by Jack Dylan
Eventually they made the drive north to Thessaloniki, and followed Katharos’ instructions to find his cousin’s taverna. Alex did take the precaution of ringing from Athens to warn them they were coming, and had a businesslike conversation with the cousin.
They arrived early evening in Nea Agathoupolis on the coast just southwest of the main town. It was still early season so there were only four or five other groups in the taverna – which turned out to be much bigger and more tourist oriented than they had anticipated.
The hugs, kisses, and formal welcoming process gave the other diners a great floor-show. They must have thought Alex and Liz were visiting royalty, or maybe just cousins. The same interior designer who had worked on the Katharos house in Hampstead had been at work in the taverna, but hadn’t been so restrained. Their bedroom was a frilly extravaganza, every possible surface coated in lacy doilies and mats. It really was quite charming and Liz thought they had probably been given the best room in the house. The package for the cousin’s wife was unceremoniously whisked away to be opened privately. Alex decided not to feel it a slight.
Katharos’ cousin Adonis took command of the evening. While the women kept well in the background, Adonis and cousin Toni joined Alex and Liz at a table where wine just kept coming, and plates of mezedes were constantly refreshed. They had just about reached the point of exchanging enough eye-contact messages to say to each other ‘time to go’ when the main course arrived. It was a kleftiko – a rich slow-cooked stew that was so good they were able to eat and drink more than they imagined possible. By the last little coffee and inevitable Metaxa, they had been told the history of the taverna, how wonderful Thessaloniki was compared with Athens, and had found themselves agreeing to being taken by the cousin on a tour of the city.
Liz and Alex crawled off to bed exhausted by the concentration required to converse with well-meaning strangers and to cope with the excessive bonhomie and hospitality.
They were meek as lambs when Adonis announced they would take his car, and were told to give the keys of the SLC to Toni ‘in case it has to be moved’.
They later agreed they didn’t really enjoy Thessaloniki. The combination of Adonis’ bombastic style as a tour guide, the endless monuments and ruins they ‘must see’, and the loss of control of their time became wearing. By the time they returned to the taverna they needed to sleep, and by the time they woke late in the evening, only the women seemed to be around. They thankfully were allowed to eat quietly in a corner, just the two of them, content to let the conversations from the other tables wash over them, and carefully avoiding eye-contact with any of the other diners who might use it as an opportunity to draw them into their discussions.
They escaped relatively early to bed so didn’t see Adonis until they met at breakfast the next morning when he returned the keys of the SLC and wished the pair a safe journey. Since Alex hadn’t told him yet that he and Liz had agreed in their room that they had to escape, had to get back to taking the world on their own terms and in their own time, he was slightly miffed but also relieved. It seemed to be a family trait to convey with minimum subtlety when one’s visit was complete. He handed Alex a similar little package to the one they had brought, similarly securely taped for Iannis’ wife.
So they drove back to the north, concentrating on covering ground rather than stopping for the sights. It was a relief to be back on their own again, and Alex more than Liz relished the effortless cruising across the face of Europe. The old SLC was still drawing admiring looks most places they stopped, and probably some looks of awe and sympathy at the petrol pumps. They drove more directly up through Macedonia, Austria and Germany, before reaching France and the Tunnel again for the return home. It was still a drive of about 2,500 kilometres, although that was some 500 shorter that the scenic route out.
Alex phoned Iannis Katharos a couple of days after their return to London, and he seemed keen to meet soon for a drink at his house. Alex offered to send him the package by courier as he wasn’t ready for more verbal battering but Katharos was politely insistent and Alex agreed that he should visit the following evening.
Once again the floodlights announced his arrival and the two generations of Katharos were there at the car door before he had time to think. Effusive greetings and more Mediterranean hugs had him ushered away from the car before he had time to extract the keys or lock the door. When he gesticulated his need to lock the car the arm round my shoulder continued to draw him into the house amid reassurances that young Iannis would see to the car.
“Trust us Mr Fox, your car will be safe.”
Alex remembered reading somewhere that only someone who is lying ever says, “Trust me.” He felt uneasy, but politeness meant it would seem foolish to resist the hospitable arm that propelled him again into the recesses of the house.
This time he was surprised to find a table spread with little dishes of mezes. There were olives, little cubes of feta, dolmades, and even delicious little bits of fried kalamari. Again he was mildly surprised that the packaged greetings from Salonika were slipped immediately into a drawer of the desk, but the pressing hospitality took over and it was an hour before he could demonstrate that he had consumed enough ouzo and mezes to be allowed to escape. This time Iannis Junior appeared just as he was gathering himself to launch into the expected profuse thanks for the delicious hospitality.
Again Alex noticed the barely perceptible nod from one to the other, the pursed lips, and the sudden switch from never-ending offers of yet another meze or just a small ouzo, to the farewell handshakes.
