Warlight(13)

“And bring us the cooked head,” he requested of the waiter. The dark, horrific sentence was said so casually that he could have been asking for a sprig of fennel. She paled at the mention of the goat head, and the nearby customers proceeded to slow their own meals in order to witness the oncoming domestic contest. The Darter may not have liked theatre, but what followed was a Strindberg-like performance that lasted an hour and a half with five or six couples watching. We knew The Darter was a “quick scoffer,” because whenever we travelled with him during the dog-racing season he’d crack open and consume a couple of raw eggs while driving his Morris, then toss the shells into the back seat. But at the Star of Argiropulos he took his time. Olive Lawrence sat on a stiff-backed kitchen chair in front of us and reenacted the moment, describing every insistence and refusal when she had to be convinced or persuaded or bullied, as well as maybe charmed—she was not sure which, she no longer knew, it was all confusing as a nightmare—into eating the carcass of a goat slaughtered, she was sure, in someone’s basement near Paddington.

Then the head.

The Darter had won, it appeared. And the intimacy he was expecting did occur a few hours later in his flat. The two bottles of wine had helped, she told us, still downcast. Or perhaps it was because he had believed so securely that he was right, that he was not arguing about consuming the goat’s head and the one eye she had to swallow in a vindictive way. The eye had the texture of snot. She actually used that word. And the head had a texture of…of…what, she did not know. She ate it because she could tell he believed in it. It was something she would never forget.

By the time The Darter arrived at our house, full of not very convincing excuses for being late, we had decided we liked her.

She had spoken to us of Asia and the ends of the earth as if they were distant boroughs of London, easily reachable. She spoke about these places in a voice unlike the beleaguered one she had used to describe her Greek meal. When we asked her what she did in her job, she told us exactly what she did. “Eth-nog-ra-phy,” she said, slowing the syllables as if we should write the word down fragment by fragment. She spoke of her pleasures as a traveller, told us that in the river deltas of southern India she had drifted on a boat with just a minimal two-stroke motor somewhere in its bowels. She described the speed of monsoons—you were sopping wet and five minutes later your clothes were dried by the sun. She spoke of a pink-lit tent that housed a small statue of a minor god at ease in its shade while the world outside was devastated by heat. She was providing us with descriptions our distant mother might have sent in letters. She had been along the Chiloango River regions in Angola, where there was ancestor worship so that ghosts had supplanted gods. Her talk sparkled.

Like The Darter she was tall and slim, with a dazzle of unkempt hair, shaped and reshaped I am sure by whatever weather she was in. An independent creature. I suspect she would have eaten a goat if she had slain it herself in some Turkish meadow. The indoor world of London must have made her restless. In retrospect it was probably the extreme difference between her and The Darter that allowed their attachment to last longer than we expected it would. Yet whatever his fascination for her, she also seemed itching to be on her way. Perhaps she was on a break and needed to remain in London writing her reports, after which she would be off again. That small god in its pink tent had to be revisited. It meant leaving every attachment and domestic utensil behind.

But it was The Moth’s relationship with her that we found most curious. Caught between The Darter’s and Olive Lawrence’s differing opinions about practically everything whenever they clashed in our living room, or worse, in the reverberating confines of The Darter’s car, The Moth refused to take sides. He obviously had need of The Darter professionally, for whatever reason, and yet we saw that though she was most likely just a temporary presence, The Moth was intrigued by her. We loved being around the three of them, witnessing their fights. The Darter appeared more complex and shaded now, with this generous flaw in him that preferred the company of a woman who contradicted his opinions. Not that his opinions would change. And we loved the dilemma The Moth was in, his awkwardness when The Darter and Olive Lawrence broke into flames. Suddenly he seemed like the headwaiter who could only brush away the broken glass.

Olive was the one person who came into our house who appeared capable of clear judgement. She was consistent in her views of The Darter. She admitted his tiresomeness alongside his quick and peculiar charm, was appalled as well as fascinated, she told us, by the consummately male taste evident in his disorganized flat at The Pelican Stairs. And I had also seen her regard The Moth as if never quite certain if he were a positive or negative force. What was his hold on The Darter, her present temporary lover? And was he a benign guardian to the orphan-like boy and girl she had come to know? She always focused on the possibility of character. She weighed character, could discover it in a few grains of a person, even in one’s noncommittal silence.

“Half the life of cities occurs at night,” Olive Lawrence warned us. “There’s a more uncertain morality then. At night there are those who eat flesh by necessity—they might eat a bird, a small dog.” When Olive Lawrence spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, an idea she was still unsure about. One evening she insisted we catch a bus with her to Streatham Common and walk its slow rise of land to the Rookery. Rachel felt uncertain in that open darkness, wished to go home, said it was cold. But the three of us kept moving forward, until we were eventually in the trees and the city had evaporated behind us.