Aphrodite's Island (13 page)

He leads me into the house and to a white-walled room on the ground floor with long windows whose light curtains billow softly in the breeze from the sea. Seeing the big double bed, its sheets turned down ready, I experience a sudden lurch at the pit of my stomach. Am I about to be seduced? Normally the prospect would be delicious but today, as so often recently, I feel only a deep longing to lie down and sleep.

I need not have worried. Karim says only, ‘There is a bathroom through that door. If you would like to take a shower after your sleep please feel free to do so. There is no hurry. Sleep as long as you like.’

Before I can thank him the door closes behind him. I slip off my dress and lie down, revelling in the cool air on my skin and the crisp freshness of the sheets. As I drift towards unconsciousness it
occurs to me that perhaps it was a mistake to drink wine at lunch after all. On the other hand, there is something seductive about this delicious drowsiness. I picture Karim, leaning towards me, tempting me with tasty morsels of food, smiling and attentive. Then I remember his face when he spoke of his early memories and, on the edge of sleep, I twist over in bed and murmur, ‘Poor boy, poor boy!’

When I wake the patch of sunlight from the window has moved across the floor to the opposite wall. There is a tap at the door. Expecting Karim, I pull the sheet across my body and call. ‘Come in.’

It is the housekeeper, carrying a tray.

‘Dr Mezeli asks if you would like some tea.’

I sit up. ‘Oh, lovely! That’s just what I need. Thank you.’

The woman puts the tray on the bedside table. ‘He asks also if you would like to go swimming later. If you have not brought your costume, he says there are some belonging to his sisters but—’ She pauses, looking at me with a glimmer of a smile behind her grave composure, ‘I think they would be too large for you.’

I smile back. ‘It’s very kind of Dr Mezeli, but there’s no need. I have my costume with me – just in case. Please tell him I should love to go swimming, and I’ll be ready in ten minutes.’

Karim is sitting under the acacia tree reading a book when I join him, freshly showered and wearing my bikini under my dress. He rises as I approach.

‘Did you sleep?’

‘Yes, I did. I don’t know what you put in that wine. I can’t usually sleep in the middle of the day.’

He smiles in return. ‘Well, I think it has done you good. You were looking tired.’

It strikes me that his story of a habitual siesta was fabricated for my benefit and also that my need of it had been anticipated.

‘You’re very thoughtful,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

I had been slightly disappointed by the beaches close to Kyrenia but Lara Beach, along the coast to the east, to which he drives
me, is much more attractive. A shallow cove encloses a crescent of sand bisected by a smooth outcrop of rock on which children clamber and young men stretch themselves to sunbathe. The water is like green crystal, fringed with the creamy effervescence of waves. We spread our towels on a patch of dry sand, strip off our outer garments and run down to the water’s edge. His body is as I guessed it would be – lean, lithe and deeply tanned – and he swims with powerful strokes that soon carry him beyond the breakers. Normally I would have matched him stroke for stroke, but today I content myself with splashing around in the shallows. He comes back quite soon and we sit quietly in the edge of the waves.

‘Do you regret leaving England?’ I ask.

He clasps his arms round his knees. ‘Sometimes. I miss the things we’ve talked about: the music, the theatres, even the climate when it gets too hot here!’

‘But you never considered staying?’

‘Oh yes. I nearly did. I was offered a fellowship.’

‘Why didn’t you take it?’

‘Oh, various reasons. Mostly because I felt I was needed more here. I came here to take up a post with the Department of Antiquities and Museums.’

‘But now you work as a tour guide.’

He shrugs. ‘The department can’t afford to pay me to work full-time. The tour guiding fits in very well.’

‘So you wouldn’t want to come back?’

‘I …’ He hesitates. ‘I’m not sure. Much of the work I came here to do is in hand. There is not the same urgency. But I wanted to get away from London. Any ex-pat community can be a bit claustrophobic, you know, and as you said, living between the two cultures can be difficult at times.’ He looks at me. ‘Don’t sit too long in the sun. You’ll burn.’

I laugh, touched by his concern. ‘Do stop worrying about me! Anyway, the sun will be down any minute.’

It is true. I have slept away half the afternoon and now the sun
is dipping towards the headland that closes the western end of the bay. We sit on until it has disappeared in a sudden upsurge of blood-red clouds and then drive back towards Kyrenia.

We eat dinner at a restaurant called the Harbour Bar and towards midnight find ourselves sitting at another café table, sipping thick black Turkish coffee. The café is right at the end of the quay, close under the castle wall, where few tourists penetrate. A little group of local men argue animatedly inside the bar but we have the outside tables to ourselves. The wind has dropped and the waters of the harbour lie still and black, reflecting the lights along the front like a mirror. The air has the texture of warm milk.

