Silver Shadows, Golden Dreams

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Stin ayassas,’ the villagers said, raising their glasses to Valentina. ‘Your health.’

  ‘Pánta yiá,’ the priest said, beaming. ‘May you always be happy.’

  She whirled and danced, her wedding gown swirling around her ankles. There were no photographers. No reporters. To the people of Agios Georgios she was not Valentina, a Hollywood star. She was Kyrie Khairetis: Evangelina Khairetis’daughter-in-law, Paulos Khairetis’wife. It was a world she felt she would be content to remain in for ever.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hazel Renko wondered whether to put the newspapers on the breakfast table or not. Vidal was not working and when he was not working it was his custom to breakfast leisurely and to peruse all the national dailies, and whatever foreign newspapers his chauffeur had been able to procure. Headlines in each and every one announced that Valentina, the screen goddess who had given up fame and stardom for marriage, had given birth to a son in Athens and Hazel had no idea how her employer would react to the news.

  He had changed drastically since the day that his protegée had so inexplicably left Hollywood with her young husband and had later announced her intention of never returning. His rows with Theodore Gambetta had been monumental as he strenuously denied every statement Theodore issued regarding Valentina.

  The lines that ran from nose to mouth in the olive-toned face had deepened. Almost overnight a flash of silver had appeared in the night-black hair that tumbled perpetually low over his forehead.

  Hazel walked out on to the terrace and approached the breakfast table. Pretending that the chauffeur had been unable to obtain any newspapers would be useless. He would know that she was lying and would immediately be suspicious. He had to see them some time and his reaction might not be as bad as she feared.

  She set the papers down beside his place setting, noticing the cold duck, the iced beer, the paté de foie gras du Perigord and salami, the black pumpernickel bread.

  Vidal had changed in more ways than one. When she had first come to Villada to care for Kariana, Vidal had breakfasted in typical American fashion. Melon sometimes; hot buttered bagels, lashings of strong, black coffee. Now he no longer seemed to care whether he fitted into the society around him or not. Even his accent had become more pronounced, the stress falling heavily on the first syllable of every word. He had become a man that people avoided. Stern-faced and short-tempered, he rarely smiled and when he did, his eyes remained hard and bleak. Hazel could not remember the last time that she had heard him laugh.

  ‘Good morning, Hazel,’ Kariana drifted across the terrace towards the table in a negligée of floating powder-blue chiffon.

  ‘Good morning, Kariana!’ it was a long time since she had been on anything but first-name terms with both Kariana and Vidal. The intimacy in which the three of them lived precluded rigid formality.

  Kariana sat down and the maid hurried out, pouring her a hot chocolate. Kariana sipped at it, ignoring the newspapers, gazing out over the valley towards the Pacific with vague, untroubled eyes.

  Hazel regarded her and wondered again if the change they had all initially thought to be for the better, might not, in the long run, prove to be for the worse.

  Kariana’s turbulent changes of mood had stabilized. There had been no unfortunate incident since the last one shortly before Valentina had left Hollywood. It was an incident that Hazel would never forget. Partly because it was the only time that she had seen the heroine of The Warrior Queen in the flesh. There had been something both vulnerable and defiant about Valentina when she had insisted on speaking to Mr Rakoczi and then, briefly, before she had hurried from the room in search of Kariana, she had seen bewilderment on that lovely face and had felt pity for her. Why? It was a question she had often asked herself. Kariana was the one who deserved the pity. Yet it was Valentina that her heart had gone out to.

  She looked down at the front page photograph of a smiling Valentina cradling her new-born son. Her pity had been misplaced. Even as they were all frantically searching for the missing Kariana, Valentina had been happily in love with her handsome Greek. The baby was described tactfully as premature. Hazel smiled. It was only five months since the wedding.

  ‘I think I shall go shopping today,’ Kariana said dreamily, tilting her head back, her long, pale golden hair catching and holding the light of the morning sun. ‘We’ll go down to Rodeo Drive and I’ll buy some dresses at Saks, and maybe a fur.’

