"I told you to put them in the bloody bag, didn't I, you stupid little cow. They were lying there,on the counter at the ticket office, and I told you, I said to you, I told you: ‘Pick them up and put them in your shoulder bag, Charlie.' Because the boys, unless they are dirty-minded little south-of-the-border faggots like Willy and Pauly here, the boys do not carry handbags,darling, do they,darling? So where have you gone and put them, girl, where? That's no bloody way to stop a man from going to his destiny, believe you me! That's no way to put the brakes on male chauvinism, however jealous we may be of our bloke's success. I've got work to do back there, girl, and bloody castles to capture, and all!"
It was about there, at the height of the combat, that Joseph made his entry. Quite from where, nobody seemed to know--as Pauly put it, somebody just rubbed the lamp. So far as could afterwards be established, he entered left--or, in other words, from the direction of the beach. Anyway there suddenly he stood, in his coat of many colours and his golf hat tipped forward, bearing in his hand Alastair's passport and Alastair's wallet and Alastair's brand-new air ticket, all of which he had apparently picked from the sand at the foot of the taverna steps. Expressionless, at the most a trifle puzzled, he surveyed the scene between the warring lovers, waiting like a distinguished messenger till he had their attention. Then he laid out his finds on the table. One by one. Not a sound anywhere in the taverna suddenly, except the little pat as each in its turn hit the table. Finally he spoke.
"Excuse me, I have an idea somebody is going to be missing these quite soon. One ought to be able to do without them in life, I suppose, but I fear it would be actually rather difficult."
Nobody but Lucy till then had heard his voice, and Lucy had been too stoned to notice its inflexions or anything else about it. So they hadn't known about his flat, ordered English with every foreign wrinkle ironed out of it. If they had known, they would all have been imitating it. There was amazement, then laughter, then gratitude. They begged him to sit with them. Joseph protested and they grew strident. He was Mark Antony before the clamorous crowd: they made him do it. He studied them; his eyes took in Charlie, moved on, then returned to Charlie again. Finally, with an accepting smile, he capitulated. "Well, if you insist," he said; and they did. Lucy, as an old friend, embraced him. Pauly and Willy between them did the honours. Each member of the family in turn faced his straight glance, until suddenly it was Charlie's harsh blue eyes versus Joseph's brown, Charlie's furious confusion versus Joseph's perfect composure from which all triumph was so carefully extinguished--yet which she alone knew to be a mask fixed upon quite other thoughts and motives.
"Well, Charlie, yes, hullo, how do you do?" he said calmly, and they shook hands.
A stage hiatus, then--as though it had at last been let loose from its captivity and was flying free for the first time--a full-scale smile, young as a schoolboy's and twice as infectious. "But I thought Charlie was a boy's name?" he objected.
"Well, I'm a girl," said Charlie, and everybody laughed, Charlie included, before his luminous smile withdrew just as suddenly to the strict lines of its confinement.
For the few days that were left to the family, Joseph now became their mascot. In the relief of Alastair's departure, they adopted him wholeheartedly. Lucy propositioned him; he declined, courteously, even regretfully. She passed the sad news to Pauly, who met with a somewhat firmer rejection: further impressive proof that he was sworn to chastity. Until Alastair's departure, the family had been contemplating a slackening of their lives together. Their little marriages were breaking up, fresh combinations were not saving them; Lucy thought she might be pregnant, but then Lucy often did, and with reason. The great political debates had died for want of impulse, since the most they really knew was that the System was against them, and that they were against the System; but in Mykonos the System is a little hard to find, particularly when it has flown you there at its own expense. At night in the farmhouse, over bread and tomatoes and olive oil and retsina, they had begun to talk nostalgically of rain and cold days in London, and streets where you could smell the breakfast bacon cooking on Sunday mornings. Now suddenly exit Alastair and enter Joseph to shake up the pieces and give a new perspective. They embraced him avidly. Not content with commandeering his company on the beach and in the taverna, they made an evening for him at home, a Josephabend,as they called it, and Lucy, in her r?le of mother-to-be, produced paper plates, taramasalata, cheese, and fruit. Feeling herself exposed to him by Alastair's departure and frightened by her own disordered feelings, Charlie alone held back.
"He's a forty-year-old fraud, you idiots. Can't you see! You can't, can you? You're such a pack of freaked-out frauds yourselves, you literally can't see!"
They were puzzled by her. What had become of her old generosity of spirit? How could he be a fraud, they argued, when he wasn't claiming to be anything in the first place? Come on,Chas,give him a break! But she wouldn't. In the taverna, a natural sitting order developed at the long table, where Joseph by popular will quietly presided at the centre, empathising, listening with his eyes, yet saying remarkably little. But Charlie, if she came at all, sat fretting or fooling as far from him as possible, despising him for his accessibility. Joseph reminded her of her father, she told Pauly, in what was supposed to be a dramatic insight. He had the same creepy charm exactly: but bent, Pauly, just completely bent all through; she'd seen it at a glance, but don't say anything.
Pauly swore he would not.
Charlie's just having one of her things about men, Pauly explained to Joseph that evening; it wasn't personal with Charlie, it was political--her bloody mother was a sort of witless conformist, and her father was this incredible crook, he said.
"A crooked father?" said Joseph, with a smile that suggested he knew the genus well. "How glamorous. Tell me about him, I insist."
So Pauly did, and drew pleasure from entrusting Joseph with a confidence. And in this he was not alone, for when lunch was over, or dinner, there would always be two or three who lingered to discuss their theatrical talents with their new friend, or their love-affairs, or the great agony of their artistic condition. If their confessions threatened to lack spice, they added some from their imaginations in order not to be dull for him. Joseph gravely heard them out, gravely nodded, gravely laughed a little; but he never offered advice, nor, as they soon discovered to their great astonishment and admiration, did he traffic information: what went in, stayed. Better still, he never matched their monologues with his own, preferring to lead from behind with tactful questions about themselves, or--since she was so often in their thoughts--about Charlie.
Even his nationality was a riddle. Robert for some reason pronounced him Portuguese. Someone else insisted he was Armenian, a survivor from the Turkish genocide--he had seen a documentary about it. Pauly, who was Jewish, said he was One of Us, but Pauly said everyone was, so for a while they ruled him Arab just to annoy Pauly.
But they didn't ask Joseph what he was, and when they tried to corner him about his work, he replied only that he used to travel a lot but had recently settled down. He almost made it sound as if he had retired.
"What's your firm then, Jose?" asked Pauly, braver than the others. "You know--who do you work for, like?"
Well, he did not think he really had a firm, he replied carefully, with a thoughtful tip to the brim of his white cap. Not any longer. He was doing a little reading, a little trading, he had recently inherited a little money, so he supposed he was, technically speaking, self-employed. Yes, self-employed was the expression. Call him self-employed.
Only Charlie was dissatisfied: "We're a parasite, are we then, Jose?" she demanded, colouring. "We read, we trade, we spend our money, and periodically we hoof it to a sexy Greek island-for our pleasure? Right?"
With an unruffled smile, Joseph consented to this description. But Charlie did not. Charlie lost her composure and rode out ahead of herself.