Songs of Blue and Gold (11 page)

But Eleni did not elaborate, and perhaps she had not intended any comparative judgement of her in any case. Melissa was just too raw, and over-sensitive.

Instead, Eleni shouted into the trees – an angry-sounding tirade which was most likely nothing more than a parting shot to let her sons know she was leaving and when they should come home for lunch – and they set off back down towards the village road. Melissa took one of the sweet-smelling
baskets and listened as Eleni told her which herbs she had picked and what she intended to do with them.

‘Come to the beauty shop tomorrow morning,' said Eleni. ‘I will show you.'

That afternoon Melissa lost herself in the water at the flat rock where the fig tree grew. She cleared her mind of everything but the present and the sea-silk against her skin. Wavelets unfurled on her shoulders from a mazarine sea and delicate plumes of smoke rose from the headland to make signals across the bay.

FOR THE FIRST
morning since she had arrived in Kalami, the weather had closed in. The water in the bay was black, ruffled by a near-horizontal wind into a sheet of crepe. The yellow buoys that normally bobbed calmly by the White House were drowning in long pipeline waves that gathered strength as they neared the shore. Against the rocky headland cliffs the swell splashed in great white plumes. Any lingering heat had gone. Melissa stared out of the balcony door for a long time.

Clouds scowled across the water as she left the apartment. Out in the open she could see a massed invasion of cumulonimbus thunderheads, tumbling ponderously down from Mount Pantokrator. It was mid-morning but the resort had the air of a stormy winter evening.

Eleni's directions took her into the village centre, down by the side of the largest of the two small supermarkets, to a hairdresser's salon under a sign reading
Filoxenia
. A light was on inside but the salon was empty and the door was locked.

She rang the bell.

Eleni was wearing a professional white starched tunic and
trousers, her exuberant hair tamed into a tight bun at the back of her neck.

‘You didn't give me an exact time – is now all right?' asked Melissa.

‘Of course. Any time is all right.'

Melissa wondered how that could be. Eleni was usually so busy, constantly working whether at home, at her business or in the gardens. She showed Melissa to a side room, explaining how lucky she had been to be able to rent this room after a beauty therapist had left the previous year. It was important for the business to be central and easy to find, and reciprocal recommendations between her and Lia the hairdresser were helping.

‘What kind of treatment would you like?' She handed over a laminated list in English. ‘Rejuvenating? Relaxing and calming? Detox? Somehow I think not the after-sun soothing today . . .!'

‘I think I need all of them!'

Eleni laughed. ‘In that case . . . I think for you I will suggest the lavender with a tiny amount of geranium oil and bergamot . . . with perhaps a touch . . .' she put her head on one side with a smile to assess her client's reaction, ‘ . . . of melissa to make it very special.'

‘Sounds lovely.'

For an hour, Melissa was soothed and pummelled, surrounded by sensuous scents. Eleni left her cocooned in a warm white towel. She drifted for a while.

‘Is good?' Eleni asked when she came back.

‘Very. That was wonderful.'

‘Get up slowly. There is a cup of mint tea for you in the salon.'

When Melissa went through, there were two cups on the tray.

‘No other ladies today so we can sit in here,' said Eleni, already perched in the reception area. She looked grimly towards the window and dark skies.

‘Not a day for perfect hair,' Melissa agreed.

‘Your husband is not coming?'

‘No.'

‘He always works very hard?'

‘Yes.'

They sipped tea.

‘Is this your mint too?'

Eleni nodded.

Melissa seized her chance both to change the subject and try to learn some more. She wondered about Alexandros. The history man, Eleni had said. Did that mean that he might be the one person who could help? And how could she contrive to see him again?

‘From Alexandros's garden?'

‘Yes. He has the gift, he really does. Everything he plants grows good. The herbs, the vegetables! He has the best vegetable garden in the village, thanks to his strange ideas.'

‘He's very impressive, but quite shy . . . isn't he?'

She looked at Melissa oddly. ‘What makes you say that?'

‘Well, I mean . . . obviously I don't know him at all, but . . . the other day, the way he was talking to us one moment, and then he suddenly went into himself and walked away.'

