Songs of Blue and Gold (13 page)

Good, he said. It was a very long season on Corfu, with
the first visitors arriving in April and May for the spring flowers. ‘But by the end of next week, it will be finished.'

‘What will you do for the winter?'

‘I will go to Athens. Rest, see friends, work a while for my brother . . .'

‘What does he do?'

‘He designs computer websites. I do some of that too.'

‘That sounds good.'

‘It's OK. I prefer being in Corfu – I love the sun and the sea.'

‘And all the tourists . . .' she raised an eyebrow.

But he did not react in the way she expected. ‘I like meeting people who come here. They are on holiday, happy, they want to have a nice time. It's very good that they like to come to Corfu. Especially the English. They fall in love with the island, and come back and back again.'

‘I can certainly see why people would come back to Kalami.'

‘Kalami, especially.'

But when she asked, he didn't know much about Adie, nor did he seem very interested.

‘Not so many tourists ask about him. I don't think they know him any more,' he shrugged, leaning back as he did so to ask the waiter for more wine.

‘Not even to find the White House?'

Christos chewed the corner of his mouth.

‘I found the St Arsenius shrine,' she said, reminding him about the first time they'd talked. ‘And I managed to take a look inside it this afternoon.'

‘So, are you another one looking for information about the woman who drowned?' he asked.

‘What?'

A shrug. ‘There was a drowning at the shrine. That's what most people in the village remember about it now.'

‘But that's awful . . .! I had no idea.'

‘More than that. They thought it was a killing—'

‘A murder?' Melissa was incredulous.

‘Yes, a murder. But nothing could be proved.'

‘What happened?' This was a whole new angle, as if the light had suddenly shifted through the prism holding Julian Adie and the past.

‘There was a woman who drowned there – or who was made to drown.'

‘So . . .' Melissa struggled to reconcile this with the conversation she had had there only a few hours before. She felt a sudden dizziness, as if the wine had hit her behind her eyes. ‘So it's a place which has a dark feeling about it, a mystery . . . something unpleasant . . .?'

‘Oh, yes,' said Christos, raising his eyebrows. ‘When something terrible has happened in a place, it never leaves.'

Why had Alexandros let her blather on about Julian Adie and the perfection of the pool without even thinking to mention this?

Christos grinned, relishing the tale. ‘A woman was last seen on the rocks below the shrine one evening. She never returned home. Her drowned body was found some days later. It was a big event, for a while. Some people even thought it would happen again, that another woman would disappear from there and be found dead in the sea like the first one.'

‘When . . . exactly did this happen – can you remember?'

He frowned as he thought hard. ‘I don't know exactly. Quite a long time ago. I heard the stories when I was a child.'

‘So . . . twenty years ago then?'

He shrugged. ‘Longer, I think. Before I was born. I don't remember it. I only remember my mother and father talking about it – it was a village story, people talked about it for a long time afterwards.'

‘So they didn't think it was an accident then?'

Christos blew out a sigh. ‘I don't know. A little tragedy – or maybe not. There was a feeling of . . . something not right about it.'

‘Why?'

‘Maybe the woman had been meeting a man she should not have been seeing. Maybe someone wanted to kill her. There was something like that, I think.'

‘So in that case, why did some people think it might happen again? How could they suspect she was attacked – and that whoever did it might try to do the same to another woman?'

He shook his head. ‘I only know what I remember being said. Stories start in villages; then they grow bigger.'

‘I should ask Manolis.'

Christos let out a dry laugh.

‘What?' she asked.

‘Manolis is the last person who would tell you.'

She had to admit that she was puzzled.

‘The Kiotzas family, and their very clever friend—'

She assumed he was referring to Alexandros.

‘—they think they are the keepers of the shrine – like the little maids of the gods,' he waved his hands dismissively.

‘But was this something to do with their family?'

‘Not exactly.'

This was intriguing. ‘Then what?'

