A Year in the World (32 page)

We talk as we fall into the ritual of afternoon tea. I’ve never been a tea drinker, but I’m pouring several cups a day. Maybe the tannin counterbalances the sweet we inevitably order: today, peach crème brûlée with lime sorbet, and a little plate of cookies. Salad tonight.

We
go into parish churches when we find them open. St. Kenelm in Minster Lovell may be our favorite. Minster Lovell’s long street of thatched houses could win any “tidy” award. “Too much,” Ed says. “Damn, can you believe yet another idyllic hamlet?” A fantastic ruined manor house’s partial walls stand behind St. Kenelm. A remaining roof section looks precipitous. Two small girls in sundresses climb among the foundation rocks while their mother reads on a picnic blanket in the overgrown grass. I recognize the cover of
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
. A small river, the Windrush, now with new ducks and two white swans, must have been a pleasure to those who lived in the house in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A plaque says the house was dismantled in 1747. The stone walls remain over two and a half centuries later.

Inside the church Ed sees a list of vicars since 1184. A shaft of morning light strikes the tomb of a praying knight, turning the cold alabaster waxy and gleaming. Each of the box pews has six needlepoint cushions for kneeling. Some have names and dates worked into the patterns. In winter the worshipers must need them on the stone floors. Near the altar I run my fingers over the carving in a wooden chair. On the back,
The same yesterday
, and down the arms,
Jesus Christ, today and tomorrow
. How perfect for this hallowed place where the vicars go back to 1184 and the precipitous roof of the manor house peaks as it did yesterday, and the day before and before and before.

In nearby Burford, another bustling market town, we have an excellent dinner with an Australian Shiraz. Pubs, many mourn, are disappearing. But good numbers of them are converting to restaurants, like this one, with an emphasis on local products and traditional fare reinterpreted without the instant-cardiac-arrest fat factor. These are bistro or trattoria equivalents—homey atmosphere and honest food. There’s nothing wrong at all with good pub food, but often you find microwaved, processed bangers, whipped potatoes from a box, and scary salads. We’ve seen several signs announcing
PUB GRUB
. We have come to know what that indicates. But the pub tradition is a hub of community. And the low-ceilinged, dark-wood atmosphere makes you feel that you’ve paused in a horse-drawn coach and alighted for a rest. Even though I don’t often drink beer, I felt the impulse to order the amber foamy ales that Ed did. The pub/restaurant in Burford kept its cozy bar area but only as a place to wait for a table and have a drink. The local mates no longer gather there for a pint. Burford in the dark was deserted except for the warmly lighted Copper Kettle tearoom. I thought of Christmas Eve, of buying pastry and bells and wrapping paper and socks, then stopping for soup there. The Cotswolds for the holidays—a perfect place.

Our
last three gardens all have the highly personal touch. I am glad to get to see the garden of Rosemary Verey. Since her death Barnsley has been sold, fated to become an inn. Already the tennis court is seedy. The front yard, bordering a rather busy road, presents nothing special, but the back is eccentrically off-kilter and appealing. I sense the person who wanted the informality of a rope swing and a small wooden summerhouse on one side of the garden and a columned pavilion and pond on the other. Against the back wall, splayed bamboo trellises fan out for roses to climb. The garden is not large, but she has managed to squeeze in a small
allée
.

Her kitchen garden—such fun. Boxwood outlines beds, as in knot gardens, but she filled each bed with a taggy mix of vegetables and flowers. Simple flowers such as mallow, sweetpea, larkspur, and cosmos go wild with onions or artichokes or corn. Tangles of parsley, a scarecrow with a bird on top of his head, four-foot-tall gone-to-seed lettuces, mint—a little
paradiso
. We laugh when Ed points to a bed of roses, garlic, and onions. What a sure hand shaped this
potager
. As at Rousham, I like the mind I see behind the composition. What pleasure it must have given her.

In the village of Barnsley we find one of those pubs gone gourmet. No bubble and squeak here. Ed orders seared pigeon breast with grilled pineapple, and I have artichoke, asparagus, and pea salad. I suddenly order a Wadsworth, the first whole beer of my life. Ed has a Hook Norton Bitter, and I like his, too.