‘Did he?'

Melissa hesitated. Had she completely misjudged the
situation, not only here in the salon but what happened with Alexandros too?

Eleni's face was hard to read.

‘No, he is not shy,' she said eventually.

Her mind ran through the obvious possibilities. ‘Oh. I hope I didn't do or say something to offend him?'

‘No . . . not at all.'

‘What then?'

Eleni sighed.

‘Is there something wrong?' asked Melissa cack-handedly, before she could stop herself. She had already become too used to rifling through the pockets of other people's lives. Perhaps it could become a habit, commonly known as nosiness, or worse.

She thought Eleni was going to tell her, too. She opened her mouth, but then looked away. ‘It's not for me to say.'

They sipped in silence for a few moments.

‘I've been trying to find the St Arsenius shrine – the path down, I mean. I've managed to see it from one of Manolis's boats.'

‘I know.'

Of course she did.

‘Does anyone still go inside it?'

‘Sometimes. Not very often.'

‘Is it locked, or –?'

‘Alexandros goes soon, to take oil for the saint,' she said, making out a bill. ‘Now the autumn storms are starting. His father and his grandfather always did it, and now it is his turn.'

Melissa ignored all the questions that raised and asked directly. ‘Do you think he might let me go with him?'

A pause. ‘I'm not sure. Perhaps not.'

She stood up and went over to the desk and fetched a flimsy white paper from a small ledger. Melissa paid the thirty euros they had agreed. It was a slightly awkward parting. Melissa had the distinct feeling she saw a gleam in Eleni's eye that said she was well aware of what she had wanted all along. In her over-sensitive state, it was enough to send Melissa's spirits plummeting.

Then, as Eleni was opening the door, she said, ‘I can ask him. Just . . . don't expect. Do you have a telephone, a mobile?'

Melissa gave her the number.

She spent the rest of the day reading on the sofa in the apartment, her legs under a blanket she found in a wardrobe. The ache of loneliness and hurt whenever she thought about her mother and Richard had not subsided, but she was managing to push it a little further away. It helped to have other people, other lives, none of them perfect, to occupy her thoughts. It really did.

When her mobile shrilled into life a few hours later, she almost jumped out of her skin.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello, is that Melissa?' A man's voice, but not Richard's. The surge of anxiety cooled to the uneasy blend of relief and a disappointment she wished she did not feel.

‘Ye-es.'

‘This is Alexandros Catzeflis.'

‘Oh . . . yes. Hello!'

‘Eleni tells me you have been asking about the St Arsenius shrine.' He sounded brusque.

‘Yes . . . that's right.'

‘Why are you so interested?'

‘I – I thought . . . it seems important if I'm visiting places that Julian Adie wrote about . . . He wrote about it so often.'

Silence.

‘This is part of your literary research?'

So he knew about the questions she had already asked.

She crossed her fingers. ‘Well, yes . . .'

He was clearly reluctant. Under pressure from Eleni and Manolis too, maybe.

But then, a sigh. ‘I suppose, in that case . . . I am going there tomorrow. To take oil for the . . . er, saint,' he said, in the diffident way that was already becoming familiar. ‘If you would like to come along, I would be pleased to take you there for your . . . literary researches.'

Was that an unnecessary emphasis, verging on sarcasm? Melissa decided to ignore it.

‘I would like that very much. Thank you.'

He hesitatingly ventured the news that the weather would change for the better by the next afternoon. In the light of that they made halting, mutually polite arrangements.

THE SUN DID
not rise the next morning until a quarter past eight. In strange citrus light, a vast flock of birds wheeled in silhouette around the bay, clustered in
pointillism
into the shape of a fish one moment, stretched into a sword the next. A lone black cloud smudged the sky's fragile freshness.

There was a cheerful scent of honeysuckle in the lane as Melissa went down to the shop to buy breakfast, hoping for fresh rolls.

‘
Kalimera!
'

She started. It was Christos, the Adonis of the tourist office. He stopped at the entrance to the shop, making it impossible for her to avoid him.

‘How are you liking it here? What did you do last night?'

‘I stayed in, reading.'

