Songs of Blue and Gold (15 page)

Adie may or may not have run into more wine, but he did not return.

The next day, as she dozed by the swimming pool in the Stilwells' garden, spent by critical self-examination as much as by the long late night (how
could
she have rambled on about colour wheels – what on earth had she been thinking?), a shadow fell over her. Clive was standing, hand outstretched with an envelope.

‘Just found this on the hall floor,' he said.

It was a handwritten note from Julian Adie. ‘
I enjoyed our conversation last night
,' he wrote. ‘
Come to dinner tonight
.' He named a restaurant in Corfu Town on Capodistria Street, and the time, nine o'clock. The invitation was not extended to the Stilwells.

‘Should I go?' she asked Mary.

Mary was chopping vegetables in the cool of the cavernous kitchen. She sliced an aubergine with a deft stroke, exposing spongy, faintly green flesh.

‘It's up to you. Do you want to?' she returned the question, smoothly wiping her hands on her apron as she kept her eyes on Elizabeth.

‘Well . . .' Of course she did. As soon as she had read the message she had felt a shiver of excitement. But she had to keep that to herself. ‘What do you think? You know him.'

‘It's not for me to say.'

No, Mary would never say. Whatever was happening in Elizabeth's life was her own business; unless Elizabeth made it clear she wanted to discuss the reasons she had called off the wedding, her current thoughts, her fears for the future, Mary would never pronounce judgement. That was why, Elizabeth realised in a rush of grateful affection, she had felt as comfortable as she did coming to them in the first place.

‘If you want to go, do so.'

No mention of him being twice her age.

‘I'm assuming . . .' Elizabeth was looking for confirmation of what she hoped would be the case. ‘If he hasn't written the invitation to all of us – that it will be just me?'

Mary gave a short laugh, disconcertingly as ever omitting the normal progression of exchanges on any vital subject. She picked up the knife and pierced the mysterious black sheen of another aubergine. A curl at the corner of one side of her mouth might just have been mischievous.

‘Julian Adie has a terrible reputation with women,' she said.

SHINY-FACED AND
nervous, Elizabeth sat as still as she could in the car. The road wound down and down towards Corfu Town. By her side, Clive drove with his fastidious schoolmaster's style: caution in all matters, especially on foreign soil; a mixture of deference to native custom and the historian's knowledge that events might spiral out of control at any time.

She was sure that he had not had a longstanding arrangement to meet a friend at the Liston, that his insistence that he was going into town anyway was a kindly excuse for making sure she was safe. The travel issue, and her safe passage back, he could control; Julian Adie he patently could not.

Elizabeth was torn between wanting to know more about their famous friend and not wishing to seem overly interested. Most of the journey, they spent in companionable silence.

They drew up at the edge of the Esplanade, where Clive parked, punctiliously observing the marked bays which Greek drivers took only as vague suggestions. She was conscious
that she was more jittery than she had expected to be, that she was fiddling mindlessly with her hair.

They strolled across the darkening park, and he walked her to the restaurant.

‘You don't have to.'

‘I have plenty of time,' he said firmly. ‘I shall be at the Hellenic Club from ten o'clock onwards. It's very easy to find, at the end of the Capodistria, opposite the palace. You can ask anyone. I'll be there waiting for you.'

The restaurant was smoky and crowded. Groups of Greek men overpowered most of the tables, so many of them clinging so desperately to the sides of each one that the effect was of a shipwreck with too few lifeboats. Roars of laughter and the clatter of plates cannoned off the walls. It was definitely not what she had been expecting.

Feeling conspicuous in her lacy white mini dress, Elizabeth stopped at the door. She almost turned and went out again, thinking she had come to the wrong place.

Then she saw him, at a long table the length of the wall. There must have been twenty people around it, the party mostly men but including a few women. Behind, a dingy mirror, speckled with brown age spots, reflected his blond head, bobbing as he talked and drank at equal speed and jabbed a finger to emphasise a point. To one side of him was a stocky man with a beard who made him rock back with mirth, to the other an equally cheerful woman with short brown hair and a frisky grin.