After a silence, Karim says, ‘Why aren’t you married, Cressida?’

The question takes me by surprise and for a moment I don’t know how to answer. Then I say, ‘The usual reasons, I suppose. Too busy building a career, not wanting to be tied down …’

‘You’ve never wanted marriage?’

‘No. Well, not until … I suppose lately I have thought about it more.’

‘There must have been boyfriends. Wasn’t there anyone special?’

‘No. Yes … Well, I thought he was, for a while. But it was all a mistake.’

‘Tell me about him?’

‘His name was – is – Paul. He’s good-looking, intelligent, fun. We had some good times together. He’s got a good job, too, in computers.’

‘Were you together long?’

‘Almost a year. I’d begun to think it was going to be permanent.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘It was when my mother got ill. I had to spend a lot of weekends down in Hampshire, looking after her and coping with her affairs. Paul hated that. He’s a party animal. He lives for the weekends.’

‘Didn’t he come down to Hampshire with you?’

‘To begin with he did. Then, when she had to go into hospital,
he just couldn’t hack it. Hospitals frightened him. After that he stayed up in town. When I came back to the flat after my mother’s funeral I found a note from him. He said he needed to get away, to think things out. Actually, I found out a few days later he’d gone to Spain with a girl he met at a party while I was away.’

‘He left you, while you were at your mother’s funeral?’ Karim’s voice is heavy with incredulous disgust.

‘Yep.’

He is silent for a moment. Then he says, ‘The man is not only a bastard, he’s a fool! Forget him.’

‘I have,’ I say. Then more honestly, ‘I’m trying.’

‘Were you … living together?’ There is a hesitation in his voice.

‘Oh yes.’

After a moment he asks, ‘Was he the first?’

My first reaction is annoyance. What right has he to quiz me like this? Then something tells me that this is a time to be honest. ‘The first? No.’

He goes on as if compelled to ask, against his better judgement. ‘Have there been many others?’

I glance at him. Why is he asking? ‘Two or three – well, three.’ It was almost true, if you didn’t count the boy who, out of pity, relieved me of my virginity on a Sixth Form field trip, or the Finn at that party whose name I was too drunk to remember.

He doesn’t look at me. In the silence I study his profile, trying to work out what is behind his questions. I have never met anyone quite like him before. In the end I decide to turn the tables.

‘Why aren’t you married, Karim?’

He withdraws his gaze from the dark water and meets my eyes. ‘Not for the reason you’re thinking of.’

‘Why then?’

‘You have to understand,’ he says slowly, ‘marriage is not a simple thing in my society. You do not meet a girl at a party and live with her for a year and then decide to marry. In fact, it’s not easy to meet a good Muslim girl at all.’

‘So how do you find someone to marry?’

‘Usually an introduction is arranged. Not an arranged marriage, you understand. Neither party is obliged to proceed further. But parents agree to introduce children who they think may be compatible.’

‘So, what went wrong in your case?’

He gives a rueful, self-mocking grin. ‘Every time I go home my parents have found some suitable new girl for me to meet. I’m afraid I have offended most of their friends by failing to pursue the connection. That’s one reason why I don’t go back to England very often. It’s a curious fact that expatriates of my parents’ generation are far more conventional and rigid than our people who have stayed here.’

‘What about the girls themselves?’ I ask. ‘Were they offended?’

He laughs briefly. ‘Oh no, I think most of them felt they had had a lucky escape.’

‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ I say and momentarily our eyes meet. I press on, ‘You must have met lots of girls at uni.’

‘Oh yes.’ There is something almost wistful in his tone. ‘No shortage of pretty girls. But none of them would have been … suitable.’

‘Because they weren’t Muslims? Is that so important to you?’

‘It’s important to my family. And I think it is important to the success of the marriage. An English girl, a non-Muslim, might find it difficult to accept our ideas, our way of life.’

‘But you wouldn’t expect your wife to wear a veil or … or live in a harem?’

He laughs. ‘Good Lord, no! How many veiled women have you seen out here?’ Then his face sobers. ‘But just the same, there are differences of attitude, different values.’

We are both silent for a moment. Then I say, ‘So there’s never been anyone – for you?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘But you’re not – you can’t be…!’ The words are out before I can stop them.

He holds my gaze. ‘A virgin? No, not quite. Thanks to a kind
girl in Newcastle and one or two … professional ladies since. But I don’t like that kind of relationship. On the whole, I prefer continence.’

It is my turn to look away. Suddenly I see how vast the gulf must seem to him between my lifestyle and his own and I wish I had lied about the previous boyfriends, or could in some way erase them.

Karim gets to his feet. ‘I’ll walk you back to your hotel.’

We walk in silence, past the now empty tables. At the hotel entrance he takes my hand.

