Bread and Chocolate. Philippa Gregory

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       Coo-eee

      He saw her the moment the bus drew up at the quayside and the doors opened with a hiss into the bright Aegean sunlight and hot Aegean air. She had a scarlet baseball cap crammed on a head of tight permed curls. It said ‘Widget Dodgers’ above the wide peak, which shaded her pink sunburned face; a slogan so obscure that he found it lodged in his brain as he watched her labour up the gangplank and haul on the hand of the crew member who waited to welcome her on board.

      ‘I’m game for a laff, me,’ she remarked to no-one in particular when she was landed on deck, and then she looked at him as if he had caught her eye, as she had caught his.

      ‘You’ll be the teacher,’ she exclaimed. ‘Am I right?’

      ‘Guest lecturer,’ he murmured.

      ‘I doubt you’ll teach anything to me!’ she exclaimed, and turned to her husband who bobbed along in her wake. ‘I said, I doubt he’ll teach anything to me.’

      ‘Certainly not, if you are not interested,’ he said pleasantly. ‘It’s not school, it’s not compulsory. Some people find that a little information enhances their cruise. They like to know a little about the history and background of the scenery. But some people prefer to drift and wonder. Think of me as a bar snack. Nibble or not, as you wish.’

      It was a practised speech, not a spontaneous one, and it had always worked before for first-time educational cruise goers who found the thought of a guest lecturer on board too daunting. She barely drew breath before she exploded in a loud honking laugh.

      ‘Nibble! Aye! I like a good nibble!’

      To his horror she bared her red lips and showed her pink gums and snapped her white strong teeth at him as if she would gobble him up, then and there, on A deck.

      ‘George’ll tell you I like a good nibble when I’m in the mood,’ she proclaimed.

      The steward diverted her by coming up then with the clipboard to tell them their cabin number. The lecturer was sorry to hear that they were two doors down from his own cabin but he was relieved as they moved away, following the steward. Still he heard her saying: ‘Don’t I, George? Like a good nibble?’, and George’s quieter assent, ‘Yes Bunny. Yes, dear.’

      It was as if each had sighted their own shadow, their own negative, that day at the gangplank: the elegant refined lecturer and the bawdy noisy woman. She was fascinated by him, and he felt both fascinated and repelled by her. She could not leave him alone, she attended his every lecture: Minoan Relics, Etruscan Civilisation, Hellenic Culture. Whatever the title, she was there in the back row: mildly subversive, slightly disorderly. Never exactly heckling – which he would have managed well; he had taught undergraduates all his professional life – but always running a commentary which was so irrelevant or steeped in such ignorance that it defied him to educate her to a better understanding.

      She had picked up from somewhere the notion that Oedipus Rex had an unnatural fixation on his mother, and somehow muddled it into the belief that he was, therefore, homosexual. When the lecture concerned the Greek tragedies and referred to Oedipus and the tragic forging of his destiny from the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, she grew rowdy in the back row. ‘I reckon they’re a nation of Oedipusses,’ she declared of the Greeks. ‘Oedipussies, we oughter call them. Nancies, the lot of them. Look at how they carried on in the old days and they’re no better now.’

      He could feel his temper rising but he kept his voice icy. ‘Excuse me, I think you have misunderstood.’

      She shook her enormously enlarged head, ignoring him completely. It was a morning lecture and she had come to it wearing her hair rollers with a scarf tied over the top. It was an outfit so bizarre, so ghastly for a prestigious cruise ship that no-one had the courage to challenge her.

      ‘You know what you ought to do?’ she counter-attacked. ‘You ought to have a bit of a laff. You’re too serious. That’s why we’re all falling asleep. You ought to have a bit of a laff. We’re on holiday, us. Not in school. Why, when we went to Egypt last year to see the pyramids and all we had a teacher on board like you but he had a bit of a laff. You learn more that way too. He had funny names for everybody. I can remember them now. So you see it works. He called one of the queens ‘‘Hot Chicken Soup’’, I remember that. And the mummy with all the gold – Tutankhamen, that’s him. He called him ‘‘Toot-toot’’. And when he mentioned him we all had to shout out ‘‘Toot-toot!’’ You ought to do that. We’d all remember much more and we’d have a bit of a laff.’

      He found he was looking around the lecture room in something like desperation, waiting for someone else to tell her that this was a Hellenic cruise with a guest lecturer, not some kind of music hall turn. In his confusion he saw only stern faces and could not judge whether they disapproved of her or of him. She beamed at him in the silence. ‘But go on,’ she said. ‘It’s very interesting. All about this Oedipus Rex. Oedipus Sex, you oughter call him!’ She laughed loudly. ‘Oedipus Sex!’