Chapter 3

Then I met Annabel, that certain initial young lady I mentioned earlier. Annabel was, like me, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago. That’s aging for you. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors. The latter kind is a young man’s game, unbecoming of a father figure or anyone over, say, thirty-five.

Let me therefore limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and I respected them as I did all her friends. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Thin-haired brown Mr. Leigh and ample, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were molded the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and class, and I doubt if much genius should be assigned to our interest in competitive tennis, the ocean, books and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. A fine job I’ve made of it—caught after a single murder! This is not to imply that these boyhood wishes had anything to do with my adult actions; it was a common enough phase.

All at once Annabel and I were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of first love so overtook us that we were inseparable, linked at the hands and lips. The only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the beach. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to be together. Sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips.

Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk cafe. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolate pudding, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our summer together. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the cafe to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of passionate kisses. Four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. For many years, I tortured myself with the notion that she and I would have been together, married, grown old and died in each others’ arms, while secretly hoping that someone would come along reignite the passion I had for Annabel my first, lost love; no one did.