  Hazel nodded in agreement, but her doubts returned. The expensive shopping trips had become almost a daily occurrence. Hazel doubted if Kariana even remembered what it was that she had bought. She forgot things continually. There were even times when she forgot where she was and mistook her Hollywood home for her father’s home in New England.

  Vidal had been too relieved that the moody highs and lows had ceased for Hazel to point out that the vagueness and dreaminess which had replaced them might be equally dangerous. To Vidal, anything was preferable to the mania that turned his wife into a stranger. He had even been able to invite people to Villada for dinner, and life had begun to take on a semblance of normality. But Hazel’s inner instincts told her it was a normality built on dangerously shifting sands.

  He strode out to join them, still wearing his breeches and riding boots from his morning ride.

  ‘Good morning, Kariana. Did you sleep well?’

  His wife turned her head in his direction, a slow smile curving her lips, and then she turned her head away without answering, contemplating the view that absorbed her for hour after hour.

  ‘Good morning, Hazel. Do you have any plans for today?’ Vidal asked as he poured himself an iced beer. He hated to be waited on at the breakfast table. The maid appeared only to attend to Kariana’s endless cups of chocolate and occasionally to serve her with slices of thin, dry toast.

  ‘Kariana would like to go shopping.’

  If Vidal flinched at the prospect of another unnecessary onslaught on his bank account he showed no sign of it.

  Shopping seemed to have become a palliative to Kariana. It had become her only interest and she seemed able to indulge in it with complete safety.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, eating his cold duck and mentally going over the arguments he was going to need in order to persuade Mayer to finance the filming of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet.

  Louis B. Mayer would refuse. He would say the subject was not commercial enough; that audience interest would be limited. He, Vidal, had to convince him otherwise. The whole project revolved around having the right star for the lead part. He pushed his plate of duck to one side. She would have been perfect. As Eugenie Grandet, Valentina would have had every studio in town riffling through the classics in a vain frenzy of imitation. Everything inside him was cold. It was as if ice had entered his heart when he had lost her and had never thawed. He wondered if it ever would.

  He reached out for the first of the papers and Hazel Renko steadfastly kept her eyes focused on Kariana.

  ‘A son for the star who gave up all for love’the headline ran, and beneath it was a photograph of a smiling Valentina, in a hospital bed with her baby in her arms, Paulos Khairetis standing with his arm around her shoulders surveying his wife and son with pride.

  For a second there was complete silence. Hazel Renko drew in a deep breath and turned her head to look at him. He looked like a man who had been turned to stone. The night-black eyes, slanting above the high cheekbones, glittered with an expression that was unreadable. He moved swiftly, scraping his chair back from the table, on to his feet before she even had the chance to blink, striding away and into the house with a pent-up rage that could not be disguised.

  Kariana did not even turn her head. She seemed oblivious of his sudden departure.

  ‘I think,’ she said dreamily, ‘that if I were to be reincarnated, I would like to be a cloud. I would drift along against a blue sky and sometimes, sometimes, when there were storms…’ Her voice trailed away but Hazel noticed that though her face was perfectly calm, b
eneath the table her fingers were pulling fretfully at the lace edging of her negligée, pulling so that the delicate material was fraying beneath her carefully manicured nails.

  Vidal strode through the house and out to the stables. He could not see Mayer today. He could see no one. He felt jealousy and a fury burn through him so devastating that he felt as if he was going to disintegrate. Paulos Khairetis had given her that which he never could have done: a child.

  His heels dug in the horse’s flanks. He rode hard, unmercifully. For the first time he realized the unspoken hope he had woken with each day. The hope that she would return. That she would leave Khairetis. The hope that would never now be fulfilled.

  The sweat poured down his body and down his horse’s flanks as he rode higher and higher into the hills, never slackening his pace. He was confounded with desire for her. Convulsed with it. He was thirty-two. How could he live the rest of his life without her? How could he exist? He wheeled his horse to a standstill and flung himself to the ground, burrowing his head in his hands in an agony of despair. When he rose to his feet it was dusk. He had spent the whole day in his private Gethsemane. He rode homewards, his face cold and hard. If he could not have the woman he loved, he would have other women. Scores of them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them if need be. Eventually, he must be able to expiate his pain in the arms of one of them. There had to be more for him in life than the shallow play-acting that awaited him at Villada.

