CHAPTER XXIX : ALICE, MARIAN, HELEN. . . . ASCENDANT.
Alice was by now four years old. A pretty, lively little girl, intelligent and precociously gifted in drawing. She was forever scribbling on a drawing notebook with colored pencils and often amazed us with her talent. Diana sent her to a nearby kindergarten and it was the wonderful Mrs. Fremantle who walked her there every morning and fetched her home at about one, fed her and put her in bed for an afternoon nap. We had discarded the cot and bought a larger child’s bed which went into Mrs. Fremantle’s room and left us free to make as much noise as we had to while making love. Mrs. Fremantle said Alice slept like an angel and she was absolutely no problem for her since Alice did not snore. On the odd occasion that Mr. Fremantle visited us he had to be content with sleeping on the couch in the living room where he was not very comfortable and rarely spent more than one night in Hove. He was visibly aging and we wondered how much longer he would be able to live alone in the Fulham flat. Diana applied and was appointed as a teacher of French at the Hove Park School which specialized in languages.
The years went by. Alice went to a primary school in Hove and her extraordinary talent in drawing continued to develop. As she grew, I encouraged her talent and bought for her crayons, charcoal and water colors and she became an exceptional water-colorist for her age. We were not as well-off as Annie and Omar and our holidays were limited. Every other year we travelled to Greece to see mother. We spent two weeks with her in Athens and two weeks on an island. A different one each time. Unlike Diana who was shy to try to talk in Greek which she well understood by now, Alice began talking Greek with some fluency and communicated with mother, her yiayia, in that language. At school she was always near the top of her class and when she entered the Hove Park School, where Diana worked, for her Senior School years, I bought a stand, canvases and oils and she started messing with colors. There was no art school in either Hove or Brighton and her efforts were purely experimental but things became serious when she enrolled in a correspondence art course and slowly, step by step, got the hang of handling oils, mixing colors and drawing rough images and abstract compositions. One could tell she derived immense pleasure from this activity and I wondered if the talent she exhibited had anything to do with her father who apparently started his painting career early and with promise before sliding to his dissolute life of parties, drink and women and mediocrity in his art.
During Alice’s fourth year at Senior School, Mr. Fremantle suffered a stroke as he was shopping near his house. He fell in the street, an ambulance was summoned by passers-by but by the time it arrived and reached the hospital he had expired. Luckily, he had identification in his pockets and we were called at Hove. Mrs. Fremantle took the news calmly but Diana and Alice were grief-stricken. We all left for London immediately that same afternoon, spent the night at the Fulham flat and early next day made funeral arrangements and Mr. Fremantle was buried at a nearby cemetery in the early afternoon without any sort of religious ceremony. For me, another plus for British realism and practicality. We returned to Hove that same evening so as not to go back to the flat where his clothes and affairs were sad reminders of the man and that life sometimes flickers out and one wonders as to the meaning of our existence. It was left to me to go on two consecutive Saturdays to give away his clothes and footwear to Oxfam and generally remove all traces of the poor man and give the house a cursory cleaning which was badly needed. On a third weekend I brought what remained of my things at 95 Queensgate to Fulham and gave up my room not without regret for the generally happy years I spent there. But then my beloved Diana and Alice were with me at my new home in Hove.
Hove Park School is a coeducational community school and Alice adapted well to its environment. She was not only a good student but participated with enthusiasm in the games and sports that were provided. She enjoyed without inhibitions the social events and school dances and had her share of boyfriends and crushes and I presume the beginnings of sexual experimentation. The atmosphere was much more tolerant in this than it was in our days at the English School in Cairo. She was seventeen by the time she sat for her G.C.E. Ordinary Level examinations. Diana and I urged her to work hard and then enter the sixth form for the Advanced Levels in order to enter university to study medicine. We were sure she was quite able to face the challenge but our headstrong daughter had already made up her mind. She thought that medicine required far too much studying and dedication, and that would distract her from her greatest love which was painting. With her “O” Levels she decided to enter a two-year nursing program while at the same time attend evening classes at an art school. We were not too happy about that since she would have to live in London and we thought she was far too young to live alone at the Fulham flat. She countered that her aunt Annie lived within walking distance from the house and would keep a close watch over her. Nothing would change her mind. With her “O” Level results in hand she travelled alone to London and applied for a nurse training course at King’s College, Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing. She was interviewed by the head of the Adult Nursing section and was accepted on the spot at the two-year course which would start in early October.