Today we return to the schoolhouse to read, write, and sip one of the lightly sparkling organic Belvoir Pressé juices we’re loving here. Nonalcoholic and not too sweet, they occupy the heretofore empty space between a soda and a glass of wine. The ginger and lime and the lime and lemongrass are perfect for enjoying the late sun in the garden. The tame northern sun feels like a balm.

English
pronunciations often surprise, beginning with Worcestershire, which was fully pronounced in Georgia, where we used the sauce over steak, in oyster stew, and lord knows where else.
Wooster!
My great-great-grandparents’ town of Loughborough is pronounced
Luftsborough
. At the winsome garden and house of Snowshill Manor, the ticket taker pronounces the name
snozzle
. I rather like
snozzle
. Sounds like the activity of garden voles or moles; they snozzle under the plants. We adore this classic cottage garden with foxgloves, ferns, lavender. Ed remarks that Snowshill is totally organic. Many gardens must remain only fantasies, but this two-acre plot, with a few years of diligence, seems within reach for a good gardener. Like an added-on farm, the house has the same haphazard charm as the garden. Did the original owner, Charles Wade, nail a line of horseshoes over a door? I read that he didn’t sleep in the house but instead slept in what looks like a shed. The house had to be given over to his various collections. Ah, a proper eccentric. He thought only apricot, creamy yellow, blue, and mauve looked best against stone walls. Orange was banned from his garden. Boxwood balls grow in wine barrels. The garden descends a hill, which always interests me, passing stone steps and little ponds and garden houses and hollow places in walls for birds to nest. Again the room concept, as if the house simply opened to other rooms furnished by arranging nature. And beyond the garden, the vegetable garden. Mr. McGregor, where are you? The hills beckon. Requisite sheep roam about, ignoring all of us trooping up and down the hill.

Kelmscott, the summer home of William Morris, has quite a modest garden, with a three-hole privy in the back—more than you want to know about the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. The gift shop is quite an ambitious enterprise, selling needlepoint, postcards, tea cozies, dish towels, wrapping paper, and the like, all in Morris’s designs. Morris took his inspiration from the past, and to me, his stylized medieval patterns and muted colors become claustrophobic if taken in these large doses. We flee the gift shop and enter the garden, in search of the foliage, strawberries, rabbits, and flowers that inspired him.

Jane Burden, Morris’s wife, had been the model for the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti—the pin-up girl for the pre-Raphaelites—when Morris met her. Rossetti painted her more than a hundred times. Morris fell for her even though he was from the upper class and she was the daughter of a stable groom. Rossetti and Morris leased Kelmscott House together, and despite the presence of William and Jane’s two daughters, Jane and Rossetti conducted a flagrant love affair. Morris put up with their liaison for years, running off to Iceland when the heat became too much. Finally Jane tired of Rossetti. The rooms give no indication of extreme natures, but hers must have been. She is
the
beauty of the Arts and Crafts era. When Henry James met her, he found her mysterious, “a wonder,” “a figure cut out of a missal,” “a tall lean woman in a dress of some dead purple stuff . . . a thin pale face, a pair of strange, sad, deep, dark, Swinburnian eyes, and with great thick black oblique brows.” Those five adjectives for her eyes reveal how hard James had to work to approach a description. As La Belle Iseult, she survives as Morris’s only painting. When he died, the doctor said the cause was “being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men.” But maybe life with Jane wore him out.

Morris was a person who lived on many creative levels at once, from typography to roses to gutters to textiles to stained glass. George Bernard Shaw’s eloquent tribute took only two sentences: “You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his. And so, until then, let us rejoice in him.”

As we walk around and look at the rooms, we think a vicar and his family could have lived here. Odd to think of a ménage à trois in this staid house and village. The gossip must have warmed the whole village on winter nights. Odd to think, too, of the fermenting artistic fervor, with influence on Europe, North America, and the far antipodes.

Ed notices the odd wooden gutters that jut way out from the house and pour into the yard. A stone walk lined with rose topiaries leads to the door, as it does in thousands of gardens where no Jane ever juggled two men. William and Jane must have forged a truce because they’re sleeping soundly together on the edge of the churchyard.

On the last night in England, I order bangers and mash at the pub in Stow-on-the-Wold. I walk out feeling as though I’d swallowed a handful of lead sinkers. “I did it! It was great and greasy. A million grams of fat.” We take a last walk around the shut village. No sheep are expected at market. Wine store, cheese store, drugstore, antique shops, bookstore, and the place with hats Queen Elizabeth might wear—all asleep, deeply asleep.

