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Cretan Teat
BY BRIAN ALDISS
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
About the Author
By the same author from The Friday Project
About the Publisher
Yes, I went to Crete. And I came back.
How exciting was everything involved with Cretan Teat. If you happen to ask yourself why so few copies of this gorgeous novel have sold, well, read on. We shall come to that in a minute.
It was a new century and I decided to take Charlotte, my youngest daughter, with me to south Crete, in the mistaken belief that we could swim in the warm seas off the coast. But, simply plunging our naked feet into the tide was sufficient to disabuse us of that illusion. The Eastern Mediterranean had a message for us: ‘Stay out!’
We went and had a drink instead, and studied our learning curve. The island was alive with such curves. We found that Crete had suffered a chequered history ever since the collapse of Constantinople. It had been prosperous under Greece, but was now – as was also the case with my daughter and me – a touch run down.
One day, I wandered through a forest of ancient trees, evidently designed by Arthur Rackham. There I found myself lost and came upon a small chapel, I felt, long ago abandoned by the family who had built it. I managed to get inside. In fresco on the wall was the portrait of a woman feeding what was evidently an infant Christ. The woman looked old and bore a halo. Not Mary, mother of Jesus. Back in the town, I sought out the village priest for information. (Ah, the thirst for information! The fuel driving a writer’s engine!) The priest was sitting on a chair in his garden. He said we could not go inside; his wife was repainting the whole house from top to bottom. This either pleased or irritated him; it was hard to tell. He told me that the woman in the fresco was Sveti Anna, Christ’s grandmother. Mary, being a virgin, he explained, had run out of milk.
On the seafront, facing the cold grey ocean, was a family coffee shop. The daughter there served coffee to customers. When not thus engaged, she sat at a tiny desk behind the glass door, studying and painting in a Byzantine manner. I gave her a photo I had taken of St Anna, asking her to copy it in the Byzantine style. She said she could do it in a week – at which time, Charlotte and I would be gone.
I paid the young lady on the spot and received the painting when back in Oxford, it was to be the cover for the novel already brewing in my mind. You see, we trusted each other. The lady now lives happily in Athens, skilfully painting fakes for tourists in the Byzantine fashion. It seems that this story of St Anna is little known in the West. Her coffin lies in the East, in Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul.
A branch of the story I found myself likely to tell, lay beyond religion, in the grey alleyways and streets of ancient Kyriotisa.
Here, Hitler’s forces in World War Two had invaded the town. Mothers and their children had been shut into the church and the church set on fire.
Here was a terrible story that had become wedged into the minds of the following generation, a story that was the antithesis of the Anna mother-care tale. Wherever one went, into garages, or food shops, or restaurants, or simple bars, there would be someone bleak of face to tell you about German war crimes.
I grew weary of their old song. I found myself asking: ‘after the war, did not Konrad Adenauer himself come to apologise for Nazi atrocities? Why, German workers arrived and rebuilt the church and mended the roads …’ And the waiter or waitress or whoever it was would ask scornfully, ‘Why do you defend such villains?’
So there I was with my two sides of a story. What I wanted to add was something of the sexuality that happens when one is young – or not so young – and on holiday. Once we were home, I wrote my novel. A new company, Stratus, had just bought up fourteen of my past books; it seemed only civil to offer them my Cretan Teat. They accepted it.
So this is where we came in, as people used to say in cinemas running continuous programmes. The reason why this gorgeous and provocative novel sold so few copies, found so few readers, was because The House of Stratus in Old Burlington Street, London, was going bust.
My faithful editor at Stratus worked on, although she had been sacked. It was she who got it into book form complete with that cover and all. Meanwhile the ‘Titanic’ was fast going under. There was no distribution. Only the angry seas.
What you are now holding is virtually a new book …
Brian Aldiss
Oxford, 2014
‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I …’
Shakespeare, The Tempest
‘What a bugger,’ I said to myself, in my old-fashioned way.
‘What an absolute bugger!’
There I stood, on a lump of mountain the name of which I did not know, in the sun, wearing a hat bought in the village. I was on holiday, wasn’t I? Retired – almost – half-dead, youthful, solitary, moderately happy. Not a care in the world, you might say. In fact I was relishing the remoteness of this place, two miles down a lane, off a road leading nowhere very much, standing in a deserted olive grove.
There before me stood an undistinguished stone building, much resembling a cattle shed, with its front wall raised to form a peak above the roof denoting its function as a holy place. In this raised wall was an aperture in which hung a small bell – a bell which time had infiltrated, so that it could no longer move or give tongue. I stood before this venerable building mute myself, my adopted son Boris beside me. Our guide stood under an olive tree, smoking a cigarette, with no sense of the theatrical.
Completely dominating the chapel were the ancient olive trees, designed, to judge by appearances, by the artist Arthur Rackham. Over the centuries, their girth had thickened, they had grown gnarly arms and hands stretching out to detain visitors, while their seamed bark had created distorted countenances, like hostile anthropophagi with faces in their stomachs. Year by year they must be creeping up on the building, I thought. This little chapel was never locked, not once in its eight centuries of existence. I stood by it. My shadow was on its wall, together with the pattern of shadows cast by the nearer olive trees. All that was real, tangible. Even my shadow was tangible, in a manner of speaking.
And I had to go and get an idea for another novel. I stood there, while a story unwound in my head.
I had travelled several hundreds of miles to reach this particular olive grove, outside