“What’s your hurry, here’s your hat,” once again.
.
Chapter 10
Lavinia: Dublin December 2005
The day after the party
Lavinia opened her eyes and saw nothing. Nothing other than the strange sparks of light left over in her eyes from the daylight outside. She waited, looking around as they subsided, and the total utter blackness took over. After a minute, she noticed a faint glow which oriented her and restored her sense of balance. A faint straight line of light was coming from under the door. She promised herself she would fix the seal.
She was now able to work out where the switch must be, and explored the wall tentatively with her fingers. A click, then a red glow illuminated the room. Beside her, glowing in the red light, was a stainless steel shelf and sink. There were black plastic bottles of chemicals on the shelf, which despite tight seals seemed to exude their sharp smell. On the draining board of the sink were three large plastic trays, upended and draining – one white, one red and one green, and smaller grey one. Opposite, Lavinia could make out the shape of the enlarger on its solid wooden table, looming against the black wall behind. On the floor she could feel the coarse weave of the ancient coir matting, and see the white cable of the power lead.
After the social catastrophe of the previous afternoon, Lavinia had decided that a day of solitude and creativity would help restore her spirits. She always found that the satisfaction of creating beautiful images on glossy black-and-white paper left her feeling rested and more philosophical about life. Today was going to be a test of that theory. Lavinia was dressed for the dark-room. She was wearing an old pair of jeans, an old work-shirt, and a blue apron that was no longer respectable enough for the kitchen. Her long dark hair was drawn back and held by a coloured elastic band, and her old trainers betrayed the occasional splash of chemical from past endeavours. She had decided that the best thing to drive out the bad memories would be to focus on something totally different, so she had chosen a roll of black and white Ilford FP4 film that she had used last October in Turkey. Even thinking about the task ahead helped her relax. The images of the little sun-drenched anchorages and the unspoiled landscape soothed her mind. She sighed for the remembered pleasure of sailing and swimming in warm blue seas in an idyllic corner of the ancient world.
She had answered a small advertisement in the Sunday Times. “Perfect Sailing on the Turquoise Coast”, the h
eading had suggested, and for what seemed not a lot more money than a package holiday, promised an opportunity to sail with four others on a skippered yacht. Some long-unrealised urge and an idealised mental image of the possibilities had combined to give Lavinia the courage to answer the advertisement. She had discovered a small-scale operation run by an individual living in London and using his Turkish based yacht for some commercial chartering. The yacht looked just beautiful in the photographs, and even to her inexpert eye and vivid imagination promised safe but exciting voyages. Part of her new-found sense of adventure persuaded her to risk her individual booking, and she kept at bay her natural worry about the other passengers never mind the unknown skipper. In the event it was one of those experiences that had rewarded her bravery, and increased her inclination to take new risks and find fresh experiences.
They had turned out to be a guest party of only 3, the others a couple who took the bow cabin on the yacht. Lavinia had enjoyed the space of her own double-cabin in the stern, and had discovered a new world of technical terms, at first worrying sensations, but ultimately the exhilaration of being propelled by the wind across idyllic seascapes. She had loved almost every minute of it, and had learned rapidly enough to be genuinely useful to Alex the skipper and his sailing partner Maggie. While the her fellow guests wanted to enjoy their own company and be transported passively, Lavinia had found herself becoming unofficial crew, and had learned how to operate the anchor windlass, coil the warps, and tie a clove-hitch on the fender ropes.
She had brought along her newly purchased Canon camera. It was an expensive SLR, deliberately not digital, and she had decided to use black and white film to try to capture images that she could process herself back in Dublin. She was fired with the imagined pleasure of creating evocative images that were in a different class from the everyday colour snaps her friends routinely showed her. Every day, as she and Alex brought the yacht into one delightful cove after another, or on one occasion into a bustling port, she saw endless images that she wanted to capture on film. Once she had carried out her self-imposed yachting duties, she took her camera and wandered the jetties and the shorelines. She took hazy early morning seascapes, looking across the great Gulf of Fethiye towards the distant high mountains. She captured bright sunny images of the yacht at anchor, or moored to one of the impossibly rickety-looking jetties. She even risked taking the expensive camera in the dingy, with Alex on the oars, to take photographs from almost sea level of yachts, anchorages, bays, hillsides and jetties.
So today as she prepared herself for the careful process of producing prints, she felt the calming influence of the distant perspective suffuse her agitated mind, and she slowed into the meticulous routine of the darkroom. As she had been reliving the warm memories of the original scenes, and even experiencing a slight pang of missing Alex’s company, she had been carefully placing the four trays side by side, and filling the first with developer, the second with stopping chemical, the third with fixer, and the last with clean running water. Without having to focus her thoughts on the mechanical tasks she had checked the temperatures and adjusted the thermostat on the tray heater. After about 10 minutes of peaceful preparation and reminiscing, all was ready. She chose a set of negatives from their first evening on the yacht.
