Paper Men by Golding William

Author:Golding, William [William Golding]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571312252
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter X

Two changes later—the young man had been all against my driving a car for a bit—I was on a Greek island that in those days had remote places in it where the sanitation was primitive which I have come not to mind, preferring it to the marble and plastic and ceramic perfections where you meet so many people. I mean, these days in a so-called good hotel the men’s room is practically a club. You don’t know who you’ll find yourself pissing next to. The island was—and now there’s no need to conceal the fact, I remind myself—Lesbos or Lesvos according to whether you did or did not do Greek in the fifth. I thought solitude and a beach would be very good for recuperating from my arrest or arrests and all that drink. So I had myself driven clear across the island to a rundown hotel and a huge beach. (You wouldn’t believe the road! Part of it was a dried-up watercourse and part a stretch of stones all the size of a cricket ball—girl’s fist—and only useful for stoning crows.) One of the good things about Greece is that the standard wine is undrinkable. I’d been in Greece before and for an extended stay, as they say, like everyone else. I’d drunk myself into kidding myself that I liked retzina and then drunk myself out of that delusion again. Now I was saved from myself, so to speak, except for a soft Cretan red without any resin in it—Minos, I think it was called—and you could buy it in galonia which are earthenware jars done up in withy and you can keep one or more by you.

So I swam gently and sometimes I lay on my back with my eyes shut and enjoyed the feeling that I didn’t know what they were writing and saying about Horses at the Spring and nobody knew where I was so I couldn’t be told anyway and by now Mr Halliday and Rick had been reduced to getting their claws into other people. I was a bit uneasy about what people would be saying, since Horses at the Spring had what might be mistaken for True Love in it and people wouldn’t wear that though I couldn’t very well tell them it was there to put off Halliday. However, as they say, ignorance is bliss or calm at any rate. So I lay for days on my tum in shallow water, a mask over my face, a snorkel up by my earhole and watched the lovely nameless indifferent creatures with their colours and stillnesses and sudden darts and habit of being chums all together between meals. Once, I deduce (my one bit of underwater archaeology), there’d been a harbour at one end of the beach and it’s still visible just under the surface, since in restful, geological terms, the island goes up and down like a yoyo. It’s full of small, harmless fish—small because everything bigger has been eaten by the fishermen who now have to go out miles and miles before they can find anything.

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