‘I understand what you must have felt,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘I didn’t at the time of course, but in retrospect …’
‘No!’ In the startled silence that followed I took a deep breath to calm myself. ‘You don’t know how I felt,’ I said quietly.
‘No, of course.’ He sounded suddenly exhausted. ‘Perhaps you’re right. This isn’t the time.’
‘You should rest,’ I said. ‘Let me speak to Irene.’
He said goodbye and handed me over. She must have been right beside him. I could hear the concern in her voice as she told him to lie back and rest, and when she came on the phone she spoke quietly.
‘You must try not to upset him.’
‘I’m sorry. Look, maybe it’s better if I don’t call for a few days.’
I wasn’t about to let the wounds of the past intrude on the present. I’d planned that Alicia and I would go away for the weekend and so I’d booked a cottage in the Cotswolds. She loved the country and I’d reserved a table at a restaurant that I knew she liked. I’d bought her a ring. I was going to do the whole corny thing of proposing and then I’d open the little box and put it down in front of her.
The night before we left, she got up from her chair and kissed the top of my head. ‘Sleepy?’
I’d been brooding, my thoughts occupied with Tony and my father. I knew from her tone that Alicia wasn’t thinking about sleep. Suddenly I wanted to make love to her. I wanted to feel close to her. A kind of reassurance.
I turned out the lights and followed her upstairs. When I went into our bedroom I glimpsed her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She was completely naked which was a sight that never failed to arouse me. Alicia took care of herself. She ran and worked out at the gym and it showed. As I began to turn away I saw her pop a birth control pill into her hand and then she dropped it into the sink and I heard the rush of water as she turned on the tap.
For a second I couldn’t move. I was shocked. Then I went back downstairs before she came out of the bathroom. I wondered how long she’d been throwing her pills away. When I thought about it, our sexual relationship had been fairly active recently even though Alicia had been working so hard. I couldn’t believe that she was trying to get pregnant. I thought I knew her, but I suddenly felt as if I didn’t know her at all.
When I went back upstairs again she was in bed and when I slipped in beside her she cuddled up to me, but I caught her hand as she slid it across my chest.
‘It’s been a difficult week,’ I said.
She hesitated in surprise but then she kissed me. ‘Go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
I turned my back on her and lay in the darkness with my eyes wide open. Alicia snuggled against me, her arm draped across my hip. She shifted position and I felt the soft warmth of her breasts against my back as her fingers trailed against the top of my thigh as if by accident. I didn’t respond. I breathed slowly and evenly so that she would think I was asleep, and eventually she fell asleep herself. After a while she turned over and I raised myself on one elbow to watch her. Her lips were slightly parted, her hair had fallen over her cheek.
In the morning we drove down to the cottage, and later we went to the restaurant I had booked for dinner. I didn’t give her the ring I’d bought or ask her to marry me. Earlier I’d pretended to fall as I was climbing over a fence, and when we went to bed I used the excuse of a pulled muscle to avoid having sex. I couldn’t hide the fact that something was wrong however, I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye any more.
When we were packing to leave on Sunday afternoon she saw the ring when the box fell out of my bag. When she picked it up she looked at me questioningly then opened it. She stared at it for what seemed like a long time and then she gave it back to me and sat on the edge of the bed.
‘Did you buy that for me?’ she asked quietly. I didn’t answer. ‘The other night at home you saw me didn’t you? You saw me flush my pill down the sink. I thought you had. I caught a glimpse of something moving in the mirror. Why didn’t you say something?’
‘I’m not sure. I needed to think about it I suppose.’
She nodded to herself and looked at her feet before she met my eye again. ‘And now that you’ve thought about it?’
‘Why did you do it?’
She smiled sadly. ‘I shouldn’t have, I know. But every time we talked about it you kept putting it off.’
‘So you decided to make the decision by yourself.’
