The Pleasure Seekers (12 page)

There was guilt in his voice, guilt clearly imprinted on his face. D’Arcy could see that as policemen he and Manoussos must take the death seriously, consider every possibility. But why was everyone else? True, the scene that everyone had been privy to the last time they saw Arnold alive did sound dreadful, embarrassing, but what was so different about it from the other scenes the
two men had had over the years, and that none of them ever did anything about? Then it came to her . . . Melina. D’Arcy’s whole body went tense. She had to close her eyes and take several deep breaths, to quell the sickness she was feeling in the pit of her stomach. Finally she looked directly into Manoussos’s eyes. Her first question to him was, ‘Where is Mark?’

D’Arcy could see the relief in Manoussos’s face that at last she had figured it out and was asking the right questions.

‘Mark is in Athens. He left here just when he said he was going to, at six on the morning following the incident at the Kavouria.’

‘Does he know about Arnold?’

‘Melina called and told him, I know that from Max. He called Max to ask about the funeral arrangements and offer any help he could. Max said he sounded really upset. He arrives back here some time tomorrow.’

‘And Melina?’

‘She is here. She’s about the only one who is carrying on as normal. Her only comment on Arnold’s death was that he had at last drunk himself to death just as Mark had always predicted he would,
and
he did it owing her fifteen hundred drachma and his car which he’d promised her if and when he ever left the island for good.’

‘She’s a liar! Arnold would never have run up a debt with Melina, she wouldn’t have let him and he never owed money. And as for the car! Arnold would never lend it to her, never mind leave it to her. She covets that car, seeing it as a symbol of wealth and class. She sees
her lie as a way to get it. Probably only wants it for Mark anyway. Oh, the stupid girl.’

‘Don’t make any accusations, D’Arcy, you don’t know whether what she claims is true or not,’ said Laurence, looking very annoyed with her.

D’Arcy sensed his irritation, his calm, almost icy indifference, and she resented the fact that he could take the mysterious death of a friend with so little emotion. She knew Arnold’s death was affecting her on many levels, not least of which was having to face up to her own mortality. Was that not the way it must be affecting most everyone else in Livakia who had known Arnold and cared about him? Policemen or not, you could see the emotion in Manoussos’s and Dimitrios’s face. Why not Laurence’s?

As if he were picking up her thoughts he took her hand in his and said, ‘This has been a shock to us all. But we must not let it get on top of us.’

She knew he was right and nodded agreement, squeezing his hand and leaning forward to kiss him lightly on the lips, grateful for his being there and that he did at least understand her distress, not only for the death of a friend but for the circumstances of that death, whatever they might be.

‘Laurence is right about not letting this get on top of us, D’Arcy, and apropos of that, I have a favour to ask,’ said Manoussos. ‘I have got to get the town back to normal as soon as possible before breaches in friendships start erupting, petty grievances we all live with get blown out of proportion, and the village starts to turn into two camps, the foreign colony and the locals
– something we have never suffered here. And if, as I suspect, there has been foul play then blame will start coming into it and things will get much worse. I want you to get the foreign residents to come out of their houses and behave normally. The same long lunches at the Kavouria, the routine swimming and boating parties, the sitting round on the port drinking coffee, reading the newspapers, buying bread and bits and pieces, and gossiping. You too, Laurence. Why don’t we start by having some dinner at the Kavouria and you can tell me about your trip? Shall we say at nine?’

Laurence and D’Arcy walked in silence from the port to D’Arcy’s house, past shops that were open but empty and houses where, unusually, all the lights were on and entire families were at home. Strangely, D’Arcy found the early evening darkness particularly beautiful. Livakia was in a hot haze of dark pearly blue; the sky, filled with stars, shone a lighter shade and the moon had risen above the village, casting its light on the white houses, showing soft yellow in the incandescent lamp light. She had seen hundreds of early evenings like this one, some of them had even been shared with Arnold.

They were climbing the narrow lane that led to her house when D’Arcy stopped and told Laurence, ‘You know where the key to the gate is. Let yourself in and open the house. I’ll be right back.’ And before he could say anything she turned her back on him and ran down the lane.

