Cretan Teat Read online

  Cretan Teat

  BY BRIAN ALDISS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  About the Author

  By the same author from The Friday Project

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Yes, I went to Crete. And I came back.

  How exciting was everything involved with Cretan Teat. If you happen to ask yourself why so few copies of this gorgeous novel have sold, well, read on. We shall come to that in a minute.

  It was a new century and I decided to take Charlotte, my youngest daughter, with me to south Crete, in the mistaken belief that we could swim in the warm seas off the coast. But, simply plunging our naked feet into the tide was sufficient to disabuse us of that illusion. The Eastern Mediterranean had a message for us: ‘Stay out!’

  We went and had a drink instead, and studied our learning curve. The island was alive with such curves. We found that Crete had suffered a chequered history ever since the collapse of Constantinople. It had been prosperous under Greece, but was now – as was also the case with my daughter and me – a touch run down.

  One day, I wandered through a forest of ancient trees, evidently designed by Arthur Rackham. There I found myself lost and came upon a small chapel, I felt, long ago abandoned by the family who had built it. I managed to get inside. In fresco on the wall was the portrait of a woman feeding what was evidently an infant Christ. The woman looked old and bore a halo. Not Mary, mother of Jesus. Back in the town, I sought out the village priest for information. (Ah, the thirst for information! The fuel driving a writer’s engine!) The priest was sitting on a chair in his garden. He said we could not go inside; his wife was repainting the whole house from top to bottom. This either pleased or irritated him; it was hard to tell. He told me that the woman in the fresco was Sveti Anna, Christ’s grandmother. Mary, being a virgin, he explained, had run out of milk.

  On the seafront, facing the cold grey ocean, was a family coffee shop. The daughter there served coffee to customers. When not thus engaged, she sat at a tiny desk behind the glass door, studying and painting in a Byzantine manner. I gave her a photo I had taken of St Anna, asking her to copy it in the Byzantine style. She said she could do it in a week – at which time, Charlotte and I would be gone.

  I paid the young lady on the spot and received the painting when back in Oxford, it was to be the cover for the novel already brewing in my mind. You see, we trusted each other. The lady now lives happily in Athens, skilfully painting fakes for tourists in the Byzantine fashion. It seems that this story of St Anna is little known in the West. Her coffin lies in the East, in Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul.

  A branch of the story I found myself likely to tell, lay beyond religion, in the grey alleyways and streets of ancient Kyriotisa.

  Here, Hitler’s forces in World War Two had invaded the town. Mothers and their children had been shut into the church and the church set on fire.

  Here was a terrible story that had become wedged into the minds of the following generation, a story that was the antithesis of the Anna mother-care tale. Wherever one went, into garages, or food shops, or restaurants, or simple bars, there would be someone bleak of face to tell you about German war crimes.

  I grew weary of their old song. I found myself asking: ‘after the war, did not Konrad Adenauer himself come to apologise for Nazi atrocities? Why, German workers arrived and rebuilt the church and mended the roads …’ And the waiter or waitress or whoever it was would ask scornfully, ‘Why do you defend such villains?’

  So there I was with my two sides of a story. What I wanted to add was something of the sexuality that happens when one is young – or not so young – and on holiday. Once we were home, I wrote my novel. A new company, Stratus, had just bought up fourteen of my past books; it seemed only civil to offer them my Cretan Teat. They accepted it.

  So this is where we came in, as people used to say in cinemas running continuous programmes. The reason why this gorgeous and provocative novel sold so few copies, found so few readers, was because The House of Stratus in Old Burlington Street, London, was going bust.

  My faithful editor at Stratus worked on, although she had been sacked. It was she who got it into book form complete with that cover and all. Meanwhile the ‘Titanic’ was fast going under. There was no distribution. Only the angry seas.

  What you are now holding is virtually a new book …

  Brian Aldiss

  Oxford, 2014

  ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I …’

  Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Chapter One

  ‘What a bugger,’ I said to myself, in my old-fashioned way.

  ‘What an absolute bugger!’

  There I stood, on a lump of mountain the name of which I did not know, in the sun, wearing a hat bought in the village. I was on holiday, wasn’t I? Retired – almost – half-dead, youthful, solitary, moderately happy. Not a care in the world, you might say. In fact I was relishing the remoteness of this place, two miles down a lane, off a road leading nowhere very much, standing in a deserted olive grove.

  There before me stood an undistinguished stone building, much resembling a cattle shed, with its front wall raised to form a peak above the roof denoting its function as a holy place. In this raised wall was an aperture in which hung a small bell – a bell which time had infiltrated, so that it could no longer move or give tongue. I stood before this venerable building mute myself, my adopted son Boris beside me. Our guide stood under an olive tree, smoking a cigarette, with no sense of the theatrical.

  Completely dominating the chapel were the ancient olive trees, designed, to judge by appearances, by the artist Arthur Rackham. Over the centuries, their girth had thickened, they had grown gnarly arms and hands stretching out to detain visitors, while their seamed bark had created distorted countenances, like hostile anthropophagi with faces in their stomachs. Year by year they must be creeping up on the building, I thought. This little chapel was never locked, not once in its eight centuries of existence. I stood by it. My shadow was on its wall, together with the pattern of shadows cast by the nearer olive trees. All that was real, tangible. Even my shadow was tangible, in a manner of speaking.

