Captain Corelli's mandolin by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online

thing is that it worked. But finally it brought me incalculable grief. 5 The Man who Said `No' Prime Minister Metaxas slumped forlornly in his favourite armchair in the Villa Kifisia and reflected bitterly upon the two imponderable problems of his life:
    `What am I going to do about Mussolini?' and `What am I going to do about Lulu?'
    It would be difficult to say which one caused him the most bewilderment and pain, for both were in unequal parts personal and political. Metaxas reached for his journal and wrote, `This morning I attempted to reach an understanding with Lulu. Up to a certain point, it went quite well, but then we argued all over again. She just doesn't understand me. I know exactly who it is that is egging her on and deceiving her. I even forgot my meeting with the British minister. I stayed with her till noon. I am so sorry for her. And what a tragic girl she is. Lulu, Lulu, my most beloved daughter. We threw ourselves into each other's embrace and wept together over our fate.'
    With Lulu he never quite knew what the truth was; it seemed that Athens buzzed with more improbable legends about her than it had with stories of Zeus in ancient times. There was the story about the policeman who had lost his trousers and his cap, both of which were found at the top of a lamppost. There was the story about the young man with the Bugatti and the wild trips to Piraeus, and then that account of her playing an English game called `sardines', a kind of hide-and-seek in which the seekers had to cram themselves into the same space as the hunted; it seemed that Lulu had been found inextricably entwined with a young man in a cupboard. Some people said that she smoked opium and became blisteringly drunk. She knew all those fast American dances, like the tango (so inelegant and vulgar, an alleged `dance' from the brothels of Buenos Aires), and the quickstep, and the samba, and dances with untranslatable and idiotic names, like the jitterbug, that involved frenetic flapping of the hands and legs. It was a sort of indecency. It reeked of immodesty and intemperance. Young people were so impressionable, so prone to fads and fashions from immature civilisations like America, so averse to discipline and the dignity that accompanies a natural sense of amour propre. What could one do? She always denied everything, or, worse, dismissed his concerns with a laugh and a wave of the hand. God knows, one is only young once, but in her case it was once too often.
    And she openly disavowed and controverted his policies in public. It was a Judas touch. It was this that hate so much, this exhibition of filial disloyalty. She loved him, she said. Indeed, he knew that she did, so why did she ridicule his National Youth Organisation? Why did she laugh at jokes about his diminutive stature? Why was she so damned individualist? Did she not realise that to be a kind of female playboy brought into question all those things that he wished for Greece? How could he Iatre bast the plutocrats when his own daughter was consorting, frolicking with the worst of them? How could he commend discipline and self-sacrifice? Thank God he had muzzled the press, because every journalist in the land had a pet `Lulu' story. Thank God his ministers were too discreet to mention it, thank God he had not yet lost respect through contagion. But that didn't prevent people like Grazzi smiling in their oily way and asking, `And how is your dear daughter, Lulu? I hear that she is a mischievous little thing. Ali, what we fathers have to suffer!' Couldn't he just hear the sniggers and the whispers? 'That he controlled all of Greece and could not control his own daughter? It seemed that even the secret police were too embarrassed by the whole thing to report her escapades in any detail. It was said that people holding parties would implore their guests, `Don't bring Lulu.'
    The grief and shame were too much to take.
    Outside, the tranquillity of the pines and the white glare of the