Bread and Chocolate

‘Nibble! Aye! I like a good nibble!’

To his horror she bared her red lips and showed her pink gums and snapped her white strong teeth at him as if she would gobble him up, then and there, on A deck.

‘George’ll tell you I like a good nibble when I’m in the mood,’ she proclaimed.

The steward diverted her by coming up then with the clipboard to tell them their cabin number. The lecturer was sorry to hear that they were two doors down from his own cabin but he was relieved as they moved away, following the steward. Still he heard her saying: ‘Don’t I, George? Like a good nibble?’, and George’s quieter assent, ‘Yes Bunny. Yes, dear.’

It was as if each had sighted their own shadow, their own negative, that day at the gangplank: the elegant refined lecturer and the bawdy noisy woman. She was fascinated by him, and he felt both fascinated and repelled by her. She could not leave him alone, she attended his every lecture: Minoan Relics, Etruscan Civilisation, Hellenic Culture. Whatever the title, she was there in the back row: mildly subversive, slightly disorderly. Never exactly heckling – which he would have managed well; he had taught undergraduates all his professional life – but always running a commentary which was so irrelevant or steeped in such ignorance that it defied him to educate her to a better understanding.

She had picked up from somewhere the notion that Oedipus Rex had an unnatural fixation on his mother, and somehow muddled it into the belief that he was, therefore, homosexual. When the lecture concerned the Greek tragedies and referred to Oedipus and the tragic forging of his destiny from the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, she grew rowdy in the back row. ‘I reckon they’re a nation of Oedipusses,’ she declared of the Greeks. ‘Oedipussies, we oughter call them. Nancies, the lot of them. Look at how they carried on in the old days and they’re no better now.’

He could feel his temper rising but he kept his voice icy. ‘Excuse me, I think you have misunderstood.’

She shook her enormously enlarged head, ignoring him completely. It was a morning lecture and she had come to it wearing her hair rollers with a scarf tied over the top. It was an outfit so bizarre, so ghastly for a prestigious cruise ship that no-one had the courage to challenge her.

‘You know what you ought to do?’ she counter-attacked. ‘You ought to have a bit of a laff. You’re too serious. That’s why we’re all falling asleep. You ought to have a bit of a laff. We’re on holiday, us. Not in school. Why, when we went to Egypt last year to see the pyramids and all we had a teacher on board like you but he had a bit of a laff. You learn more that way too. He had funny names for everybody. I can remember them now. So you see it works. He called one of the queens ‘‘Hot Chicken Soup’’, I remember that. And the mummy with all the gold – Tutankhamen, that’s him. He called him ‘‘Toot-toot’’. And when he mentioned him we all had to shout out ‘‘Toot-toot!’’ You ought to do that. We’d all remember much more and we’d have a bit of a laff.’

He found he was looking around the lecture room in something like desperation, waiting for someone else to tell her that this was a Hellenic cruise with a guest lecturer, not some kind of music hall turn. In his confusion he saw only stern faces and could not judge whether they disapproved of her or of him. She beamed at him in the silence. ‘But go on,’ she said. ‘It’s very interesting. All about this Oedipus Rex. Oedipus Sex, you oughter call him!’ She laughed loudly. ‘Oedipus Sex!’

He stepped down from the lectern. ‘Excuse me,’ he said faintly. ‘I feel unwell.’ He went swiftly from the lecture room, across the bright sunlit deck and down the shady corridor to his cabin. He shut the door behind him and lay on his bunk, his hand over his eyes. For no reason at all that he could think of, he felt seasick for the first time in his life.

After that she was everywhere, as if scenting victory over him. When he talked quietly after dinner to a pleasant table of people about the writing of Homer, with a tiny black Greek coffee before him and a glass of Metaxa at his elbow, she appeared from nowhere bearing a huge frothing glass adorned with little paper umbrellas and streamers.

‘Try this,’ she ordered, plonking it down before him. ‘I got the barman to make it up for you special. I call it the Sexy Rexy. He says you’ll have ten per cent of every one he sells. I cut you in on the deal. Don’t thank me! Just tell me if you like it?’

He would have demurred but she could overcome any protestation. She could overcome any refusal. He began to fear that nothing could stop her. He drank the drink she ordered for him, she brought him another. He surrendered the after-dinner conversation he was enjoying, she dominated the table.

‘Now we’re having fun,’ she declared and arranged the party into a circle so that they could play charades. He slipped away before he had to hear more than: ‘Now then! Sounds like snog’, and leaned over the stern rail and watched the small sliver of moon on the edge of the sky and the white wake vanishing into the blackness of the wine-dark sea.