Elizabeth was both relieved and disappointed.

‘You came!' Adie stood up as soon as he noticed her. There
was no denying he seemed rather unsteady on his feet. ‘Come and meet everyone – everyone, this is Elizabeth.' He made a rapid-fire round of introductions, none of which hit home.

A chair was found and she was squeezed in between a Greek biologist and a bald American who said he wrote plays.

Plates of food were piled on the table: bowls of glistening olives, bread, aubergines, fried peppers, and tiny fish. And carafe upon carafe of thin red wine.

The talk swelled over and around her.

‘Snivelling malingerers. Never known a day's hard work . . .'

‘. . . so to avoid the press he arrives at his own wedding ceremony in the back of a butcher's van . . .'

‘ . . . A toast to the gods of rashness and misadventure . . . May they keep us and inspire us . . .!'

‘ . . . it's a form of courage, you see, refusing to give in, no matter what the critics say . . .'

She tried to catch Adie's eye, but he was never looking her way.

The Greek biologist on her right had a sweet manner and a wild mane of dry brown hair. The playwright to her left was prickly. He did not venture his name. Conversation with both was easy in that a few quiet questions set each off on his pet topic.

‘ . . . when the little bastard gave me a second bad review all it made me think was, what would really ruin his day . . .? Well, it's the prospect of me writing more, and making a lot more than he does, living in his crummy Brooklyn penthouse not an original thought between his ears, the little shite . . .

‘Have you met Veronica?' the playwright broke off to demand, nodding at someone over her shoulder.

Elizabeth turned.

An attractive but pursed-lipped woman was now standing behind her chair. A hard, assessing gaze was embedded in her bony face. She held out a hand which slithered briefly past Elizabeth's. In her very early middle age, she had smooth, expensively maintained skin, but with deep lines cutting from nose to mouth and between the shaped, lined brows where she frowned. She was dressed in a neat pink suit, and a girlish scarf tied as a headband over stiff controlled brown curls,

‘Are you one of his
daughter's friends
?' The emphasis was unmistakeably rude and she was addressing Elizabeth.

‘Sorry, I don't know what you mean.'

‘I thought as much.'

Veronica signalled to a waiter to squeeze a chair into the confined space between Elizabeth and the playwright, and wiggled in. A drink was brought for her. It looked like whisky.

Veronica drank deeply, and flicked a glance up the table where Adie was deep in conversation with the woman to his side, managing to make it seem as if she were the only person worth talking to in the room. Elizabeth wondered whether she might not be the only one feeling she had been brought here under false pretences.

Not that it should matter to me, thought Elizabeth. I don't even know the man. But all the same it was disconcerting, realising she was disappointed. Her attempts at conversation with the American woman kept stuttering and failing, mainly because the latter's efforts to keep tabs on Adie were becoming less and less discreet. At one point her glance became a loaded stare. She speared a piece of pepper delicately, allowed it to dangle in a greasy yellow ribbon from
her fork, contemplated it with disdain and slight puzzlement, then put it down again untouched. Then she laughed in the back of her throat.

‘Word of advice, never believe a word men say. That's the best way.' A crack in her voice hinted at an over-emotional state of mind. But there was an abrasiveness about her that precluded any empathy. ‘I learned that from my second husband.'

Elizabeth said nothing.

‘Divorced now,' she continued bitterly. ‘That's the best way too.'

It was impossible to ignore the woman's compulsion to observe Julian Adie. To Elizabeth it was unseemly, obscene almost, to be that obvious.

‘Are you and Julian . . . together?' she asked boldly.

Veronica crinkled her nose. ‘Does it look like we are?'

‘I . . . well, no . . .' Elizabeth was stumped again.

Noise levels rose. Always among the top notes was Adie's staccato laugh. His stories inflated into theatrical performances. At one point he got up on his chair to demonstrate the agonising plight of an opera singer with piles and a top C to hit. She was just part of the audience.