Washed by
Time's Waters

Islands
of Greece

At sea, the first surprise: the horizon becomes a circle. From land, the horizon seems ruler-drawn between ocean and sky. As I walk from stern to bow and back, thinking of intrepid explorers who feared the world was flat and sailed anyway, I watch the steady brushstroke of the horizon line, a curving cobalt mark overstruck with purple. Clearly, we could drop over that edge, our tiny ship falling through space forever. But we are sailing in the center of a blown-glass bowl filled to the brim.

Just yesterday the ship slipped out of the lagoon into the Adriatic. Already I see that something happens to time because I feel that we set sail a full moon ago and must be over to the next latitude.

“Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu,” Lawrence Durrell writes, “the blue really begins.” A few hours out of Venice the churning green-gray Adriatic shifted to intense blue and the water smoothed. I could walk or roll across this water. Our prow slicing the swells trailed scrolls of white marble. Easy to see how, when Saint Augustine touched something smooth, he began to think of music and God. I saw as far as I could see shimmering blue, out to that finite line navigators through the centuries aimed toward and beyond.

Because we’re in high summer, friends in Cortona were astonished that we planned to travel in this direction. “You’re going to Greece? Greece is finished,” my friend Alain announced at dinner, his perfect French assurance combined with the throat-cutting gesture that years of living in Italy have made natural to his speech.

“Finished?” I said. “That can’t be; I’ve never been.”

“And summer—it is impossible,” he continues. “Heat and mobs, mobs and heat.” He plans to spend the summer at his stone house in the serene hills above Cortona. “Swarms,” he emphasized.

This I knew, but I had been invited to speak on a cruise ship, and of all their trips, only the blue Aegean pulled me. To sail out of La Serenissima! An old dream, to ply these waters: Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, Santorini, Piraeus, Náfplio, Volos, then over to the other side of the Aegean—Bodrum, Kusadasi, up to the fabled Bosporus. Irresistible—to disembark in Istanbul!

At first I refused the offer. My mother used to take cruises in the Carribean. I remember her talking about the constant eating—I’m easily tempted—and duplicate bridge games on the deck, with rum drinks arriving between every rubber. There was one incident in Barbados when her group was pelted with rotten oranges by the locals. Fortunately the stains came out of my mother’s pink linen dress.

But recently two friends took a Mediterranean cruise and came home raving about it. As I looked through their photographs of yellow and purple fish in the limpid waters of the Sinai, the moon-white cubical houses of Mykonos at sunset, and Peter perched on a camel, I started to dream of dropping anchor off Corfu’s coast, sailing into the Rhodes harbor where the Colossus once stood, rocking to sleep in the ancient waters where Jason sailed, and of seaside tavernas with silhouettes of Knights Templar castles in the distance.

Finally I said yes because I have been haunted forever by the fateful pentameter lines:
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/to the holy city of Byzantium
, from W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” When I think of the poem, the images of saffron-colored sails at sunrise and the reflection of a sleek white sailboat skim across the waves of my mind. All of Western history criss-crossed this sea. I too want to follow in the troughs of the Argonauts’ wake.

With such lofty aspirations, I did not expect to make my mythic voyage on a ship that is twin to an American convention hotel. This giant floating tub is nautical on its decks, which are polished and furnished with proper teak chairs with proper marine-blue cushions. Inside, crystal chandeliers remain steady, miles of floral teal carpet cushion every step, and guests lounge on curved upholstered sofas designed to absorb sloshed drinks without stains. We are eight hundred on board, which seems like a floating town but is actually a midsize cruise ship.

In our cabin I can also feel that we are on a ship. Through our blurry porthole we see the water not far below. I hear odd sluicing sounds running under our beds. Those old navigators with their sextants, hourglasses, astrolabes, and gimbaled barometers surely slept in more comfortable quarters. We do have a little marble bath with a tub. The water flows clearly for a minute, then turns the hue of tea. Hepatitis? Staph infection? In the tiny room, about twice the size of my closet in California, each bed is narrow as a coffin. When Ed stands, the ceiling almost grazes the top of his head, and when he lies down, his feet hit the desk. My looming Gulliver. Last night he woke from a nightmare that the room was filling with water. Doesn’t matter, we tell each other; we’ll be on deck most of the time.