‘It was wrong. But I thought … no I think … that you’ll never agree to have children. I think you’re afraid to. You think your children might hate you the way you hate your father.’
‘Christ.’ I shook my head at her amateur psychology. ‘That’s bullshit. The truth couldn’t be more different. I want kids. It’s true I don’t want to fuck things up for them, but that’s why I’ve put it off. I just wanted to be sure.’ I gestured angrily toward the ring. ‘And I was sure. Why else do you think I got you that?’
Alicia looked at me. Her eyes were shining. ‘Nothing’s changed then,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I love you. I always have. You must love me if you bought that.’
But I didn’t know any more. She was wrong to think nothing had changed and she knew it.
The following morning in London Alicia told me that she was going to stay with a friend for a while.
‘I think it would be for the best.’ She wrote me a number and left it by the phone. ‘I’m sorry for what I did. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you.’
That night when I came home to an empty house I wanted to phone her, but I told myself I needed time to think about it all, to decide how I felt. I missed her. I felt as if I was rattling around in my big house that suddenly felt empty. But as the days passed it began to get easier.
A week later Irene phoned to say that she was taking my father home from hospital. I was surprised. He’d barely been in there for two weeks.
‘The doctors have advised against it,’ she said, ‘but he will not listen.’
I had the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. I sensed her indecision. When I asked her what was wrong she said it was nothing, but she asked me again when I was going over.
‘A few weeks,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
After I’d hung up I picked up the number Alicia had left me. I stared at it for a long time, and then I crumpled it up and threw it in the bin.
THREE
The plane landed just after midday Greek time, swooping down over the Ionian Sea past hills scorched brown by the sun. It hit the runway with a series of bone-jarring bumps and shudders before finally coming to a halt beside two Second World War vintage fighters parked at the side of the apron.
The young woman sitting next to me breathed an audible sigh of relief, and, catching my eye, smiled self-consciously.
‘I don’t really like flying,’ she confided, only now releasing her white-knuckled grip on the armrest between us. Her friend in the window seat was looking outside, anxiously searching for something that resembled the pictures she’d seen of Kephalonia in holiday brochures.
‘It looks hot,’ was all she could manage by way of uncertain pronouncement, no doubt unimpressed by the concrete and glass terminal and the featureless hills beyond.
‘The beaches are nice around Lixouri,’ I assured them.
‘Is that where you’re staying too?’ the one beside me asked.
‘I’m going to Ithaca,’ I reminded her.
‘Oh, yes. You told me that earlier didn’t you? Is that near Lixouri?’
‘It’s another island. You have to catch a ferry.’
She looked disappointed. ‘That’s a shame. We could have met up. Had a drink or something.’
She held my eye, emboldened by duty-free vodka. She was quite pretty, in her late-twenties with short hair and elfin features. In fact she reminded me a little bit of Alicia and for a moment the thought of her caused me a sharp pang of loss. It had been
a month since she left. I had seen her once in a restaurant with a man I didn’t recognise, but I’d hurried on before she noticed me. She had called me at home a few days afterwards, the coincidence making me think she must have seen me after all. I wasn’t at home when she called, but when I came in and turned on the answering machine and heard a hesitant silence I knew it was her. I waited to see if she would speak, my pulse racing.
‘It’s me,’ she said finally, and then there was another long pause before she hung up. I checked to see if she’d called back but there were no other messages and I hadn’t heard from her again.
The seat-belt sign over my head went out and I put thoughts of Alicia out of my mind as all around me people got up and began to haul luggage down from the overhead lockers. When we emerged from the plane it was to a sudden and unfamiliar heat. Even in June, England had been chilly and grey. As we crossed the Tarmac to the terminal beneath a cloudless sky I could already feel the prickle of perspiration through my shirt.
I said goodbye to the girls I’d sat next to and after I’d collected my bag went outside to find a taxi to take me to Efimia. Already a throng of people had emerged dazed into the sun, clutching their luggage. They mingled with the crowds heading home who had just been disgorged from a line of buses. A few sat on a low wall exposed to the sun, their brown or sometimes livid red bodies bared for a final time.