‘Oh, no. That is not right.'

‘It's perfectly right. I'm having a lovely time.'

Clearly it was his idea of hell. ‘Have dinner with me tonight.'

‘Oh, no . . . thank you, but really I –'

He put his head on one side and pressed his palms together
in supplication. Melissa laughed and he winked. ‘You are a beautiful woman on your own. I am on my own. It's very sad.'

She shook her head, still laughing.

‘Why not?' he persisted.

Now there was a question.

‘I know a very, very good restaurant. Nice food. Wonderful views . . . the real Corfu – the old Corfu . . .'

How could she resist? Melissa let the eye meet run on for a while. Then she said, ‘All right, then. I'll come.'

He was incorrigible. And also the youngest and most handsome man that she had flirted with for a long time. Sitting reading on the balcony later she couldn't help but smile, not in anticipation but amusement.

Impossible to pretend the thought of Richard and Sarah had nothing to do with it. Could she find it in herself to give Richard another chance? One last chance? Or did the person she loved no longer exist, the good times overwritten by hurt and betrayal?

The sea was bright jade as she passed by the White House, on her way to meet Alexandros at four. His weather predictions had proved accurate, and the sun had returned, bringing several more degrees of warmth.

The water was so clear now that the rock shelf jutting from under the house was visible two or three feet down. It ended abruptly over deep water, and she understood with a single glance how Adie and Grace had lounged at its edge as if it were their own vast natural lido. The bottom of their pool was a swirl of sea grass, black streaks of which now littered the stony beach, along with oranges wrenched from their branches
by the storm and flung down where salty tongues of sea water licked inside their split skins.

The roaring of waves in the bay had gone now. Only mermaid whispers teased the shingle.

She left the beach behind and climbed into the first olive grove. The quietness had the effect of making her feel distanced from her surroundings. It lasted until the descent into the neighbouring bay and a waft of homely scent, one that had felt familiar from the very beginning, stole into her senses: the wild mint growing at the base of a vigorous patch of prickly pear.

Yaliscary was deserted, apart from a boatman packing up his summer hideaway. Time after time he walked the makeshift jetty in the far corner, shifting plastic chairs and a table, umbrellas, crates, and finally the white-painted car tyres which acted as bumpers on the side of the wooden walkway. All was piled at the end, and then he began to load his boat.

She went on towards the tavernas at Agni, where Alexandros had specified the middle one of the three. And there he was, waiting in the courtyard, standing rather rigidly by two old trees, their gnarled and whitewashed trunks intertwined like the mythical trees formed from the bodies of Philemon and Baucis after they entertained the gods unawares.

His greeting was polite but serious, old-world courtesy. He had not taken a seat; they were clearly not staying for a cup of coffee or social diversion. He said something to the waiter, whose response and parting shot implied they knew each other well, and walked off straight away leaving her to skitter after his long loping strides.

He let her chatter nervously, inconsequentially, for a few minutes until she managed to match his pace and let the breeze
in the trees and the rhythm of their footsteps fill the silence between them.

The serpent path rose again into untended olives and scrub. Alexandros led the way as if this procession held in deep thought was part of the ceremony. Melissa shrank back into herself, not wanting to be an irritation or encumbrance.

Above them hung the winding road to the north of the island. Now and then the sound of a truck or bus rumbling by confirmed its existence, but silence predominated. No cicadas, no birdsong, only soles crunching over the path. She looked for landmarks she might have passed before, wanting to see where she had gone wrong and missed the tiny trail down to the shrine. The sea glistened far below to the left.

Melissa stumbled, experiencing a moment of disorientation, a sense of electric foreignness all around, the purple sound of words not understood, a warning ripple of madness. Here she was, with the history man (she still had no idea what that meant, and had missed all chances to ask), on an island where they kissed the feet bones of St Spyridon in his casket. Dead since the fourteenth century, yet his blackened mummy was still being paraded in the streets and routinely asked for protection and advice. Centuries were no time at all. It put her own tiny quest into context, tiptoe-ing across the dusty footprints laid down by someone else only a matter of decades ago. But did those faint traces still exist?