Songs of Blue and Gold (35 page)

One night he takes Elizabeth to a party given by the Swiss architect Ivo Swarbach. It is a bad move. As soon as they arrive they come face to face with a quarrelsome Veronica Rae. Guests have been exhorted to ‘
Dress with Abandon
' but even so she stands out from the crowd, a bony figure in a column of silver sequins.

At one point, fuelled no doubt by quantities of alcohol, Adie and Veronica engage in a loud argument. It is a classic of its kind; the company falls silent and listens. The public spat is played out in front of dozens of witnesses. A slap rings out – Veronica has struck him hard and humiliatingly. Elizabeth runs to his aid, screaming abuse at her rival. Julian Adie has to be restrained from retaliating. For he would hit a woman, let there be no doubt about that. It would not be the first time, nor the last. A few minutes later, all three of them have left the party.

It is the last reported sighting of Veronica Rae alive.

What happened next has long been the subject of intense speculation. The published facts are few but what is certain is that Veronica Rae's body was found on one of the tiny empty beaches south of Kassiope by fishermen two days after the Swarbach party.

When I began my investigations at Kalami it was with the intention of subjecting text to the closest scrutiny, remarrying Adie's words to the landscape as it were. I wanted to see for myself the St Arsenius shrine, intrigued for some time by the fact that after 1968, Julian Adie never wrote another poem or lyrical passage about the place of his iconic rebirth. In interviews Adie gave subsequently, whether in print or in radio and television conversations, this fulcrum of his idealism was never again mentioned. All questions were blanked. Why?

The abrupt abandonment of what had been Adie's thematic heart, so crucial to understanding him as a man and an artist, pointed to a seismic shift which warranted detailed investigation beyond the texts.

It was not long before my enquiries in the locality took a disquieting turn. Not only did people remember Julian Adie but they spoke about him as if he were still among them, as if events which had taken place decades previously were still newly-minted.

I put to them his name, the location and the dates. What emerged from all these separate conversations, with only slight variation of detail, was a single unsettling story. In the centre of it were Julian Adie and a drowned woman.

In the days after Veronica Rae's body was discovered, police interviewed the host and party guests as well as the wider expatriate community. With no evidence to the contrary, they rapidly – perhaps too rapidly –
concluded their investigations with the declaration that the death was not suspicious. Accidental drowning while under the influence of painkilling drugs and alcohol, was expected to be the official verdict, and indeed was reported as such in the local expatriate newspaper, which also – extraordinarily – declined to mention Adie's name in connection with the incident. In fact, the verdict was left open.

Astonishingly, there is no record that the police ever interviewed Adie. Furthermore, he was allowed to leave the island a few days later. Neither was Elizabeth Milne interviewed by police.

My researches, however, have cast serious doubt on the presumption of both Julian Adie and Elizabeth Milne's innocence in Veronica Rae's death. But by the time the body had been released to the Rae family, the two key witnesses had fled, in Adie's case at least, never to set foot on Corfu again.

Elizabeth Milne changed her name on marriage soon after, becoming known under her married name of Elizabeth Norden as a London-based landscape painter (again, in a curious echo of Grace Heald) and relieving herself of any lingering connection to a suspicious death in a foreign country.

On the island, the stories persisted.

The three of them were seen that night on the rocks by the little chapel of St Arsenius.

Kosmidis Patronas was a boy of twelve who had been taken out by his uncle, a night fisherman. He has no doubt that the two women and a man he watched from the fishing caique with its acetylene lamps were Julian Adie, Veronica Rae and Elizabeth Milne. He put the time at about ten thirty. His evidence at the time was not taken seriously because of his age and the fact that he was a summer visitor himself – from Thessaloniki – and therefore his grasp of local geography was not deemed sufficiently reliable. It should be noted too, that as a stranger he had no knowledge of Julian Adie nor reason to be gratefully loyal to him as were so many of the villagers of Kalami and Agni.

