Songs of Blue and Gold (22 page)

I knew that. Of course I did. But there was something else that drew me to the Adies and more particularly to
his first wife Grace: the universal concerns of a woman on her own wondering what the rest of her life would hold after a shattered marriage. Perhaps I was beginning to obsess about Grace. But then, my mother too had attempted to find out more about her, searching for art books that reproduced her paintings and photographs. Why was that?

To all intents and purposes, Grace Heald disappeared from Adie's story when they divorced after the war. His official biography gives a touching account of their departure from Corfu in September 1939, their hands forced by the reality of their island exile. Grindlay's Bank in London warned that they would not be able to guarantee the transfer of funds during wartime, and the prospect of sitting out a prolonged conflict was bleak. No longer able to dismiss the rumours from abroad, they scrambled for tickets on a passage south to Athens, and subdued, they prepared to leave. Village women and children were gathering the grape harvest, while the fish swam free. The men had been sent to the mountains to prepare for defence. In calm waters like slabs of malachite, the viridescence streaked black with weed, mines were being laid. As unseasonable rain slanted down, Adie stood on his balcony watching the green-black sea, ‘
half-suffocated with grief
'.

In Athens Grace discovered she was pregnant. They
obviously felt that they both ought to do all they could to hold the marriage together, and for a while, in their new city home, it looked as if they might succeed. Certainly Adie tried harder to be an ‘old married man', and there was also the practical question to address of how to earn some real money in order to support a family. He achieved this under the auspices of the British Council, which found him useful teaching work as well as a part-time post using his new mastery of the Greek language as a journalist on what was effectively a pro-British propaganda publication.

Their daughter was born in May 1940 and they named her Artemis, after the goddess of the wild and of the hunt. ‘
She is a sweet darling, quiet and good with searchlights of sea blue for eyes. Grace is very tired but rightly full of her achievement in producing such an angel
,' he wrote to Peter Commin. The same letter hints that he may have been spending more nights in: ‘
I'm loath to trust the situation enough to send for my books, much as I would like to fill up a splendid array of bookshelves in this apartment. But could you send some of the Elizabethans? I am scribbling most evenings
.'

But he was still a carouser, given the chance. As he settled to his exile, Adie the inveterate talker and drinker soon found sympathetic company among his fellow expatriates and Greek circles opened for old friends from Corfu and Paris. By the summer of 1940, he was often to be found late in the bars and restaurants of the Plaka, the old quarter of Athens, with the rowdier writers and
poets to whom he always gravitated. Soon, with his openness and gift for friendship, he was at the heart of a hard-drinking literary set, a meeting of minds between Greek and Briton.

His wife may not have appreciated the resumption of his social life, but the friends he made in Athens would stand him in good stead when Greece fell in April 1941, and no doubt he excused his worst excesses on the grounds that he was providing them both with a security net of contacts.

But it seems Grace disagreed with his methods of assuring their future. In late 1940, she left, taking the baby with her – taking one of the few remaining routes home, via Turkey and Karachi. Evidently she preferred to take her chances on an appallingly difficult journey than remain with the volatile Adie in uncertain times.

His friend the writer and fellow British Council wordsmith Alan Maurice attests in his memoirs that the arguments between them had become increasingly ugly. Adie found Grace too malleable. He liked arguments; the verbal cut and thrust made him feel alive. She did not; discord only upset her. ‘
I need to feel the blood coursing
,' he told Maurice. ‘
All she ever wants is for me to calm down
.'

When she turned, sick of his behaviour, it was more unexpected to Adie than it was to anyone else. He still loved Grace deeply; there was no doubt about that. He never spoke a sour word about her afterwards. Grace, on the other hand, vowed never again to read a word he wrote.

It would be ten years before he saw his beloved Artemis again.