Very happy with the result of her endeavors she had a snack at a coffee bar and went for a nap to the Fulham flat. She already felt the heady feeling of independence, of the confidence that comes with a quick and successful expediting of a task. In the afternoon she paid a visit to her cousin Michael and helped him with his homework, a little impatiently at that. When he made a mistake in his algebra she tut-tutted and ordered him sternly, think, you stupid boy, think, until in exasperation mike shouted back, stupid yourself. Don’t be rude, she told him, or I’ll box your ears. His mother returned from work and as usual was delighted to see her and, when told, congratulated her on her enrollment at the nursing faculty. I am so happy, she told Alice, that we shall now be able to see much more of you than in the past. And by the way, when you move to London you must invite me to see your paintings. Oh, they’re nothing much, Alice replied. How come George tells me they are unbelievably good? Annie insisted. It’s because he loves me, Alice said smiling. In that case I am sure to like them as well, Annie said. Alice teased the good-looking Mike who at thirteen was already as interested in girls as they were in him and tried to find out if he had a girlfriend. What about you? he asked. How many boys have you kissed? You don’t expect me to remember all of them, she answered laughing. Wow, he said and laughed with her. Omar was away on a business trip and Alice stayed to have dinner with Annie and Mike. Aunt Agatha was no longer with them. She had become too old and weak and Annie put her in a comfortable rest home and visited her every Sunday without exception, an old custom that began almost two decades ago and lasted until her death. At present they had Gerda, a German au paire, helping in the house and sleeping in the same room as Mike. For the moment she was the stronger of the two and kept an often amorously inclined Mike at bay. Annie, passing outside the door one day, heard him plead with Gerda, oh come on, I just want to have a look, nothing more, and the hefty girl reply, if you don’t behave I’ll tell your mother.
Alice spent the night in Fulham. In the morning she looked up the Heatherly School of Fine Arts in Chelsea which had evening courses and specialized in drawing, portraiture and figurative painting and had classes for beginners. It was a private school and there were fees to be paid but she knew her parents would not stint at the expense. It seemed a good deal and she applied to start also in the autumn term. She returned triumphantly to Hove brimming with happiness and spent a large part of the summer holidays travelling to London initially to clean the Fulham flat thoroughly and then little by little transferring her clothes, her books of famous artists and their work, the water color and oil painting paraphernalia as well as many of her finished immature canvases. She visited Annie frequently during those trips and the familiarity that developed seemed to increase the love that each felt for the other. With Omar the relationship was more formal but easygoing nevertheless. Omar was doing well. He had become a partner in his firm, dressed well and drove a Jaguar. Responsibility and travel as well as loss of hair had withered his beauty considerably but he still had a distinguished though portlier bearing, which was an inevitable result of daily and copious business lunches. He wanted them to move to a larger flat but Annie resisted. I am a little superstitious about flats, she told him. We have been so happy and successful here and I have the feeling that if we move to a flashier home something will go wrong, something will change. In any case, let’s stay here one or two more years until Gerda will not be able to stave Mike off. Omar laughed and agreed.
With Alice’s move to the Fulham flat in early October and her frequent visits to Annie which helped alleviate her loneliness that was inevitable in the early stages of suddenly living alone in London, Alice developed a camaraderie with Michael despite the four-year age difference and found common topics to talk about. She asked him what he would like to do when he grew up. In other words, what field of study he would like to follow? He said between his father’s profession and Annie’s he definitely preferred Annie’s. Wisely for his age, now fourteen, he said he would like to become an architect which was in between. It had both the engineering bit of building houses and the artistic bit of taking into consideration the attractiveness of his creations. Alice tried to open his horizons beyond the pretty girls at school and the material things that his parents unstintingly and often unasked piled on him. Clothes, tennis racquets, riding boots, bicycles, sophisticated toys and the electronic games and computers that were starting to enter the market. Michael, she often told him, our world is not just South Kensington, the school, the tennis club and the ponies you ride at the countryside. It is a vast and wondrous world of different nations and races and animals and even insects that scientists study. You could become a marine biologist and study dolphins, whales and sharks. You could become an astronomer and study the vast universe where the earth is just an insignificant speck in the billions of galaxies each of which has billions of stars like our sun and try to understand how all this started fifteen billion years ago. Or become a scientist to study the quantum physics of matter. Every piece of matter is composed of very tiny atoms and molecules and people are trying to unravel its mysteries. Oh, stop it, Alice, he would shout whenever she tried to stimulate his curiosity. You are confusing me. Good, she would answer laughing, I want you to think a little beyond kissing Jennifer and Jane and Janet and Joyce.
