The Forgotten Smile Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Kennedy

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part One: ‘There’s Nothing There’

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: ‘Happy Birthday, Mrs Benson!’

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Three: Beatitude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Four: The Numen of Keritha

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Five: ‘De Mortuis …’

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Six: ‘Away! We’re Bound Away!’

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Kate is bored of being overlooked by her grown-up children and decides to escape on an Aegean cruise. She ends up in Keritha – a mysterious Greek island all but forgotten by the modern world. There she encounters her childhood friends, the Challoners, returned to the island of their birth to claim their heritage. When another stray arrives – the unattractive, foolish Selwyn Potter – Kate is irritated. But under the spell of this strange and beautiful island both visitors find themselves, and each other, cast in a new light.

  About the Author

  Margaret Kennedy was born in 1896. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller. She then met and married a barrister, David Davies, with whom she had three children. She went on to write a further fifteen novels, to much critical acclaim. She was also a playwright, adapting two of her novels – Escape Me Never and The Constant Nymph – into successful productions. Three different film versions of The Constant Nymph were made, and featured stars of the time such as Ivor Novello and Joan Fontaine; Kennedy subsequently worked in the film industry for a number of years. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen and a work of literary criticism, The Outlaws of Parnassus. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.

  OTHER NOVELS BY MARGARET KENNEDY

  The Ladies of Lyndon

  The Constant Nymph

  Red Sky at Morning

  The Fool of the Family

  Return I Dare Not

  A Long Time Ago

  Together and Apart

  The Midas Touch

  The Feast

  Lucy Carmichael

  Troy Chimneys

  The Oracles

  The Wild Swan

  A Night in Cold Harbour

  TO DAVID DAVIES

  The dialect of Keritha is spelt, as nearly

  as possible, as it was pronounced.

  PART ONE

  ‘THERE’S NOTHING THERE’

  Little we see in nature that is ours.

  WORDSWORTH

  1

  A large uncouth artefact stands in a little garden outside the Museum of Antiquities on the island of Thasos. It has the head of a seal, a body like a horizontal sausage roll, rudimentary wings, and human legs plunged into heavy boots. Few visitors think it beautiful.

  It had, however, an enduring fascination for Selwyn Potter, who never failed to inspect it whenever he came to Thasos. Seen from the front, so that the bird-like rump was concealed, it reminded him of someone whom he must know quite well. The morose expression on the seal face was tantalizingly familiar.

  This long-standing riddle was solved one spring morning, when he saw Dr Percival Challoner come stumping out of the museum to peer at the thing. The association became abundantly clear; they were as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In another era, in another life, Selwyn had sat for hours, attentive to information trickling out of that glum mouth.

  Now these fantastic twins stood confronted as though each waited for the other to begin a cross mumble, some obscure quotation from the Palatine Anthology. Selwyn strolled up to them and got one in first.

  Tweedledee took no notice but Tweedledum begged his pardon, in modern Greek, without looking round.

  This had always been Dr Challoner’s technique, in any country, with foreigners who insisted upon addressing him. He begged their pardons and went on doing so until they shut up. He also knew the word for thank you, in French, German, and Italian, but had not troubled to learn it in Greek.

  Selwyn obligingly translated:

  ‘The holy bird can give his swift wing a rest here.’

  Foreigners who talked English were the worst nuisance of all since nothing could shut them up. Nor did Dr Challoner relish this singularly tasteless translation of Mnasalcas. He gave a disapproving grunt and turned to go out of the garden, pursued by Selwyn who was anxious to find out what Tweedledum thought of Tweedledee.

  ‘Was he once very holy, this bird, do you think?’

  Now, after many years, he heard the thin titter with which his one-time mentor reproved ignorance. It was like putting a penny in a slot.

  ‘Te-he-he! A bird?’

  ‘Isn’t he a bird?’

  ‘A griffin, possibly.’

  ‘I thought a griffin had four legs.’

  ‘The hind legs have obviously been destroyed.’

  ‘What do you think of it?’

  ‘It’s not in the least remarkable. I was merely wondering … I had an impression I’ve seen it before somewhere.’

  You see it every morning when you shave, thought Selwyn.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘you’ve seen something like it in some exhibition of contemporary art?’

  This was another penny for the slot and it drew from Dr Challoner a smug assertion that he knew nothing whatever about contemporary art. He had always taken a kind of pride in confessing total ignorance of any subject save one; upon late Greek poetry he claimed to be an absolute authority, and this claim was, it seemed, partially based upon a determination to know nothing whatever about anything else.

  The dear old responses had something of the charm exerted by a treasured musical box, lost, forgotten, and rediscovered. To elicit yet another was an irresistible temptation.

  ‘A Greek griffin,’ suggested Selwyn, ‘saying what it thinks of the Turks?’

  Prompt as ever the rocket went up.

  ‘Greek? What exactly do you mean by Greek?’