They had sailed from Gocek to a beautiful little inlet called Kapi Creek. She could still remember her sense of overwhelming awe at the peace and beauty of the place. They had enjoyed invigorating sailing winds during the day, and the sheltered bay was suddenly quiet and welcoming after the excitement. They had arrived mid afternoon, and only a couple of other yachts were already there, so Alex had time to show her how he organised the yacht with the right ropes and fenders for their mooring to the jetty. She wasn’t much help that first day, but was already fascinated and enthused by the process. She watched Alex expertly reverse the boat to the jetty, shouting greetings to his friends who were waiting to help. The ropes were thrown with no drama and Alex had brought the boat to a standstill about a metre from the jetty before going to the bow to secure what he later explained to her was called a lazy line. The details were a bit of a blur to her that first time, but she drank it all in and had been quick to grab her Canon and step ashore to try to capture the images she wanted of this idyllic location.
She remembered walking back and forwards along the beautifully rickety jetty as she captured frame after frame of hillside, reflective water, yachts, and local children. The jetty was her photogenic ideal, with old weathered wooden slats nailed to a rustic underwater framework of unfinished pine trunks. It had been a totally intoxicating and captivating experience. When Alex called her back to the yacht for a swim and later for the ritual pre-dinner raki, she still was not satiated with capturing her images of the creek. So when evening came she had the camera by her side, and brought it to the taverna table on the shore as the five of them shared the bread and wine in what felt like a sacramental celebration of the ancient coast. Alex, she remembered, had been restless and had almost spoiled the atmosphere of the waterside dinner, but once he left them to do something back on the boat, they settled down as a foursome and found the conversation came easily and philosophically. She had used the firm wooden table as a base for the camera as she continued to experiment with wide aperture shots in the gathering gloom. And she had even tried some time-exposures looking out over the bay in the moonlight, with two little boats posing perfectly in the moon’s reflected beam; two timeless silhouettes in the ripple-interrupted path of light across the water.
Lavinia back in the darkroom switched on her anglepoise lamp, carefully gripped the first set of six negatives by its edges and slid it out from the protective sleeve. She held the negatives up to the light and tried to visualise the finished prints. A couple of the negatives looked under-exposed, and she feared that at least one might have been blurred by some movement during the long exposure, but the late-night shot of the two boats in the moonlight looked crisp and clear. She checked the negative for dust, and gave it a light squeegee between her fingers before slotting it into the holder from the enlarger. She put it in apparently upside down, so that the projected image looked the right way up on the enlarger table. Once she was satisfied that all was well, she clicked off the anglepoise, returning the room to a dim red glow, slipped the negative holder into the enlarger, and switched on the enlarger light.
The projected image was still in negative but was now much larger and easy to examine. The dark parts were where most of the emulsion had been affected by light and had therefore not washed away in the developing chemicals. This retained emulsion would resist the enlarger light passing through to the sensitive paper on the enlarger table, and would turn out light or even pure white in the finished print. The lighter parts of the negative represented the areas where the original image had been dark, the emulsion had not reacted and was washed away in the chemical processing so would allow lots of enlarger light through and turn out black or grey in the print. She adjusted the size and focus of the image until the ripples of the moonbeam and the two little boats were larger, clearer images than she had been able to see on the night in Turkey. She still couldn’t work out what the boats were doing - probably some sort of fishing - but liked the composition and contrasts of the image. When she was happy that everything was well-focused, and the important aspects of the image were eye-catchingly placed, she made her test strips to work out the ideal exposure time. When she was satisfied with the settings she at last slipped a glossy sheet of 10 x 8 paper into its place, and made the exposure. Once the exposure was complete, she slipped the sensitive paper into the tray of developer, pressed the timer start button, and gently rocked the tray as the seconds ticked by. The trick she had learned was to keep things moving, just gently, but never allowing the chemicals to sit still on the print. The gentle rocking of the tray kept the chemicals washing back and forth over the active surface. After only about 15 seconds the image was emerging, and after 20 it looked clear, but she knew to keep processi
ng it until the specified minute had elapsed. She knew that consistency was crucial in achieving good results.
After the minute she lifted it with tongs into the red tray holding the chemical that stopped the process, and then into the final green tray containing the fixer. One more minute and she was able to turn the anglepoise on again to examine the still glistening wet print. It looked promising in the dim light. She knew from experience that what looked marginally too dark in the darkroom would look well in daylight. This print was a satisfyingly contrasty study. There was an enormous amount of firm unblemished black – no dust particles had interfered. Across the black was the jagged bright white rippling reflection of the moon’s light, interrupted by her two mysterious boats in silhouette. She allowed herself a flutter of self-congratulation at the production of a really striking image before slipping it into the fourth tray with the clean running water.