neither did I feel that these attentions were exclusive to me. He was interested in so many people and there had been so much experience before he met me. The two former wives revealed their presence in photographs, letters and small objects whose history I would never know. Sometimes I referred to myself as “Number Three”, hoping to make Nikitas laugh. But it also made me realise how I was just one among all the other people who came and went through his life, leaving deposits, like water dropping silt along a river bank. It was all welcome to him. The more people you knew, the richer your life would be. But the longer we were together, the more I was aware of how little I knew of Nikitas’ origins – the lake or spring at the source.
The air was musty, like coffee dregs growing mould. I went over to the daybed, gripping the worn wooden end, keeping steady, noticing the dent in the cushion that must have been left by Nikitas’ head the last time he lay there. I sat for a moment, taking in the manly smells of wood and books, then opened the curtains, turned on the overhead light and went to the desk. It was swamped with papers that already looked old, as though the place had been abandoned long ago. The laptop was closed and dusty. Standing on top of it was a glass and an almost empty bottle of Cutty Sark whisky. There were several Greek books about the Civil War – thick paperbacks with grainy photographs of men with untamed beards and weapons slung across their backs. The dense texts were littered with acronyms like codes that might give answers: EAM, ELAS, KKE, EDES, EPON, OPLA, SOE, X…
Nikitas had been researching for a book about the relationship between the British and the Greeks through history, with a particular focus on the Civil War and its aftermath. He had been gathering material for ages, and had taken on an assistant who worked at the paper. I hadn’t met her, but I knew that someone called Danae was helping stoke his anger about the contradictions that lay behind the famous British philhellenism and the country’s involvement in Greece. He didn’t have a title yet, but my nickname for his book was Perfidious Albion . He was annoyed that the British remained so ignorant about the Greek Civil War that they helped provoke.
“Even English school children know about the bombardment of Guernica and the horrors of the Spanish Civil War,” he complained. “But nobody in England learns about the massacres of civilians in Greece a decade later. Sadly, we didn’t get Picasso painting the English aerial attacks in Athens, or Orwell and Hemingway telling our story.”
“Philhellenism, my arse,” Nikitas liked to say. “In reality, the English have been just as much anti-Hellenes or mis-Hellenes. Even Shelley’s old favourite, ‘We are all Greeks’, was a way of saying the English are better at being Greek than us. The English used Greece for their own fantasies and adventures, but trampled all over it when it suited. All Greeks know about Byron, the hero-poet who supported the Greek revolution. And maybe he did, but if it hadn’t been in their interests, the English would never have backed us against the Turks in 1821. And then they spent the next 100 years trying to foist atrocious foreign kings on us. Oh, and don’t forget the Ionian Isles were little English colonies for quite a time – they still play fucking cricket on Corfu.” I could almost hear Nikitas’ voice as I tried to bring some order to the surface of the desk and heaped all the books together on a shelf, and made piles out of different papers. I find this occupation as soothing as other people find needlepoint or knitting, and it is fitting that I have managed to place archives at the heart of my work. It was something my grandfather Desmond had taught me from a young age, when he got me to help organise his study. We would spend hours arranging the books alphabetically, sorting through index cards, tidying files and cleaning
The air was musty, like coffee dregs growing mould. I went over to the daybed, gripping the worn wooden end, keeping steady, noticing the dent in the cushion that must have been left by Nikitas’ head the last time he lay there. I sat for a moment, taking in the manly smells of wood and books, then opened the curtains, turned on the overhead light and went to the desk. It was swamped with papers that already looked old, as though the place had been abandoned long ago. The laptop was closed and dusty. Standing on top of it was a glass and an almost empty bottle of Cutty Sark whisky. There were several Greek books about the Civil War – thick paperbacks with grainy photographs of men with untamed beards and weapons slung across their backs. The dense texts were littered with acronyms like codes that might give answers: EAM, ELAS, KKE, EDES, EPON, OPLA, SOE, X…
Nikitas had been researching for a book about the relationship between the British and the Greeks through history, with a particular focus on the Civil War and its aftermath. He had been gathering material for ages, and had taken on an assistant who worked at the paper. I hadn’t met her, but I knew that someone called Danae was helping stoke his anger about the contradictions that lay behind the famous British philhellenism and the country’s involvement in Greece. He didn’t have a title yet, but my nickname for his book was Perfidious Albion . He was annoyed that the British remained so ignorant about the Greek Civil War that they helped provoke.
“Even English school children know about the bombardment of Guernica and the horrors of the Spanish Civil War,” he complained. “But nobody in England learns about the massacres of civilians in Greece a decade later. Sadly, we didn’t get Picasso painting the English aerial attacks in Athens, or Orwell and Hemingway telling our story.”
“Philhellenism, my arse,” Nikitas liked to say. “In reality, the English have been just as much anti-Hellenes or mis-Hellenes. Even Shelley’s old favourite, ‘We are all Greeks’, was a way of saying the English are better at being Greek than us. The English used Greece for their own fantasies and adventures, but trampled all over it when it suited. All Greeks know about Byron, the hero-poet who supported the Greek revolution. And maybe he did, but if it hadn’t been in their interests, the English would never have backed us against the Turks in 1821. And then they spent the next 100 years trying to foist atrocious foreign kings on us. Oh, and don’t forget the Ionian Isles were little English colonies for quite a time – they still play fucking cricket on Corfu.” I could almost hear Nikitas’ voice as I tried to bring some order to the surface of the desk and heaped all the books together on a shelf, and made piles out of different papers. I find this occupation as soothing as other people find needlepoint or knitting, and it is fitting that I have managed to place archives at the heart of my work. It was something my grandfather Desmond had taught me from a young age, when he got me to help organise his study. We would spend hours arranging the books alphabetically, sorting through index cards, tidying files and cleaning
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