The Winter Folly

by Taylor, Lulu

  Her hands shook, and her breath came in panting gasps as adrenaline raced through her, leaving her fingertips tingling and her scalp prickling. She sank down onto a small chair, her legs unable to support her under the onslaught of emotion, staring at the letter and absorbing the implication. How and why had all this happened? Why had such a dreadful lie been allowed to take root and grow and become the truth? Who had allowed all this?

  Then one awful thought pushed out all the others: Should I tell John? Thank God he’s not here . . .

  She closed her eyes, grateful she didn’t have to make the decision immediately, not while she was still overwhelmed by what she had read. Before she said anything to anyone, she would have to be absolutely certain there was no mistake . . . She wondered again if she’d misread or misunderstood, but there was only one way the letter could be taken.

  But I need proof, she thought, trying to gather herself. I need more than this.

  She thought for a moment and then went to the hall table, picking up the telephone handset there with clumsy, shaking fingers. Her nervousness made her misdial the solicitors’ number twice before she managed to get it to ring.

  A receptionist answered.

  ‘May I speak to Gordon Evans?’ she asked, reading the typed name at the bottom of the letter.

  ‘He’s in a meeting right now. Can I put you through to someone else who can help?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ She was transferred to the tinny sound of a piano sonata, listening to her own breath down the handset until a voice spoke.

  ‘Hello, Sarah Hargreaves speaking. How can I help you?’

  Delilah looked down at the paper in her hand. ‘I’ve received a letter today which I opened in error. It’s from your company to Lady Northmoor.’

  There was a pause and the woman on the other end said, ‘Yes. We have recently written to Lady Northmoor. We send our correspondence to her address in Greece.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid in this case you’ve sent it to Fort Stirling, where there’s been no Lady Northmoor for forty years. I’m Mrs Stirling.’

  The pause was briefer this time and when the woman spoke again it was with a kind of anxious embarrassment. ‘Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. That must have been my error. Oh dear – I do apologise. Could I ask you to please destroy that letter? And would you mind not mentioning this to anyone? I could get into serious trouble.’

  ‘I understand,’ Delilah said, her voice stronger as she began to regain her equilibrium. ‘But I’ll need a little information in return.’

  She walked out into the garden hardly seeing the riot of colour and the teeming life around her. It all seemed invisible, taking second place to the whirl inside her mind.

  This letter had come in error – Sarah Hargreaves, embarrassed and rather panicked, had confirmed that. She had also confirmed that the Lady Northmoor currently living on Patmos was indeed Alexandra Stirling. It was almost too much to take in.

  John can’t know. I’m sure of it. She tried to recall everything that John had said about his mother, and she was certain that he had said his mother had died. No one would lie about such a thing, surely? And how could he be tormented by nightmares and so oppressed by misery if the horror of his mother’s suicide was a fantasy?

  Delilah shook her head in disbelief. What would Alexandra be like? She wouldn’t be that sweet-faced girl in the photographs now, but an old woman. The portrait, like John’s father’s, had stayed the same but the subject would have withered and changed. Delilah tried to picture her with grey hair, lined skin and a slight stoop. An old lady. She remembered the solicitor’s letter. An old lady who enjoyed a generous allowance.

  Delilah sat down on one of the stone benches, its rough surface still warm from the afternoon sun. The excitement and bewilderment of the discovery leeched out of her and anger began to boil up in its place, as fierce as it was unexpected.

  An image filled her head. It was Alex, passing her days in comfort in the sun, while her only son was left to cope with his loneliness and grief, believing his mother had killed herself.

  Fury engulfed her. What kind of a mother would do that? Of course it was tragic to lose her daughter in whatever circumstances had happened, but to abandon a small boy and his father and simply walk away? That was unforgiveable, wasn’t it? It was coldly, horribly selfish. There was no excuse.