  And I had to go and get an idea for another novel. I stood there, while a story unwound in my head.

  I had travelled several hundreds of miles to reach this particular olive grove, outside the village of Kyriotisa. I simply stood there and the idea arrived from… wherever it is ideas come from. What the relationship was between the reality of my situation and the unravelling proto-fiction in my head, I leave as a mystery.

  This is one of the central questions, as far as I am concerned, the question of consciousness, and why to certain tormented minds do ideas present themselves unbidden, like gifts, which have to be pursued? All I wanted on this holiday was a blank mind.

  Instead, I had this obsession with storytelling. And I would write about a man whose obsession ruined him.

  The novel that sprang upon me would take at least a year’s work, and then all that business with publishers, when really I wished to do nothing at all constructive. Maybe the odd screw here and there, if I was still capable of it, with some darling woman, and another helping of that amazing understanding men and women reach when locked together.

  But it was a fruitful idea I had. I stood in the dappled shade, turning it over in my mind, while a lizard scuttled up an olive tree hand-carved by time. Its ancestors had prob
ably lived in that tree in the days of the Paleologues.

  ‘Are you okay, Pop?’ Boris asked.

  ‘Just thinking …’

  The novel, I knew at once, would have two protagonists: a contemporary man, a man of probity whose character would bring about his downfall, and a woman dead for two thousand years, whose legend was possibly false. He would be respectable, while she would be remembered only for her breasts.

  Sex is not respectable. It is our last freedom, still untaxed.

  Oh God, please not a novel with ideas. I can’t cope with ideas; the racecourse is more my territory. I’m old, too old to be intellectual. I’m due for retirement, if not the funny farm. It’s all I can do to hit the correct keys on my computer keyboard. When you are rapidly becoming impotent, a number of other inadequacies also kick into place.

  However, if write another novel was what I was going to do, I had better get the starting point clear. I had better go back into the chapel and take a closer look at that painting.

  The man who had led me to this particular olive grove, and this particular little chapel in the olive grove, reopened the chapel door for me. It was a low door, virtually a stable door. I’m a big chap. I had to bow low to enter. The threshold had probably been designed to induce humility.

  The guide waited outside. He stood and smoked a cigarette.

  Boris waited outside, ostentatiously patient. He dug his hands into his pockets and planted his right trainer on a stone, to stand there, leaning forward and whistling through his teeth. Boris had not acquired a taste for Crete’s Byzantine mysteries.

  The daylight died almost as soon as it crept inside the chapel. The candle I had lit still burned on the small altar, in a little haze of darkness. My passion for the mysteries and intricacies of Byzantium awoke again. Of all the pasts of the world, it was the most alluringly rich and religious and corrupt. Its music began to play in my head: deep, masculine, monotonous.

  I stood in a small room, maybe three metres by four. A cattle shed, little more – probably built by men who understood only cattle sheds. Rush-bottomed chairs clustered there, vacantly waiting. Having gathered for a chat about old times, they had found nothing to say. The chapel contained no ikonostasis; evidently the family who worshipped here were not the créme de la créme. Rather crude paintings adorned the wall, their holy images in blues and reds made indistinct through the erosion of neglect and the centuries. A smell of damp and aroma of candle, laced with the ghosts of incense.

  This assemblage of reverend relics had remained imprisoned in this stone cell since the Paleologues ruled in Constantinople. A family of Kyriotisa had built the chapel, to worship here, generation by generation, until something untoward had happened. Wealth and prayer had failed them. Those remaining had gathered up their garments and had cleared off, perhaps to Hania to start a new life.

  Without its congregation, their chapel had died, their olive trees had embraced the grotesque.

  Modern me, I unholstered my Olympus camera, switching to flash. I focused on one particular painting, daubed on the irregular plaster.

  The painting was of a woman nursing a child.

  The woman’s eyes had been scratched out. In consequence, her face was almost obliterated. Mould and damp had destroyed other parts of the painting. Age had mottled the plaster like a living hand. The head of the babe the woman held could hardly be distinguished. Not that the Byzantine artist had ever been numbered among the masters of his calling. Nor had he, poor man, enjoyed an intimate knowledge of a woman’s anatomy. The breast the woman had produced for the babe’s nourishment was the size and shape of an aubergine, and protruded from her lower rib.

  Above the painting the wording was clear: Agia Anna. Saint Anna.

  Shutter clicked, flash briefly lit, like the flash of inspiration. And again. And once more, from a slightly different angle. Better get it right, chum. You’re not likely to come this way again.

  Recollecting that time, as Boris and I walked back up the hill, I remember I was happy. It’s a curious thing about happiness, that, unlike misery, it frequently eludes our awareness at the time; only later can we say, perforce using the past tense, ‘I was happy then’. It is hard to determine if this is because for much of our lives we are experiencing frustration, disillusion, boredom, or even pain. We never get enough practice at recognising happiness when its wings brush our lives.

