Three Marriages by George Loukas - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXXV : ENDING THE TALE.

 It had to end this beginning, this initial sexual dimension of their love in the beautiful, infinitely varied land called Greece, with its noisy, often discourteous, self-centered and self-regarding population who believed the flowering of western civilization was their single-handed accomplishment. But it continued in England for several more years fitfully, on and off, until they got married. As I said at some point previously, Alice’s fortune was working overtime. It was her talent, of course, but also her luck to have met Chester Basterfield who also worked overtime to promote it. The sales of her work were increasing in leaps and bounds both in London and New York and Chester kept telling her that she had given him a new lease of life. It was not the money. It was the thrill and movement her art brought to his almost moribund gallery. They travelled often together to New York for exhibitions of her work and there a number of gallery owners approached her and proposed to represent her directly by-passing Chester. They promised considerably greater profits but Diana refused these offers out of hand. She was discreet and told Chester nothing so as not to spoil his cordial business relations with them. She loved these visits to New York and often stayed there a week or two longer than Chester. She rubbed shoulders with people who were interested in art and had the money to spend on it. She made friends and was often invited to parties where Eleni was much in demand because she was gay and interesting and all the young men flirted with her.

At one time during the third or fourth year of their collaboration Chester asked her to take him with her to Hove to meet us. Diana and I were a little apprehensive about the visit and as to the direction our conversations might take but we could not very well avoid it. He had done so much for Alice that we considered him to be her benefactor, just as he often said, he considered Alice to be his. On a Saturday, Diana and I met him at the Brighton railway station where he arrived with Alice. He had inevitably changed some in the more than twenty years we had not seen him. His curly hair was almost intact but white as cotton wool, his face wrinkled and his tall stature was still trim but accommodated a slight stoop. He kissed Diana and told her she was as lovely as then, and shook my hand heartily. Alice was surprised. For all the business and personal interaction with her he had never mentioned that we had met long ago. Oh yes, he said, I met your mother before she met your father, at the gallery with Edgar Mackenzie, and later we met again on several occasions, this time with your dad, at the pub I showed you at Old Brompton Road. And the funny thing is, your mother did not remember me. Oh, well, I am definitely not as handsome as your father. Not a face to be remembered.

We went directly to a good restaurant in Brighton and had a very pleasant lunch and no more talk of Edgar but I could see that Alice was troubled. I had not talked with Diana as to how we should tackle this situation which was bound to arise and obviously we could not do it after Chester left for London and the three of us returned home. I left the responsibility to Diana.

Later in the evening Alice asked her mother why she did not tell her that she knew Edgar Mackenzie. I did not think it was important, my dear, Diana said. But mummy, you saw how much that man meant to me, how sad I was when he died. Would it have done any good? Diana asked. Perhaps not at the time, Alice said, but if you don’t mind, would you tell me about him? He was almost sobbing when I told him that you lived at 73 Fulham Road before you moved to Hove and your name was Diana. I think he loved you. Perhaps he did, Diana said. He never told me so. He was not a man given to tenderness. We went out together for a few months but I didn’t like the crowd he associated with nor the dissolute life he led and when I met your father I broke up with him. He kept pestering me and your grandmother, wanting to marry me and, in the end, to escape his constant harassment we moved to Hove where I had inherited this house from Uncle Robin. By that time I was pregnant and I needed the peace and quiet of Hove. When Alice left us on Monday, I asked Diana why she did not tell her the truth. Oh, my darling George, I did not want her to know that Edgar raped me and that she was the product, the fruit of a rape. I also could not know how deeply distressed she would be by this information after feeling compassion for Edgar in his misery. After the love he showed her and the help he provided by sending her to Chester Basterfield. And another thing, I didn’t want her to know that you were not her father, not the wonderful, loving father you were to her. Of course it wouldn’t have changed her love for you but I didn’t want it nevertheless. What worries me is that I don’t believe Alice was totally convinced, I felt that some doubts persisted in her mind. They will soon die away, I said.

When Alice and Michael returned to London after three months in Greece, he began wondering what to do. Omar told him he was welcome to join his firm but Michael declined. Bridges, roads and dams were not his cup of tea. Annie, on her part, did the same. Michael hesitated but did give it some thought. Mother, he told her, I am not an interior decorator. Do you know, Michael, that some of the houses we buy are decrepit, simply falling apart, and we hire architects to restructure and shape them up? Give it a try and if you don’t like it you can always leave. As a start I shall hire you as my personal assistant and advisor where apart from exercising your profession you shall learn the ins and outs of the business. It is a fascinating business, believe me. And another thing. Tasos has just one more year to go before he is transferred to the Ministry in Athens and I shall be going with him. By that time you shall have mastered the business and you will take over my position and responsibilities. I think it is a wonderful opportunity for you. Michael asked Alice’s advice and she told him it was worth a try and so with some misgiving he began working with Annie. The principal shareholder, Stamatia Foundoulaki, the woman who started the business liked him well enough and was proud to have an architect of the Imperial on her staff. Michael began enjoying his work much of which consisted in scouring newspaper advertisements for old and cheap houses on sale, evaluating them and doing the structural repairs once they were acquired by their firm. The rest of the work, installing toilets, bathrooms, fireplaces, wooden and tile floors, partitioning and painting was decided, designed and supervised by Annie and Stamatia.