The airport is on the western side of the island, but Ithaca lies in the other direction, reached by ferries that ply back and forth across the strait from ports on the eastern coast. The road led over the mountains, climbing high above fertile valleys past olive groves and vineyards where the taxi driver kept offering to stop so that I could buy some of the local wine. When I repeatedly declined he eventually gave up and for the rest of the journey contented himself with chain-smoking.
At Efimia I found that I had to wait an hour for a ferry to take me to Ithaca so to fill the time I ordered coffee at a nearby kefenio. The town had been built on the slopes of low hills surrounding a pretty bay that formed a harbour. A few yachts were tied up against the wharf where some children were fishing and a group of Greek men smoked cigarettes and chatted. Beneath the hot sun I could feel life slowing down, changing gear. When the ferry arrived I went to pay my bill, remembering too late that I hadn’t changed any English currency into euros. The owner shrugged, waving away my pound coins.
‘Next time. Next time.’
I thanked him, making a mental note to be sure I remembered to come back here on my way home.
There were perhaps twenty or so passengers besides myself making the trip across the strait. Once out of the bay, Ithaca revealed itself as a hazy series of rocky humps resembling some sleeping sea monster. The colours of the landscape brought back memories of childhood visits. The sun flashed like silver on the impossibly blue sea. Kephalonia retreated, its coastal hills bare and brown while Ithaca’s coast in comparison seemed lush with dark green growth. I sat on the top deck wondering what I would find when I arrived.
Since my father had left the hospital he’d been making a steady recovery. According to Irene he was resting and eating properly and drinking only half a glass of wine a day with dinner. When I spoke to her she sounded strained, but I put that down to worry and the stress of coping with my father. My father had regained some of his old bluff manner on the phone. I kept saying that I would come out some time soon, but I had never been precise about dates. I had told him I thought it would be better if I waited until he was stronger and, though he was disappointed, he tried not to let on. My vague plans had changed abruptly two days earlier. Irene had called me at five in the morning. I was only half awake, but as soon as I heard her voice I knew something was wrong.
‘Irene? What is it?’ I said, glancing at the clock by my bed and sitting up.
‘It is your father, Robert.’ I gripped the phone tightly, fearing that she was about to tell me he’d had another heart attack, but instead she said, ‘He has vanished.’
‘Vanished? What do you mean?’
‘Yesterday he left the house early in the morning. Before I was awake. Since then, nobody has seen him.’
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I wondered how anybody could disappear in a place the size of Ithaca. ‘Do you mean he’s left the island?’ The first thing that occurred to me was that he might have gone to Kephalonia to catch a plane and was on his way to England. I even glanced toward the door as if at any moment I might hear the doorbell downstairs.
‘I do not think so,’ Irene said. ‘Nobody remembers him buying a ticket for the ferry, and the police found his car at the marina.’
‘The police?’
‘When he did not come home I phoned them. I thought something might have happened to him.’
I was fully awake by then and I tried to think logically. ‘Hang on, you said his car was at the marina. What about his boat?’
‘The Swallow is still there.’
‘But if his car is there surely he must be around somewhere.’
‘The police have asked everybody. Nobody has seen him.’ She paused and when she spoke again her voice caught in her throat. ‘They are searching around the harbour.’
I understood then that she was afraid he’d had another heart attack and I understood how worried she was. I tried to reassure her. I said that I was sure he would turn up but I was already thinking about how quickly I could get out there. By the time we hung up I’d promised I would get a flight as soon as I could. As it turned out, the next available seat on a scheduled flight to Kephalonia wasn’t for forty-eight hours. Even after I’d booked my ticket I expected him to show up before I left, but the last time I’d called Irene from London there still hadn’t been any news. By then my father had been missing for three days.