  Selwyn smiled and went glibly into the old routine:

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say Achaian, or Dorian, or Ionian, or Aeolian. I don’t suggest he’s strictly a Hellenic griffin but …’

  ‘You! Why … you’re English! I know you!’

  This really disconcerted Selwyn who had assumed the recognition to be mutual. If he remembered people it was natural to suppose that they must remember him. Nor could he understand why anybody should mistake his nationality. He had but a hazy notion of his own effect upon others. That his waistline was abnormal he knew because he found it difficult, in England, to buy trousers off the peg. He also knew that his hair was stiff and curly since hats had a way of bouncing off it as though recoiling from a nest of springs. Of the general effect he was unaware. To take him for a florid young Levantine was very natural in a place like Thasos.

  ‘I’m Potter,’ he explained, a little crestfallen. ‘You know me. You coached me once. Selwyn Potter.’
/>   Dr Challoner riffled through his mental card index. Potter? Potter? Ten years ago? More? A fat young man with a scholarship from a grammar school. Promising, as so many of them were. Fizzled out, as so many of them did. Why should anybody remember Potter?

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, doing his best. ‘You got the Beaulieu?’

  ‘The Glanville.’

  ‘Ah yes …’

  And how many times, since then, had brilliant young men carried off the Glanville Award before fizzling out?

  ‘Ah yes. And what are you doing now?’

  ‘Oh … loafing round the islands.’

  ‘On vacation? I mean, what do you do?’

  This meant, apparently, how did Selwyn earn his dinner. He said glumly:

  ‘I teach.’

  He did not say where. Had he taught in a reputable institution he would have named it. Some miserable Dotheboys Hall, reflected Dr Challoner, unrecognized by the Board of Education, catering for boys who had failed to qualify for any secondary or grammar school, for parents too snobbish to accept the inevitable – that was a beach frequently combed by holders of the Glanville who had fizzled out.

  ‘I see. Well … pleasant to have met you.’

  With a last suspicious glance at Tweedledee Dr Challoner stumped off, unaware that his former pupil had been looking forward to a much longer conversation, although they had very little in common.

  Selwyn had once read Greek with eager pleasure until all pleasure vanished abruptly from his world, leaving him footloose and solitary. He had always valued the older man’s grasp of verbal subtleties and had listened to him with respect, although obliged to laugh at him occasionally.

  Dr Challoner’s felicity lay elsewhere. He got most pleasure out of scoring off an opponent, was uneasy in the company of people who knew as much, in his own field, as he did, and dreaded the bare possibility that anybody could ever know more. Promising young men occasionally gave him qualms of apprehension; they might become potential rivals if they should emulate his own austere determination to know nothing whatever in any field save one. But they could generally be trusted to waste time and energy upon history, archaeology or philosophy. They deserted the printed word for the plastic arts. They even made excursions outside the classics. They came and they went. He dealt out the required information, tittering sometimes at their inaccuracy, and tolerably certain that they would fizzle out.

  Selwyn’s disappointment was short-lived, for he had not expected very much. The brief warmth engendered by the meeting soon evaporated, and he subsided once more into a sadness so complete that he scarcely knew himself to be sad. No part of him remained detached from it to observe or to comment on the rest. In a frozen melancholy, the prevailing climate of his existence at this time, he wandered down to the harbour and exchanged island gossip with some men who had come in with a haul of squid. In some ways he was a good mixer; he had the easy tap-room geniality often to be observed in melancholics. These peasants were going over to the mainland and offered to take him with them. He would have accepted, since he had had enough of Thasos, if Dr Challoner had not reappeared, trotting down the quay and bleating for him in querulous anxiety.

  ‘Potter! Oh … I say! Potter!’

  A little boy in the boat thought this summons very funny and repeated it in ecstasy.

  ‘Potta! O-ai-se Potta!’

  His father cuffed him into sobriety. People like this were common enough upon Thasos. They came in boatloads, took a look at Tweedledee, climbed up to the Acropolis, walked round the island, and sailed away again.

  ‘I say, Potter, can you speak the language? I saw you talking to these people. I wonder if you could help me. I’m in rather a fix … most annoying …’

  ‘I speak it well enough. What’s the trouble?’

  ‘I want to get to an island called Keritha. I thought I could get a boat from here, but they tell me no boats ever go there.’

  ‘They wouldn’t, in a regular way. There’s a post boat goes to Zagros, twice a week. That’s the nearest island to Keritha.’

  ‘So I gather. I must hire a boat, and I don’t know how to set about it. I have the address of an agent here; I’ve just seen him. A most incompetent person. Can’t speak English. Only French, of a sort. I thought he’d fix me up with a boat and an interpreter, but he just shrugs his shoulders and tells me to go to Zagros. Nobody, according to him, ever goes to Keritha.’

  ‘I dare say not. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘But I must go. It’s a business matter.’