  She stood up and began to pace round and round the central flowerbed, seeing nothing as a torrent of thoughts crashed into her mind. She felt absurdly betrayed, not just on John’s behalf but on her own. She had pitied Alex, felt for her, empathised with her. She had almost lived the other woman’s loneliness, the sense of being daunted by this place and everything that came with it. She had experienced something of her terror and been horrified by the final act, the pity and horror of what Alex had done.

  Except that she hadn’t done it.

  ‘I just don’t understand!’ she said out loud, coming to a halt and staring out over the woods towards the old folly, hidden from view by the trees.

  She wanted, above all, to make sense of all this and how her life had come to be so bound up with what happened here. Ever since she’d come to Fort Stirling, she’d been looking for answers to explain why she was in this house, trapped in its vast solitudes, powerless to change it, inside a marriage that was poisoned by the past.

  She could see clearly now that to get the final answers, she would have to leave. They lay elsewhere, with the only person alive who could answer them.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Present day

  The huge ferry made its way through shimmering heat across the bright blue waters of the Aegean Sea. There were crowds everywhere, mostly keeping inside or under the ferry’s wide awning on the top deck, though a few hardy souls – tourists, for the most part – stood out in the blazing sunshine looking ahead eagerly to where they were going.

  Delilah had spent some of the seven-hour journey dozing in the air-conditioned interior, recovering from her early start, and then breakfasting on black coffee and yoghurt in the restaurant. She had arrived at daybreak, stepping out into suffocating heat at Athens airport, and from there caught a taxi to Piraeus where she’d boarded the ferry. They’d already stopped at various island ports, the great hulking vessel sailing with surprising nimbleness between islands and outcrops of land into small harbours, where it manoeuvred itself up against slender docks to disgorge passengers and take on new ones. Now, as they approached the island of Patmos, Delilah had climbed to the top deck and found a seat that faced out over the railings where she could marvel at the extraordinary vivid blue of the sea as the ferry churned through it. The breeze that came up, tangy and salty, to lash her hair and beat her cheeks was pleasant after the artificial chill inside.

  She longed to arrive, and yet she was also apprehensive about what exactly she planned to do.

  ‘I’m just going away for a few days,’ she had told Janey. ‘While John’s on his fishing trip.’

  ‘That sounds lovely,’ Janey said, wiping up some dishes. ‘Are you going somewhere nice?’

  She hadn’t wanted to lie but telling the truth would be dangerous, if Janey should mention it later. ‘I have a friend, Helen, who lives in Italy,’ she said, letting the implication do its work. Helen did live in Italy but Delilah was not going there.

  ‘Italy – how beautiful,’ sighed Janey. ‘I’m envious. We had a lovely holiday there once.’

  ‘I’m only going for a short trip. I’ll probably be back before John is.’

  ‘Enjoy yourself. It’ll be good for you to get away from here.’

  Janey had not known how true her words were, Delilah thought. The feeling that she ought to get away had almost been as strong as the compulsion to seek out the truth. Her body was refusing to forget the way Ben had made her feel when they’d stood so close, the atmosphere charged with electricity, and she needed some space in which to consider how she really felt about him. She was letting her reaction to
Ben put her marriage at risk. Should she fight the attraction between them? Or was her marriage foundering anyway?

  ‘This is absolute bloody madness,’ Grey had said down the phone, when she told him of her intention to go to Greece – at least one person ought to know where she really was. ‘What on earth are you doing? Can you really be sure this woman is who you think she is?’

  ‘The lawyer was clear. It’s her.’

  ‘Well, why do you have to go there? Can’t you just telephone her or something?’

  ‘I think that’s an even worse idea,’ she replied. ‘I can just imagine how quickly she’d hang up on me.’

  ‘Delilah,’ Grey said in a worried voice, ‘you should just leave all this as it is. You’ll do no good meddling in it. I don’t want to see you getting hurt. I know what you’re like – you want to sort everything out, make everyone happy – but it could backfire.’

