Corfu Read online

  Robert Dessaix is a writer, literary commentator, translator and broadcaster. Having taught Russian language and literature for many years, he was ABC Radio National’s weekly ‘Books and Writing’ presenter from 1985 to 1995.

  Acclaimed among his books are the autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace, the novel Night Letters and a collection of essays and short stories (and so forth).

  A full-time writer since 1995, Robert Dessaix lives in Tasmania.

  THE AUTHOR’S OTHER WORKS INCLUDE:

  Turgenev: the Quest for Faith (1980)

  Anthology of Australian Gay and

  Lesbian Writing (ed.) (1993)

  A Mother’s Disgrace (1994)

  Night Letters (1996)

  Secrets (with Drusilla Modjeska

  and Amanda Lohrey) (1997)

  Speaking Their Minds: intellectuals and

  the public culture (ed.) (1998)

  (and so forth) (1998)

  ROBERT

  DESSAIX

  Corfu

  A NOVEL

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth

  Government through the Australia Council, its arts

  funding and advisory body.

  First published 2001 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Picador edition published 2002 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

  Reprinted 2002

  Copyright © Robert Dessaix 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publiction Data:

  Dessaix, Robert, 1944–.

  Corfu: a novel.

  ISBN 0 330 36357 3.

  1. Australians – Greece – Fiction. 2. Friendship – Fiction.

  3. Authors – Fiction. 4. Actors – Fiction. 5. Corfu Island (Greece) – Fiction.

  6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Post Pre-press Group

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Cover and text design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design

  These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Corfu: A Novel

  Robert Dessaix

  Adobe eReader format

  978-1-74197-174-3

  EPub format

  978-1-74197-375-4

  Mobipocket format

  978-1-74197-576-5

  Online format

  978-1-74197-777-6

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buyboth print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  For information about Kester Berwick’s life I am deeply indebted to Patricia Manessi Green of Benitses, Corfu, as well as to Graeme Dixon, Reg Evans, Saskia Handley, John Slavin and, above all, Christopher Coote, who was exceptionally generous both in his willingness to talk to me about his friendship with Kester Berwick and in granting me access to Berwick’s diaries and papers.

  I am grateful to Peter Timms and Clara Mason for the many refinements to my text which they suggested, and to Helen Nickas for her generous help with correct Greek usage. To Judith Lukin-Amundsen I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the knowledge and understanding she brought to the editing process. Her discerning comments and exacting criticisms were invaluable.

  Quotations from The Odyssey are from the translation by Robert Fagles (Viking Penguin, 1996); quotations from Sappho’s poetry (except for the poem ‘Gone is the moon’) are from The Love Songs of Sappho by Paul Roche (Prometheus Books, 1998); quotations from Daphnis and Chloe are from Paul Turner’s translation (Penguin Books, 1989); Cavafy’s poems are from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (The Hogarth Press, 1984), used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

  ALTHOUGH THIS NOVEL WAS INSPIRED BY THE LIFE

  OF THE AUSTRALIAN WRITER AND

  ACTOR KESTER BERWICK, THE NARRATOR

  IS AS FICTIONAL AS THE CHARACTERS

  HE ENCOUNTERS.

  — KESTER BERWICK —

  Born Frank Perkins in Adelaide, South Australia, 1903

  Founded the Ab-Intra Theatre Company, Adelaide, 1930

  Studied at Dartington Hall, Devon, England, with Michael

  Chekhov, 1936-7

  War years spent teaching in Australia

  Teaching in London, 1955-60

  Settled in Methymna (Molyvos), Lesbos, 1960

  Moved to Gastouri, Corfu, 1969

  Published the novel Head of Orpheus Singing

  (Angus & Robertson, London), 1973

  Died Corfu, 1992

  PART ONE

  … seventeen days I sailed, making headway well;

  on the eighteenth, shadowy mountains slowly loomed …

  your land! My heart leapt up, unlucky as I am,

  doomed to be comrade still to many hardships.

  Many pains the god of earthquakes piled upon me,

  loosing the winds against me, blocking passage through,

  heaving up a terrific sea, beyond belief – nor did the whitecaps

  let me cling to my craft, for all my desperate groaning.

  No, the squalls shattered her stem to stern, but I,

  I swam hard, I plowed my way through those dark gulfs

  till at last the wind and current bore me to your shores.

  But here, had I tried to land, the breakers would have hurled me,

  smashed me against the jagged cliffs of that grim coast,

  so I pulled away, swam back till I reached a river …

  So, fighting for life, I flung myself ashore

  and the godsent, bracing night came on at once.

  The Odyssey, Book Seven

  (Odysseus, a notorious if spellbinding liar, recounts his

  arrival on the island of Corfu on his way home from Troy.)

  1

  It was just on two. The train had arrived, thank God.