A year later as Michael’s responsibilities and competence expanded he began earning a decent salary and proposed marriage to Alice. Alice laughed and Michael felt slighted. I would have understood if you had proposed that we live together, she told him, but marriage? What’s eating you? Aren’t we happy together as we are? Or are you going to threaten me that you shall find yourself another wife as you did with Janet? In his turn Michael laughed. Okay, he said, let’s live together. Alice smiled and said, for the moment it won’t work. I’m too busy, I travel a great deal, I don’t cook and I can’t keep a house clean and tidy for one person, let alone two. That’s not a problem, Alice. We shall have help at home. I think we can well afford it. Hey, Michael we are very happy as we are, aren’t we? We see each other nearly every day, we make love at my place or yours and we have a good time going out to movies, theatre and cultural events. We must give ourselves a few years to see if this attachment will hold before we get married. I don’t want to get married and divorced within a couple of years. And another thing we should agree on before we get married is whether we shall have children. At the moment I do not envisage it at all. And so the relationship continued in this loose arrangement, which nevertheless continued to be strong and passionate for some time.

Annie and her husband Ambassador Yalouris left London later that year for Athens. They set up their household in Tasos’ paternal flat which Annie hated and fled from long ago. It was spacious, in a good neighborhood and Annie got rid wholesale of all the old furniture, bibelots and paintings that reminded her of the miserable days she spent there and her hated mother-in-law. They stayed in a suite at the Grande Bretagne on Syndagma Square for two months while she redecorated it and bought the finest furniture available in Athens. They could have stayed at yiayia Helen’s house but Annie did not think it was quite up to par for Tasos’ stature who had been promoted to General Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a post second only to the Minister. Our sensible Annie was still eminently sensible and she had a good deal of money at her disposal and spared no expense since, as she said, she would not take it with her in her afterlife. As for the paintings on the walls, they were exclusively the work of Alice which she had collected through the years. She had managed to wheedle from Alice the painting that Alice had refused to sell Tasos, the Eve of Belgravia in Paradise, and hung it in the main salon. Tasos was not too happy about it. What will people say? A painting of the General Secretary’s wife naked? Oh Taso, how will they know it’s me? Annie protested. Why, my dear, the resemblance is uncanny and the painting, you must admit, is slightly scandalous. I mean, that snake like a long erect penis and the dreamy way you are looking at it, I don’t know…. Never mind Taso, Annie said laughing, I want it there. I want, when I am eighty and moving about with a walking stick, to look at it and say, yes, that was me. Mature and beautiful and lusty.

I think my love for Diana and her love for me was an extremely rare phenomenon. Not the love itself and the passion, but its endurance. I am sure many people fall in love just as passionately as us but with most of them first the passion then the love itself tends to fade away sooner or later. Our love, if anything, is even stronger. The passion has unavoidably diminished with time but it is still there. I still find my beautiful skinny bitch as desirable as ever. Her body, even now that it is slacker, with her lack of inhibitions has never bored me and we make love as often as my strength and desire builds up. I make this short introduction to bring up the case of my daughter Alice and my nephew Michael. After that summer in Greece when they became lovers their attachment remained strong for two years. Michael, of course, was eager to marry Alice and who can blame him. Alice, sensible like her auntie Annie, told him they ought to wait a few years. There was nothing pressing. Sensible advice but also risky for their relationship. Michael was flourishing in his profession and earning good money. He bought a car, travelled during his holidays alone because Alice was always engaged elsewhere and inevitably had a few flings which he kept from Alice. Alice on the other had was super busy with her work, her painting trips and her business travels to New York. She had already earned a considerable amount of money and bought a two-bedroom flat on a lovely curving street in South Kensington, called The Boltons,  with a lovely park in front of it and began furnishing it. She still lived for a time in the Fulham flat, which she intended to keep as her studio. She did not buy a car mainly because she hadn’t the inclination and could not be bothered to take driving lessons, and like her auntie Annie used public transport and taxis. New York, in time, became a sort of second home away from home visiting it every few months. She had many friends who were from wealthy families but were educated, interesting and lived it up with parties and slumming with artists, bohemians and pseudo-intellectuals in Greenwich Village. Eleni Ioannides was a well-known name in those circles and when she was introduced to third parties they usually stared and stared for she seemed to them far too young to possess all that fame. Inevitably like Michael, Alice too had affairs and a number of marriage proposals as well. They did not interest her as much as the fast-lane lifestyles of the people that proposed, the parties and fun she had. In any case she was not starved of sex and the passion for her art was as powerful as ever and dominated her life. In this way she and Michael drifted apart seeing each other less and less frequently with an understanding that the craving for each other was fading but not the sustained friendship and mutual affection.

