by Anne Hampson
‘I still can’t believe Daros would do anything dishonourable,’ said Pam after a while. And yet she spoke with a little catch of doubt in her voice - doubt and disillusionment. ‘You did make a dreadfully bad start,’ she reminded Toni after another silence. ‘To demand money ... he must be thinking you’re the most avaricious person alive. Why don’t you tell him what you did with the money?’
An unhappy face was raised, and Pam noticed that her sister’s eyes were unnaturally bright.
‘I’ve thought of doing that, too, but such was his opinion of me that he wouldn’t have believed I could give the money away. And now,’ she ended wretchedly, ‘it’s too late. Even if he did believe me it wouldn’t make any difference to our relationship. How could it when he’s gone back to Olivia?’
‘Gone back?’
‘You know what I mean.’ Realizing that Pam was almost as unhappy as she, Toni tried to assume a more cheerful front, saying that perhaps some day Daros would have another change of heart and give Olivia up. ‘Then we might be happy together,’ she ended brightly.
‘Yes ... I think perhaps he will one day give her up. I do hope so.’
Two days later she left for England and Toni was too busy superintending the activities in the house to dwell very much on her own unhappy state. A small amount of plastering had to be done, and then the decorators came in. By the time Pam returned the carpets were laid and the curtains were up at the windows. ‘The furniture will be here in about a fortnight’s time,’ Pam said, thrilled with the transformation in her house. ‘I shall have to stay with you for a while yet.’
‘We don’t mind, Pam, you know that. But it’s easy to see you’re impatient to be in your own place,’ Daros smiled at her and his face was transformed, as it always was when he was in such a mood as this. He was handsome at any time, mused Toni, even when his customary hardness was in evidence, but when he smiled he was devastatingly attractive. What was Olivia like? Toni wondered. She had not been close enough for Toni to judge the beauty of which Evyania had spoken. But the girl was tall, and walked with the self-assurance of a fashion model.
‘Yes, I’m just dying to be in,’ Pam was saying. ‘The house looks so inviting, now that it’s been painted, and with the garden all nice and straight. Did you notice, Toni, that I have an orange tree and a fig tree?’ Coming out of her reverie, Toni smiled.
‘Yes, I noticed. And you have two oleanders, one pink and one white, and a beautiful bougainvillea by the back porch.’
‘I know.’ Pam’s eyes sparkled. ‘You’re both so good ... this is the first time I’ve felt happy since - since Frank died.’
‘Well, from now on you stay happy.’ But though his voice was soft there was a sternness about Daros that caused both girls to look inquiringly at him. ‘And from now on too, there’ll be no more demonstrations of gratitude. You’re buying the house, and paying for it yourself; you’re bringing your own furniture over—’ He flicked a hand carelessly. ‘There really isn’t anything much that anyone else has done.’ His glance met Toni’s as he stopped speaking and he seemed surprised at what he saw. Was all her gratitude revealed in her eyes? - her sincere gratitude for what he had done for Pam? Toni knew it must be, for her heart was full. But what troubled her was that her husband might find more than gratitude in her eyes, and she lowered them, not looking up again until she heard her sister say, ‘Here’s my little brood coming in from school. Anyone would think they had the devil on their heels!’
David was the first to arrive on the terrace, where the three adults were sitting, enjoying the sun. It was beginning to cool now, for November was not far off.
‘We’ve got a holiday tomorrow!’ he gasped, flopping into a chair. ‘It’s a feast day.’
‘Does that mean we feast all day?’ giggled Robbie, sending his mother a mischievous glance.
‘I’m hungry now,’ cut in Louise hopefully. ‘My stomach’s empty.’
‘Too bad,’ returned her mother unfeelingly. ‘It’ll have to stay empty until teatime.’
‘The rest will do it good,’ added Toni, laughing at Louise’s sudden pout.
‘Shouldn’t ask,’ said David, resigned. ‘You know Maria won’t give you a crumb between meals.’
‘It’s a long while from lunchtime to five o’clock.’
‘You took some biscuits to school,’ her mother reminded her, but Louise was shaking her head.