Now an electrical engineer, Patronas has never changed his story. He stands by his identification of the figures he saw from the boat. The scene was lit by a searchlight moon, and he remembered the distinctive blond hair of the strong stocky man, and the long blonde hair of the younger woman.

But most vividly of all, he recalls the silver dress worn by Veronica Rae, catching the light like the sparkling scales on a fish as it turns in the water. She was upright on the rock. She was not swimming, nor did she show any sign that she was about to go swimming.

They were almost round the headland when he heard a scream. His uncle held the caique on its course. When asked, he said he had not heard anything. After a while Kosmidis thought he must have imagined it.

The most important and startling evidence, however, is provided by Marina Dandola. It was she who cleaned the olive press after Adie had left in a hurry and discovered the mess of papers along with the empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. Some of the papers had been burned. Others were ripped through and defaced. But there remained about twenty that were legible, if stained and screwed up. She could not read them, but she was canny enough to know that Adie's golden touch might make them worth something one day.

After all, Manos Kiotzas had sold several manuscript pages given to him by Adie on his departure from the White House at the outbreak of war. The high price they fetched after Adie became famous had bought the first boats that he hired to tourists.

But these sheets were half-finished, then half-destroyed. No one wanted them. So she kept them, never entirely losing hope that one day they might come into their own to her benefit.

A title page had been neatly typed yet the poems were stillborn: phrases and words that were never published, never carved and polished by Adie into his
Songs of Blue and Gold
. And there was a simple reason they could never be put before the public. As I will show, they can be read as his confession.

Finding my mother's account was a shock, not least because I had been so certain there were no papers.

The notebook, originally a painter's sketch book with extra papers stuck in, was bound tight with a thick elastic band to hold it all together. The closely scribbled pages of tiny writing were sometimes hard to decipher. It was oblique in places, but for the most part remarkably honest. Some of it was uncomfortable reading for a daughter. But this much was clear: Dr Braxton, for all that his intentions had made me wary, had discovered before I had a devastating episode in my mother's life. In many ways, it was the defining event of her life and one from which she never entirely recovered.

He was right too about the existence of papers, papers of a kind I would never have expected to find. I was astonished, and profoundly discomfited, to find verbatim records – or as near as could be – of her
conversations with Julian Adie in Corfu, preserved as if she did not want to forget them, wanted to be able to reconstruct them afterwards. They were dated May to August 1968. Reading these pages was like eavesdropping. The intimacy was unsettling, but my need to know overrode any other consideration. Her observations were raw fragments, like shattered pottery still caked with earth in the archaeologist's hand.

Letters, too. A folder of them, some written but never sent; others postmarked and returned.

The biographer comes to the aftermath like a guest too late for the banquet, to the disembowelled birds and spilled wine and crumbs, then has to find a way of gathering the leftovers and reconstructing them so that all the pieces make sense. It is a delicate business. The memories of those who were there might be unreliable, or coloured by previous slights and arguments. At any rate, the picture built up piecemeal is only ever a construct of the biographer's imagination, even when worked by the purest of motives.

We all want wholeness, for the narrative to have a clear momentum followed by conclusion. But what we are faced with is constant revision and reinterpretation, as subsequent versions of the story come to light. And the writer of a new biography must necessarily find something new to say, must be in the business of recreating a life, for better, for worse, and for his own purposes.

I would not have begun this endeavour had it not been for Dr Martin Braxton. At first I was simply trying to discover the truth about one episode in my mother's life because I thought it would help me to know her better, because she had seemed to be telling me something that she wanted me to understand. Then, later, it became my duty to ensure that she was fairly represented in the light of Dr Braxton's published work.

All successful biographers need a source of new material and a piece of good luck. Dr Braxton had his piece of biographer's luck when he was approached by Hero Adie's friend Megan Venner with private papers which contained the astonishing allegation that Julian Adie had been party to a suspicious death.