It was yiayia Helen’s death that brought them together again. In her ninety-second year she contracted a blood disease similar to my mother-in-law’s and as her condition worsened, Annie moved her to a well-known and very expensive private hospital. She had always been a beautiful and strong woman and in her old age never had the air of a crone. Her complexion was still fresh because she took special care to conserve it with all sorts of facial creams even when she moved about unsteadily with a walking stick. Entering the hospital was a shock and Annie phoned me and asked me to come to Athens for an extended period to be near her. When she saw me she must have understood the seriousness of her condition and unspoken questions flowed from her eyes to mine. When I was in the room her eyes rarely left my person. I told her that I would be with her for the short time it would take until she returned home. The blood transfusions began in earnest and especially transfusions of platelets which in the human body thicken the blood and prevent hemorrhages. We were faced with a shortage of this blood constituent and we desperately asked friends and relatives to contribute them through a process where the blood passes through a device that removes the platelets and returns the blood to the donor. Even then she often had blood dripping from her nose and I felt the anxiety that this manifestation caused her. As her body lost one after another of its functions she was kept alive by intravenous feeding and a catheter for urination. The end was approaching rapidly and we alerted Diana, Alice and Michael who arrived in a few days and a few days before her death. She was very feeble when she saw them and smiled when they kissed her but must have realized that her end was approaching. She fell into a coma and the doctor told us that death was imminent. He told us to go home and that he would phone us when it happened but we stayed in the hospital until the very end. Annie was crying silently and our children, and Diana and Tasos just stood around grim-faced waiting. It was the first time I saw the arrival of death at such close proximity when her labored breathing grew weaker and weaker until it stopped. I caressed her lovely face and the doctor came in with a nurse to remove the various tubes and the catheter that vainly tried to keep her alive.

It was way past midnight when we left her. Two orderlies from the morgue came to remove her body. I shivered. I had never seen such horrible countenances. As if they had just arrived from Hades to receive her soul. They smiled hideously at us and told us to go away so as not to see her being carried away. We drove to Annie’s house and talked until dawn. Then Annie drove us to mother’s house and we went to bed. Alice and Michael slept together. I am not absolutely certain but I doubt that they made love after so much tension and sadness but it was the beginning of the second flowering of their relationship. The funeral took place two days later at the Kifisia cemetery and mother was interred in the family crypt that she had bought years ago for my father. Many, many people attended because she was widely and greatly loved and at the coffee reunion that took place in the coffee house outside the cemetery the usual jovial atmosphere of life reasserted itself. In Greece, there is no marriage without tears and no funeral without laughter.

Diana and I left the next day for London and Hove but Alice and Michael stayed on for a few more days. They both needed to see and spend some time with Annie. Michael reported developments in their business which interested Annie who was a minor shareholder and received a small part of the firm’s profits and Alice recounted her travels and the exuberant life she led. Annie too appeared to be happy in her life with Tasos and his love for her seemed not to have dimmed in the slightest. But the big surprise was Michael’s and Alice’s announcement that they decided to marry. Oh how wonderful Annie exclaimed. I was going to suggest it but I didn’t know how to do it tactfully and you beat me to it. It’s about time. Alice, you’re thirty five and Michael’s thirty one. If you intend to have children you must hurry. We haven’t decided about that yet, Alice said. Let’s just say that if we’re going to get married, which was our intention long ago but sort of frittered away, we can’t put it off much longer. We already wasted too much time, Michael interjected. No I don’t agree, said Alice, it was a necessary period of sowing our wild oats. Our yiayia brought us together again. She had to die to do it but if she knew she was the cause I am sure she would now be waltzing with St. Peter.

The news surprised me and Diana though we felt that in those days of mother’s hospitalization, death and funeral, something was cooking again between our Alice and Annie’s Michael. We were very happy and thankful because we thought their initial intention had erred irrevocably from its intended path. But do you think this marriage will last? Diana asked. I smiled at my aging but still lovely Diana. I really can’t tell, I said. As Doris Day says, Que sera….sera.

                                                                               George Loukas.

                                                                               10:32 PM    9/10/2014