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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 fist 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
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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.
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A Story Dreamt
Long Ago
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