Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Graves

clear-headed, clear-skinned and humourless! Their irreproachable diet went far to explain their fanciful theories of love and amatory sympathy. Also the facility with which they shed tears: I once had an operation for a fistula, followed by a week of nothing but tap-water and barley sugar, and by the time the doctor consented to put me on milk and mush I was so unlike my usual self that one evening I shed tears at a waifs-and-strays appeal on the radio, and then lay in bed, still sobbing uncontrollably, and watched an imaginary but most realistic battle being fought on the window-curtain between stags and swans. Not that I was on an insufficient diet now: the food was plentiful and probably contained all the vitamins and calories needed for perfect health, and the glass of lager – though they didn’t offer to fill my empty glass – was every bit as drinkable as the one I had been given before. But what my stomach expected was a real Sunday dinner with joint, Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes, introduced by a couple of dry Martinis; it did not get any of this, and I felt like someone who has gone to the wrong restaurant, and finds himself confronted with nut-cutlets and hoax-in-the-hole.
    What had happened was this. I told Sally that I proposed to stroll out by myself in the park for a few minutes, if that was allowed. She made no objection, so I took the other direction from the one we had taken that morning, crossed the orchard and made for a low ridge about a hundred yards from the house, where I stopped to take my bearings.
    ‘Let me see,’ I thought. ‘That’s where the
Coq d’Or
used to be, and there’s the stream still running, and look, there’s a new mill exactly where ours was; so I must be standing on the site of the
Mairie
, which was on the crest of this ridge; and my house must have been over there in the hollow where that cow’s grazing.’ It gave me a rather nightmarish feeling to look at the smooth green turf and realize that somewhere underneath the cow, if I dug, I might come across the foundations of my house, and very likely the concrete floor of the cellar, but absolutely no other trace of my life in these parts. Unless perhaps a fragment survived of my own gravestone; yes, I would probably have died here and been buried in the English Cemetery which my father, a retired clergyman, had bought and consecrated himself. Or would I have left the village and gone to live in Oxfordshire, as Antonia always wanted us to do, and died there?
    Another large building not far from the mill caught my eye. The two elderly recorders whom I had seen that morning were coming out of a side door and making for the bridge. That was where the Doctor’s house had stood and I sighed a little guiltily, remembering that Erica Turner used to stay there. Erica was a wild girl, the Doctor’s half-American niece. She and I had had a passionate love-affair, which was in its final stage when Antonia came with her two brothers to stay at the
Coq d’Or
. Antonia caught me on the rebound, and I married her almost at once. She knew all about Erica, of course, from village gossip and what I told her myself – or practically all, because there are certain things one does not repeat and, anyhow, they were over and done with and Antonia would not have enjoyed hearing about them. I had made up my mind to forget Erica. She had not only treated me foully but managed at the same time to put me in the wrong and make me feel a thorough heel, before suddenly breaking with me and going off with a man I detested and despised. She had also withdrawn all the money from our joint account at the
Crédit Lyonnais
and left me flat. No news of her for many years and then I heard from a friend, some months before the start of the Second World War, that she had been seen in Florence going about with an Italian count and looking a good deal older and thinner than when we had known her. No news since. As I walked towards the Doctor’s house, or