‘I lost them - or else Michael Vatiokotis pinched them.’ ‘Nonsense. Michael wouldn’t steal your biscuits.’
‘He was chasing me, and I think they fell out of my pocket. He stopped chasing me, so I’ll bet he saw them and picked them up.’
‘Where can we go tomorrow?’ Robbie changed the subject, looking up at his uncle coaxingly. ‘Can we go for a picnic?’
‘We might.’
‘Where to?’ demanded Louise, her stomach forgotten.
‘I’d like to go to Rhodini,’ said Robbie. ‘You took us there once and it was lovely.’
‘I want to go to the Valley of the Butterflies. And as I’m the oldest I should have the pick.’
‘But I haven’t ever had a pick.’ Louise went to her mother and put an arm round her neck. ‘They never give me a pick because I’m the youngest - and a girl.’
‘Girls don’t have a pick in Greece.’ David dismissed the whole idea with a disparaging wave of his hand. ‘They just do what the boys want to do.’ He glanced at Daros. ‘So we’ll go to Rhodini?’ ‘But we’ve never been to the Valley of the Butterflies.’
‘There are no butterflies at this time of the year,’ Daros informed them quietly. ‘They die at the end of the summer.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them.’
Robbie’s forehead puckered as he struggled with his comprehension.
‘What about next year?’ He shook his head. ‘No, they must just be sleeping.’
‘Next year the eggs, which the butterflies laid this year, will hatch out, and there will be millions of butterflies in the valley again. This happens all the time.’
‘I thought butterflies laid caterpillars,’ Louise looked to her mother for confirmation of this.
‘Yes, in a way; you see, the caterpillar’s the larva and the butterfly hatches out of the caterpillar—’ Pam broke off, laughing. ‘That’s not right, is it?’
‘Not quite,’ said Daros, responding to her laughter. ‘But who wants a biology lesson anyway? The butterflies come out every year,’ he told the children. ‘And after three months they die.’
‘But I want to know,’ insisted Robbie. ‘Butterflies don’t lay caterpillars, they lay eggs.’
‘And the egg becomes the caterpillar,’ explained Toni. ‘Then the caterpillar feeds and feeds until he almost bursts—’
‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Louise. ‘I am hungry.’
‘—and then he goes to sleep in a lovely little silk bag he’s made for himself. This little creature in the bag is called a chrysalis, and this finds a nice sheltered place to stay—’
‘What sort of a sheltered place?’ Louise put a hand to her stomach as if she had a pain there.
‘Perhaps on the trunk of a tree, or on the side of a wall. Then, like magic, the beautiful butterfly comes out - not until the spring, of course, when the weather is nice and warm and sunny.’ Toni’s voice was soft and low, her eyes dreamy. She looked up as she stopped speaking and found her husband’s eyes fixed intently upon her. She smiled, a quivering smile, and his gaze softened. Toni’s heart thudded, quite uncontrollably, and she glanced away.
‘So you see,’ flashed Robbie triumphantly at his brother, ‘you can’t have the pick because the chrys - chrys— The butterflies aren’t out of the little bags yet. So we can go to Rhodini!’
‘That’s not fair! Girls should have a—’
‘I think,’ came the softly-spoken intervention, ‘that we’ll let Aunt Toni have the pick.’
‘Me?’ It wasn’t what Daros said, or the way he said it that sent Toni into confus
ion. It was the manner in which he was looking at her, puzzled, it was true, but with an altogether different expression too ... an expression she had never seen before. Pam was watching her, and then she looked across at Daros.
‘That’s a good idea,’ she enthusiastically agreed. ‘It will settle the argument once and for all.’
‘I’d like to go into the mountains - if that’s all right with you,
Daros. You’ll be doing the driving.’
‘The driving’s no trouble. Very well, the mountains it is.’
CHAPTER TEN
THEY set off immediately after breakfast, heading for the west of the island. At Aghios Issidoras they stopped for refreshments, and the villagers, friendly and delighted with their visitors, presented fruit to the children and flowers to Toni and Pam. They drove away with a smiling, waving crowd standing in the square to see them off.
