“No one!”
The maid hovered in the center of the vast terrace, listening for a cue, semi-invisible. It was she alone who was aware of the martins whistling as they swooped around the stone posts that marked its outer perimeter. They were almost alone out here in the mountains, the very last villa of the port at the top of its own vertiginous set of steps and walled off from the rest of the species with graceful emphasis by ancient padlocked doors and iron grilles. From there the sea felt closer and more real than the houses below them. The only other villa across from the gully was closed down, the Greek owners bankrupted by the financial crisis. Paid gardeners groomed the cypresses and olive trees in its garden, but otherwise it was a ghost house. On the island it was mostly the foreigners who had remained solvent, who stayed on for their summers and kept their doors freshly painted. Carissa was a native who had watched them evolve all her life. First the poets and writers renting fishermen’s houses for ten dollars a month. Then the prosperous middle-agers from the cities, then the airline entrepreneurs with a taste for art. She regarded them all as barbarian intruders.
Codrington had even named his house Belle Air, which was rather lame as well as misspelled (Bel Air, however, would not have evoked his airline), and he had filled it with art made by people who had, over the years, become his friends. The maid had no idea why he valued them, these objects that littered every room. There was a ceramic bust of Hitler smoking a cigarette in the front room that always made them laugh. It was famously ironic. But what was the joke? Her father was a Communist who had always told her that the British were not to be trusted.
“Even so,” Codrington was saying as he held his wife’s hand, “the summer isn’t so bad this year. I only wish Naomi would enjoy it more.”
“Where does she go every morning? She gets up at dawn and disappears. I asked Carissa, but she said she didn’t know.”
She turned a second time to the maid and spoke again in Greek.
“Where does Naomi go in the morning? Do you make her coffee?”
“Yes, madame.”
“She doesn’t say?”
“No, madame.”
Phaine returned to English.
“She’s only here for the free rent anyway. What happened in London?”
Jimmie confessed that he was not entirely sure.
“She left Fletcher and Harris, and she’s only said something about a disagreement. She doesn’t tell me anything. Hasn’t since she was fifteen.”
It was the hour of the swallows. Codrington always fell into melancholy when he thought of his daughter. Perhaps it was because in her there remained some beautiful trace of his first wife. While Naomi was still alive, Helen was not yet dead. There was the lingering vestige of the mother in the daughter. But a broken home disrupts the continuities, in ways that he had not foreseen, that no one ever foresees. Naomi, he thought, being a teenager at the time of Helen’s death from cancer, had never recovered. The broken teenager never mends. The law, in any case, had been a bad choice for her; it didn’t suit her temperament. He suspected that being in litigation for a large firm had been playacting for her, a form of impersonation. But can you make your own children authentic against their will? It was never clear, after all, why the young adopted liberal or leftist positions that clearly had nothing to do with their own material conditions and in fact undermined and contradicted them entirely. At first you could put it down to youth itself. If you weren’t a socialist at twenty you had no heart—and so on. But what if they now had a generation that sailed into their thirties without this deranged view of the world being challenged by anyone they could respect? Not because such people didn’t exist—they were easy to find—but because they were effectively screened out of the person’s consciousness by peer pressure and conformism. It was, he had decided, because they were a spoiled, soft generation who had never experienced anything in the real world. Indeed, they didn’t really believe in a real world in the first place. Their consciousness had been created by the media, not by life.
The Codringtons made their way down the steep steps to the port. Dusk enthralled Jimmie. The houses had high walls, relics of a time when feuds and vendettas raged, and even at high noon the calcimine squares could be empty and guarded, as if they remembered the plague. The fuchsias and cicadas and blinding whitewash, the donkeys toiling up the stone steps with their bells, felt removed from the modern world by the simple application of nostalgic stubbornness.
The Codringtons moved slowly because of Jimmie’s age—he was almost seventy and not as stable as he had once been—and on the way down they met another exile, an old American struggling upward in the opposite direction.
“Look,” Phaine whispered, “it’s the Ancient Beatnik!”
“Evening, Jeremy,” Codrington called out to him as they crossed a white square at the same time. The American raised a hand and there were no other words necessary. So it was after a few years. You simply raised a hand and that was enough. The semaphore of the tamed.