As the ferry approached the small port of Piso Aetos on Ithaca’s western coast I searched for Irene on the wharf. Nothing much had changed since I was last there. There was just a dock and a couple of low-roofed buildings at the bottom of a steep hill. A handful of people stood waiting and among them I spotted Irene. Despite the years that had passed since we’d last met, I had no trouble recognising her. She wore a simple sleeveless jade-green dress that clung to her figure in the afternoon breeze, reminding me that she was twenty years younger than my father. As a boy I used to spend a week or two with them every summer during the school holidays. When I was fifteen, Irene would have been in her thirties. I used to wonder what she saw in my father, who by then was steadily thickening around the waist. She had made an effort to be especially nice to me and, with youthful confusion, I misinterpreted her kindness and indulged in fevered guilt-ridden sexual fantasies. A father cuckolded by his own son. It couldn’t have been more fitting on a Greek island.
Once the ferry had docked, Irene scanned the disembarking passengers anxiously. I waved and when she saw me she raised a hand in return but there was something hesitant and forlorn in her greeting. When I met her we hugged briefly and then she took both of my hands in her own.
‘Robert, it is good to see you again.’
‘And you Irene. Is there any news?’ She took off her sunglasses revealing eyes that were reddened and puffy and I knew. Instantly I regretted not having come earlier. I was shocked. Somehow I hadn’t believed it could happen. When I found my voice I said, ‘He’s dead isn’t he?’
She managed to nod. ‘I am so sorry.’
I looked past her to the hills beyond. I wasn’t sure exactly what I felt but I knew that it wasn’t the grief that a son should feel on hearing such news. I wasn’t sure which was the greater tragedy; his death or my reaction to it.
The road that led from the port wound back and forth up a steep hill in a series of switchbacks. It was flanked on one side by an almost vertical plunge. From the top we looked down on the causeway that joined the southern and northern halves of the island. Beyond lay Molos Bay and in the distance were small hazy islands, faint smudges against the blue of the sea and sky. Mount Nirito rose almost vert
ically from the shore of the bay, its slopes surprisingly green from the wild oak that grew profusely all over the island, while on the other side a narrow gap between two headlands marked the entrance to Vathy harbour.
Instead of going to the house, we drove north. From the coast road I glimpsed the terracotta roofs of the occasional hamlet among the olive groves below. I remembered driving along this road with my father years before. I saw a curve of brilliant white beach where I was sure we had once gone for a swim.
When we reached the village of Stavros, Irene parked beneath the shade of a pine tree in the square.
‘I grew up here,’ she said. ‘When I was a child I came to this church with my family.’ Two towers flanked the entrance to the church opposite, and behind them was an impressive blue, domed roof. ‘If you do not mind waiting I would like to go inside. You can wait for me in the kefenio across the street. I will not be long.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Take your time.’
When she had gone I lingered in the quiet drowsy heat of the square, but after several minutes curiosity got the better of me and I followed her. I had never seen inside a Greek Orthodox church before. Compared to the sombre austerity of the chapel I remembered from boarding school, the contrast could hardly have been greater. Instead of cold stone walls and rows of unwelcoming pews, the style was almost gaudy. The walls and the inside of the dome were painted a pale eggshell blue and a strip of what had once been bright red carpet led up the central aisle. Massive glass chandeliers hung from the ceiling and elaborate painted icons looked down on the rows of seats. Several huge throne-like carved chairs stood on a dais where I imagined the priests sat during services.
Irene genuflected before an icon of the Virgin Mary and then lit a candle that she took from a brass holder. She sat on a chair with her head bowed, her lips moving in silent prayer. As I watched her I wanted to feel something, but quite what I didn’t know. I wondered if my father had become religious though I couldn’t imagine him in a place like this somehow. If there was an afterlife, if some essence of him was present here, I wondered what I would say to him. No answer was forthcoming and in the end, feeling that I was intruding on Irene’s grief I slipped outside again to wait for her.
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