Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

identical, except the slightly thinner one has pierced ears, with little red drops, like spilled wine, dripping from them. They are also holding hands; sisters or lovers. The other couple, a man and woman, are jovial, well-off and American. Though in their fifties, he guesses, they are energetically slim, and have the same perfect teeth as the girl he had known in Athens. The other stranger possesses a young, dark, clandestine foreignness. He is preoccupied with scowling, less at Nick than at everything.

Then there are the two known ones.

Facing Nick as he enters is Joss Lewis, his father, whom he has not seen, (aside from, at best, a couple of disordered journalistic photographs in the late ‘90’s) for more than a decade. Joss seems no older, and more or less as he did in the dream on the plane. He is, as then, expressionless, and too - although he focuses straight ahead on Nick - Joss stays completely still save for one slow blink of his eyes.

To Joss’s right is Kitty, or Kirri, or whoever the fuck she is.

She has on a plain white blouse, what looks like a pale grey skirt. Her nails are red, as is her mouth, and her hair. Unlike Joss she has only gazed briefly at Nick. She has given Nick a strangely complicit smile, then lowered her eyes. Round her neck the same gold pendant winks as she raises her wine glass and sips.

One of the French women lights a cigarette. Nobody objects; there are ashtrays laid along the table, ready.

Then Pera has bustled up to a single empty chair, pulled it out, and stands grimly behind it.

Nick goes to the chair and sits down.

The big Greek reappears and is pouring wine into a glass by Nick’s allotted place.

The American man leans across the table. He extends his hand. “Hi. I’m Clyde. And this lovely lady is my wife, Shelley.”

Nick shakes hands with him, beams back and beams at beaming Shelley. “Nick.”

The French women regard Nick from their smoke with covert indifference. The other unrecognised man angrily averts his eyes and picks at a piece of bread on a side plate.

Joss speaks suddenly. Nick finds he has forgotten Joss’s voice, or rather has remembered it wrongly. Like his face it is expressionless.

“Did you have a good journey?”

“Yes,” says Nick. It is obvious to him somehow that it is useless to be polite, or attempt intimacy - thank you, Dad simply does not fit this Mad Hatter’s Lunch.

And Kitty-Kirri anyway gives a soft laugh. Then turns and speaks quietly to the Greek man, her companion in the village. Her spoken Greek is perfect, Nick can hear that. She utters it as only a Greek would. Obviously. She is half Greek.

The first course consists of colourful salads, olives, and cold imported caviar. The Greek man, whose name is now revealed, (when Joss speaks to him, in English) as Stephanos, serves everyone, nimbly assisted by a skinny, gazelle-like girl who appears less than fourteen.

Since this is a scene from a play, Nick cannot shake off the idea that all of them, except his father and Kitty-Kirri, are actors hired for the occasion.

He has assumed his father will have been expecting him by now, as Kitty-Kirri will have been. Mad Jonquil of Marylebone would have let them know. From her looped wire of handwriting Nick himself had initially read, along with location details, that Kitty was here ‘with yor Dad.’

The dishes are removed. Slabs of hot lamb appear with oiled rice and mint.

Nick eats a little, as he ate a little of the salads and fish-eggs.

It now looks to him, when he risks a sidelong stare at his father, as if Joss is gradually aging in front of him. The old man must be seventy-five, surely. He begins to look seventy-five, if only by degrees, like a slowly speeded-up film.

Very infrequently, Joss says something encouraging about the food, to his guests. These utterances are like what? Lines learnt by a clever parrot?

Kitty talks to Joss exclusively in an incomprehensible if coquettish undertone, as if they are alone in a crowded restaurant. It must be she has made him her fourth conquest from the Lewis family. She will have had them all now, then.

Clyde and Shelley meanwhile chat enthusiastically to Nick about the painting course. They, it transpires, are star pupils, like the French women and the moody Pole or Romanian, whatever he is, who refuses to talk at all. Clyde even vaunts this man as “quite a genius”. (Nor does that elicit any response from him.) As for the French, they too have begun to chatter to each other in darting glissandi - Tu - je - oui - non - alors - alors - waving their narrow hands as they light up between every plateful - mouthful - of food.

After the lamb there are pastries, halva and loukoumi.

Nick has grown tired, literally exhausted by lying about his interest in painting and the potential of the landscape and endless ruined temples. He is becoming hypnotised by the patterned grass wall.

When will this end? What can he do?

Has Joss become senile, does he not even recollect Nick is his son? But then why should he? - neither had meant much to the other. And yet, had Joss been wounded by the indifference of his children? After which had arrived this slenderly curvaceous young woman, with her Claudia hair and her Claudia skin and her Claudia eyes, her scarlet nails like Claudia’s in the heyday of the fifties… Does he flinch now when Kitty-Kirri makes her hair red and her nails white instead? Does he put up with it, even like it - adventures Claudia herself might have tried and never did?

Despite the open doors, there is so much smoke in the room from the cigarettes, Nick’s eyes sting. He recalls Jonquil’s baking tray full of burning paper, and the old woman coming out with her bleach bottle.

Clyde and Shelley have given up on Nick and are murmuring together. Nick