottled up. Her beautiful, pale, moist lips were overflowing with joy or grief. Hilary was trying to restrain his annoyance.
After a short honeymoon at Luxor Hilary returned to his regiment. When the Australians embarked for home and other theatres of war, he remained behind, attached to a British headquarters in the Western Desert. Alex returned to the parents’ house at Schutz. There her children were born, first Hal, then towards the end of the war, Hilda.
Several times when on leave I was entertained to formal lunches by the Papapandelides. I found that Aliki’s acquaintance addressed her as Madame Xenophon and that Madame X’s husband was wedded to the telephone. He was always waiting to be called to it. He would jump up, dropping his napkin and his cutlery to accept an invitation to le bridge and le thé. In fact most of this Smyrna gentleman’s life had been spent at bridge and tea, or in writing complimentary verses to the ladies of his circle. When he died of a stroke in the garden at Schutz near the end of the war, the ladies sighed, as they wiped the porto from their lips before the next rubber. ‘Ce pauvre Stepho Pa-pa-pan, il était si gentil …’ and soon forgot.
Once in the garden at Schutz after lunch the pretty dolls of children tumbling round our ankles, their mother in a flowing tussore dress, I asked Alex, ‘Do they see much of their other granny?’ (for Magda was still around, between Cairo and Alexandria). Alex raised her upper lip with its steely pinpricks of afternoon perspiration and replied, ‘I’ll leave Mamma to answer that one.’
When asked, Aliki pursed her mouth and faintly smiled; she had complained earlier that she was starting a migraine. ‘In Smyrna we met, I think once or twice. We didn’t know them.’ The faint smile dissolved in a silvery mist of painful recollection.
Aliki could dare anyone to disagree with her standards. In appearance she was to Magda what an etching is to a painting. Aliki’s lines had been scratched remorselessly into the copper. Magda was a series of flat, splattered planes reflecting whichever continent or island she happened to inhabit at the moment it was done. Aliki was Greek: she had suffered wars, invasions, revolutions; Magda the Levantine had battened on these, along with the black marketeers and the lovers an occupation throws up.
In later life Aliki visited her grandchildren in Australia, but could not be persuaded by their mother to stay. She missed the scents of thyme and stocks, and the smell of burnt-out candles. ‘Though I am not a believer,’ Aliki assured us, ‘the smell of an Orthodox church is consoling.’
The last time I saw Magda she was down on her luck. It was on a balcony in the Delta town of Mansoura. I had been sent to Egypt by Alex to order the Government to surrender property they had confiscated when foreigners were expelled. Of course they refused, but I had my meeting with Magda. The henna of her hair and the orange powder with which her cheeks were ingrained outdid the Nile sunset. ‘Keeping old age at bay,’ she explained when she caught me looking too closely at her. Her laughter reeked of cheap Egyptian cigarettes. From inside the block came the smell of burning cottonseed and someone was cooking a pot of beans. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you won’t see me again. Oh, no, no! What should I do in Australia but die?’ Nor did we see her. Not long after my visit, the building in which she was living collapsed, as buildings in provincial Egypt will.
Aliki Xenophon settled in mainland Greece when the Second World War was over. I met her there in Athens, and on the island of Nisos. The old cardigans she wore, in black or sepia wool, were as ravelled as post-war Greece. In her character she remained as severe as ever. As an old woman the archontissa was writing something on Bouboulina, the pirate queen who led the war in the Aegean against the Turk which resulted in her country’s independence.
Independence: the grand illusion to which a trio of incongruously related women – Aliki, Magda, and Alex – were unswervingly dedicated. From which of these women Hilda’s character derived, I sometimes wondered.
At first appearance, her mother’s slave, she was also her mother’s keeper: she kept the archives, as opposed to Alex’s arcane memoirs. Whether archives or memoirs contained the truth it might be difficult to decide. Fossicking through the memoirs was not a job I looked forward to, but I had a sense of duty to this family whose lives were intertwined with mine. The expression of Hilda’s face when she made the proposition dared me to reject it. Although an Anglo-Saxon Australian on both sides, I am a sybarite and masochist; some of the dramatis personae of this Levantine script could be the offspring of my own psyche.
So, I submitted, with misgivings.
Notes
Schutz: suburb of Alexandria
archontissa: Greek noblewoman