Some time later they were standing on the top of the island’s highest mountain, which wasn’t very high at all but from its summit the shores of Asia Minor could be clearly discerned.
‘What a lot of islands we can see,’ exclaimed Robbie. ‘There must be dozens of Greek islands, Uncle Daros!’
‘Hundreds, Robbie, but some are just huge chunks of bare rock. Others have some trees and plants growing on them, but people do not live on them.’
‘Why?" Louise brought a bar of chocolate from her pocket and proceeded to take off the wrapping.
‘There are many reasons. Perhaps there isn’t enough water, or not enough flat space to grow things,’ Toni explained.
‘I wish we could explore an uninhabited island,’ said David. ‘Would you take us in your boat, Uncle Daros?’
‘Nothing doing.’ Daros’s eyes were narrowed against the sun as he pointed westwards. ‘Do you know what that island is, Toni?’ he inquired with a hint of humour.
Crete — where they met. Why should he make a point of bringing her attention to it?
‘Of course,’ she submitted at length.
He smiled, because she was confused and vaguely wondering, but he made no further comment, merely turning round to look once again across to the shores and misted hills of Turkey.
A few minutes later they were exploring what little remained of the ancient Temple of Zeus, which had stood on the summit of
the mountain along with the Palace of Althaemenes.
‘There’s a story about this,’ commented Toni with a frown. ‘But I can’t remember what it is.’
There was a myth, Daros began, smiling as the children all gathered round him, that the prophecy of an oracle was that Althaemenes would slay his own father and in order to avoid this he left his home in Crete and built a palace on the highest mountain of Rhodes, which was Mount Atabyros.
‘This is Mount Atabyros,’ he added for the benefit of the children. ‘He built his palace here so that he could look out on the island he loved, which was Crete. However, his father, the king of Crete, dearly wished to see his son and came here, disguised, along with some of his attendants, who were also disguised. But Althaemenes mistook them for pirates and had his soldiers kill all the attendants while he himself set about killing the king. And so the prophecy came true.’
‘Is that a real story?’ asked Louise.
‘Uncle Daros said it was a myth, darling,’ interposed her mother. ‘And a myth isn’t true.’
‘A fairy story?’
‘Sort of, yes.’
‘Shall we move on?’ suggested Daros a few minutes later. ‘We can keep to the mountains or make for the sea. Which would you like to do?’
Toni glanced at her watch.
‘We have time for both, I think.’
And so their explorations took them through the mountain regions, where they would at times travel above bare and rocky ravines, where torrents cascaded down the sunlit hillsides before dropping into their narrow, boulder-strewn beds, and proceeded merrily down to the sea. At other times they would meet with lush green vegetation, where the air was saturated with the fragrance of pines and sweet-smelling herbs. Their final halt in the mountain area was on Monte Smith Hill, not far from the city of Rhodes. The children were more interested in the caves than the temple rums of Apollo and Zeus, and they were allowed to play their noisy games for a time until Toni and Pam called them over to the grassy ledge on which the picnic lunch was set out under the shade of the trees.
The meal over, Daros drove on to Rhodes and to the lovely beach right at the northern tip of the island. There followed a stroll around the old city, refreshments on the harbour at Mandraki and then, with everyone tired and ready for home, they drove in the swiftly-gathering dusk down towards Lindos.
A great moon hung over the sea as they turned into the road leading to the beach. Daros’s house nestled in its natural rock setting, its arches and fagade sprinkled with silver. Pam’s little villa sat proudly on the hillside, white with blue shutters — the colours of Greece.
‘Aren’t we lucky ...?’ Toni spoke to herself. And she was still in this happy, docile frame of mind when, much later, she sat on her bed, listening to every movement in the next room. The day had been wonderful.... Should she tell Daros the whole story? It could not work a miracle, of course, and make him love her all of a sudden, but it might make him understand, and find excuses for her conduct. Dismally she owned that there were no excuses for her conduct, and she was still sitting there, undecided, when the apologetic voice of Maria came to her ears. The woman spoke in Greek. Miss Olivia had rung and left a message requesting that he ring her when he came in. Maria was sorry, very sorry, that she had forgotten to deliver the message earlier.
