Betwixt and between

Chapter 1 • PREHISTORY-4

Dimitri, not satisfied with merely washing his face, washed himself all over, put Father’s brilliantine by Yardley on his hair, and wore his best white shirt and the new grey English wool shorts, which his aunt had bought him, just before she left for France. He put his recording of songs by Nat King Cole on the tape recorder and, ready by five o’clock, he waited.

Evdoxia and Aspasia were the first to arrive. They wore plain cotton dresses, with wide belts confining them at the waist, to set off their breasts and hips to advantage, and on their feet white sandals. Since they already knew the house, they went straight into the kitchen and offered to help Mrs Katerina and Tasia. They left Dimitri to wait on his own for Paris and Nikos, who lived nearby and were not long in coming.

The boys sat in the saloni and talked about the student demonstrations in Athens in support of Enosis - a union with Greece. Sixth-form students at the Pancyprian High had been shouting slogans against the United Nations in the school playground. Aspasia came back from the kitchen holding a jug of fresh orange juice, and filled them in on the latest news report from her school. On Saturday, St Lazarus’s day, the last day before the holidays, sixth-form girls at Phaneromeni High had written WE DEMAND OUR FREEDOM in large letters on the blackboard, in time for the English lesson.

The discussion became more general when Evdoxia came back in from the kitchen, and they were interrupted by the arrival of Iason, Christina and Fanny, whom the others were meeting for the first time. Christina was tall for her age and somewhat thin, dark, with brown eyes behind the thick lenses of her glasses. By contrast, Fanny was so small that she looked more like a ten- or eleven-year-old than fourteen. Even the way she dressed was childish, with a short skirt and white ankle socks. After the due introductions, Dimitri invited his friends to help themselves to food, and switched the tape recorder on to Nat King Cole, crooning about the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa. A little later the orchestra, accompanying the black American singer, struck up the first notes of the Spanish hit Mi casa su casa and Iason invited Christina to dance.

The two children moved together with ease towards the middle of the drawing room, and as they tuned in to the slow rhythm of the music, there was no doubt of their familiarity with one another, and that it went beyond the relation of plain neighbour. Dimitri felt encouraged by their example, and so he took Aspasia by the hand and led her onto the improvised dance floor. This was the signal for the dancing to take off overall.

Dimitri danced with all four girls. In each one he admired a different quality. With Aspasia, he wanted to recapture the feeling of excitement he had come to know that first time, when she fell off Maria’s bed and into his arms. With Evdoxia, he savoured the ease of their friendship as they commented conspiratorially on their friends. With Christina, who was one year older than the other girls and therefore in the same year as he was, he found that they had literary inclinations in common. As for Fanny, who was the youngest of them all, he happily took advantage of her inferiority to tease her.

Iason was the first to leave, at about eight o’clock, together with Christina and Fanny, who had some way to go to get home. The other two girls followed shortly afterwards, and as soon as Dimitri, Paris and Nikos were alone, they began a critique of their soirée. All three gave it enthusiastic reviews. Nikos, who had shown a particular preference for Aspasia throughout the evening, made a stunning announcement: at the next plenary session he was going to put forward a motion that the four girls be voted into the club.

“That way not only will we dance with them, but we can teach them to play spin-the-bottle and strip poker!” he declared enthusiastically.

So on the next day a special session was called, and Nikos’s proposal was unanimously accepted. The eight children began to meet every Saturday evening, usually in Dimitri’s house, but now and again at Iason’s. He too was bereaved, having lost his father. Usually when they were together, they listened to music and danced. The girls never seemed to take to strip poker, but they soon got into the spirit of things and played spin-the-bottle with the boys.

As time went by, Dimitri, Evdoxia and their respective parents grew ever more attached to one another. Dimitri’s father had a small bedroom at his disposal at the hospital which he had inherited from his predecessor, who lived at Aglantzia, and to whom it had been allocated, so that he could spend nights at the hospital when work kept him there until late in the evening. But Dimitri’s father lived next door to the hospital and so had no use for it.

When he and Maria began to ‘go steady’, he had the idea of putting his room at her disposal so that Evdoxia could sleep there, as Maria’s room really was too small for two. This solution of course had the added benefit of allowing Dimitri’s father to spend Saturday nights with Evdoxia’s mother. So gradually, Dimitri, tired of being alone at home, got into the habit of coming to the hospital early on Sunday morning, and going into what had been his father’s little room to wake up Evdoxia. Then the two children would prepare a large tray with coffee and bread, butter and marmalade from the kitchens and would take it into their parents’ bedroom. While they all had breakfast together, they would make plans for that day’s expedition. For both children these were perhaps the happiest moments of their week. Never, since the time that his mother had become ill, had Dimitri felt so safe.