  ‘I can’t leave it,’ she’d replied obstinately. He didn’t understand – no one else could. He hadn’t seen those pictures in the albums, or lived in this house with all its ghosts and echoes of the past. He hadn’t known, as Delilah had, and as Alex had, what it meant to become a Stirling and belong to this huge old place. Alex understood. Finding her seemed more than simply a way to get to the bottom of a mystery; it was also forging a link that might make sense of her own life. That was why she had to go.

  ‘What about John?’ Grey persisted. ‘Shouldn’t you at least ask his opinion on tracking down his dead mother?’

  ‘I can’t spring a shock like that on him without seeing her first, and knowing a bit more about why she did it. She needs to know how she’s made him suffer, and explain how she could go and leave him like that, with him thinking she killed herself.’

  ‘You don’t think you’re going to be able to reconcile them, do you? Tell me you’re not thinking about trying something so foolish.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Delilah said, even though she had wondered if she might be able to do just that if it seemed that it might help John. ‘I’m doing this because I have to know – for myself as much as for John.’

  ‘All right.’ He sighed. ‘I can tell there’s no stopping you. I just hope it doesn’t make this whole thing worse, that’s all. Keep in touch, darling. I’ll come out and join you if you need me.’

  She acted before she could change her mind, booking a flight, a ferry and a hotel in minutes – not cheap at such late notice in the summer, but still possible. She had left the following day, with a sense that she was at last taking control after a long time of being at the mercy of other people and places.

  Now here she was, a salty rime forming on her lips, feeling the slow rocking of the ferry as it cut through the water on its way to the port of Skala, and soon she would have to decide exactly what she was going to do when she got there.

  It was late afternoon by the time they arrived at last; the island stretched across the blue sea like a pair of open arms beckoning them into its bosom. As they approached, the embrace of the island grew tighter so that they seemed to be surrounded by rocky hillside dotted with houses set among groves of olive trees. A mass of glittering white gradually resolved itself into the harbour town, and now she could see that the island was not one thick land mass but a delicate lace of narrow connections and small bays. In the distance, high on the horizon, a jagged edge of dark rock became the castellated border of an ancient building of brown stone that contrasted with the whites and pinks and pale yellows of the flat-roofed houses below. Around the bay were hundreds of boats, from tiny sailing vessels to vast white yachts, moored along the seafront or against rickety wooden jetties poking out into the water.

  As the ferry slowed and the engine roared, throwing up white spumes of seawater, she saw that around the port were all the marks of the tourism trade: apartment blocks, hotels, tavernas, restaurants with hundreds of tables and chairs set out along the seafront, racks of mopeds and rows of taxis for hire. She felt a rush of holiday excitement despite herself. She had not known what to expect, thinking of the horror stories of Greek towns overwhelmed with drunken tourists, but this place did not seem like that. The travellers around here were mostly families and there was also a good number of nuns in their sensible plain frocks and dark head coverings. She felt a sudden yearning for John, wishing that he were here to share this new experience, to witness the beauty of the island and to set about exploring it with her.

  But I’m not here for that, she reminded herself. I’ve come for something else altogether.

  She gazed around at the island while down below the port workers set about mooring the great ferry against the wharf, and prepared for disembarking the passengers. Behind a gate waited a horde of fresh travellers, ready to take the return journey overnight back to Piraeus.

  Is she here? Delilah wondered. Is Alexandra somewhere close by? She imagined the dark-haired woman from the photographs – of course she wouldn’t look like that – walking through the streets above the town, unaware that the ferry, its arrival and departure so familiar as to be almost invisible, this time had brought a messenger from the life she had left behind.

  Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll set about finding her.

  Once the passengers had got out through the port gates, shunted in a different direction to the crowds waiting their turn to board, they dispersed, heading off towards hotels or hailing taxis or looking for bus stops. Delilah consulted her map. She had booked a hotel room in Chora, the main village of the island that lay to the south-west of Skala, higher up and near to the castle on the horizon, which the map told her was actually a monastery. The village had looked only a few minutes’ walk from the port but now she could see that it would be quite a hike up a steep hill with her luggage, so she headed for a rank of shabby looking cars with taxi signs on their roofs.

  ‘Chora?’ she asked of the driver of the first available car. He leaned out of his open window, his eyes unreadable under his sunglasses. ‘How much?’

  ‘Chora – eight euro.’

  ‘Fine. Thanks.’ She opened the back door and climbed in, hauling her small suitcase after her. The driver started the car and, with a roar from the rattling engine, they set off through the narrow roads of Skala, expertly avoiding the milling crowds of wandering tourists searching for their holiday accommodation. Most of the buildings were whitewashed, brightened with baskets of flowers or hung with vines, and every other one was a restaurant or a taverna, with tables lining the street or set out under canopies of woven fax. Mopeds and bicycles seemed to be the preferred form of transport and the driver took their buzzing approach in his stride, skimming past bare legs and billowing shirts without so much as a squeeze on the brakes.

  They left Skala, ascending the curving asphalt road lined with scrub and eucalyptus trees towards the white village above that shone where the evening sun caught it. The monastery sat strong and dark on the skyline, looking like a Byzantine fort, and at its base white boxes of large villas and houses emerged from pine forests and olive groves. Beneath the grander residences was a tumble of whitewashed roofs, bell towers and walls that marked the heart of the village.

  The driver pulled to a halt by a high wall with a tangle of greenery falling over the top. ‘We stop here.’

  ‘I’m staying at Hotel Joannis,’ she said, looking out of the taxi window at the narrow path curving away into the village. ‘Is it close by?’

  He gestured up the hill. ‘You will find it up there. No taxi any more.’

  ‘I see.’ She got out and passed him ten euros. ‘Thank you.’ Taking her bag, she began to walk in the direction he had indicated. Despite the late hour, the sun baked the backs of her legs and arms as she climbed. If this was what it was like in the early evening, it was going to be seriously hot the next day. Maybe this was the wrong time for a fair-skinned Welsh girl to visit Greece. Well, she’d just have to cope with that as best she could.

  The town was charming, with streets, lanes and passages that were too narrow for cars. Thick walls
bordered each street, houses and courtyards tucked away behind them. Although she could see many bars and tiny restaurants, there wasn’t the touristy feeling of the port up here.

  It’s beautiful, she thought, as she pulled her case past another tiny courtyard lined with wooden chairs and tables, brightened with pink and purple bougainvillea and pale blue clouds of plumbago. She passed through an archway and bumped her case up the cobbled streets until she reached a small shop-lined square where people sat at tables outside a cafe and a small market was selling vegetables, fruit, pottery and all manner of woven things, from baskets to tiny dolls. Going up to a plump woman sitting on a wall by a stall offering bright raffia hats, she said shyly, ‘Hotel Joannis?’

  The woman nodded towards an alleyway leading upwards in shallow steps from beneath another archway, and pointed with one brown arm.

  ‘Thank you.’ I must be getting closer now, she thought, climbing the steps and bumping her case up behind her. The alley was lined at intervals with doorways, their thick stone lintels not whitewashed like the rest but left a dark honeyed brown colour. The same brown strip was left above the windows. This place feels as though it’s been designed, she thought. Everything is so in tune, so beautifully matched, almost as though we’ve styled it for a shoot.

  There was such a grace and cohesion in the harmony of white and dark stone, the strips of cobbles, the worn paving stones. Even the chairs and tables in front of the cafes seemed to have been chosen so that their shabby blue wood and woven seats would look delightful against the white walls, the terracotta pots with their spreading plants loaded with bright pink flowers, and the curving lines of the walls and arches. It made her feel peaceful to look at it, as though it was balm for her soul to see something so satisfyingly of a whole, but she wondered if its unchanging perfection might eventually become too much and feel stultifying. For now, though, she was happy to imbibe its well-worn beauty.