‘A scandal is a shame for the whole family. Never forget that in Greece.'

‘I don't know what you are trying to say.'

He offered only another aphorism. ‘All Greeks are storytellers.'

‘As in liars?'

‘Sometimes. Or they will offer you a story first told by Homer, and make it sound like it happened yesterday, really happened.'

This perplexing exchange was cut short by the arrival of the first course. Christos explained the origins of the dishes, showing off all his skills as a tour guide. Melissa was deflated by the thought that he would have used all the same words on similar evenings through so many summers.

She smiled and nodded, while wondering whether what he had just told her explained Alexandros's insistence on knowing why she was so interested in the shrine.

‘So . . . was there ever another suspicious drowning, after the first?'

‘No.'

‘What was the end of the story?'

But this time he closed that conversation down straight away.

‘I don't know,' he said, leaning back and looking over her shoulder to ask the waiter for another carafe of wine.

‘Don't worry so much! You are very, very serious . . .'

‘I'm not worried,' said Melissa.

Christos pulled a disbelieving face. ‘Relax, enjoy yourself! You're not my kind of woman anyway.'

That pulled her up short. He could not have said anything
more calculated to make her feel even more awkward and tense. And how dare he assume she found him irresistible! ‘Well, that's a relief. I can assure you you're not mine,' she countered.

‘I only like ugly women.'

He sat back in his chair and raised his palms.

‘Ugly . . .' Melissa took a few seconds to realise his eyes were crinkling at the corners. ‘Interesting . . .'

‘Hairy legs. Big spotty noses. Terrible teeth . . . ah! That's something wonderful for me . . .'

‘Perhaps there is more to you than meets the eye . . .' She raised her glass.

‘You are not right for me, not at all.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.'

‘Although . . .'

‘What?'

‘Smile at me?'

She obliged, with a sarcastic expression.

‘Actually, I am finding you quite attractive.'

‘Great, thanks.'

‘You have spinach on your teeth.'

She had to admit it, Christos was good company. The teasing continued, and the jokes kept coming. But he was attentive, too, making sure she was comfortable, had all that she needed. The evening might not have meant anything to either of them – it was the dregs of the season and he didn't have his usual choice of foreign women to play around with – but there was a relief in that, for her. None of it mattered. It didn't matter if he wasn't honest with her. He was nothing to her, so therefore
she could relax and enjoy herself. And she was beginning to. In the flicker of the candlelight, across the table from his wicked smile and sharp twinkling eyes, she forgot her concerns. Perhaps she had not lost every scrap of confidence after all.

It was an oddly exhilarating experience. One it might even have been tempting to take further, in other circumstances.

‘You know, old Manos won the money to set up the boat hire business,' he was telling her with relish. ‘One night at the casino in Corfu Town. The story is he was playing roulette for the first and only time. He backed two numbers twice and they came up both times. “I heard a voice in my ear,” he said when he returned to the village the next morning with a leather sack of banknotes. “Whose voice?” everyone asked. You know what he said? “No one I recognised.” There was always something strange about it.'

‘Why?'

‘Because normally, a person would say it had been the voice of a saint.'

‘But he didn't . . . so?'

‘It is unlikely to be true.'

It did not make sense to her, but she was not about to push the point. At heart Christos was a Greek country boy. He certainly liked a good story.

It occurred to her he might be just the person to clear up just one more mystery, though. He would probably relish doing so, if his dismissive tone earlier was anything to go by.

She took a breath, feeling disloyal but rationalising that it would be better to know so that she could avoid any crass remarks in the future. ‘You know Alexandros . . .?'

A curt nod.

‘What is he so unhappy about?'

He did not ask why she wanted to know. Without hesitation, he said: ‘His wife left him. She ran off with someone else. Can't say I blame her – he's a strange man.'

‘Strange? In what way?'

‘Just . . .' Christos shrugged. ‘He's like a crazy professor, all that science stuff he does. Not much fun to be with, is he?'