D’Arcy’s closest neighbours were Cretans. One was a boat builder and his wife and their two handsome grown-up sons. They were friends; the sons often sat
and drank at the same table as D’Arcy, the mother on occasion had had her in for a meal, at the very least a snack at Easter. They had had good relations for as long as she could remember and yet when she and Laurence had just passed the house, the father and son had walked off the balcony where they had been sitting – a deliberate snub. Her other neighbour was the schoolmaster and his wife, and she had actually stepped behind a curtain to avoid a greeting. The boat builder’s door was the first one D’Arcy knocked at.

Twenty minutes later she pushed open her own gate. She was hot, she was tired, and she was sad. It hadn’t been easy but she had been determined and had won through. The schoolmaster and the entire family of boat builders had accepted her invitation to dinner at the Kavouria. D’Arcy’s rationale, that they were doing a disservice to Arnold and his death, as well as to themselves, by behaving as if he had caused a crime to take place and disrupt their happy little world, had appealed to their sense of fairness. She pointed out, rather bluntly, that fear was dividing neighbour from neighbour – so much so that they had forgotten that a man, a neighbour, had lost his life. When she asked them how they could allow fear to take them over, and insisted that was what it had to be because only fear or ignorance would have made them turn their back on her, and she knew them to be not at all ignorant but intelligent and kind people, she broke them down. There were misty eyes and profound apologies.

Walking through the first courtyard of her house, she looked up at it, the place she loved, cherished actually. It was large with inner courtyards and terraces on several
levels. Nearly every room had a different view of the sea. It was a house with good spirits in it, a happy house, and she never came home without appreciating it for what it was and the pleasure and peace and contentment that the place seemed to generate. It was a house that had not come easily to her, she had worked hard and long to earn the money to buy it, even harder to make it a perfect place of simplicity and beauty. It was as people said a work of art to live in, the same thing she had made of her life. It had actually been Max who had said that, Max who best understood and appreciated the house.

She could see a trail of lighted rooms that Laurence had walked through to her bedroom and her bath. She entered the hall: period white marble floors, a large double cube – the perfect room, so all artists and architects claimed. The ceiling twenty-five feet above her head was of open beams and the gallery surrounding it had doors off it leading to other rooms, giving the hall stature. It was incredibly cool here, a relief after the hot evening, and the tinkling sound of water was enchanting. She had brought the marble fountain set in the centre of the floor from Damascus along with period Damascene furniture: inlaid ivory and mother of pearl, huge mirrors and elegant chairs, chunky chests of drawers, some with Bombay fronts and rippling curves, others square and flat, a pair of slender settees and small charming tables, all of which she’d mixed with Greek Island period provincial pieces and rough white Haitian handwoven fabrics. There was also a collection of Bugatti furniture, Lalique glass, and ancient Greek sculpture. The paintings were spectral: Miro, Motherwell, Francis Bacon, nine Rothkos, all
of which Laurence disliked. He also disliked having a house with no more than one or two things in a room, the dining room and the kitchen being the only exceptions to the ‘less is more’ code that D’Arcy lived by.

She walked through the hall and down several steps to her studio. It was there she kept her drawing board, there where her office equipment was kept. A long fax was hanging from the machine but she paid no attention to it. She went directly to the telephone and called Max and then the Plums and Elefherakis. She made the calls short and to the point, and they all agreed to dine with her at the Kavouria, albeit reluctantly. Switching off the lights, she went from there directly to her bedroom, stripping her clothes off en route, anxious to steep herself in a long and luxurious bath.