  Hollywood was stunned. Rakoczi took and discarded the most beautiful women in town with as little regard for their reputation as his own. He became known as ‘The Hungarian Devil’and rumours of his sexual exploits were discussed at every Hollywood cocktail party. It was said that he made love to three or four different women every night. That Paramount’s leading female star had attempted suicide when he had abandoned her. That there wasn’t an actress on the Twentieth Century lot that hadn’t graced his bed. That Errol Flynn’s romantic exploits were those of an inept schoolboy in comparison.

  Hazel Renko read the gossip columns, answered the never-ending telephone calls to the house, and wondered if she was destined to go through life feeling pity for the people she most cared about. Whatever Vidal’s exploits outside Villada, inside life continued as it had always done.

  Vidal was punctiliously polite to Kariana and everything and anything she expressed a desire for she was given. Hazel was careful to see that no reporters were put through to Kariana on the telephone. That no newspapers were left lying around the house. Alone in all of Hollywood, Kariana Rakoczi was unaware of her husband’s sexual exploits. She had withdrawn into a world that nothing could penetrate. The shopping expeditions had ended. She was content to sit, the same piece of embroidery in her hands for days, her eyes fixed on the far horizon as if therein lay the answer to her problem.

  Perhaps, Hazel thought as she tried to urge Kariana indoors long after the sun had set, it would be better if she were in a home or a hospital. Better if Vidal remarried. But none of the stars and starlets that his name was associated with brought a softening to the granite-hard face.

  Valentina had been able to hold the baby briefly, alone, before Paulos had been ushered into the room. He had weighed over ten pounds and there was no way that his weight could be issued to the press.

  She could see nothing of herself in his face; he was all Vidal. His hair was a wild, shaggy mop of jet-black. His eyes at first had been screwed up as he had yelled lustily. Then, when the nurse had placed him in her arms, his cries had ceased, and his eyes had opened. Mother and son regarded each other for the first time. Small, clenched fists fought their way free of the blanket that the nurse had cocooned him in, with a fury that was worthy of his father. His eyes, though the nurse would later state categorically that all newborn babies’ eyes were blue, were gypsy-dark, and thick-lashed. Valentina touched the petal-soft face with wonder and love, tracing the unformed features with her forefinger, knowing very well how strong the lines of nose and jaw would be. How high the cheekbones. How winged the brows. He was a son Vidal would have been proud of. A son she and Paulos would love.

  Paulos entered the room, the relief on his face still not quite disguising the lines of anguish he had suffered during the hours he had been barred from Valentina’s side.

  He crossed quickly to her, kissing her gently. His concern, as always, first of all for her.

  ‘Are you all right, my love? Was it very bad? They wouldn’t let me near you, but I heard you cry out and…’

  Valentina smiled, her love for him nearly as maternal as it was for her child.

  ‘Darling Paulos, it was a very easy birth. Truly.’

  He sat down beside her, his gaze travelling from her radiant face to the warmly wrapped bundle cradled in her arms. His first emotions were of wonder and astonishment. He had never seen a new-born baby before. He reached out tentatively to touch it and immediately his forefinger was seized in a sturdy grasp.

  ‘She’s marvellous, darling. Absolutely incredible.’

  ‘She’s a he,’ Valentina said in amusement.

  The bright black eyes screwed up again tightly, the face turning an angry red as the little mouth opened, emitting a deafening squall.

  ‘I think he’s hungry,’ Valentina said as the nurse hurried into the room.

  ‘I dare say he is,’ the nurse said scoldingly. ‘You’ve been holding him for far too long. Boiled sugar water is what he needs right now. You can put him to the breast tomorrow.’

  The baby was unceremoniously whipped from Valentina’s arms and whisked from the room.

  ‘They’re very authoritative, aren’t they?’ Paulos said with a grin.

