by Lucy Gordon
She’d never told him of the night she’d followed him to the distant room. Once she slipped upstairs to try the door and, as she’d expected, found it locked. In her mind it came to symbolise the fact that she still hadn’t gained entry into the deepest heart of him. Despite their happiness, she wondered if she ever would.
One night she awoke to find herself alone again. The door was open and from a distance she thought she could hear sounds. Quickly she scrambled out into the corridor and was just in time to see Lysandros turning the corner. He walked in a slow, dazed manner, as though he was sleepwalking.
When she reached the little staircase he was just standing at the top. He approached the door slowly, then, before her horrified eyes, he began to ram his head against it again and again, as though by seeking pain he could blot out unbearable memories.
Suddenly she was back on the roof all those years ago and he was in her arms, banging his head against her, seeking oblivion from misery too great to be borne. And she knew that fifteen years had changed nothing. In his heart he was the same young man now as then.
She would have run to him, but he stopped suddenly and turned, leaning back against the door. Through the window the moonlight fell on his face, showing her a depth of agony that shocked her.
He didn’t move. His eyes were closed, his head pressed back against the door, his face raised as though something hovered in the darkness above him. As she watched, he lifted his hands and laid them over his face, pressing them close as though he could use them as a shield against the Furies that pursued him. But the Furies were inside him. There was no escape.
Wisdom told her to retreat and never let him know that she’d seen him like this, but she couldn’t be wise now. He might try to reject her, but she must at least offer him her comfort.
She moved the rest of the way quickly and quietly, then reached up to draw his hands away. He started, gazing at her with haggard eyes that saw a stranger.
‘It’s all right; it’s only me,’ she whispered.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came because you need me-yes, you do,’ she added quickly before he could speak. ‘You think you don’t need anyone, but you need me because I understand. I know things that no one else knows, because you shared them with me long ago.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he whispered.
‘Then tell me. What’s in that room, Lysandros? What draws you here? What do you see when you go inside?’
His reply startled her. ‘I never go inside.’
‘But…then why…?’
‘I don’t go in because I can’t bear to. Each time I come here, hoping to find the courage to enter, but that never happens.’ He gave a mirthless snort of laughter. ‘Now you know. I’m a coward.’
‘Don’t-’
‘I’m a coward because I can’t face her again.’
‘Is she in there?’ Petra asked.
‘She always will be. You think I’m mad? Well, perhaps. Let’s see.’
He opened his hand, revealing the key, allowing her to take it and put it in the lock. Turning it slowly, she pushed on the door. It stuck as though protesting after being closed for so long, but then a nudge opened it and she stood on the threshold, holding her breath, wondering fearfully what she would find.
At first she could see very little. Outside the dawn was breaking, but the shutters were still closed and only thin slivers of light managed to creep in. By their faint glow she realised that this room had been designed as a celebration of love.
The walls were covered in paintings depicting gods, goddesses and various Greek legends. Incredibly, Petra thought she recognised some of them.
‘These pictures are famous,’ she murmured. ‘Botticelli, Titian-’
‘Don’t worry, we didn’t steal them,’ Lysandros said. ‘They’re all copies. One of my mother’s ancestors wanted to “make a figure” in the world. So he hired forgers to go all over Europe and copy the works of great artists-paintings, statues. You’ll probably recognise the statues of Eros and Aphrodite as well.’
‘The gods of love,’ she whispered.
‘His wife directed matters, and had this room turned into a kind of temple.’
‘It’s charming,’ Petra said. ‘Had they made a great love match?’
‘No, he married the poor woman for her money, and this was her way of trying to deny it.’
‘How sad.’
‘Love often is sad when you get past the pretty lies and down to the ugly truth,’ he said in a flat voice.
But now she scarcely heard him. Disturbing impressions were reaching her. Something was badly wrong, but she wasn’t sure what. Then she drew closer to a statue of Eros, the little god of love, and a chill went through her.
‘His face,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t see, but surely-’
With a crash Lysandros threw open the shutters, filling the room with pale light. Petra drew a sharp, horrified breath.
Eros had no face. It looked as if it had been smashed off by a hammer. His wings, too, lay on the floor.
Now she could look around at the others and see that they were all damaged in a similar way. Every statue had been attacked, every painting defaced.
But the worst of all was what had happened to the bed. It had been designed as a four-poster but the posts too had been smashed, so that the great canopy had collapsed onto the bed, where it lay.
Someone had attacked this temple to love in a frenzy, and then left the devastation as it was, making no attempt to clear up. Now she could see the thick dust. It had been like this, untouched, for a long, long time. That was as terrible as the damage with its message of soul-destroying bitterness.
‘You asked if she were in here,’ Lysandros said. ‘She’s been here since the night I brought her to this house, to this room, and we made love. She’ll always be here.’
‘Was she here when-?’