‘Thank you for a very enjoyable day.’

‘No,’ I respond, ‘I should thank you. It’s been a lovely day, and you’ve been very kind and thoughtful.’

Our eyes meet again and I long to reach up and press my lips to his but find myself held back by an unfamiliar restraint. He raises my hand and kisses it lightly.

‘Good night. Sleep well.’

‘Good night, Karim.’

In the foyer of the hotel I turn and watch him through the glass of the doors, walking away towards his car. It comes to me that he has not asked me to go out with him again.

When I come down to breakfast the following morning, I find that the tour group has already left on a day trip to Nicosia. I pass the day idling around the town, explore the castle, then lie by the pool. When I come back into the hotel I find another envelope waiting for me from Os Wentworth. Inside are translations of two more of my father’s letters. I take them to my favourite spot on the terrace and discover that my hands are shaking as I unfold the first one.

The third letter was brief and Os had written at the top of his translation, ‘The writing on this page is very erratic and quite difficult to follow. I think your father was in a bad way when he wrote it. I’ve done my best with it but there were bits I couldn’t make sense of at all.’

(The letter breaks off here. My guess is that what your father was hearing was probably the beginning of the Turkish invasion. This is bound to be distressing for you. I’m sorry. If you want to come out to Lapta and talk it over Meg and I would be delighted
to see you. Os.)

I look at the back of the letter and feel sick. Those rust-coloured blotches that I noticed before have taken on a much more sinister significance. ‘Strong arm tactics.’ What did that mean?

I shut my eyes tightly and try to force myself to remember those last days on the island. There are only fleeting, disjointed images. Bags, suitcases, my mother shouting at someone – and running. That recurring nightmare. Running with my mother, being dragged along by the hand, a bag banging against my legs. ‘Hurry! Come on! You can run faster than that! We can’t stop here!’ Then something I had not recalled before. A beach, crowded with people, but not sunbathing, not swimming. ‘No, you can’t go and paddle! Sit here and don’t move. Do you understand? Don’t move from this spot. I want you to look after the cases.’ Legs moving around me – men’s, women’s – cases being picked up and dumped down again – voices. Then someone lifting and carrying me, a man, a stranger. Not my father. In all the confusion there is no image of him. And yet I remember him in England, walking me to school along the Hampshire lanes. Surely I can’t be mistaken about that.

I take a taxi to Lapta, where the imperturbable Meg insists that I stay for lunch. When I describe my memories Os says, ‘That makes sense to me. When the invasion happened the navy was sent in to rescue British nationals. They couldn’t use Kyrenia harbour because the EOKA guerrillas were firing into the town from the hills above and the castle itself was still in Greek hands. So people were taken off by launch and helicopter from the beaches to the east of the town. It was a pretty chaotic scene, I should imagine. That’s probably what you were remembering.’

‘But where was my father at that time?’ I ask. ‘The last thing we know, he was being held prisoner in a cave somewhere, half dead with malaria. How did he get away?’

Os shrugs gently. ‘We shall probably never know. Perhaps the Turkish army rescued him when they took over. Maybe his captors just disappeared and he managed to get himself to a road
or a village. He may not have left on the same ship as you and your mother. What matters, surely, is that he did get away.’

‘I suppose so,’ I agree reluctantly. ‘But I would love to know the full story. It’s awful to think of what he must have been through – and I never knew anything about it.’

‘What still perplexes me,’ Meg remarks, ‘is how those letters came to be here. He meant to give them to Evangelos to pass on to this other woman – whoever she was.’

Suddenly I have a vivid mental picture of the ‘angel boy’ who rescued me from the bombing. ‘Of course! He did give them to Evangelos! And Evangelos brought them to my mother by mistake. He must have misunderstood.’

I describe the dream/memory I experienced under the fig tree. ‘I can picture him carrying me back to the house. There was another explosion and I think he must have been wounded. Blood was running down his arm and he was carrying some folded papers. Those marks are Evangelos’s blood, not my father’s!’

‘Well, that would certainly explain how the letters got here,’ Os agrees. ‘You and your mother would have had to leave in a hurry so they were probably shoved into a box or a drawer and forgotten about.’

Meg says thoughtfully, ‘The fighting in this area was pretty fierce – well, you obviously remember that. And yet Evangelos braved the shelling to get those letters to your mother. I suppose, if your father was delirious at the time, it’s not surprising that Evangelos misunderstood who the letters were for. But he must have felt very strongly about your father to bring them, under the circumstances. Unless it was that he felt he had an obligation to you and your mother.’

‘I wonder where he is now,’ I say. ‘I suppose it would be no use searching for him.’