Summer and the end of lessons came suddenly, as it seemed to do every year. From the last days of June onwards, Nicosia was a furnace. Maria sent Evdoxia to her grandparents in Yeroskipou and followed her there, as she did every summer, to take her annual holiday at the beginning of August. Dimitri’s father, for professional reasons, was obliged to stay at his post. But once Eleni’s sister had come back from Paris with her husband for the holidays and had established herself at The Dome Hotel in Kyrenia for the month of August, Dimitri’s father took a room at The Dome as well, for himself and his son, and retreated to the hotel every evening after work, since the journey from Nicosia in the Morris was a matter of a mere half hour.

Initially, Dimitri found it amusing to observe the British tribe who inhabited the hotel. Pensioners of both genders, exceedingly old and semi-invalid, propped up on walking sticks and crutches and wandering about the spotless white corridors, would wait expectantly for dinner time; or, with even more enthusiasm, for afternoon tea, served on the veranda of the hotel with copious scones, butter and jam. Only a few rare newly-wed couples, spending their honeymoon, varied the oppressive homogeneity of the British clientele a little. There were of course a few well-to-do Cypriots, like Dimitri’s uncles, who had settled in for the summer to take their sea baths. To this category belonged the numerous family of the contractor, Isidore Neophytou, whose empire extended to both Egypt and Cyprus.

Dimitri soon grew bored of waiting for mealtimes along with the relics of the British Empire and his own nouveau riche compatriots at the hotel. He would a thousand times rather have been with Maria and Evdoxia down under the vine in her grandparents’ house in Yeroskipou, or be casting a fishing line from the Turkish castle into the little harbour in Paphos, or even staying in Nicosia to walk at dusk along the side streets of the Old Town, with an ice cream, and Nikos, Paris and Iason for company.

The contractor’s family included two children, one and two years older than Dimitri. They were, respectively, Johnny and Laetitia (known as Laeta), who he couldn’t help but feel were unbearable show-offs. They belonged to the category of Cypriots, miserable because they weren’t born British, who either studied at the English School or at the American Academy in Nicosia, frequented the English Club in the capital and in Kyrenia, and spoke in English to one another.

Dimitri threw himself into his mediaeval reading, from the Chronicle of Machairas to the poems of the troubadours, written in the melodious literary idiom of Southern France, and when he wasn’t strolling about alone around the castle of Kyrenia, he would beg his uncles or, on Sundays, his father, to take him on outings to the Abbey of Belapais, or to the castles on the Pentadaktylos mountains - castles whose exotic architecture he tried to reproduce in his sketch book.

Dimitri’s father had no one for company except for his brother-in-law and Dimitri’s aunt, so he was happy to fall in with his son’s wishes, apart from one weekend, when he went to meet Maria at Yeroskipou.

That was how things were, at least until the addition to the great contractor’s family of his sister Jenny, a beautiful and elegant woman of about thirty-five, recently divorced from her English husband and just returned from London. The well-defined curves of her body seemed strangely at odds with her thin arms and legs and doll-like head, with its auburn hair and bright blue eyes. She was always flawlessly dressed and groomed, and even when she spoke Greek, she mingled English words and phrases in her speech. She was a striking woman, who captivated and at the same time repelled Dimitri. His father, on the other hand, was simply captivated - a turn of events which was puzzling to Dimitri, at least at first.

When in mid-September Dimitri and his father left Kyrenia for Nicosia and joined Maria and Evdoxia, who had already returned from Yeroskipou, there was every sign that things would go back to normal. In fact, things were not the same at all, and Dimitri felt it, but without being able to locate the cause. To begin with, he attributed it to the change in the political atmosphere. This was aggravated by announcements and threats now being made by the British authorities against people who were demonstrating in favour of a Union with Greece.

Meanwhile, Greece appealed to the United Nations Organisation to recognise Cyprus’s right to self-determination. In December, the UN’s refusal to take a stand led to an explosion of protests, sporadic fights between students and the police, and dramatic events in Limassol, where the army opened fire on protestors.

Dimitri was horrified when he learnt about the outbreaks of violence, and kept away from every kind of demonstration. The sight of broken shop windows, goods destroyed, the blood of children, as well as policemen, made him instinctively turn away. His attitude was becoming a cause of conflict with Aspasia and Nikos, since they were both leaders of the pro-Enosis movement of students. They had been in the front line during the attack on police headquarters at Paphos Gate, in the Old Town.

Evdoxia and Paris found it difficult to keep the peace between Dimitri and his political friends. Meanwhile Iason, Christina and Fanny, when they were not at school, were kept at home by their parents to prevent them from being caught up in the disturbances. Inevitably, gatherings with all members of the Four Aces Club became more and more infrequent, and eventually they petered out altogether.

Dimitri’s family life was undergoing a change at the same time. The rich contractor, with whom his father had become better acquainted during the holidays, was a fanatical player and organiser of bridge contests. Mr Dorides was again leading a double life: with his new friends during the week and with Maria, Evdoxia and Dimitri on Saturday evenings and Sundays. Then, from the beginning of spring, his father’s socialising began to spread over onto Sunday as well. An outing to the contractor’s country house in Platres, or a visit to the races to watch a friendly contest at the Racing Club - these outings meant that father and son saw less and less of Maria and Evdoxia.