D’Arcy’s bathroom was a large room, almost her favourite in the house. It was square and had a beige marble floor and three sets of windows, glass doors that went from the floor to the ceiling and led out on to a terrace overhanging the sea. The walls were a soft ivory colour, the bathtub many centuries old, deep, oval and long, of cream-coloured marble. It was a Greek artefact found in Turkey, and had already been drilled to let out water. Just below its elegant rim, a lovely deep curved lip, there were carved swags of acanthus leaves, obviously wrought by a master sculptor. It was fed from the mouth of a carved lion with a chipped nose and magnificent mane of black marble mounted on the wall above the tub. At the far side of the room, the entire wall was of beige marble and all ten feet of it was enclosed by a clear glass screen. That was the many recessed-headed shower
stall where at one end stood a white marble massage table: a two-inch thick slab on a pair of marble bases curved and ending in huge lion’s paws. It was more than a huge shower stall, it was D’Arcy’s mini-Turkish bath. A retired master of the art of Turkish massage had returned to live out the remainder of his life in Livakia where he was born. Most every week D’Arcy took advantage of his talents, as did a dozen other people in Livakia.

She sat down on an ivory chair in front of the marble table she used as her dressing table and broke down and cried. The sight of Laurence lying on the table, the shower playing over his body, reminded her of the times Arnold had been there to use the shower room for his Turkish bath. He was convinced that Andreas the masseuse was prolonging his life. Except for the drink, Arnold clung on tightly to his life, his beliefs. He was a pleasure seeker who’d enjoyed the life that had been snuffed out. By whom? One thing was for certain, Arnold had expected to live out a long and contented life in Livakia. How had that been snatched away from him?

It was some minutes before D’Arcy had herself under control. When she did she drew her bath and stepped in. She washed her hair under the flow of water into the tub then lay back and listened to the sound of the sea crashing against the rocks far below her house.

Chapter 6

In the days that followed life slowly returned to normal, but with slight differences. People seemed just a little wary of each other, there was a strained atmosphere. But on the plus side at least they were able to talk openly about the tragic death. Everyone had a theory as to what had really happened to Arnold, where he had been in those lost hours between the time Dimitrios put him to bed and Max found his body on the beach. Arnold’s death was the main topic of conversation but there were other things happening in the community that no one liked but seemed unable to do anything about: a pall seemed to hover over the old port where everyone gathered, the Cretan residents of Livakia seemed to be retreating from the foreign residents out of some sense of shame that the death of one of the foreigners should not have taken place in his own bed. There was a split into two factions, those who believed there had been some sort of foul play concerning Arnold’s death and those who didn’t. The one thing that no one wanted to think or speculate about was the autopsy report, although all waited anxiously to hear its verdict.

Mark returned to Livakia. He had little to say about
the death, except that he was sorry that his predictions had come true and Arnold had drunk himself to death. No one bothered to point out to Mark that this might not be the case. The long lunches in the port resumed but they were no longer the same. The innocent frivolity had gone out of them.

They got better when some friends of Manoussos’s and D’Arcy’s, three handsome men of about their own age whom they had known all their life, came down from their mountain village some twenty miles away. They made the visit about twice a year and always stayed in Brett’s house. The whole of Livakia was always pleased to see them; they were intelligent and amusing, mischievous and generous, and they cheered everyone up. They were tough and realistic about Arnold’s death, sorry because they had known and liked him, and because, as they pointed out continually, he would have been appalled to have caused them all so much unhappiness. That as it happened was quite true.

Things got even better when friends of Elefherakis arrived from Paris. The pleasure seekers were back. The outings resumed and the long lunches became more interesting but there was as usual talk about Arnold and more speculation while they waited for the facts to be revealed and his Boston family to arrive.

Elefherakis was playing host to a party of thirty in the restaurant in the garden when the subject was yet again brought round to Arnold and his death by Rachel, who announced that she had taken it upon herself to write a poem she hoped the family would use for an epitaph. That had silenced the entire table. Her flowery poetry
had always irritated Arnold but he had been too polite to discourage her. Rather, he had kept buying her books: T S Eliot, Auden, and Jimmy Merril.

The silence was broken by Elefherakis’s guest, a French doctor, who asked, ‘What was your friend Arnold like? You speak about his death but I have no sense of this murdered man’s personality. I would like to know what kind of a man could incite someone to take his life and leave him in the manner they did.’