‘Not on this side of the dividing line,’ Os says. ‘If you want to pursue your enquiries you’ll have to come back to the Greek half of the island for your next holiday. Only make sure that the Turkish customs and emigration don’t stamp your passport when
you leave. Otherwise they’ll never let you into the Greek sector.’

Rauf Demirel is a corpulent man in his late sixties, as near as I can guess. He welcomes us courteously into his small, whitewashed house and offers apple tea. After the exchange of some necessary
small-talk, Karim brings up the subject of our visit.

Demirel responds at once in fluent though heavily accented English.

‘Mr Stephen Allenby? I met him only briefly. But I remember his wife – your mother – very well. She came to see me a few days before the peace operation began.’

‘Why did she come? Was she looking for my father?’

‘She came to report that he had disappeared, yes. At that time I was in charge of the police depot in Kyrenia. It was a difficult period. I’m not sure how much you know, but the situation was … volatile, shall we say. If I remember correctly your mother came to the police station on the tenth or eleventh of July. She was obviously very worried. She told me your father had not been home for several days and asked for our help.’ Demirel spreads his hands. ‘You understand, your father was a grown man, in full possession of his senses. Normally we would not follow up such a case, except to check the hospitals and circulate his name to other police stations. If a man wishes to disappear …’ He shrugs expressively.

‘So you don’t know what had happened to him.’ Is that all? I try to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

‘Ah, but wait!’ Demirel goes on. ‘That is not the end of the story. As you perhaps know, a few days later the Greek National Guard attempted a coup against President Makarios. From then on there was civil war – Greek against Greek – as the supporters of Makarios fought the National Guard. We Turks were told to keep out of it, that it was nothing to do with us. But we knew whichever side won we would be next to suffer. Kyrenia was taken over by the National Guard. My officers and I were mostly Turks. We decided to withdraw from the city, up into the hills near the pass that leads to Lefkosa. We stayed in a village called Agirdag and waited to see what would happen. Then, five days later, the Turkish army arrived. I watched the paratroopers coming down out of the sky onto the mountain slopes right in front of me!’

I try not to fidget. It is obvious that Demirel is wrapped up in his memories, but I can’t see what relevance they have to my father. Karim catches my eye and makes a slight, pacifying movement of one hand.

‘The fighting went on for two days and nights,’ Demirel continues. ‘The planes came over by day, dropping bombs and strafing the Greek positions. And the ships off the coast kept up a constant bombardment. It was high summer and very hot. Soon the
hillsides
were ablaze. The Greeks had prepared positions in caves, where they had stashed large quantities of arms and ammunition. We could only wait and watch. Then, on the third morning, during a lull in the bombing, a farmer arrived in the village. He was driving a tractor and pulling a trailer on which were his wife and children and everything he had been able to salvage from his home. There was also an Englishman – a very sick man.’

‘My father?’

‘Yes, Miss Allenby. Your father. The farmer told us how the previous night, during a lull in the fighting, he had heard a knocking at the door. When he opened it, he found your father slumped on the threshold. He was delirious and unable to stand, so obviously someone must have brought him to the farm, but whoever it was had already disappeared.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We did what we could, but we had no medicine and no doctor. Of course, all communications were cut. So I sent him with two of my men with instructions to try to get through to the British base at Dhekelia. I believe they had some difficulties, but they reached the base eventually. I assume your father was cared for there until he was well enough to be flown home. He reached you all right, in the end?’

I hesitate. It seems ridiculous that I cannot be sure. ‘I suppose he must have done. I remember him in England, soon after that.’

‘Dr Mezeli tells me he died a year or two later,’ Demirel says sympathetically. ‘My commiserations. Perhaps he never recovered from his ordeal?’

I struggle to remember whether he was ill during that brief interval. ‘Perhaps not. But thank you. Thank you so much for helping him – and for filling in part of the mystery for me. I suppose you have no idea why he was kidnapped?’

‘What makes you think he was kidnapped?’

‘Some letters he wrote – letters I have only just come across. It seems he was being held in a cave somewhere, but I don’t know why.’

Demirel shrugs again. ‘I can only guess. The EOKA terrorists were very active at that time. What they might want with your father I do not know, but kidnapping and murder were part of their trade. If they were holding him, perhaps his captors were killed in the bombing, or went off to join in the fighting, and he was able to escape. But someone must have helped him.’

‘I wish I knew who. I should like to thank them.’

Demirel raises his palms. ‘There, I’m afraid, I cannot help you.’

We leave soon after that. In the car Karim says, ‘Shall I drive you back to the hotel? Or would you like to come back to my place for some proper tea?’

My mood lifts immediately. ‘Tea would be lovely.’

Once we are seated in the shade in the courtyard of Karim’s house I say, ‘Thank you so much for taking the trouble to find Mr Demirel for me. At least now I have one more piece of the jigsaw.’