What fired me – still – was the end of that marriage, when they had been so happy. Clearly the all-encompassing sensual partnership he described in his book was at odds with reality. Equally clearly, he had adored her. But the problem was that there were only his biographies to go on. Her story went on in parallel but unrecorded. It piqued me that it was never properly explained what had gone wrong.

Adie and his great friend and correspondent, the equally libidinous Don Webber managed to reinvent themselves every few years, with a new wife, a new book, a new location. They seemed to accept the end of marriages with such
sangfroid.
Was this evidence of a capacity to control their emotions, or simply proof that those emotions had never run very deep in the first place? Did they never struggle, these romantic pragmatists, with the loss of hopes, of what had seemed like a future mapped out?

My interlude in Corfu seemed like a dream; but it had made Julian Adie become almost real to me. It was a strange magic, reading his words now I had seen his landscape for myself.

Not everyone agreed Adie was a good writer. Even
at the height of his fame, the critics had their ears tuned to his false notes. ‘His polymath's ambition allied to an adolescent need to shock' wrote one. ‘His brilliant glibness' was another excoriation. His characters were one-dimensional, they said – all mouths and monstrous egos, with emptiness at their core.

But did his flaws make him a bad man – or a more compelling one?

I made a list of his characteristics as I saw them from my reading of the biography and his own work: Earthy, intense, idealistic, curious, sceptical, cynical, arrogant, engaging, charismatic, generous, funny, brutal and selfish, loquacious, torrential, entertaining and infuriating.

All the critics point out that Julian Adie is an intensely autobiographical writer. He himself claimed his books contained all there was to know of him. Without ever specifying personal revelation, almost every piece reflects his experience or observations, and he can be charming. So much so that it is impossible to like his writing without feeling that you would enjoy his company as a person.

But there's a problem. Behind the charm and the garrulous sociability, the smooth articulacy, enthusiasms and vivacity is a blank. In his work, there is a contradiction between the solid, stocky physical presence and the elusive heart of the man. The more I looked, the more I realised I was looking for what he had left unsaid under the mesmerising lushness of his set pieces. And I came to realise that what I was searching for – his
smaller, authentic voice – was frequently absent. He revealed only what he chose to reveal about himself, often leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions. Perhaps this is the secret of Adie's success: the personality which so beguiles – on the page as in the taverna – is a work of personal interpretation according to our own needs, leaving only the impression of intimacy.

What was he to my mother and where did she fit into his story? It was hard to reconcile Elizabeth, so gentle and poised, so cautiously self-contained, with this adventuring cosmopolitan.

Corfu, 1968

‘
I HAVE A
disease called islomania,' Julian told her. ‘I am morbidly predisposed to love islands.'

And, he made clear, there were times when he needed to suffer alone. He would take the boat by himself and sail around the coast, or set off in his camper van revisiting old haunts. Or even try to work in the rooms above the olive press where he was staying. Elizabeth accepted his solitude as a necessary part of his grieving for Simone, although when she asked him, gently, about Simone he said nothing. If he did speak of his state of mind, it was usually in generalisations.

‘I should know by now that unhappiness passes,' he told her. ‘When I left here the first time, I'd never known such agony. But it can't last, not at that intensity.

‘When I went to Egypt, it was appalling. I'd lost everything, you see. My wife, my child. And Greece. I felt that very deeply, the loss of Greece, like part of myself. And loss was all around, successive waves of loss. I was attuned to it, you see, and I saw it, felt it, everywhere. From the tragedies
etched on the monuments, from outpourings from the ancient poets, from the faces of the wounded military as they were hurried on from the desert, to the startled eyes of the refugees as they disembarked in the harbours, astonished to find themselves there, astonished to find they had survived to be anywhere at all.

‘All the words, in all the languages, washed over like a tide, leaving their debris, the displacement and the unhappiness. But they were also eroding in infinitesimal ways all the sadnesses that had gone before.'

‘Have you ever been back to Egypt?'

‘No. Why would I? Ghastly place. Hated it.'