According to Braxton's published account, he detected the story in a scholarly manner from Adie's own literary works. He fretted away at the texts, eager to know why Julian Adie never wrote another poem or lyrical passage about the blue sea and the shrine where he was ‘reborn', why he would never speak about it after the summer of 1968.

He presents himself as the academic reading between the lines, making his wide-ranging assumptions, becoming the biographer. Decades after the events he describes and distorts, he is peering into the gaps, the evasions, the edited leaps, like a caver shining his torch into the tiny crevices and crinkles of rock, making tiny temporary circles of light deep underground.

What he found in Kalami was perfect for his purposes: a collection of unfinished poems.

No previous biographer (nor Julian Adie himself for that matter) had written about Elizabeth even as an unnamed shadow. In any published account of his life, she was not even a footnote. Gradually the truth of her presence has been established, teased from the dust and rubble of a literary reputation.

Now I am writing her into Julian Adie's story. It is a personal account, of course, but true to her, I hope, and her version of events.

 

- 1968 -

 

On her return to England from Corfu in the late summer of 1968, Elizabeth wrote to Adie, care of his publishers in London. She was cautious in her choice of phrasing, but made it plain that she needed him to contact her.

Veronica Rae was dead. To Elizabeth, that knowledge was crushing. The weight of evidence was surely that her death was a tragic accident, caused by her own reckless behaviour and instability. But was Adie's continued refusal to acknowledge Elizabeth a sign that they – as the last people to see her alive – had greater reason to feel guilty?

For Elizabeth did feel guilty. She and Julian Adie were implicated. She had provoked Veronica by sending the
note over to her at the party, knowing that the woman was stupidly drunk, wanting to hurt her. Adie had been with her when she went into the water.

He was the only person she could talk to. ‘
And if he would not, that could only mean that there was something that must remain unsaid
,' she wrote. ‘
What happened that night that was so much worse than I first thought?
'

Several weeks elapsed before he replied, in the briefest terms. His letter was polite, and claimed pressure of work. He did not suggest they meet again, but asserted he would remember their time together with pleasure. He wished her luck for any exhibition she had in the future. It was friendly but it had the ring of finality about it. He answered none of her questions.

She kept the letter, but tried to forget about it.

Alone in the tiny bedsit she rented in Pimlico with an allowance from her parents (still concerned about her state of mind but relieved not to have to face the social complications of her return to the family home in Suffolk), Elizabeth buried herself in books: psychology, science, history and novels. She was glad not to have been summoned home but she could not paint; her hand trembled too much to hold a pencil to a line drawing. She felt weak when she ventured out and fainted one day on a bus. Her nerves were a constant susurration, never allowing her any peace. She was frightened; but what was she so scared of, all the time? What had happened that
night? Could she really have done any more than she did?

She began to rationalise that her present problems had more to do with her sense of guilt at a first, tiny, death – pushed right down inside until it turned rotten.

Elizabeth managed to haul herself to the bookshop on Victoria Street where she bought Adie's books, tearing through them looking for clues, searching for some insight.
The Colossus of the Rose
, his account of Rhodes and his post-war romance with L and their subsequent marriage, was so richly evocative it made her weep. She was too close; she was there with him in L's place as they walked in medieval darkness through the town in the months before the street lamps were restored, into the overgrown garden which holds the Mosque of Murad Reis, and into its deeper blackness, deeper quiet, among the broken Turkish tombstones. And later, in the course of another summer evening incursion, finding the tiny house at its heart, overrun by hibiscus.

She was there with him on the fallen gravestones while sunset trembled over the mosque's dome, rosy as the wine, the dry leaves of the eucalyptus cracking from the branch as they took flight, whirring through the soft scented air. She was L with her generous lips, and dark, darting eyes. She inhaled the musky sighs of flowers and tobacco smoke, a breath away from the dark crumbs of bone.