Excerpt 3
The next day we shopped for shoes. Bettina and I shared a shoe fetish. We both loved to be either barefoot or luxuriating in the most elegant of shoes. Appropriately, long before I'd owned a pair of 'town shoes', one of the first poems I'd learnt at Tarpoly school was:
'New shoes, new shoes -
red and pink and blue shoes.
Tell me, which would you choose -
If they let us buy?'
I'd dreamed of going to a shoe shop and buying some of every kind. I doubt I ever voiced this lust but I knew the few Sydney shops where one could buy imported shoes - Italian - obscenely expensive.
Suddenly in Athens these 'Italian', soft, multi-coloured, strapped, bowed, buckled, folded, ruched, studded, flat or heeled shoes were available in thousands. 'As cheap as chips', Bettina said. 'You'll need good shoes, you'll be walking miles, you'll be dancing all night. Whatever you wear you must have suitable shoes.'
Under the influence of my recent Convent experience I chose a pair of simple navy court shoes with a chisel toe which, I reasoned would be serviceable and elegant. 'You'd better choose a few more pairs.' Bettina advised. I chose beige. I did not dare to look too closely at the carmine sandals or the sky-blue needle toes or the silver with the rhinestones in the heel or --- Just try a few --- just check that you can walk in them,' Bettina said. I paraded up and down, towering and wobbling on ten-centimeter heels. Lizzie's careful training was not wasted. I could dance in anything! There was not a single shoe that could defeat me. The pile of boxes grew. The tissue paper mounted higher. There were shoes strewn in a wide circle around me and on the adjacent chairs. I was trying to select the most useful, the most suitable. 'Are they all comfortable? Bettina asked. 'Could you wear them all day? Do they pinch? Do they rub?' Those that did were set aside and there was a sea of shoes. At last Bettina said, 'We'll take these.'
'Which did madam choose?' the shop assistant asked.
'These,' said Bettina with a wide circular gesture taking in the whole array of shoes around us, excluding the little pile of pinching, rubbing rejects.
'All these?' questioned the shop assistant in disbelief, copying the gesture.
'All these?' I echoed.
'Well - in Europe you can't go anywhere without shoes,' was Bettina's explanation.
The assistant packed thirty pair of shoes. She built the boxes into towers. She tied the towers with string. We looped the ties over our fingers and with the string cutting deep, we exited the door obligingly held wide by the smiling staff.