Toni glanced at the clock. Only ten-thirty; everyone had felt tired. She heard Daros go downstairs; it was an age before she heard him returning, and suddenly her blood boiled. He had forced her into this marriage, then forced his attentions upon her, and now he was having an affair with his ex-fiancee! Just let him come in here— Toni checked her furious thoughts. She must take care that he did not guess at her interpretation of Maria’s words. And so she merely said, when her husband entered the room,
‘I’m tired, and I’m sure you are. Good night - and thank you for a lovely day.’
He raised his brows, puzzled.
‘You’re very abrupt all at once.’
‘I’ve said I’m tired.’
‘Giving me the brush-off, as it were?’ Soft the voice had become
- and edged with inflexibility.
‘That’s not a very delicate expression.’
‘This isn’t a very delicate situation.’ He moved further into the
room, and stood looking down at her. There was a sparkle in her eyes and a flush on her cheeks. The graceful curve of her throat ended at the frill of lace; his eyes went lower, to where even more beautiful curves were tantalizingly concealed in a gossamer web of softest green. ‘What’s wrong, Toni?’
A sigh of impatience before she said,
‘I’ve told you, I’m tired.’
A small silence followed. Daros turned, looking oddly at the door behind him. He was quietly pondering.
‘Pity,’ he drawled at last. ‘Because I’m not.’
She glared at him.
‘You said you were. That’s why we came up early — all of us.’
A smile of amusement touched the fine outline of his mouth. ‘You, my dear Toni, are enough to waken me - however tired I might happen to be.’
A seething fury engulfed her. What to say to this - without giving herself away? She could of course say she had seen him out with a woman, but this was surely an odd time to mention it. No, Daros was not a fool; should she mention Olivia now he would quickly perceive that Maria’s message had been fully understood by his wife.
‘I would prefer you to go,’ she said stiffly, curbing by some miracle the anger within her.
‘But I intend to stay.’
‘I’ll fight you!’ Tears of frustration hung on her lashes even as she uttered that futile threat.
; ‘Good. I said once before I’d enjoy that.’ With a flick of his finger the light was reduced to the soft pink glow from a single bed lamp. ‘I don’t believe you’ll fight me, Toni, but we shall soon see,’ he laughed, and crossed the room towards her.
From the distant hillside came the sound of laughter and Toni smiled to herself as she entered her sister’s house.
‘They’re right up in the hills,’ she replied to Pam’s inquiry as to whether she had seen them anywhere around. ‘It’s a wonder you haven’t heard them.’
‘I’ve been busy inside— Yes, I hear them now.’
‘You’ve got this place really beautiful.’ Toni followed Pam into the sparkling kitchen and sat down.
‘How’s the job going?’
It was fine, said Pam, commenting on the short hours and her employer’s understanding of her position. She must adjust her hours to suit herself when the children were on holiday at Christmas.
‘I wouldn’t alter my hours, of course, because it would seem like abusing his generosity. But it was kind of him to mention it, don’t you agree?’
‘I do, Pam. And I’m so relieved about all this. It hurt me to see how you were, and I feared you’d have a breakdown in the end.’ Pam smiled. She was pretty again, and that shade of sadness in her eyes was lifting with every day that passed.
‘It was rather hard work. I never seemed to have a moment to myself - and the children were beginning to give me anxiety. I have a lot to thank your husband for, Toni.’ A sort of challenging note in her voice, and yet a kind of hurt as well. ‘He has so many good points that - that...’ She trailed away into silence. Toni said in completion of her halted words,
‘That you can’t believe he’s acting so badly towards me?’ Daros had gone to Athens two days after that little argument in the bedroom and Toni had not seen him for the past fortnight.
‘What I can’t understand is, if he wanted Olivia then why did he—? I mean - he made an annulment impossible. It doesn’t make sense, Toni.’
‘Olivia came along with her act of contrition later.’