The Young Wife by David Martin

Author:David Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-09T05:39:19+00:00

12

Patricia left the theatre after the first curtain-call, when it was already clear that the play was a success. When the guests began to arrive for the first-night party she was waiting to greet them.

It was nearly midnight before Criton arrived, travelling with Yannis and Anna in a long cavalcade of cars bringing the actors, a host of University people and half the leading members of the Greek community, whom Alexis had infected with his enthusiasm.

The gossip columns had taken up Anna’s story—a village girl, a newcomer to the country. In the end, however, it was her natural dignity that had given importance to her small part. She had conquered her nervousness, yet the feeling that it was not her own body which moved on the stage never left her. The old terror came back only when it was all over and she saw Yannis himself leading the ovation, gazing at her as if he had never seen her before and wiping his hands to clap and clap again. There had been eight curtain-calls.

Peter and Susan arrived a little later with Alexis and his large retinue, which included Kondos. It also included an extraordinary and strange-looking group of well-set-up men whom Patricia had already noticed in the theatre. They wore formal evening dress as if they were not used to it. In the interval, when she had asked him about them, Alexis had laughed and dismissed them as his claque: he had brought them because they had large hands. Peter had a young man in tow, an American exchange scholar who had turned up at the last rehearsals and was starting to pay open court to Susan. Peter was rather quiet.

A huge bonfire was blazing in the garden, oozing heat into the crisp winter night. Guests were already moving in and out of the house. Over a small fire, a Hungarian chef had been roasting an ox since the morning. Peter was trying to reproduce the atmosphere of a Homeric feast, in defiance of the calendar and of geography. Women were wandering about in fur coats, not knowing whether they were too hot in, or too cold out of them. Some couples were dancing to records in the drawing-room which had been cleared, and a number of men, among whom was Yannis, were clustering round two big kegs at the entrance to an improvised pantry, in charge of a red-haired, red-bearded undergraduate who looked like a young satyr on holiday. They were drinking hard. The yacht had been brought ashore, beached and propped up; her generators were working and it was bright and cosy inside. Peter had fitted it out with Smyrna rugs: guests who had had enough meat could retire there, drink wine and look out over the river mouth and across to the distant lights of St Kilda.

By degrees, all literary Melbourne was assembling. Many had also come who belonged to the charity coterie; one or two judges and their wives, a few businessmen with cultural pretensions, and Lady B.

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