  ‘Very,’ Valentina agreed. She could still feel the weight of the tiny body in her arms, the warmth of him against her flesh. ‘I don’t want to stay here a day longer than necessary, Paulos. I want to be at home with you and the baby.’

  ‘What are we going to call him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘I don’t think an American name would suit him. He doesn’t look American, does he?’

  ‘With that mop of black hair, he looks very Greek,’ Paulos said, a gleam of amusement in his eyes. ‘Shall we call him Alexander?’

  ‘Alexander would be perfect,’ she agreed, and raised her face for his kiss.

  Neither of them had any desire to hurry back to the concert platform circuit. In the Villa Ariadne, Alexander thrived, gurgling on a blanket in the shade of a plane tree, sleeping to the strains of Bach and Liszt.

  After the first year they left their idyllic retreat occasionally, journeying to Athens and to Rome. Paulos was devoting himself more and more to composing and his face appeared with increasing regularity on the covers of Greek and Italian glossy magazines.

  Valentina spurned all attempts by reporters to interview her as well as her husband. She guarded her privacy jealously. Not even telegrams from London and Hollywood offering her the choicest film parts tempted her from her seclusion. She was happy. She had Paulos. She had Alexander. And she had no desire to leave either of them, not even for a day, much less the months it would take to make a film.

  Alexander was now four, sturdy and strong, with a shock of black hair and sparkling dark eyes. Paulos paused at his piano practice, watching through the open window as Valentina threw a ball for Alexander and he ran, laughingly, to retrieve it.

  The news from Europe was not good. Mussolini was looking increasingly aggressive and Hitler was already causing havoc in Eastern Europe. Crete was no longer a safe place for his wife and child.

  Reluctantly he rose to his feet, the wild flowers massed in the vase on the piano trembling at his movement. He touched their petals. Pink, lance-shaped anemones; stark white clusters of neragoula; tall purple and rose skylaki; tulip-shaped fritillaries. Valentina gathered them fresh every morning, walking with a chattering Alexander at her side far up into the foothills of the White Mountains.

  There would be no skylaki and fritillaries in New York and he kn
ew that she would be appalled at the prospect of leaving him. Heavy-hearted he left the room, walking down through the garden to the beach.

  Alexander was gleefully chasing the waves as they creamed towards him. Valentina was watching him, her arms hugging her legs, her dark eyes alight with pleasure, her shining black hair held away from her face by two heavy tortoiseshell combs.

  Never, in all the years of their marriage, had he become accustomed to her beauty.

  ‘We should have called him Poseidon. He’s more at home in the water than he is on land,’ Paulos said, sinking down on to the sand beside her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders.

  She turned her head to look at him, at the unhidden love in his eyes, the adoration that had not faded with time, the kindness and the compassion that were such an integral part of him, and smiled.

  She had grown to love him more deeply than she had ever imagined possible. His goodness and gentleness she had been aware of from the moment she had first met him. Later, she had become aware of other things. Of his talent. Of the way other women looked at him and the knowledge that she was envied. Not simply because she was Valentina, but because she was the wife of Paulos Khairetis, the pianist and composer who looked as if he had been the original model for a hundred Greek statues. Tall, fine-boned, lean and graceful, his charm was not a social veneer, but stemmed from a genuine interest in everyone he met. A deep concern for others that those around him instinctively sensed.

  His face was unusually serious and she felt a flicker of alarm. ‘The news from Athens is not good, Valentina. I think it best if we leave Crete.’

  Her concern deepened. ‘But why? Surely whatever is happening in Europe will not touch Crete?’

  ‘But it has already touched Crete, my love. John Pendlebury, the archaeologist who has been working on Crete for many years, was stopped by a local policeman and accused of being a spy.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous!’

  ‘I know. Apparently Pendlebury was so indignant that he suggested the policeman ring up the King, or the British Consul, to check on his identity.’ He grinned. ‘The policeman sensibly remarked that to telephone would cost twenty-five drachmas and that it was cheaper to let him go.’