  Selwyn turned to the squid boat and explained that he could not go to the mainland, since he must stay and look after this old character. The men nodded and continued to throw their cargo on to the quay, more or less in the direction of the old character’s ankles. The boy, risking another cuff, yelled:

  ‘Zany!’

  ‘What horrible creatures,’ exclaimed Dr Challoner, recoiling from the squid tentacles.

  ‘They’re good eating,’ said Selwyn.

  ‘Zany! Zany!’

  ‘Why does he keep shouting Zany?’

  ‘He means foreigners. Xenoi, originally.’

  ‘Good heavens!’

  This unorthodox encounter with a perfectly respectable word, hitherto only to be met with in print, quite flabbergasted Dr Challoner. He crept away up the quay followed by Selwyn, who demanded:

  ‘Did you say you had business on Keritha?’

  ‘I did. Is that a newspaper kiosk over there? Could I get a Times, do you think?’

  ‘You could try. But … Keritha! There’s nothing there. Never has been. No ruins, no sites. Never once mentioned in history or literature …’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  ‘No nearer than Zagros. There’s a church and a shop on Zagros. I got to know the schoolmaster there; he goes over to Keritha to teach school two days a week and he told me what a God-forgotten place it is.’

  ‘Can you help me to get a boat?’

  ‘I’ll ask around and see what I can do. You wait for me at that taverna behind the kiosk.’

  There was no Times to be had, nor anything nearer to it than an elderly copy of the New York Herald Tribune. Dr Challoner was not surprised. The difficulty of obtaining The Times every day had, long ago, given him a distaste for all foreign travel. It had exasperated him in places far less barbarous than Thasos. He rejected the Tribune and went to the taverna where, for the price of an abominable cup of sweet black poison, he could sit down.

  This, he reflected, was foreign travel at its very worst. He might hope to know more about late Greek poetry than anybody else, but he had never felt the faintest inclination to visit the land of its birth. He could, by reading, ascertain all that was necessary; any visual gaps could be filled by good photographs. It might, originally, have belonged to a lot of dead foreigners, but he considered that it had now become the personal property of people like himself, who settled hoti’s business decorously in a thousand libraries from Upsala to Princeton.

  As he tried to swallow his nasty foreign coffee he wished that he had had the foresight to bring a tin of Quickcafe in his suitcase. Potter might know, perhaps, whether such a civilized amenity could be purchased on Thasos; Potter might, if that was so, write down on a piece of paper some sentence which he could show to these people: Bring me a cup and a spoon and a jug of hot water.

  Sighing, he thought of his quarters at home – of the breakfast table with Quickcafe, toast and marmalade, birdsong and daffodils in the Fellows’ Garden outside, and an uncompromising photograph of the Parthenon over the fireplace.

  Presently Potter came into sight again, exuberantly seedy, lounging along the quay. A belt or braces! thought Dr Challoner, watching his progress. One or the other! A paunch, inexcusable in so young a man, cannot be trusted to keep the trousers from slipping below the navel.

  ‘We’re in luck,’ said Selwyn, subsiding heavily upon a chair. ‘There’s a boat in from Keritha, going back today. I’ve fixed it all up. There’ll be so
me cargo, but they’ll have room for us, if you haven’t too much luggage.’

  ‘I’ve a couple of suitcases. But … are you coming too?’

  ‘I’d better, if you’re going on business and can’t talk Greek. I’m sure nobody on Keritha even speaks French. In fact I dare say their Greek is pretty queer; that schoolmaster says they’ve a lingo all of their own; a lot of words you don’t meet anywhere else.’

  ‘Very good of you. But I don’t want to upset your plans.’

  ‘I have no plans,’ said Selwyn, who was determined to find out what Challoner might be up to. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Keritha, and this is a very good chance.’

  ‘And will this boat bring us back?’

  ‘Oh no. We’ll have to come back via Zagros. We can easily get somebody from Keritha to run us over. And then from Zagros catch the next post boat here. There’s one on Thursday.’

  ‘You mean sleep on Zagros? Is there an hotel?’

  ‘Good heavens no. But somebody will put you up. The schoolmaster might.’

  ‘Where did you sleep when you were there?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I don’t remember. I just … sleep around.’

  ‘I never thought I should have to spend a night … I thought I could stay here … though this is bad enough, and run over to Keritha for the day.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve never been so far off the map in these parts before?’

  ‘I’ve never been in these parts before.’

  ‘You haven’t? Really? How very odd!’

  ‘I’ve never felt the least desire to come. What is there to come for? All this …’ Challoner waved towards the quay and the squid, ‘… what has this to do with literature?’

  ‘It had a lot to do with it once.’

  ‘Not now.’

  Never at any time, in Dr Challoner’s private opinion. Poetry has never been written by yokels who throw fish about on quays.

  Selwyn mused for a while and then said:

  ‘All over long ago? Dead and gone?

  ‘… On thy voiceless shore

  The heroic lay is tuneless now,

  The heroic bosom beats no more?’