He went to his cabin early, he did not dare to accept an invitation to join a table and talk with them for fear that she would see him and come waddling in, shouting encouragement, and telling people about her trip to Egypt when the lecturer had been such a laff. He took a large glass of brandy with him and sat on his narrow bed and drank it, looking mournfully out of the dark porthole where the islands he loved so much, slept in the darkness of night and forgotten history.

He was starting to get undressed when he heard her unmistakable shriek of laughter at the head of the corridor, and he sank back on his bunk, gritting his teeth at the very presence of her on the far side of his door, weaving her way, probably drunk, to her own cabin just two doors down.

‘Bet you I dare!’ she cried to her companions.

Shrill giggles alerted him that she was not with the helpless George who normally escorted her everywhere, but with her new friends, two women travelling alone, who had mistaken loudness for confidence, and were eager to hear of her adventures in Egypt and her equally profound knowledge of Indian art.

‘Bet you think I don’t dare!’ she cried again to shrill squeals of delighted alarm, only this time even louder, right outside his cabin.

Ignoring the disturbance, he pulled down his trousers and started to step into his cotton pyjamas. His horror when he saw the door knob turn was total. The door opened and she entered in one smooth movement and slammed it shut behind her with a noise as loud as one of Zeus’s thunderbolts. She was inside his cabin and he was a man surprised, with one leg in a pyjama trouser and one leg still out, his nakedness open to her frank scrutiny.

‘They dared me!’ she said, out of breath. ‘So I did.’

She seemed to think that was explanation enough. ‘But now I’m here…’ She swayed towards him, staggering slightly from the rocking of the ship, her clumsiness exaggerated by the three Sexy Rexys she had drunk. ‘Now I’m here – how about a bit of a giggle? Or a bit of a nibble, as you offered? You naughty man! You naughty naughty man!’

She came towards him, as unstoppable as an oil tanker. He shrank back, the narrow cabin bed offering no refuge. Still she came on. He thought wildly of the several hours that it took for a ship to stop at sea, as she surged forwards and fastened her bright wide mouth on his and thrust a cold hand down into the tangle of his clenched pyjamas.

She pulled him out like a bookmark. ‘Whassamatter?’ she asked. ‘You want a little warming up?’

She kissed him again, more insistently, her gin-sweet tongue pressing against his closed lips. ‘Come on,’ she urged him. ‘Let’s have a little fun. Let’s have a laff.’ She reared back and gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘If you’re worried about George, he’s out for the count. Nobody knows I’m here.’ She had quite forgotten her bosom pals of the corridor; but he could imagine them, only too vividly, listening to all of this at the door of his cabin, daring each other to bend and peep through the keyhole.

He tried to rise to his feet but his pyjama trousers, one leg on, one leg off, entangled him and he fell back on his single bunk. ‘I must ask you to leave,’ he said and knew himself to be pompous and powerless.

‘Oh, give us a kiss.’ Once again she insistently fumbled down the front of his trousers. ‘Come on. Warm you up! Cheer you up. Show a girl a good time! Come on!’

He found the strength in his irritation to push her away, and at last got his second foot down the second trouser leg. He pulled the trousers up, tied the cord, and confronted her with more authority. ‘You must go,’ he said. ‘You should never have come in. I did not invite you. Your presence here is a mistake.’

‘Whassamatter? You some kind of pansy?’ she asked, lurching back from him and bumping against the door. He could not now throw the door open, she was clinging to the door knob for support. ‘You some kind of faggot? You some kind of queer? You some kind of Oedipussy? Is that why you’re so keen on him?’

‘Get out,’ he said coldly. ‘Get out and I don’t want to see you again.’

Roughly he pushed her aside so that he could pull open the door. As soon as it opened her two companions tumbled in as if they were enacting some ghastly farce. He stood, glacial and irritated, as they picked themselves up and got themselves out of his cabin. Only when they were all gone, like reprimanded fourth formers, did he sink to his little bunk bed and put his head in his hands and shake from the horror of it, and from the shame of her questing hand, and from the cruelty of her accusations.

They were at Paxi the next day, an unspoiled Greek island, some few miles from the mainland. There could be nothing here to attract her: a tiny harbour, a boat trip to the Blue Caves, a few quayside bars. Nothing more. He could assume she would stay with the cruise ship, drinking cocktails and looking at the enchanting view of pale rocks and rustling olive groves and complaining of boredom.