Elizabeth was surprised. ‘I think a lot of people would be shocked by that – to know that you hated it there.'

‘Why? It's completely irrelevant. What's on the surface is irrelevant. It's the strata underneath that interest me. You don't fall for a place because it looks fine, or hate it because it's a seething anthill of a shanty town, you make what you can out of what it
implies . . .
of the stories it tells, or seems to be telling, and how a place changes a person.

‘I had to stop fighting it for the city to appear. I had to stop the anger and reach down to pick up and feel the thick petals of frangipani, taste the grittiness of the cheap black windfall dates picked off the sand by the poor, and smell what was in the air: the sea salt and jasmine, the bruised tangerines and the dung. Then I found my way in.'

She was in awe of him: the way he talked, the effortless articulacy, the way he saw an inner life in geography. But neither was she blind to his faults. He had the habit of issuing an edict, then closing down the conversation when it ceased to suit him, she noticed.

The days on the boat, the moorings in deserted coves, an illicit trip across the water and to his old hunting ground: these would be just the two of them. Her skin was soon baked as brown as his. Elizabeth began to live for the telephone calls that told her to be at the jetty.

His light blue eyes were chips of quartz, hard and bright. ‘
He is a force of nature
,' she wrote in her journal. ‘
Quite unlike anyone else
.'

As the summer grew hotter, she came to know and anticipate the tides and contradictions of his behaviour. He claimed he could not write. ‘The words come like snails' coughs in February,' he said. Then a few days later he claimed he needed time alone in order to work. He wanted to spend days and nights with her, but always of his choosing.

Elizabeth went on walks of her own into the burning days, first finding different routes down through the olive groves to the sea, and then striking out into the hills over herb-scented scrub. She sketched, she took photographs and wrote on scraps of paper that she would stick in her diary when she returned, hot, dusty and thirsty, her limbs ever browner and tingling with the delicious ache of physical effort.

When they met he always questioned her closely about where she had been, what she had seen, what her impressions were. He had a way of making her feel as if it were a secret discovery between the two of them, the mapping of a world that lay just below the surface, invisible to anyone else.

She was strong and confident again. There was no doubt she was over David and the wedding debacle. It was far away
and long ago, and that was due to Julian Adie. Together they inhabited somewhere out of time, out of normal experience.

Evenings together would often begin in the Liston Bar in Corfu Town. Drinks would flow as his friends and acquaintances dropped by knowing they had a good chance of finding Adie there. Tourists would crane their necks wondering whether or not it might be him. Back-slapping bonhomie was his prevailing mood. But Elizabeth had witnessed by now how that mood could switch. While he rarely gave any outward sign of being drunk – his exuberance seemed natural; he was as engaging at eight in the morning after his breakfast swim – he drank continuously. So it seemed logical to blame the wine when blackness cut in as if a light bulb had popped.

On the periphery of several evenings was Veronica Rae. Some nights she arrived with friends and contented herself with her trademark stares from a separate table chosen, it seemed, to keep him in her sightline. Julian would occasionally raise his hand in greeting when she arrived but would otherwise ignore her.

‘How exactly do you know her?' Elizabeth asked. She knew she was being persistent on this issue, but the woman was disconcerting.

‘I think she came via Don Webber, somewhere along the line – Paris maybe.' He was in a soaring mood after a day rediscovering a near-deserted cove to the north. They had slept through the afternoon there, entangled and drugged on warm wine. ‘She's been hanging around a few months. She
might have been here in previous years. I can't remember.'

‘She gives you such looks!'

‘Does she?'

‘Of course she does. I can't believe you don't notice.'

‘I don't let it bother me.'

Elizabeth tried to do the same.

Then one evening Veronica came directly to their table. She was alone. Her hair was scraped back (in another hair band that matched her dress) in a way that accentuated the boniness of her little face and shadowed eyes. She jutted her chin at Elizabeth as she stopped. It was only six o'clock and the other chairs were empty.