Songs of Blue and Gold (41 page)

‘Did you stay longer at the party?'

Theodora grimaced. ‘I stayed till the end. I was trying to punish Giorgios.'

‘In her diary, Elizabeth wrote that the last she saw of him that night was when he ran back to Nissaki saying he would raise the alarm. But did he? Did you see whether Julian Adie came back at all?'

She was thinking of the passage in
The Carcassonne Quartet
– the man and two women at the rock pool. How upsetting she had found it because it might have been true. Elizabeth must have thought that too, else why would she have marked the passage so furiously?

‘Oh, yes. Adie came back.'

‘On his own? My mother – Elizabeth wasn't with him?'

‘He was on his own.'

‘You're sure?'

Theodora nodded vigorously. ‘He
burst
back in, all puffed out – shouting for help: the
bloody
woman was in the water! We all knew without asking who he was talking about, not Elizabeth. He was going out in his boat to search, and he wanted to get the fishermen out looking too. As far as the party went, it was a dramatic ending – and after we thought we'd already had the fireworks . . .'

‘But it was too late by then . . .'

‘He didn't give any indication that's what he thought. He was trying to organise everyone. We streamed down to the jetty. Those with boats started them up. Others took the path. Make no mistake – we all did as much as we could.'

‘Did you ever think there was anything suspicious about the way he was behaving?'

‘No.'

Melissa smiled. Relief released the tightness across her shoulders.

‘Well, not at the time,' said Theodora.

‘Not at the time?' Melissa's heart sank again. She had been so sure that her mother had been right to believe in Adie, that she had not been such a terrible judge of character after all.

Theodora shrugged. ‘Well, all sorts of things came out about Julian Adie after that, didn't they?'

Melissa was leaving when she remembered to ask. ‘Do you know the local Medusa myth?'

‘Now you're asking . . .' Theodora demurred. ‘Why?'

‘Adie referred to Poseidon and Medusa in something he wrote later.'

Theodora rearranged the baubles hanging from her neck. ‘I can't remember. But I know where you can find Medusa in Corfu, though – in the archaeological museum. Why don't you ask Alex?' she asked. ‘He'll know.'

Melissa shook her head sadly. ‘I've asked him quite enough.'

‘Go and see the Medusa then.'

Melissa walked slowly down the drive to the taxi waiting beyond the gates. Seeing Theodora again really was the end of the trail. But then, on a whim as she got into the car, she asked the driver to take her into Corfu Town.

The Archaeological Museum was on the waterfront.

As she walked through the great doors Melissa felt enervated, coshed by too much coffee and yet more information that never quite yielded an answer. Inside the museum the atmosphere was hardly less close than outside. Few other visitors drifted through the high-ceilinged rooms.

She asked for directions, but the mother of the Gorgons was easy to find.

The Medusa was enormous. Squat on furious taut muscled legs, the stone monster was more than life-size;
the central motif, flanked by two supercilious lions, claws drawn, of a great stone pediment from the Doric temple to Artemis dated 570BC. Angry hissing snakes formed a belt around her waist and swung from her hair. But time had amputated her hands and eroded the menace of her expression. The face, with its bulging eyes and mad grimace, the wrecked, pitted mouth and obscene poking tongue supposed to turn a man to stone was now a diminished mask, its bite and horror blunted.

Melissa stood back, taking it all in.

‘You asked about the Medusa myth.'

She spun round. It was Alexandros.

‘How did you—?'

‘The Medusa has several histories,' he said, ‘and no one can say for certain which is the true story. One is that she was the victim of a ritual murder, fully, er, sanctioned by the gods on Mount Olympia, the ghastly deed carried out by Perseus using the helmet of invisibility from Hades and a scimitar to slice off her head.

‘In another version, it is Athena who ordered her death, because she wanted the powerful head for her own purposes. Same method, however . . .'

His voice was soft, confiding the fables like secrets, the sense of time passing, of improbable tales, beating heat and brightness. The air between them seemed charged.