We
arrived in Venice with more luggage than we’ve ever hauled on a trip. Having been on month-long book tours with carry-on luggage, I am the master of light packing, but because the cruise has five formal events, we have brought a tuxedo (sleeves stuffed with tissue) with its starched shirts, my evening bags, dresses, and strappy high heels. All the paraphernalia required a bag of its own. I broke my own rules and also brought a bathrobe and too many linens that wrinkle. And we are a travelling library—guides, histories, and books of poetry stuffed in all the luggage pockets, lining the bottoms of bags and weighing down carry-ons. Ed, ever optimistic that he will have time to study Italian verbs, packed workbooks and texts, as well as the laptop, voice recorder, and earphones. Hannibal over the Alps—we almost sank the water taxi. “The word
portage
comes to mind,” Ed said, as the driver lowered a bag into the boat in a controlled fall. He groaned and clutched his shoulder. Disembarking at the
fondamenta
, we fortunately had help hoisting the four bags to the hotel.

Looking for the camera, Ed rummaged to the bottom of one bag and said, “Do you know you have brought
twelve
pairs of shoes.” We stashed three bags in the closet and walked out into Venice. We love this city. It is
the
walking city. The Basilica di San Marco could have been transported on a flying carpet from Constantinople/Byzantium and deposited in front of the million pigeons waiting for
biscotti
crumbs. The five domes and the church’s rhythmic exterior look strangely squat, with that feeling of low horizontal spread that in mosques invites Muslims to fall to the floor in prayer. With the construction of this holy building beginning in 829, Venice became the first moment of the East. The four bronze horses, cut apart for the journey to Venice then reconnected, could rear and fly home to Constantinople. Many of the church’s ornaments and crown jewels are spoils brought home to glorify the city by the Republic of Venice’s aggressive conquerors of the Mediterranean. A glance, however, into the San Marco area on a steamy August day made us determined to stay away from the
centro
. Even in summer, that’s easy. We visited the Rialto market for the buckets of breathing silver eels, the virtuoso artichoke peelers—thirty seconds and voilà! the clean heart—and the live spider crabs, and to inhale the briny sea smell from rainbow arrays of spiny, rocky, scaly fish and mollusks on ice.

I thought of all the shops for heavenly silks and cut velvet, the luxurious velour robes and pillows, and the artisan shops with vellum-bound books of paper that looks like communion wafers. With our bulging suitcases in mind, I didn’t even mention those directions.

We walked to the Basilica di San Pietro, Venice’s cathedral before San Marco landed from the skies. St. Peter’s bell tower leans slightly, and the grounds are weedy. No one was there except a monk nodding in a chair tipped back against the outside wall. The throne chair inside, fit for Saint Peter, was made from a Muslim funeral stele and is inscribed with lines from the Koran. Look under anything religious in Italy, and you find the previous civilization’s religious stones. The holy hot spots remain.
Spoglia
, a word I like, an object incorporated into a new use. The site of this St. Peter’s was originally occupied by a shrine to Bacchus. There, we’re already linking to our voyage, to myth, and to the desert fathers.

We walked, just walked, anywhere but the infested San Marco area. The Arsenal and San Pietro in the Castello area were curiously deserted. Families disembarked from serviceable blue or red boats, holding their bathing suits and baskets and shuffling in beach shoes, which they wore from a day at the Lido. Everyone dropped away except for a man walking his dog. Late in the afternoon we stopped for a Tintoretto—champagne and pomegranate juice—at a bar and watched a miniature crane mounted on a flat boat dig silt from a small canal. Barriers on two ends blocked the area where the crane worked, and the water had been pumped out. How difficult and specialized, the work of keeping Venice afloat.

At dinnertime we chose a restaurant new to us, Acquapazza, crazy water, what a good name for a restaurant in Venice. The Santo Stefano area is one of my favorite parts of Venice. After zucchini gnocchi and a platter of fried shellfish, we were served a tiny glass of
basilicocello
, like limoncello only made with basil leaves and steeped for two months before being poured into icy, icy glasses. Venice always lures us to walk even late at night, especially a night with a full August moon, but we would board the ship early tomorrow and so went back to our hotel, where we leaned out of the window before we sank into bed, looking at the trillion ribboned reflections of moonlight in the canal. A window opened in an adjacent house, and a man lifted a small dog out onto the tile rooftop. The dog pattered a few feet away. He squatted, peering down into the Grand Canal, while his quivering backside deposited
merde
onto the roof.