Alice went to Hove every weekend. She left London on Friday afternoon and returned Sunday evening. The family’s reunion was a weekly celebration. She was usually on time for the evening dinner in which the aging Mrs. Fremantle put all her skill to get a kiss and a word of appreciation from her darling Alice. We sat at the table and exchanged our news. Well, it was mostly Alice that talked of her classes at Nursing School and her evening sessions at Heatherly, about her teachers, her colleagues and new friends, about Annie, Michael and Omar. About a play she put in now and then with a boy from Heatherly, whom we assumed was her current boyfriend. At eighteen, she was living, she told us, the best part of her life. Diana and I had nothing much to say. Our life was settled. Diana continued teaching French at Hove Park School and I remained steadfastly at the American Express. I rose slowly in rank and had the promotions I more or less expected but never reached the top posts which were usually reserved for American executives. Nevertheless, I had no complaints and was generally happy with the quiet life we led. Diana kept her trim and firm figure and that went a long way to keep her a desirable sex partner in my eyes. I can only humbly guess that she felt the same with me, for though our sexual appetite inevitably lost its initial madness, it was still there, lively and uninhibited. Mrs. Fremantle was nearing eighty but was in good health. We took part of her burden in the housework but she did the daily cooking. When Alice was in Hove they shared her double bed and because there were no complaints I assumed that Alice did not snore. My mother must have been the same age as Mrs. Fremantle or perhaps slightly younger. She was definitely younger looking and both Annie and I visited her quite often even for only a few days to make sure she was well. As for Tasos, after a three year stint at Caracas, he spent two years at the Foreign Ministry in Athens and during that time both his parents died. He was successively posted as Ambassador in Bolivia and then Norway before returning once again to the Ministry in Athens. He remained married to Annie and they corresponded in very cordial tones and he often told her that if she ever needed his help he would be ready to do his best for her. He was forever sentimentally devoted to Annie, literally stuck to the lovely, quiet girl who had been his wife for two years and he must have regretted many times his stubbornness, which caused her to leave him. In his last letter he wrote that he was trying to get the ambassadorship in England to be near her. Annie wondered what the point of this was supposed to be. He never disclosed details of his private life and only made allusions sometimes of relationships with other women which Annie did not bother to believe or disbelieve.
The next two years passed peacefully with Alice going through her Nursing course and perfecting her painting technique at Heatherly. She had converted the Fulham flat, apart from the room where she slept, almost to a studio with paintings stacked all over the place, water color drawings pinned on the walls and the typical untidiness of a painter’s atelier, of a table overloaded with paint tubes and solvents, plates with dried pigments and a few easels for her work. Diana visited the flat sometime during the second year and was horrified. What a madhouse you have made of this flat, Alice. How can you live in the middle of such a mess? she cried. This flat is where you shall live when you get married. Alice laughed. Oh mum, who’s thinking of marriage? It’s a long way off. And those nudes, men and women, do you mean to tell me they posed in the buff right here in the flat? Diana inquired. Sure mother, did you think we should go out in the street to paint them? I am an artist. People pose for me and I pose for other painters. Naked? Diana exclaimed, shocked. She had forgotten the parties Edgar had dragged her to. Undoubtedly, people tend to become more conservative as they age. Alice was, as she often asserted, living in a dream. A sprightly, beautiful girl with luminous blue eyes, her mother’s silky hair, an unblemished, milky complexion, slightly taller and sturdier of body than Diana, and above all, a merry , good-natured disposition. She attracted males like honey attracts flies. She flitted from one to the next trying them all, enjoying them all, getting to know the male species thoroughly, armed with her mother’s and grandmother’s dire warning, a warning whose lapse at an unfortunate moment brought her to life: never without a condom.
In those two years she had become very close to Annie. Despite the age difference they had come to be intimate friends. Now that Omar was getting heavier both in body and temperament and overcoming whatever mental inadequacy caused him to be a sexual athlete, the ever-youthful Annie lived a second flowering of youth through Alice’s tales and romances. I saw her often and, like our mother, she seemed hardly to age or lose her energy that made a success of her career. She too had become a partner in the firm where she worked but her lifestyle was much less flamboyant than Omar’s. Her dresses were sensible and she travelled by public transport and taxis though she could easily afford a fancy car. During Alice’s second year Omar bought a larger and more luxurious flat in South Kensington. It was in the apartment building where Omar and I occasionally played squash. Of course, Omar had neither the time nor fitness to tackle such a fast game but Michael often invited his school friends and, often Alice, for a game. Alice was nearly twenty one and Michael seventeen and while the age difference was constant its significance diminished. Their relationship was now on a more equal level as it would be still more in the future. They had serious talks without Mike’s former strident protests and he took an interest in her paintings and expressed his preferences while Alice insisted that he explain in detail the reasons for these. When he sometimes boasted of his conquests, which were neither as numerous nor as compulsive as his father’s, she tutored him that the sexual urge was normal for both girls and boys but that temperaments differed. That if a girl had a more active sexual life or more partners she should not be called a bitch or a slut and should not be scorned. Above all, to be mindful not to cause a pregnancy and to treat all his girlfriends kindly. Next year he would be sitting for his “O” Levels and he had decided on architecture as a career which meant a further two years at school for the advanced level G.C.E. in order to enter university.