Inheritance by Evelyn Toynton

Author:Evelyn Toynton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Ten

At Stony Brook I had developed a certain scorn for the glossy rich girls whose lunch plates I had to clear away, wearing a hairnet and overalls, for $3.75 an hour, and not just because of their habit of stubbing out their cigarettes in their leftover cheesecake. They were always shrieking with laughter, they had such an air of sucking greedily at all the goodies the world had to offer.

Now I realized that, for all their fancy clothes, they hadn’t been truly posh, whereas of course Isabel was, very posh, though I think she made conscientious efforts to play it down. But sometimes, if she was excited, or in fervent agreement with something I’d said, she slipped out of her pleasantly neutral accent and reverted to something closer to her mother’s. Once I was telling her about a show of roses at Kew Gardens I was writing up for some magazine, and she said, waving a rare cigarette, “Oh, it sounds too too riveting.” Later, when I came to introduce her to my new friends, there was always a subtle shift in their manner around her, a heightening of attention, as though metaphorically they were sitting up straighter.

Which may be part of what she’d loved about Greece, where she might not have been so easy to place, except as an Anglo. (I knew a little about that, feeling happily unplaceable in England.) But when she told me about it, it was always Stavros she talked about. It made me uneasy sometimes; she was so worshipful, telling me about his specialness, his wisdom: “At first I had this idea I was going to save him, heal him from his despair, only then I saw it wasn’t despair, it wasn’t some sickness in him but a kind of knowledge. A way of seeing things as they really were. Which I’d never had the courage for.” Maybe that was true. But it felt strange that she rarely mentioned being happy with him. Nor was there any of that wild carefree Zorba-the-Greek-dancing-barefoot-on-the-sand stuff (though she did say he took her on his battered old Vespa to watch the sun setting over the sea).

Instead he had set out to re-educate her. The first time they met, in the foreign-language bookshop where he worked, she had asked for a new translation of Cavafy, and he had told her Cavafy was a fascist. No he wasn’t, she said, shocked, but he insisted: yes, he was a fascist, he had accepted a medal from a fascist dictator. Furthermore, Mr. T. S. Eliot—she was carrying a copy of his plays—was a fascist also; did all English ladies have a liking for fascists? He could not agree to order her a copy of the poems of Mr. Ezra Pound, if that was what she’d like next. She laughed as she told me this, but her eyes were shining, as though it were proof of what a pure soul he was. Like Wittgenstein or someone.

A few days later, as she was

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