‘But you might like this one better. According to a poem by Hesiod, she was entranced by Poseidon's waves of blue-black hair, and allowed him to . . . seduce her in the dark depths of the sea. One of the children of this union was Pegasus the winged horse.'

‘Why are there so many versions?'

‘No one knows. Perhaps they are all parts of the same story, incoherently understood.'

‘Maybe . . .' she murmured.

‘Or perhaps, the ancients knew how to look beneath the story, and to understand that the Medusa was a lunatic, and the fear she inspired was the fear of losing one's own mind.'

The crazed rictus grin. The great bug eyes. The sinister snakes poised to attack on her chest where the pressure builds. Now Melissa could see it. She felt the skin over her own face tighten.

‘So . . . the severed head then . . .?'

‘Emphasises where the problem lies, and how its effects must be cut from the body. Yes, that could well be the most plausible explanation.'

A figure of pathos, then; instead of a laughable ogress.

‘In all the ancient beliefs, snakes were the symbols of renewal for the skin they could shuck off and regrow. So now the serpents are no longer weapons primed for attack but an emblem of hope.'

‘We see what we want to see,' murmured Melissa.

They stood quietly for a few minutes.

‘Are you all right?' he asked as they walked out of the room.

Melissa nodded, exhausted suddenly. ‘Thanks, that was kind of you. But how did you know I would be—' She stopped as she worked it out, feeling stupid for being so slow. ‘Theodora.'

His eyes softened. ‘She called me. I had already spoken to her – she knew I was here today.'

‘She told me to come here,' said Melissa.

A pause.

‘I'm driving back to Kalami now. Would you like to come with me?'

‘Yes, please.'

In the car, he was as quiet as she was.

‘What are you going to do the rest of the afternoon?' she asked eventually.

‘I'm going to take my boat out. I might want to swim.'

The thought of cold water on her body made her long for the sea.

‘Could I come too?'

Alexandros collected her at the jetty on Kalami beach. His boat was sharp and sleek, an old-fashioned cutter with a scrubbed wooden deck.

Out on the water she could see the fabled indigo and gold of the Ionian, sparkling on the swell. The lush greens of the headlands. The brown smudged hills of Albania. You could half-close your eyes and imagine the scene had never changed.

He was using the engine – they would not be going far. On the edge of Yaliscary bay, she mentally saluted the flat yellow rock where she had sat for so many hours the previous year.

‘Do you want to stop here?'

‘No . . . go on further.'

Alexandros waved as they passed the little row of tavernas at Agni. A figure on the forecourt of the middle one waved two wide arcs in return.

‘I know where I'd like to go,' she said quietly.

He was expressionless. He understood, though. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes.'

The boat cut through the water, its roll long and smooth.

She sat at the prow as they passed the rocky headlands where the tides nibbled and fretted at the stony land. And there it was: the shrine at the base of the cliff, perched on its strange frozen waves of rock. She remembered with a pang how she felt when she had driven herself in Manolis's hire boat. The shrine was just as it had been; it was as if the year might not have passed. It was just a funny little hut. But where then it had been charged only with her curiosity and longing to understand, now it was full of meaning, new layers of experience and knowledge.

Melissa did not care if the water was deep and cold at the base of the cliff. She was going to swim. A new, expensive snorkel mask would ensure she saw it all clearly. She had done this so many times in her imagination.

Alexandros anchored about five metres away from the rocks.

‘Will you come in?' she asked.

‘I'll wait here. I like sitting in the boat – it's good thinking time. Take as long as you want, I don't mind.'

Any embarrassment she might have had about exposing herself in a swimsuit in front of him was overridden by the intense need to do this. Besides, she was grateful he was there, for many reasons, not the least of them practical. Splashing into the water would be easy, but it would be hard, maybe even impossible, for anyone to grapple their way back up into the boat alone.

She lowered herself into the water, braced for iciness. It was warm as a bath. Buoyant and comfortable, she struck out for the green shallows ahead. Black ribbons of seaweed were satin caresses on her legs as she swam over them.

Inside the pool of jade and turquoise, the water was clear as glass. Six feet down, the floor of white pebbles sparkled. She could see the blood-red cherries pulsing on the stones, and Grace Adie's sudden graceful dive, effervescence on her brown outstretched arms as she swooped down to harvest them. And Elizabeth, decades later, young and euphoric in her fantasia, kicking her legs while Adie flicked and turned like a fish, splashing sea sequins.

Somewhere to the left of her was the cave with the shelf where the statue to Pan once stood – perhaps it stood there still.

Now the pool was hers. There was nothing bad here, only the silky salt of the sea on her skin. She had no idea how long she floated there. It was a whole world, a real world and a dream world. The sea that rocked a child to sleep. There was a fleeting moment, like a sudden play of light on the sea bed, when she felt she understood it all: how we all brought our past to present experience; how chronology is irrelevant to our own tiny histories. The past mattered. It manipulated and controlled us, just as the ancient gods once did. All was clear, just as Adie had said.

Back in the boat, Alexandros was waiting.

She swam back, reinvigorated yet calm. High on the bobbing boat he was impassive. When she reached the ladder he bent forward and took her hand, pulling her up smoothly despite their slippery connection. Suddenly waking up to her near nakedness with him, she grappled for a towel.

But while she was in the water he had stripped off his shirt.
There was no inequality between them. So she let the wind dry her, as the boat tipped gently at anchor.

‘Thank you – again. That was wonderful. Do you want to swim now?'

‘I have done.'

She hadn't seen him, not a splash or ripple.

‘I didn't notice.'

‘I called to you but you didn't hear me either. Are you OK – do you want to go back?'

She shook her head. It was perfect. It was the present, the vibrantly alive and happy present and she wanted to stay in it.

They sat for a while in silence, watching the light dapple the swell.

‘I love it here,' he said. ‘When I'm away this is what I miss.'

The sea sighed and crumpled on the pebbled rim of beach.

‘I've become a fatalist,' she said. ‘Since I found that book.'

Citrus-scented, a breeze danced lightly in the air between them. His voice was soft and low, barely rising above a murmur. She had to lean in towards him across the boat to catch the words.

‘Good decision.'

It was too soon, their bond was too newly born and fragile to say what she now believed: that happiness is simply a feeling that anything is possible.

The coast burned red and orange, then the sunset left the boat adrift in a purple luminescence. Under the magic lantern, the sea seemed black. They rocked on darkness. Neither suggested going back to shore.

Wavelets sucked at the hull. In the quiet, suspended in a vast cloud of colour, the hills all around rose protectively.

‘I've thought of you often,' he said.

‘I've thought of you too.'

‘But then . . . I could do nothing. I – it seemed too difficult. There was never a good time for us. It seemed it was not meant to be.'

Birds wheeled above. The scrubbed deck was bone white in the strange light, the wood still warm under the backs of her bare legs. She did not feel cold, just faintly shivery.

She was shy of putting into words the way he had saved her from herself and the constraints her mother's story had so subtly imposed on her choices. How, after he had left her at St Cyrice, she had wanted him so ferociously that every olive tree, every crumb of red earth, every black hill crinkling in the distance was a reminder of Corfu, by which she meant him, Alexandros. How she had so gradually built up her own understanding on the bulwark of knowing that a man like him existed, even if she carried him only in her mind. So faint was the hope that she hardly knew it was there.

Melissa moved closer and put one hand over his.

For a few seconds, as they touched, she could feel the unheard creak of rock as layers settled, the shiver of the cypresses so close on the rocky shore, the soft hollows of the dimpled hills, sense the ripe grapes popping on the vine, see the nacreous sheen in the white morning sunlight, hear the clock of the sea.

This was when it was hard, being older, wary of taking a risk. Being too full of other stories.

He took his hand away, and it felt as if the tide had receded, leaving her stranded with burning cheeks. Then his touch on one shoulder, tentative yet infinitely reassuring. It was too
dark to see the colour of his eyes, only the contours of his face. She leaned towards him and felt his breath in her hair.