He was really something, thought Elizabeth. It was fascinating to see him in action. He dominated the table, even when he was listening rather than speaking. His effervescence was tangible, like a fizzy drink. There was such abandon in his amusement. She had never been this close to anyone like him. The evening was hardly what she'd expected, but that was all right. She was glad she had met him and had the conversation with him at Clive and Mary's party – it would be a story to tell one day.

‘You heard what happened to his wife?' Veronica interrupted her thoughts. The harshness in her voice made Elizabeth wonder if it hurt her throat to speak like that.

‘Only that she died.'

‘He once said she was the only one who could keep up with him. She was such a tiny woman, but she would match him drink for drink. They drank when they were happy and when they were sad. They'd drink brandy together at breakfast and not stop at one.'

The woman leaned in and Elizabeth could smell the fumes on her breath.

‘Simone would keep pace with him. Smoking, drinking, fighting, shouting. He threw a plate, she'd throw one back. He thought that was wonderful. Anyone who met them wondered how she could do it. And it seems she couldn't. She got sick at Christmas. They thought she had pleurisy. But by the New Year she was dead. A tumour in one lung and another in the liver. Completely inoperable.'

Veronica nodded as if Elizabeth was doubting her.

‘Poor woman,' she murmured.

Poor Julian, too. It was hard to reconcile the show he was giving with the shock of losing his wife like that. But who was to say that there were inappropriate ways of dealing with devastation? Elizabeth was uncomfortable discussing either of them at his table. She tried to change the subject but Veronica was oblivious.

‘She was tough, though – make no mistake. She left her husband for him. She persuaded him to move to France and went out to work as a secretary so that he could write all day. She wanted him and nothing was going to stop her.'

Veronica's attitude was a strange cocktail of admiration
and anger. She was drinking rapidly. She could have been trying to emulate Simone. Her words slurred into a hiss: ‘He must have been worth it.'

Hours later, Julian was still going strong. He had barely glanced in her direction. Elizabeth slipped out. She could not get round the table to where Adie was sitting with his back to the mirrored wall, and she could not catch his eye, so she raised her hand to say thanks and goodnight. No one noticed.

Just as he said he would be, Clive was waiting for her at the Hellenic Club.

‘Thank you,' she said, meaning for all his many kindnesses, not just that night.

He put down the glass of brandy she knew he would have nursed for hours.

‘How was it?'

‘Interesting. I'm glad I went.'

Perhaps it was the defiance with which the words came out that ensured Clive asked no more. She sat back in the passenger seat of the car. The scene in the restaurant played in her head all through the dark cinema of the drive back to Kouloura.

‘YOU IGNORED ME!'

Elizabeth gasped at the injustice. ‘What?'

Fat droplets of water rolled out of her hair and down her arms. Still out of breath after her swim off the rocky beach, and the climb up the path, she stopped abruptly and took in the group sitting under the idleness tree: Clive and Mary, a man she did not recognise, and Julian Adie, who had more accusations to fling.

‘Never even said goodnight!'

From the soft shade, they all stared at her, exposed in her bikini in the fierce afternoon sun.

‘I'm sorry, I—'

But he was grinning at her.

‘Here's a wrap for you, dear,' said Mary pointedly, tossing a gauzy garment from the back of a chair. ‘Cup of tea?'

Elizabeth accepted both.

She turned to Adie, uncertain what she was expected to say, but he got in first.

‘Actually, I've come to apologise to you.'

‘Oh?' She was conscious that everyone else was listening. ‘There's no need . . .'

‘On the contrary. Last night – I simply had no idea until it was too late that my brother and assorted company would take upon themselves to follow me to my favourite restaurant and take over the entire event, completely unbidden, and scooping up undesirables on the way . . . It was appalling, quite appalling. And then I looked up and you had gone – and quite rightly too.'

‘Well, I—'

‘You will give me another chance, won't you?'

‘Another chance?'

Elizabeth did not know what to say. She was not aware that a previous chance had existed.

‘You are awfully pretty, and very intelligent too. You might take pity on me.'