Sailing out of Venice would excite the heart of a robot. The watery city of sublime Tiepolo-to-Turner colors and shapes slid away like a good dream upon waking, as the ship met the open sea. Venice, I realized, is a fabulous
idea
. Like nowhere else in the world, it suggests human imagination—how the irrational is sometimes the best idea. Centuries of people have lived their lives on these unlikely earth platforms in the tides. From birth they were saturated with beauty, their first patterning was beauty, their last breath drawn with beauty.

What was known, known well and loved, receded, and what was unknown and alluring beckoned. We left the stern and moved up to the bow, listening to the chuff-chuff of waves against the hull as the ship picked up speed.

At
sea, at first light, I look out the porthole and see that we are in the craggy shadow of what must be Albania. And what a grim historical shadow the hills cast. The water seems darker, the coast formidable, but breakfast in the dining room throws me from any dour reflections to a comfortable midwestern motel—waffles, pancakes, French toast. We resolve immediately not to fall into the severe temptation of two-thousand-calorie breakfasts. “Fruit,” I tell our Italian waiter. “Every day, fruit, please, coffee, perhaps a little cheese and bread.” In the vast dining room we are assigned to a table for two and are relieved. What if you had two weeks of meals with great bores? But we wonder—what if we were at a table of eight potential lifelong friends? Ed signs up for a massage, and I head for the deck chairs with my notebook and several books. In the afternoon we have a swim, lounging on deck while unidentified coasts and islands swim by us. We are moving over ancient wrecks that lie far below, far below the nets of fishermen, a mile, two miles deep, the golden sand bottom littered with barnacled amphorae, anchors, a cooking pot. We’re plowing in the watery furrows of old trade routes. Silks, wines, and spices transported to Venice for the pleasure of doges and merchants and courtesans. I begin
The Voyage of Argo
by Apollonius of Rhodes, written three centuries before Christ, in the time of the Ptolemies, the introduction tells me. It has stood on my bookshelf for a decade, unread. Now I am interested in Jason and the Argonauts, brave as astronauts in our time, from the moment the
Argo
was hoisted into the sea until it returned, after epic adventures, from the quest for the Golden Fleece.

We have no such mission on this ship, although individually, I imagine, many have embarked with some private quest. I have. Martin Buber said, “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.” This voyage I’m taking in honor of my youth. At nineteen I dreamed of Greece. If there is another inner destination, I will wait for it to be revealed. All the reasons I dreamed of Greece that year influenced my whole life, though until now I have never travelled east of Slovenia.

It’s exhilarating simply to sit on deck looking out at the Homeric sea. I would not be surprised to see a mermaid surface, flip up her fish tail, and disappear. Sunglasses, hat, and the vantage point of my deck chair give me the chance to observe my fellow passengers. I see many miniwomen, eighty or so and weighing about the same. Two of these ladies fascinate me. They are twins and wear identical white lace cover-ups over two-piece suits. Their bluish hair is cut in a cap of curls, and one has painted her eyebrows in an ogival arch; the other paints hers in a horseshoe extending far above a usual eyebrow. One looks demonic, the other as though she is always about to ask a question. They leave a wake of dense floral perfume with a metallic edge cutting the sea air. No beach thongs or deck shoes for them; they walk steadily in high-heeled backless clear plastic, decorated with a puff of pink feathers. They don’t seem to speak to each other; perhaps they don’t have to.

At
earliest dawn we dock at Corfu. I first heard of this island from my Greek professor when I was a sophomore in college. I’d conceived a passion for Greece, a transference of my intense crush on the professor. From him I took a course in Greek and Roman history, followed by Greek tragedies, then Greek and Latin etymology. I was ignoring the mundane requirements in plain old humanities and science courses after seeing the lost expression in Professor Hunter’s eyes as he pronounced Byron’s line Ζώη μου σάς αγαπώ, my life, I love you. In the summer, babysitting for my two-year-old nephew, I taught him, instead of Mother Goose, Byron’s verses about Greece: