The Tomb in Turkey

by Simon Brett

  Carole wasn’t particularly interested in archaeology, but she thought visiting tombs might be a good way of giving her some sense of purpose on the holiday.

  When they stepped out of the plane at Dalaman Airport, the heat hit them almost like a physical blow. They followed the crocodile of other passengers to the air-conditioned oasis of the terminal building.

  Once inside, everyone seemed to whip out their passports and rush towards a couple of what looked like ticket booths. ‘What are they doing?’ Carole asked Jude.

  ‘Have to pay ten pounds for a visa to get into Turkey.’

  ‘Really?’ said Carole, who had not entered this sum into her detailed budgetary plans. ‘That’s daylight robbery.’

  At the baggage reclaim it seemed, as it always does, that their bags were the last to emerge on to the carousel. Jude sat on the floor, serenely waiting, while Carole paced up and down, convinced that her luggage was on the way to Delhi.

  There seemed to be no one in the customs control area as they walked through, and immediately they entered the airport foyer a voice said, ‘Hi. You must be Carole and Jude.’

  EIGHT

  Nita was tall and blonde, dressed in a pale-blue sleeveless cotton top and white shin-length cotton trousers, with brown leather flip-flops. She looked very trim and tanned. Minimal make-up, just mascara and pale-pink lipstick. There was a thin gold chain around her neck and a chunky gold ring on her wedding finger.

  Though she glowed with health, a slight crinkling around her lips suggested that she was perhaps not as young as she appeared on first sight. But Nita looked supremely at ease in the alien environment into which Carole felt she had been thrust.

  ‘How did you recognize us?’ asked Jude.

  Nita grinned. ‘Barney gave me very full descriptions.’

  Oh yes, thought Carole, I can imagine how he described me: thin, awkward, anxious-looking, unused to foreign travel. The Burberry over her arm seemed suddenly ridiculous, a blatant symbol of her insecurity and lack of savoir faire.

  ‘And this is my friend Donna. Donna Lucas.’ She indicated a shorter woman at her side. Dark-haired, well-rounded, the outline of a dark bikini top visible under her white polo shirt. ‘Runs a restaurant in Hisarönü.’

  ‘The Dirty Duck. Do come.’ Donna’s voice was pure, unreconstructed cockney. ‘Full English Breakfast all day, Pub Favourites, Range of British Beers. And, what’s more, special rates for friends of Nita’s.’ Whipping a couple of flyers out of her bag, she handed one to each of the new arrivals.

  ‘Well, that sounds very nice,’ said Carole politely, though what she’d read in her guidebook about Hisarönü didn’t sound very nice at all.

  ‘Ooh, sorry, must rush.’ Donna Lucas was suddenly waving frantically. ‘There’s the person I’m picking up. Great to see you!’ And with that she dashed off into the crowd.

  ‘The car’s parked just over there,’ said Nita. ‘Can I help you with one of those, Carole?’

  ‘No, thank you, I’m fine,’ came the instinctive response, though in fact pulling the two wheeled suitcases behind her while still keeping hold of her Burberry made her look rather clumsy. It also drew even more imagined attention to her from the oblivious Turks around the airport.

  Again the move from air conditioning to direct sunlight was a shock as they walked towards the car park. Carole could feel herself beginning to sweat, though she knew it was from nerves rather than the heat. But it upset her. Sweating was something that Carole Seddon just didn’t do.

  Nita’s car was a Hyundai Accent. Silver. In fact, looking round the car park, Carole observed that most of the cars were either silver or white. On the back window was the logo of a travel firm, so presumably it was the car that went with Nita’s job. The boot was capacious enough for all their bags. Carole sat in the front, while Jude lolled dozily over the back seat. Now Jude felt she was genuinely on holiday and could begin to untwitch.

  It would be a while, though, before Carole untwitched. Indeed, there was a question mark over whether Carole Seddon had ever in her life fully untwitched.

  On the drive from Dalaman to Kayaköy, Nita demonstrated her background as a tour operator by keeping up a running commentary on sights they passed and the opportunities for tourism during their stay at Morning Glory. She did more of the second than the first because, although they went up and down some fairly impressive craggy mountains, the car stayed on the main D400 motorway and there weren’t that many sights.

  But there were unfamiliar images that made Carole feel she was definitely in a foreign country. They went past a few mosques, the domes and minarets of which reminded her of a copy of The Arabian Nights she’d had as a child. At the roadside there were stalls piled high with watermelons and oranges. Cafés offered a variety of goodies which, though written in the Roman alphabet, bore no relation to English words. Instinctively, because of her long acquaintance with the Times crossword, Carole found herself trying to make anagrams from them. One particular delicacy, gözleme, appeared with such frequency that she asked Nita what it meant.

  ‘Pancakes. Kind of flatbread with fillings of meat, cheese or sometimes fruit or honey. Very good. Often in Turkish restaurants you see women in traditional dress squatting over big circular hotplates pouring out the batter and making endless gözleme. On menus with English translations you’ll sometimes see them described as “village pancakes”.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  ‘You must try them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carole, not certain that she would. Did she really want to eat village pancakes? The whole concept of Turkish cuisine still rather worried Carole. In her mind she couldn’t separate the word ‘kebab’ from the adjective ‘dodgy’. And she felt glad she’d packed the Imodium.

  Along the roadside they also passed a lot of posters attached to lamp posts or pasted to walls. Each featured large photographs of men with luxuriant moustaches.

  ‘What are those about?’ asked Carole.

  ‘They’re politicians. There’s an election coming up.’

  ‘Why have they all got moustaches?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nita, ‘but it’s very Turkish.’

  ‘It looks as if it’s more a competition between the moustaches than political parties.’

  ‘You’re not wrong. Turkish politics are extremely complicated. Probably easier just to vote for your favourite moustache.’

  The car slowed down as they approached a row of toll booths. ‘This is the tunnel,’ Nita explained. ‘You used to have to go right over the top of the mountain. This has cut a good half-hour out of the journey.’

  But Nita didn’t have to pay any money to have the barrier raised. The journey was clearly one she made so often that she had a season ticket.

  Carole looked round into the back of the car. Jude was asleep. How could she be so relaxed in a country she didn’t know, being driven by a person she didn’t know? Carole felt a familiar pang of jealousy, knowing that she would never experience the insouciance that Jude so often exhibited.

  Some way after the tunnel they turned off the D400, following the signs to Fethiye and Ölüdeniz. Nita drove with practised ease, knowing where she could speed up and when to slow down. In Fethiye, the road ran alongside the sea with rows of restaurants flanking it. There were a lot of yachts moored in a marina, their masts in serried ranks. ‘Very popular with the sailing crowd, Fethiye,’ said Nita. ‘Are you into sailing, Carole?’

  ‘No.’ When she had been growing up, sailing, like skiing, was regarded by her parents as something rich people did.

  ‘Or scuba diving? There’s a lot of that out here.’

  ‘No,’ said Carole.

  Traffic was heavy, and Carole’s eyes were busy taking in the unfamiliar shop fronts, watching the people who wandered nonchalantly amidst the cars and vans. There were lots of scooters, driven by men without crash helmets and only flip-flops on their feet, who were buzzing around, threading their way through the bigger vehicles. The men wore j
eans and T-shirts; the only ones in shorts were very obviously tourists. The women were also casually dressed; very few – and most of those were older – had their hair covered. Carole found herself wondering what it must feel like to be Muslim. Very odd to believe all that stuff. On the other hand, though she put ‘C of E’ on the diminishing number of forms that asked about her religion, Carole didn’t believe in any of the Anglican stuff either. Very odd to have a faith was probably what she meant.

  ‘There’s a very good fish market here in Fethiye,’ Nita went on. ‘Circular place, surrounded by restaurants. You buy your fish in the central area, and then it’s taken to one of the restaurants to be cooked. I recommend you do that for a lunch or dinner one day.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Carole, though she didn’t think she would. It sounded a rather complicated way of getting a meal, and it’d probably be very expensive too. Mind you, fresh fish might be safer than a kebab.

  Up out of Fethiye, they took a narrow alley that looked hardly wide enough for a car. They turned right on to a wider road. Jolting on its uneven surface woke Jude up, just as Nita carefully steered round a large stone object in the middle of the road. It resembled a giant sentry box, maybe six feet square and fifteen feet high, with a roof shaped like a bishop’s mitre.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ asked Jude blearily.

  ‘It’s a Lycian tomb.’ Carole provided the answer before their guide had time to reply.

  ‘Well done,’ said Nita. ‘You’ve certainly done your homework.’

  ‘Actually, to be more accurate,’ said Carole as they drove away from the memorial, ‘it’s a Lycian sarcophagus. The more traditional and distinctive Lycian tombs are carved out of rock on cliff sides. There are examples all over the area, but perhaps the best-known ones are to be found in Dalyan.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jude. Then, a little plaintively, ‘Where have we got to?’

  ‘Just come through Fethiye,’ said Nita. ‘Another five miles and we’ll be in Kayaköy. And, incidentally—’ she gestured back towards the town – ‘there’s an example of a carved Lycian tomb back there.’

  The two visitors looked back and caught a glimpse of something rectangular carved out of a giant crag on the outskirts of Fethiye. Then the car turned a corner and it was gone.

  The road zigzagged up through a forest set on a steep hill. The slickness with which Nita negotiated the many gear changes again suggested this was a road she had travelled many times before. Carole wasn’t convinced that she would much enjoy driving in Turkey if all the roads were like this one. And then, of course, they drove on the right, which was an added complication. Maybe the car which Barney Willingdon had so carefully insured for them would stay in the Morning Glory garage for the entire next fortnight.

  ‘How long have you known Barney, Nita?’ asked Jude from the back.

  Carole would have felt embarrassed about asking such a direct question to someone she’d only just met, but Nita didn’t seem to regard it as an intrusion. ‘Oh, God knows. Must be twenty years, I suppose. It was when I first came out here, working for Thompson’s. He wasn’t building his luxury villas then. Smaller developments, almost chalet style.’

  ‘Have you ever actually worked for him?’

  ‘No. I’ve always worked for one or other of the British holiday companies, but inevitably we got to know most of the developers. Back in those days there’d be lots of calls to Barney about teething problems on the new builds. Showers not working, toilets blocked. God, when I think of the number of times I’ve been called to sort out a blocked toilet. Glamorous job, this tour guide lark.’

  ‘And you’ve been a tour guide all the time, have you?’ Carole dared to ask a question.

  ‘Well, I have risen up the hierarchy a bit. More managerial these days. And I’m working on more upmarket villas and places. Though I still get to do my fair share of meeting and greeting. And, if there’s no one else round the office when the call comes in, I still occasionally end up sorting out the odd blocked toilet.’

  ‘I gather,’ Carole went on, emboldened, ‘that Barney’s going to be coming out here soon …?’

  ‘He’s already here. Arrived yesterday.’

  ‘But not with his wife this time,’ Jude contributed.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you met Henry?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  Carole and Jude both detected a slight caution in Nita’s voice.

  ‘And did you meet his first wife,’ Jude pressed on. ‘Zoë?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what actually happened to her?’

  There was a silence. It could have occurred because Nita was negotiating a particularly tight hairpin bend, or she could have been deliberately avoiding a reply to Jude’s question. Either way, the moment for a reply had gone. They were going steeply downhill now and, as they turned the corner, came out of the trees’ shade into full sunlight.

  ‘There,’ said Nita. ‘Your first glimpse of Kayaköy.’

  After the bustle of Fethiye, the sparsely wooded valley of the village looked wonderfully flat and tranquil. Up against the hills at the far end stood terraces of grey buildings, slightly wobbly through the heat haze. ‘Is that the ghost town?’ asked Jude.

  ‘It certainly is.’ The car turned another corner and the old buildings disappeared from sight.

  ‘And Morning Glory is actually in the village, is it?’ asked Carole. Though impressed by the quiet serenity of the scene before them, she still worried about finding that their accommodation was surrounded by lager louts with tattoos and Union Jack T-shirts.

  ‘Oh yes. You’ll see it in a minute. Fabulous views.’

  ‘From here,’ said Jude, ‘the place doesn’t look very developed.’

  ‘No. There are a lot of holiday villas and what-have-you, but they have been built quite sensitively. There are lots of restaurants too. The whole place is geared to the tourist trade, but wandering through the village you really wouldn’t know it. You’d never believe how close it is to Ölüdeniz.’

  ‘To where?’ asked Jude.

  ‘A very thoroughly developed seaside resort,’ said Carole, pleased to offer more of her guidebook research. ‘Only a few miles away, but there you can find everything you’d expect in a tourist centre – water sports, beach umbrellas, English package-holiday people …’

  Jude grinned. ‘So in what way are we not “English package-holiday people”?’

  ‘Well, we aren’t here on a package holiday, for a start,’ Carole replied righteously. ‘We’re staying in a private villa. That’s entirely different.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jude, still amused.

  ‘No,’ Carole went on, ‘Ölüdeniz is very touristy. Not our sort of place at all. Rather ghastly, I believe.’

  ‘I live in Ölüdeniz,’ said Nita.

  It could have been an awkward moment. Carole certainly thought it was. But Jude, catching Nita’s eye in the rear-view mirror, winked and received an answering grin.

  ‘It’s practical,’ Nita continued. ‘My husband’s business is in Ölüdeniz.’

  ‘Ah, now, he teaches scuba diving – is that right? Barney mentioned it.’

  ‘Yes, Jude, he has a school in Ölüdeniz. If you fancy having some lessons, there’s a flyer with all the details in the villa.’

  ‘Yes, I think it’s probably unlikely, but never say never.’ Jude’s response to the suggestion was rather more gracious than Carole’s had been.

  ‘Right. We actually only live in Ölüdeniz during the summer – you know, the tourist season. In the winter we’re in Muğla, which is where Erkan’s family comes from.’

  ‘And do you have children?’ asked Carole, now feeling ready to pose a personal question.

  But the sharpness with which Nita said, ‘No,’ made her wish she hadn’t. Still, the awkwardness was not allowed to linger, as their guide went on briskly, ‘Anyway, Ölüdeniz is a temple of culture and good taste when compared to Hisarönü.’

  �
��Where?’

  ‘It’s a village – well, maybe I should say it used to be a village – only a few miles away. Between Kayaköy and Ölüdeniz, and that’s really touristy.’

  ‘For tourists from where?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Oh, English, definitely English. All the cafés and restaur-ants do full English breakfasts – and Sunday roasts. Lots of pubs called things like the Rover’s Return. And the Dirty Duck, of course, that Donna mentioned. People can spend a fortnight there and never hear anyone speaking anything but English.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Carole Seddon as her mind clouded with images of tattoos and Union Jack T-shirts. And she had another little niggle of worry about the shorts on Lily’s teddy bear.

  ‘It sounds fun,’ said Jude. ‘We really must go there.’

  The Hyundai turned off left fairly soon after the road levelled out at the beginning of the village. The track up which they travelled was just wide enough for one car but, unlike the potholed route they had taken from Fethiye, it was well-paved. The sides of the track were wooded, but here and there were turnings, presumably leading to other villas.

  When they emerged from the woods on to a paved forecourt, through black railed gates they saw Morning Glory in all its glory. The central part of the building, rising to three storeys, was made of slabs of old grey stone. That part must have been some existing structure, a granary perhaps, considering its height, but to either side new wings had been sympathetically added. They were constructed mostly of wood and glass, but pillars and rows of stone contrived to make the whole villa look like a single concept. A wooden garage door presumably hid the car that Barney Willingdon had promised them the use of.

  Between the gates and the front door, a large swimming pool sparkled in the sunlight. Water trickled continually over its outer edge into a conduit from which it was recycled back into the pool, so that swimmers had the illusion of an infinite vista beyond. Around the pool, loungers lay, attended by palm trees. And any harsh contours of the building were softened by variegated shrubs and potted plants.