Songs of Blue and Gold (6 page)

‘Why did you do it then?'

‘Because . . . because I'm an idiot! I've been a bastard, a stupid bastard.' He held both arms out, half in supplication, half in honesty.

There was a moment when she could so easily have closed
the distance between them and reached out too. She longed to feel his arms around her, the softness of his lips. Seconds elapsed and she stayed where she was.

Her mobile rang.

She answered it, listened and hardly spoke. When the conversation was over, Richard came closer.

‘What's wrong?' he asked.

ELIZABETH DIED SUDDENLY
of pneumonia in the nursing home on 5 October.

The following afternoon, Melissa stood on the bridge where the two rivers met not far from her mother's house. A turquoise kingfisher darted like a bullet down the river. A few flashy seconds and it was gone, leaving only a stab of remembered brilliance.

Julian Adie could hardly believe his luck when he met Grace Heald at a party in Soho, still less when she swiftly became his partner. She was tall and languid, angular and with jutting cheekbones, considered a beauty. Ever ambitious, sexually as much as socially, he set out to win her and succeeded in less than four hours. He was twenty to her twenty-two.

What was Adie's appeal to Grace? Like him, she was trying to kick against convention, though she was gentle where he could be bombastic. She was surprisingly shy for all the attention she received. Perhaps she admired his self-confidence, the way he stood up so straight in company and held forth in such torrents of wit and amusing stories that his small stature was irrelevant.

They were an unlikely couple. She towered over him by almost a foot when she wore heels. But they shared the same passions and bohemian ideals. Both were rebelling against solidly middle-class backgrounds in a
social circle where creative ambition burned. Grace was an aspiring painter, who had studied at the Slade.

Soon they had set up home together: a bedsit in a house off the King's Road in Chelsea that was owned by one of her wealthy old school friends, the actress Jill Mayhew. Through Jill they socialised with the rich, and occasionally the talented, of their generation, like the then aspiring playwright Brian Gibbs, and actor Henderson Spinks.

But Adie was making little money. He supplemented his small private income by the tutoring he attempted in the late afternoons when he would rather have been at his typewriter, or preparing for a stint at the piano in one of the jazz clubs. He had also started to write seriously: mainly poetry and a novel. He made intensive studies of the Elizabethans, in particular Marlowe and Bacon. There was always a disciplined side to Adie. During the days when he was not working, he would spend up to ten hours at the British Library, reading and making notes. He felt keenly his lack of a formal university education and was determined to make up the shortfall. It was around this time that he forged what was to be a lifelong friendship with Peter Commin, then an assistant at the prestigious bookshop Sandwood's in Chelsea, later to be his bibliographer.

In January 1935, Adie and Grace moved to the country, to the rural hamlet of Poundsbridge near Tunbridge Wells in Kent where he imagined they would both be able to work in peace. Despite the glorious walks
to nearby Penshurst with all its Elizabethan resonances and associations with Ben Jonson and Philip Sidney, even here, the young couple felt constrained, constantly suffering from colds, surrounded by the damp claustrophobia of their cottage walls. The experiment was not a success.

A friend had gone to Corfu, an island so far off the north-west coast of Greece that part of it faced Albania. Edward Lear had lived and worked in the light and heat there in the mid-1800s. ‘Come,' urged the letters. So they did.

They took a packet boat from Tilbury, ploughing across the Bay of Biscay in the first week of March 1935. Grace's parents were horrified at how far their beautiful and clever daughter had thrown in her lot with the louche and prospect-less Adie. The situation was barely improved by the news that this was a respectable passage: the Adies had been pronounced man and wife on 28 February by the registrar at Bournemouth, where his family had set up home. They had not been invited to the ceremony. It was not so much a secret wedding, as a fuss-free occasion, in the same manner as the passports had been arranged and tickets purchased with the last of that month's allowance from their respective families.

In Italy, there was a delay. A letter to the family back in Wimborne Road, Bournemouth reads, ‘
We are stuck on the docks with nothing but pennies for cigarettes and wine, waiting for some mischief-makers in Brindisi to settle
their differences with the ship owner before we can board for the final push across the Ionian . . . we are short-tempered but managing to ration our arguments along with any unrealistic hopes. Our first marital test – G. wants either a bed for the night or an immediate divorce. I told her this is a Catholic country and she has Burned Her Bridges!!
'

When they finally arrived in Corfu they stayed for three weeks with Paddy and Bridget Williams at the Villa Limoni near Perama – it was Paddy's letters that had lured them – then struck out north to find somewhere wild and remote in which to write and paint.

At Kalami, they found rooms to rent in a fisherman's house. It was always known while they lived there as Prospero's House, but he called it the White House in his first major literary success,
The Gates of Paradise
.

Adie was to write ever after that he lived a peasant's life in Corfu: he fished with the fishermen; he toiled in the olive groves; he was a picker of oranges and kumquats. If that was not strictly true (he soon made friends with the island aristocracy and caroused in convincing imitation of a leisured and wealthy expatriate in Corfu Town) this was a time of simple pleasures and sunshine.

Photographs of the time show his blond hair bleached almost white, his beguiling grin triumphant above an octopus caught on a trident, or fish grilling on a beach fire; while Grace is almost always serene, smiling thoughtfully at the horizon from a jetty or a balcony as if she is keeping a delicious secret to herself.

The sea was the bluest he had ever seen, shot through
with veins of gold. ‘
We plunge into lapis lazuli, molten by the sun
,' he wrote to his old friend Peter Commin back at the bookshop in Chelsea, ‘
and emerge dripping with bright diamonds
.' He and Grace developed a passion for nude swimming. Adie was working hard, brimming with ideas; Grace was painting confident gaudy canvasses inspired by the lushness, the rocks, the cobalts and aquamarines of the Ionian. It was an idyll which neither ever forgot – nor from which he ever recovered, according to some who knew him in that ‘period of perfection'.

And why should he not have presumed he had reached the gates of paradise? (It was typical Adie that he just hedged his bets: he was at the gates, but not quite inside . . .) He was young, lusty, fired with enthusiasm and ambition, heady with his first serious attempts at writing both poetry and prose, and perhaps most importantly, he was deeply in love with a beautiful young wife who shared his ideals.

ALONE SMALL BOAT
skimmed into Kalami bay from the south. The splutter of its outboard motor grew louder. Soon it was close enough to make the two men on board visible. As they nosed towards the stone landing stage at the White House, the younger stood up with a rope and ran off the front of the craft and on to the mooring with no break in his stride. He tied the boat up, amid shouting. The other gesticulated at Melissa. She turned away. In another life she might have tossed back a choice remark. It was a moment before she realised the older man was Manolis, her temporary landlord. The men unloaded some boxes from the boat, and threw some soft bags on to the stone landing stage.

Manolis shouted something else unintelligible, this time directed at her.

She closed the book and walked a few steps closer. ‘Sorry?'

‘How is the apartment? Is OK?'

‘Oh . . . yes. Fine, thank you.'

‘You are coming to the taverna? Tonight is very good swordfish!' He grinned engagingly.

She couldn't decide. What if her need for kindness had
become too great, if her friends had been right, that it was too soon after the funeral to be making this trip? Perhaps it was better to remain alone, to read and sleep through the pain, until she could accept it with a degree of self-control. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself by a tear slipping down at a friendly smile or a glass of undrinkable retsina on the house.

‘Where is it?' she asked eventually.

He frowned then raised his hands to encompass the front of the White House. ‘Here, of course!'

‘Here?'

‘Yes!' shaking his head at her idiocy.

Water slurped at the rocks between them. There was no way forward on foot.

‘Take the little path,' he shouted, pointing behind. ‘Come round that way!'

How could she not go after that?

At the side of the house was a small paved area, where some washing still hung. A few beach toys lay abandoned in a corner, along with fishing nets and a pile of old wooden planks that seemed to suggest some renovations were under way. At the front, a short flight of stairs led up to a front door on the storey above. As she walked round she could see that to the right of this was a grey marble plaque. In Greek, then English, the engraved words announced: ‘
In this house lived the famous writer Julian Adie, 1935–39
.' She could not see any lights on inside. She stood for a few minutes trying to let imagination take over, to picture him as a young man bounding up those steps, but no magic happened.

A sign for Prospero's Taverna beckoned her round the far corner and down towards the rocks and sea again.

The restaurant's vine-covered canopy had been reinforced by a covering of stout canvas, and plastic sheeting had been let down all along the sea wall to take the chill off outdoor dining. She knew from the books – Adie's biography, as well as his own account – that this was the old terrace garden. She was actually in the place she had come to see, immediately and effortlessly. Only two tables were occupied. She began to see why Manolis was so keen to lure her in to eat.

A young waiter with a quiff of curly hair and a loud patterned jumper gave her a choice of any table along the sea wall. She took the one furthest away in the corner, ordered a small carafe of white wine, and chose the swordfish.

She ate listening to the waves as the night closed in and a fat moon rose. Now and then, ships passed beyond the bay, decks blazing like illuminated honeycomb. With no lights shining from the dark country opposite to provide a reference point, they might as well have been flying though the black sky.

Apart from the waiter when he served her order, she spoke to no one. It was a relief. She did not want to be drawn into any conversation, to have to pull a curtain over the truth, nor to find herself lying to strangers. It was good to be there without having to provide explanations and justifications. Not to find herself replaying her circumstances, nor why she was here alone.

How would you ever make idle chit-chat of it?
No, my husband will not be joining me, work or no work. And my mother, who loved me and could once have explained everything, has gone for ever. When I needed to go away, this was the one place that crept into my mind, that made any sense.

Melissa stared out into the infinite-night sea and sky. There were so many questions, and she was oddly grateful for that, for the harness they provided to contain the sadness which was of such intensity she could hardly let herself feel it.

It was better to be on her own. Richard had been kind the past few weeks, but it had been a bad idea to agree to his suggestion of coming with her. She had changed her mind as soon as his name was on the booking form.

All she wanted was some time alone.

As she was leaving, the waiter took up a look-out position at the edge of the restaurant and trained a pair of binoculars on to a point on the beach. Whatever it was he could make out, he was studying it intently.

The next morning dawned yellow and peach. Sky fire was rising behind the hills across the bay. The headlands reached out dark arms to embrace it, a miraculous stillness all around. From the narrow balcony of the Prospero Apartments, Melissa watched the sun come over the lumpy red horizon until a glittering golden path led across the water to her hand on the rail. When at last she looked away and blinked, spangled circles were imprinted on her vision like a slew of gold coins.

Below, the village was a necklace of low buildings along the narrow shore road. To the left was an ugly hotel complex on the hillside. On that side the headland was colonised by large villas. But to the right, the steep slope up was verdant and untouched, the headland a mass of olive and cypress. There, where the green joined the blue, secured together by rock and beach, the White House was still the most prominent
building. The village of the past was still embedded there despite the cruel disfigurements of modern development. It could have been much worse – certainly, Melissa had been prepared for far worse.

But in this craggy northern part of the island the road corkscrewed tightly down from the main highway, cutting into the side of Mount Pantokrator. There were three beach tavernas but not much else to lure the coaches of mass tourism.

Maybe in high summer the crowds and the heat and the raucous drunken mating calls of the young would make it less than the paradise it seemed that morning, but just then she was happy and glad to be there, with no past or future thoughts, standing now on the balcony, gazing at the sea as its colours deepened into azure and cobalt. She had never seen such blue.