She sipped her wine and said nothing.

They lingered over coffees and a bright orange kumquat liqueur he persuaded her to try. He gallantly refused her offer to pay half the bill. When they got up to leave, he draped her woollen wrap over her shoulders, and left a hand there casually. She let it be, but made no move closer.

Her slight stiffness probably told him all he needed to know. She wasn't ready for any kind of involvement, not even a passing fling. When they arrived back at the steps of her apartment, he kissed her on both cheeks when she thanked him for the evening.

‘Maybe some time?' He gave her another sweet grin and touched a strand of her hair. ‘But not now?'

‘Maybe some time,' she said.

She went inside alone.

In the middle of the night Melissa woke from a dreamscape of Adie's blue pool made ice cold by the vision of a woman falling through the water, hair drifting like seaweed, white limbs stiff and waxy.

Julian Adie would not return to Corfu until 1964. For the first time since his hurried flight from the island with Grace in wartime, he gazed upon the long-remembered, long-idealised inlets and headlands of his own Corcyra. From the deck of the night ferry from Brindisi, recreating his very first sight of the island, he passed through the straits where its north-eastern point almost nudged the mountainous coast of Albania, smudged purple-brown in the day's first light.

He was holding his breath (he wrote) as the ship cut across the water to breach the last finger of cliff and cypress before Kalami, waiting for his first sight of the White House. ‘
For the hours leading to it, mind flying ahead to the bay, the house, I had prepared myself for disappointment, for the emblematic dribbles of rust down a grey façade; but there it was on the rocky promontory, pristine and proud. After many years, many adventures and
hardships, I had returned. Just for a second, I was Odysseus, and ahead was Ithaca
,' he wrote in
Vacation
magazine (December 1964).

The trouble with this account (apart from its vanity of conferring heroic status upon himself) is arrogance of Adie's usual kind: here was a poignant homecoming purporting to be fact when it was nothing of the sort. At best the piece, which appeared not in a collection of literary memoirs but in an American magazine for those planning European holidays, was a composite of the ‘imaginary truths' in which he excelled.

The touching image he presents is of the lonely wanderer returning, full of bitter nostalgia and fear that he will not regain the paradise he has carried so long in his psyche. Will memory prove to be closer to imagination than reality? In a few strokes, he has us with him on his voyage as he strains his eyes across the sea for a lost world, and (a clue to what he is up to) a mythical land.

The reality was this: on the boat from Brindisi he was accompanied by his third wife Simone, her teenage son and daughter Bryan and Jane, his sixteen-year-old daughter Hero, and a new French camper van complete with inflatable boat and outboard motor lashed to the roof rack.

For the next few years, he arrived every summer with Simone and their extended family. In the long holidays, her children would live with them. Adie's younger
daughter Hero soon did the same, and Simone and Hero grew fond of one another. His elder daughter, Artemis, was also enthusiastically welcomed for holidays whenever she could join them, despite her mother Grace's coolness to the idea.

Adie enjoyed marriage to Simone. ‘She suits me well. It is important to find a woman who gives you freedom,' Adie wrote to his confidant and fellow author Don Webber when the latter was going through one of his own periodic matrimonial upheavals. The two had been close since meeting in Paris before the war, though Webber had long since retreated to his native California. (Webber believed in changing wives according to mood and circumstance, at which times Adie took a position on the sidelines proffering what he considered helpful advice.)

‘Simone is a Frenchwoman. She understands my needs in a way the others did not,' he informed Webber. By which he meant that their domestic happiness did not preclude sex with other women when it pleased him. Their rows could be visceral, but were never terminal.

This was the kind of woman Don appreciated too. ‘You have your life well-organised,' he replied. ‘I am envious and still searching for my Simone. Meanwhile I have met an eighteen-year-old nightclub dancer called Kiyo – Japanese. I'm satisfied for now.'