Part 2 — XI

THE next evening Lewis dined with the Apostolatoses in Bayswater.

A Gothic hall with elephant tusks and Italian cabinets made of ebony, from which the inlaid ivory bulged, loosened by the hot air from the heating apparatus; for the house was centrally heated: England was already far away.

In the drawing-room upholstered in cherry-coloured damask, on a uniform ground of crimson velvet, stood out black Khorasan enamels, minute Giordès designs and delicate Sineh whorls. The drawing-room formed a kind of atrium surrounded by a balcony of polished wood from which hung Janina embroideries, Scutari velvets and huge mosque lamps decorated with cyphers in relief. Between the windows stood an Arab saddle in violet leather braided with gold, hung with all the weapons of an emir.

Other embroideries similar to those on the walls were displayed in glass cases, but these got older and older and became finer and finer, more difficult to see and more tiring to the eyes, going back to the period of Byzantine lace.

When Lewis arrived, the company, as they say in Russian novels, consisted of Irene and three other ladies, two of whom rose to their feet. These were the old cousins of Irene, the Misses Apostolatos. They stood one on each side of their paralytic old grandmother, a kind of moody Napoléon, who, seated on a throne, followed the conversation with a vacant face but an alert eye from which her thoughts seemed to trickle. Beside her on the table was a half-finished game of patience.

Lewis expected that her three sons, the Old Jewry bankers, would be there, but none of them turned up. Sir Solon Apostolatos, the old father, came down at last in a velvet dinner jacket, preceded, as the Rhodes hangings over the door lifted, by a fiercely hooked nose kept in leash by the chain of his eyeglasses; he had bat ears, a close-cropped beard and protruding eyes like those of the gold masks of Mycenæ, and he wore a skull cap in the middle of his very scanty white hair.

In spite of his courteous greeting and the traditions of ancient Greek hospitality, Lewis summed him up as being mean, eccentric and a bully.

"Please accept my compliments," he said.

He pretended to be deaf to add to his authority. Irene offered him her slender cheek. He treated her harshly, as he did his daughters.

He made no allowance for youth, declared that everything easy or pleasant was wicked, upbraided his daughters for forgetting birthdays, for thinking themselves his equals and for living for nothing but pleasure, even though they were both over forty and lived like nuns. He also reproached them for being old maids, having done everything possible to prevent them from marrying; they surrounded him with fear, respect and admiration. He had once had a wife whom he killed by his bad treatment of her. With Oriental jealousy, when he had to leave her to go to the Bank he used to take down the unfortunate woman's hair and shut it in a chest of drawers, taking away the key.

They sat at an overburdened table round which an old butler carried out all sorts of funereal rites like those of the Orthodox Church, wandering about as they wander round the churches in Athens act Easter. In the centre of the table stood a bowl full of flowers whose object was not so much to decorate the table as to hide the guests from one another, thereby minimising the number of dreadful disputes and the threats of expulsion from the house that devastated the family dinner at every other course.

The food was plentiful. Oriental and heavy. But the old father, Solon, was only interested in the china on which it was served.

"And now," he said, addressing Lewis and rubbing himself to get the uric acid out of his joints, "you are going to have..."

Lewis waited expectantly for a tale of some noble vintage.

" ... my blue and gold Vincennes; there are only seventeen pieces left. Prince V—— has two and there are three at South Kensington; I have got the other twelve, which you see here."

There was no general conversation in honour of Lewis. The only subjects discussed were family affairs, baptismal names, charity, Greek politics; austerely formal discussions on liturgy, the size of Paschal candles and so on.

Then followed long silences in which one listened to the old man munching his anti-diabetic rusks.

Lewis remarked on the beauty of their pearls. Irene explained that uncle Solon had rushed into a mad whirl of expenditure when confronted by the fall of the drachma; inasmuch as he had been thrifty all his life ("Don't handle things too much," he said; "a gold coin disappears altogether in eight thousand years"), now, feeling in his old age that the end of all economy, patrimony and capitalism was approaching, he disdained the arbitrary value of post-war money and never stopped repeating, sometimes in a frenzy and sometimes light-heartedly, "Spend the money, my children, spend the money!"

And so, without wanting to, just because they were accustomed never to dispute this man's authority, the two sisters began to squander money, returning each evening tired out, having spent the day ransacking sales, stores and antique dealers' shops, and having changed their fortune into utterly useless articles.

At night they shut themselves into, and all light out of their rooms, put on a hundred thousand pounds worth of jewelry and sat and looked at themselves in the glass.

Uncle Solon was repeating himself.

"In three years' time the entire organization of the world will have changed."

He had two cruisers, costing two million pounds each, and a fortified villa for Venizelos with underground cellars built at his own expense for the "Cause."

"I don't want to offend you, uncle Solon," said Irene, taking the sort of liberty with him that her ancestors used to take with Jove, "but, personally, I think we ought to be more optimistic. I have given the Prefect of Athens ten thousand pounds to reconstruct the prison."