  As Boris, the guide and I trudged up the stony way to the guide’s car, we were shaded by gnarled olive trees, themselves witnesses to centuries past. The guide informed me that the saint’s eyes had been scratched out by Turkish invaders. His tone was both confident and confidential. The eyes represented witnesses to the Christian church, which should not be allowed to gaze on the rituals of Islam.

  I contradicted him. My argument was that the damage could have been more recent. It was too easy, in all lands which had been under Ottoman rule until after the turn of the century, to blame the Turks for everything. Maybe the Communists, or maybe the Nazis, who had occupied Crete in the early forties, had desecrated the image. Or what about the superstitious – those whose incipient blindness had moved them to scratch away the plaster of the saint’s pupils, dissolve it in water, and drink it?

  My faith in all these ideas was not strong, being unsupported by evidence; or maybe I had presented the guide with too many alternatives. He continued to insist the damage had been done by the Turks. The Turks were somehow to blame for the awful poverty that had recently befallen this entire area.

  And why should I challenge his beliefs? He lived by them. It was his country. The man was not a fool. I was the fool. We both fell silent, contemplating, no doubt, my foolishness.

  But I was the one with the photos, and the one with the idea for the novel. I was the one who was going to get rich – okay, rich by his standards… We walked companionably up the steeply winding track. Boris followed us. The day was hot. The afternoon was long.

  We reached the guide’s car, left by the side of the road. He drove us back into Kyriotisa. There we sat outside a taverna in the shade and drank a glass of retsina, from Hania, away over the mountains.

  The first part of the story has to provide Archie Langstreet with a little background. Archie is a large, bullish man of mixed parentage. He has a big closed face, with a steep brow and craggy nose red from the Aegean sun. His square jaw and rather thin lips give him a look of determination. He is approaching retirement from his work with the World Health Organisation in Geneva. He is a decent, concerned, religious man, who takes his work seriously. Some of his colleagues would tell you that Langstreet is driven.

  At present, he is holidaying on board a yacht hired from Pireus, with a hired captain. On board with him are his wife, Kathi, and a son by a former marriage, Clifford, together with two crew to cook and do all the donkey-work. At present, the yacht is moored in the harbour at Paleohora, on the south-west coast of the island of Crete. They have sailed around the island from east to west. Kathi, at least, is enjoying the respite from the tensions in Geneva, which are soon to come to a head.

  That’s enough background for now.

  Langstreet sat in a beach chair, reading. A novel lay in the sand near his chair, but he studied a sheaf of papers, occasionally ticking a paragraph with an HB pencil. The pencil hovered, ever ready to peck at the legal document.

  He paused, sighing. He gazed into the blue vacancy above the Libyan Sea. Through his sunglasses, the sky appeared a dark rich purple. Time passed. He willed it to pass. Sighing again, he resumed his study of the papers.

  The beach was not particularly distinguished. It spread away to the west, where a sea wall had been built; behind the wall was Paleohora’s harbour, in which Langstreet’s yacht was at present moored. Visitors ensured that the beach was moderately busy. Tourists lay on the sand, exposing various parts of their bodies to the sun, or sheltering under black-and-white rented umbrellas. Their naked bodies glistened with heavy oils, much like joints of meat roasting. Distant people shi
mmered like faulty ghosts in the rising heat. The margins of the sea contained infants cavorting and mothers guarding. The faint shrieks of the children reached Langstreet’s ears.

  From more distant stretches of water, a bikini-clad figure emerged, to come slowly up the beach to where Langstreet sat, shaded by wispy tamarisks.

  ‘Oh, that was just brilliant, Archie! The water is gorgeous. You should have come in with me!’ Kathi reached for her beach towel, to dry her face. Wrapping the towel about her shoulders, she stood dripping and looking down at her husband. ‘I must have swum at least a mile. I don’t have a fear of the sea any more, I just love it.’

  ‘Don’t get cold, Kathi,’ he said, smiling up at her.

  She put a chilly hand on his arm. ‘Feel that!’

  ‘You’re like a frozen fish,’ he said, with a short laugh. ‘Better get dressed.’

  ‘Dressed?! Don’t you like me in my costume?’ She struck an inviting pose, raising her arms and thrusting out her breasts. She was a dark woman, with honest grey eyes.

  Langstreet set his legal document down carefully in the sand beside his chair, weighing it down with the neglected novel. ‘Kathi, you are lovely, and we both know it. But I am in need of some action. You know I never was one for the beach. I’d like to see something of the island. Do you want to come with me for a drive?’

  She gave a wail. ‘Oh, Archie, you are indeed restless! We came here for you to take life a little easy – yet still you worry about this lousy law case… Where are you thinking of going?’

  He told her he was planning to see what was happening inland, and asked where Cliff was. She told him to look across the road, with a certain edge to her tone.

  Clifford could be seen sitting outside the restaurant of a white-stuccoed hotel, clad only in bathing trunks and a white hat, talking to a plump young blonde. His lean body inclined slightly towards the tanned female figure.