‘When I did this? When I took an axe and defaced the statues and the pictures, smashed the bed where we’d slept, wanting to wipe out every trace of what I’d once thought was love? No, she wasn’t here. She’d gone. I didn’t know where she was and after that-I didn’t find her until she died, far away.’
He turned to the wrecked bed, gazing at it bleakly as though it held him transfixed. Shivers went through Petra as she realised that he’d spoken no more than the truth. His dead love was still present, and she always would be. She followed him through every step of his life, but she was always here, in this house, in this room, in his heart, in his nightmares.
‘Come away,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing here any more.’
It wasn’t true. In this room was everything that was terrible, but she wouldn’t admit that to him, lest her admission crush him further. She drew him to the door and locked it after them. She knew it would take more than a locked door to banish this ghost from his dark dreams, but she was determined to do it.
He’s got me now, she told the lurking presence in her mind. And I won’t let you hurt him any more.
She didn’t speak to Lysandros again, just led him back to their bed and held him in her arms.
At last some life seemed to return to Lysandros and he roused himself to speak.
‘Since we’ve been here together, I’ve found myself going more and more to that room, hoping that I could make myself enter and drive the ghost away.’
‘Perhaps I can help you do that,’ she suggested.
‘Perhaps. I’ve resisted it too long.’
‘Am I something you need to resist?’ she whispered.
He took so long to reply that she thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but at last he spoke as though the words were dragged out of him by pincers.
‘From the first evening you have filled me with dread,’ he said slowly. ‘With dread-with fear. There! That’s the truth. Despise me if you will.’
‘I could never despise you,’ she hastened to say. ‘I just can’t think of any reason why you should be afraid of me.’
‘Not of you, but of the way you made me feel. In your presence my defences seemed to melt away. I felt it when we met at the wedding. When I discovered that you were the girl on the roof in Las Vegas I was glad, because it seemed to explain why I was drawn to you. We’d been practically childhood friends so naturally there was a bond. That’s what I told myself.
‘But then we danced, and I knew that the bond was something far more. I left the wedding early to escape you, but I called you later that day because I had to. Even then I couldn’t stay away from you because you had an alarming power, one I shied away from because I’d never met it before and I knew I couldn’t struggle against it.
‘Do you remember the statue we saw in the Achilleion Palace? Not the first one where Achilles was in all his glory, but the second one, where he was on the ground, trying to remove the arrow, knowing that he couldn’t? Did you see his face, upturned to the sky, begging help from the gods because he knew that this was stronger than him and only divine intervention could save him from its power?’
‘But he was fighting death,’ Petra reminded him. ‘Do I represent death?’
He smiled faintly and shook his head.
‘No, but you represent the defeat of everything I believed was necessary to keep me strong. The armour that kept me at a cautious distance from other people, the watchfulness that never let me relax, so that I was always ahead of the game and all the other players. In your presence, all of that vanished. I implored the gods to return my strength so that I could be as safe against you as I was against everyone else, but they didn’t listen-possibly because they knew I didn’t really mean it.
‘Your power over me came from something I’d never considered before. It wasn’t sex, although there was that too. Lord, how I wanted to sleep with you, possess you! It drove me half demented, but I could cope with that. It was something else, much more alarming.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I could make you laugh. I’ve always loved doing that, not because it gave me power but because I hoped it might make you happy.’
‘It did, but it also alarmed me because it meant I was vulnerable to you as to nobody else in the world, man or woman. So I departed again. This time I went away for days, but then I began to worry that you might have returned to England, and I discovered I didn’t want that after all. I was acting like a man with no sense, wanting this, wanting the opposite, not knowing what I wanted-like a man in love, in fact. So I called you.’
‘I was with Nikator,’ she remembered. ‘He guessed it was you and warned me against you.’
‘He was right.’
‘I know he was. I never doubted that for a moment. Do you think I care what that silly infant thinks, as long as you come back to me?’
‘When I saw you again I knew I couldn’t have stayed away any longer,’ he said, ‘but I also knew I’d come back to danger. I was no longer master of myself, and that control-that mastery-has been the object of my life. I understood even then that I couldn’t have both it and you, but it’s not until now-’
It was only now that he’d brought himself to face the final decision, and for a moment she still wasn’t sure which way it would go. There was some terrifying secret that haunted him, and everything would depend on what happened in the next few minutes.
Suddenly she was afraid.
CHAPTER NINE
AT LAST he began to speak.
‘It started in my childhood with my mother’s fantasies about Achilles and his hidden vulnerability. I understood the point about keeping your secrets to yourself, but in those days it was only theory, little more than a game. I was young, I had more money than was good for me, I felt I could rule the world. I fancied myself strong and armoured, but in truth I was wide open to a shrewd manipulator.’
‘Is that what she was?’ Petra asked.
‘Yes, although it wasn’t so much her as the men behind her. Her name was Brigitta. She was a great-niece of Homer, not that I knew that until later. We met by chance-or so I thought-on a skiing holiday. In fact she was an excellent skier, but she concealed that, just kept falling over, so I began to teach her and somehow we fell over a lot together.
‘Then we abandoned skiing and went away to be by ourselves. I was in heaven. I didn’t know any girl could be so lovely, so sweet, so honest-’
He drew a ragged breath and dropped his head down onto his chest. He was shaking, and she wondered with dismay if this was only memory. After all these years, did some part of his love still survive to torment him?
She reached out to touch him but stopped at the last minute and let her hand fall away. He didn’t seem to notice.
After a while he began to speak again.
‘Of course I was deceiving myself. It had all been a clever trap. She was thrown into my path on purpose so that I could make a fool of myself over her. Even when I discovered who she was I didn’t have the wit to see the plot. I believed her when she said she’d concealed her background because she was truly in love with me and didn’t want me to be suspicious. Can you imagine anything so stupid?’
‘It’s not stupid,’ Petra protested. ‘If you really loved her, of course you wanted to think well of her. And you must have been so young-’
‘Twenty-one, and I thought I knew it all,’ he said bitterly.
‘How old was she?’
‘Nineteen. So young; how could I possibly suspect her? Even when I found out she was using a false name, that she’d engineered our meeting-even then I believed that she was basically innocent. I had to believe it. She was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.’
She could have wept for the boy he’d been then. To cling to his trust in the face of the evidence suggested a naïvety that nobody meeting him now would ever believe.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘We planned to marry. Everyone went wild-the two foes putting their enmity aside to join forces and present a united front to the world. My father advised me to delay; he was uneasy. I wouldn’t listen. We came here to be alone together and spent the summer living in this house. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone could be as happy as I was in those weeks.’
His mouth twisted in a wry smile.
‘And I’d have been right not to believe it. It was all an illusion, created by my own cowardly refusal to face the fact that she was a spy. She didn’t learn much, but enough for the Lukas family to pip us to the post on a lucrative contract. It was obvious that the information must have come from her, and that she’d listened in to a telephone conversation I’d had and managed to see some papers. She denied it at first, but there was simply no other way. I turned on her.’
‘Well, naturally, if you felt betrayed-’
‘No, it was worse than that. I was cruel, brutal. I said such things-she begged my forgiveness, said she’d started as a spy but regretted it in the end because she came to love me truly.’
‘Did you believe her?’ Petra asked.
‘I didn’t dare. I sneered at her. If she truly regretted what she’d done, why hadn’t she warned me? She said she tried to back out but Nikator threatened to tell me everything. But he promised to let her off if she did one last job, so that’s what she did.’
‘But Nikator must have been little more than an child in those days,’ Petra protested.
‘He was twenty. Old enough to be vicious.’
‘But could he have organised it? Would he have known enough?’
‘No. There was another man, a distant cousin called Cronos, who hadn’t been in the firm more than a couple of years and was still trying to make his mark. Apparently he was a nasty piece of work, and he and Nikator hit it off well, right from the start. People who knew them said they moved in the same slime. Cronos set it up and used Nikator as front man.’
‘Cronos set it up?’ she echoed. ‘Not Homer?’
‘No, to do him justice, he’s a fairly decent man, a lot better than many in this business. The story is that after the whole thing exploded Homer t
ore a strip off Cronos and told him to get out if he knew what was good for him. At any rate Cronos vanished.
‘Obviously, I don’t know the details of any family rows, but my impression is that Homer was shocked by Nikator’s behaviour. Being ruthless in business is one thing, but you don’t involve innocent young girls. But Nikator had come down hard on Brigitta when she tried to get free. He bullied her into “one last effort”, and she thought if she did that it would be over.’
‘No way,’ Petra said at once. ‘Once he had a blackmail hold over her he’d never have let it go.’
‘That’s what I think too. She was in his power; I should have seen that and helped her. Instead, I turned on her. You can’t imagine how cruelly I treated her.’
But she could, Petra thought. Raised with suspicion as his constant companion, thinking he’d found the love and trust that could make his life beautiful, he’d been plunged back into despair and it had almost destroyed him. He’d lashed out with all the vigour of a young man, and in the process he’d hurt the one person he still loved.
‘I said such things,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t tell you the things I said, or what they did to her-’
‘She’d deceived you.’
‘She was a child.’
‘So were you,’ she said firmly. ‘Whatever happened to her, they were responsible, the people who manipulated her. Not you.’
‘But I should have saved her from them,’ he said bleakly. ‘And I didn’t. We had a terrible scene. I stormed out of the house, saying I hated the sight of her and when I returned she’d vanished. She left me a letter in which she said that she loved me and begged my forgiveness, but there was nothing to tell me where she’d gone.’
Petra made no sound, but her clasp on him tightened.
‘I couldn’t-wouldn’t believe it at first,’ he went on in a voice that was low and hoarse. ‘I went through the house calling her name. I was sure she had to be hiding somewhere, waiting for a sign from me. I cried out that we would find our way somehow, our love was worth fighting for.’