  I’d had no warning dream about this moment, that was the extraordinary thing. There’d been none of those ragged, foggy patches lying low in the mind. On the contrary, I’d pictured it a thousand times in brightly coloured detail, each time with a small bolt of pure excitement. Even now there was no sign that anything had changed, none at all.

  But no sooner had the train shuddered to a halt at Roma Termini, and his chunky black boot touched the platform, than I knew I’d made an appalling mistake. Some distance away behind a clutch of Polish nuns, I reeled. The second black boot touched the platform and a kind of anguish engulfed me, shot through with screeching wheels and muffled cries of joy.

  There was William, entirely William, casually dapper in that unfussy way of his, demurely cocky as he always was, peering about in the yellow light, his suitcase at his feet, waiting to be rescued.

  I caught his eye, smiled, and walked quickly across the platform – to hug him and to tell hi
m the first lies.

  2

  If Kester had a favourite time of the year on Corfu, it was the week before Easter. It didn’t seem to matter when Easter fell, early or late, or whether it was damp and chilly or shockingly sunny all of a sudden, something inside Kester always woke up that week, exactly like the tortoises struggling up from under the ground all over the hillside behind his house. A bit gnarled, a bit stiff in the joints and liable to lurch off in odd directions, but at the same time, in a sedate sort of way, delirious.

  This Easter awakening was one of the first things I ever learnt about Kester Berwick. Inconsequential, you might say, but at that moment, when I was as fragile as a moth’s wing, picturing the lurching tortoises buoyed me up.

  The voice over the telephone that first morning in Corfu was not exactly faint, yet by no means robust. Certainly not youthful, but hardly quavering, either. It was sprightly.

  ‘Easter’s one thing I can’t abide,’ it said firmly. ‘The crowds, the priests, all that jiggery-pokery – not to mention the pot-throwing – I try not to leave the house.’ No accent you could put a name to, just a carefulness with the vowels. ‘But the week before Easter is always a miracle – I have to wade through the wildflowers, you know, when I walk down the hill, I almost float up into the air on the scent.’

  It was an odd thing for a man to say to a complete stranger, but I was actually looking at a vase of asphodels as I listened, so felt instantly drawn in. And then he mentioned the tortoises, ‘doddering about’ in the sunshine behind his house.

  It was Palm Sunday, I remember, and I’d rung him from the Hotel Cavalieri in town where I’d come to rest after fleeing Rome (and William) several days before. I felt more like someone’s shadow than a man. It actually startled me whenever someone spoke to me – a waitress, a child on the staircase, anyone – had they really noticed I was there? A few days earlier on the deck of the ferry, squinting into the sheets of spring rain and seeing Corfu Town, glowing like a painting, all umbers and pinks in a patch of sun to the south, I’d thought instantly: I’ll stay here, I’ll cast anchor here and ride out whatever comes until I’m myself again. (An inane thought, really – who did I imagine I was, if not myself?)

  A day or two later, while I was leafing through the gossipy local newspaper with its advertisements for bouzouki lessons and coffee mornings at the Anglican church (‘all denominations welcome’), Kester’s tiny notice had caught my eye. House in Gastouri for rent for 2 mths, it said. Occupant travelling. Reasonable rent. Not, on the face of it, very revealing. Not even a telephone number to call. But I liked Occupant travelling, and I liked the idea of Gastouri, too, wherever it was. It rang a little bell. So I left a message at the newspaper for the travelling occupant to ring me at the hotel. Which he did, on Palm Sunday, just as the bells of St Spiridon died away, leaving everyone slightly stunned, as if abruptly purged of something.

  It was a strange, disembodied sort of conversation we had that morning. Who Kester Berwick might be, what sort of house it was, where he was going – I learnt nothing about any of that. He just asked if I was newly arrived, made a few remarks about Easter and then said: ‘Actually, I’m just about to set off – I’ve left it all rather late, I suppose – but you could come up and look over the place this afternoon, if you’d like to. I’ll have gone, but Agape will show you around.’

  And so after lunch I took a taxi up to Gastouri in the sweet-smelling hills behind the town with the curious feeling that I was the last piece this Mr Berwick had needed for some jigsaw puzzle he’d been working on. Missing until the last moment under a chair, perhaps, but I’d turned up eventually and been slotted into place. I’m not sure why I felt that – it was nothing he actually said.

  3

  Stuck awkwardly amongst straggly olive-trees on the high side of the road winding up from the village to the crest above the sea, the house had not a skerrick of charm. To tell the truth, it almost looked like a child’s drawing of a house: a square, white block, with two shuttered windows upstairs and a door and one window downstairs. Some scruffy greenery drooped from the window-boxes. No sign of life. It was not at all what I’d had in mind. I stood and stared up at it glumly.

  The silence at that time of the afternoon was so deep it was almost like a dinning in the ears. The odd whine of a motor-scooter somewhere down in the village only made the quiet more intense.