‘Paxi is principally interesting for the legend that this is where the River Styx flows,’ he said as dryly as he could. She was in the back row with George in attendance. She was silent for once. He imagined that a blinding hangover from three Sexy Rexys was suppressing her usual morning vitality.

‘The River Styx flows from this mortal world into the underworld, as you know. The only way to the underworld is to be ferried across it by the boatman Charon. It is, as you can imagine, a one-way journey.’ He waited for the usual gentle murmur of laughter.

None came. He had lost his audience for this cruise. They were so accustomed to her interpolations of crude jokes that they had lost the taste for mild academic wit. And he had lost his sense of timing. He was no longer confident before them. He was continually waiting for some noisy demand from her table for a joke or for something to cheer them all up. He could hardly hold the floor when he was certain that in a moment, she would be bellowing: ‘After all, what I say is: you’re a long time dead!’

‘Our ship is too big to enter the narrow harbour of Paxi,’ he said when he had left a moment for them to laugh, and they had not laughed. ‘So we will take one of the ship’s launches to pay a brief trip. We will go down the winding and narrow channel to the harbour, and then we will take a short trip to the Blue Caves, returning in time for lunch on board. You may bring cameras and video apparatus, of course. And if I may ask, when we enter the narrow gorge, let us do it in silence. It does have a certain air of mystery, there is a rather special sense of place. Let us be as quiet as we can to enjoy that.’

He had his eye on her. She looked pale under the yellow colour of the fake tan which she applied religiously every morning. ‘For those of you who find the morning sun a little bright there is no need to come,’ he continued. ‘There are better and more interesting sights to be seen later on this trip. This is really nothing more than a little diversion, of interest only to those of you who know the legend of the River Styx and are curious to look at the jaws of death itself – from the comfort of an Aegean Experience launch rather than Charon’s boat!’

Again there was no laugh, but she lifted her heavy head and looked at him, across the room. ‘It’s always dead things with you, isn’t it?’ she demanded, and he felt the attention of the room shift to her. ‘Old things, and dead things. What I say is: it’s all a long time ago!’

He forced himself to smile at her. ‘It’s been my interest, no, my passion, for all my life,’ he said. ‘And I know of nothing more rewarding than the study of the classics.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she said as if that confirmed her worst opinion. She winked at her friends. ‘I bet you don’t.’

‘We can go at once,’ he said, speaking to his class over the murmur of their comments on this exchange. ‘Anyone interested in seeing Paxi and the legendary mouth of River Styx on Deck B at once please.’

He had been certain that she would not come, but she was there in a bright pink top which showed the swell of her midriff and seam-stretchingly-tight white Capri pants. She wore her heated rollers in her hair as was her habit before noon, but today she had tied a bright pink turban on top by way of camouflage. He watched the sailor help her into the neat little launch and saw the way she held the man’s gaze and flashed a smile at him as if the man were serving her from desire and not because he was paid to do it.

He said nothing to her, nothing to any of them, as he dropped into the boat himself. He felt as if he was far away from his class, far away from the subject that he loved. He felt as if he would never speak inspiringly of it again.

But he had a job to do. Not a very academically respectable job, not a very well-paying job, but a job which allowed him to come to Greece twice a year, which was more than enough for him who so deeply loved the islands. And sometimes he was able to explain what the place meant to him, how the light that they saw even now on the pale limestone of Paxi was the same that Homer had seen and loved too.

‘This is a very special place,’ he said softly into the microphone as the launch moved away from the side of the gently rocking ship. ‘Greek legend has it that when a man is dead his soul comes down this narrow gorge and is met here, perhaps exactly here, by a dark boat, guided by the boatman Charon. This is the River Styx and no man ever comes back from his silent journey over these dark waters.’

The cliffs were very narrow on either side of the blue lapping water, the olive trees bowed over their reflection at the water’s edge, the cypress trees stood like dark exclamation marks on the horizon. There was no sound but the faint puttering of the outboard motor of the launch, and he let the silence linger, wondering if he could hear at the back of it the beat of Charon’s oars.

‘COO-EEE!’ He was so startled that he dropped the microphone and it made a loud popping noise as it hit the teak deck. But the noise she made was even louder. ‘COO-EEE!’

She turned around to him, quite unaware of the sudden thudding of his heart. ‘No echo,’ she complained. ‘No echo. I thought you said this place had a famous echo?’

‘I said nothing about an echo,’ he said in sudden passion. ‘I said a lot, a great deal, about this being the very mouth of death itself. And you come here and bellow Coo-eee!’