  Spiralling down inside, I nevertheless climbed up the damp stone steps to the narrow terrace outside the front door and stood for a while taking in the afternoon. Purple honesty sprinkled the cobbles. Of course, at that time everything still reached my eyes through a William-coloured haze. A thousand times a day I saw those chunky black boots of his touch the platform at Roma Termini and felt my soul turn to lead. Over and over again I heard myself say ‘I’m so happy to see you’ as my lips brushed the cheekbones I’d once – indeed, just minutes before – thought more beautiful than beaten gold. Well, certainly striking.

  Even now the gaudy mauve judas-trees across the road amongst the cypresses swam towards me through memories of what had happened when we left the station – in the taxi, in the cramped, yellow hotel room with its unforgiveably purple bedspread filling half the room.

  But all of a sudden around the corner came Agape. Who else could it have been? No ancient Greek crone, Agape. Grey-haired, a trifle hunched, a little pear-shaped, but nimble and sharply alive, possibly to things I couldn’t see.

  ‘Hérete,’ she said with a smile, inspecting me in careful detail and drawing a large key dramatically out of her cardigan pocket. Chatting amiably to me in Greek, she rattled the key in the lock, pushed open the weathered wooden door and stood aside to let me go in, nodding encouragingly.

  At first it gave me a prickly, uncomfortable feeling, to be honest, prowling through someone else’s house like that. But Agape seemed perfectly at home, opening doors, peering into cupboards and flinging the shutters wide. She was wearing a deep-blue dress, so can’t have been a widow. Who was she exactly? A neighbour? Surely not Kester Berwick’s mother-in-law? She made the odd comment in Greek, laughing softly once or twice and not minding at all, it seemed, that none of her comments would be understood.

  Although sparsely furnished, the house felt curiously far from empty. The downstairs kitchen felt talked in, the wobbly table sat around, and the cool silence in the two upstairs rooms strangely inhabited. It was a comfortable, intimate sort of silence, the sort of silence you can sit back and let creep over you at the end of a long evening with a friend. Was it the books crammed into the home-made bookshelves that gave me that feeling? E.M. Forster, Peer Gynt, Annie Besant, Clive James, The Odyssey and several old Time magazines – rather a queer assortment, actually. Was it the framed photographs dotted about the house? The amateur canvases high on the walls? The faint smell of dog? Whether the life lived in these rooms was small or big, though, was hard to tell – there just weren’t enough clues.

  From the upstairs window the view was actually more Italian than Greek: cypresses spearing the sky as far as the eye could see, pink and cream houses curving away to the left down the slope towards the jumbled village, while up on the brow of the hill that hid us from the sea, partly concealed by the huge holm-oaks in the gully between us, I could just make out a large, white palace of some kind.

  Still, turning back from the window to meet Agape’s eye, I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a stranger’s house, eating off his plates, squeezing my clothes into his wardrobe, sleeping between his sheets.

  But I took it, of course. It was less a decision than a matter of hearing myself saying, ‘Ne, yes, I’ll take it.’ Agape nodded peaceably and smiled. She’d never doubted it, apparently. She led me outside and banged the door shut.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Efharistó.’

  ‘Bitte schön,’ she said, rather unaccountably at the time.

  Walking up to the bus-stop outside the white palace, I had the strong, sudden feeling that the silence of Gastouri was almost certai
nly deceptive.

  4

  I should never have been in Greece at all, that’s the point. I was actually on my way home. Greece, as we know, is full of foreigners who were once on their way home from somewhere and got stranded there. They wash up on the beach while floating idly past, disappointed by something or other – the lack of a new beginning, perhaps, wherever they’ve just been. They get snared amongst the driftwood and then can’t move on. Swapping coffee-stained novels from home and complaining about the sloppiness of everything, they stay on, growing sourer, even about home. I wondered as I looked about me on my first morning in Mr Berwick’s house if he was one of those castaways.

  As I saw it at the time, I hadn’t washed up anywhere. I wasn’t entangled in any driftwood. I was just sorting myself out in picturesque surroundings. I’d hardly got in the door before I was unpacking briskly and wiping down benches.

  So this was it. With the last shirt hung in the cupboard and my toothbrush stuck in a jar, the longed-for moment had now arrived: I’d finally cast anchor. Life was a smooth, wax tablet again, waiting to be written on. It was deeply unsettling.

  I stared at the greasy sink for a moment and went upstairs.

  Dear William, I wrote (first things first), seated at Kester’s rickety table, gazing out of the window towards the palace (if that’s what it was). On the bookcase to my right stood a framed photograph, unmistakeably of Krishnamurti, youthful, lostlooking, achingly handsome, I’d never had much time for Krishnamurti and so laid the photograph face-down on its shelf. I considered the Dear for a moment, but, really, in English one has so few options.