by M. M. Kaye
‘Kostos is here, Glenn. He arrived just before you did. I don’t know why he didn’t see you in Limassol and save himself the journey. These people never think.’
‘He couldn’t,’ said Mr Barton. ‘They had a bit of trouble on the ship. One of the passengers died, and things got a bit held up. I’ll see him now. Will you look after Miss Derington?’
‘Yes, of course. Wouldn’t you like a wash, Miss Derington? I–I know how dusty that road is. And what about some orange juice or sherry or something? Or there’s some iced coffee if you’d prefer that? Glenn will be here about ten or fifteen minutes; there are some invoices he’ll have to look at.’
‘Iced coffee sounds wonderful,’ said Amanda gratefully. ‘And so does a wash. I’m stiff with dust and parched with thirst.’
Glenn Barton said: ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ and Monica Ford led Amanda away. ‘Come on to the verandah when you’re ready,’ she said. ‘It’s through that door over there. I’ll have the coffee ready for you.’
The verandah was wide and shady but it seemed intolerably bright after the cool dimness of the shuttered rooms. Monica Ford had set out two chairs and was pouring out iced coffee from a frosted jug.
‘Lovely!’ said Amanda, drinking thirstily. ‘I needed that!’
She smiled gratefully at Miss Ford and noticed that in the full light of the verandah the sallow, sensible face looked older, and somewhat ill. There were dark shadows under Miss Ford’s eyes that the wide pink plastic rims of her glasses failed to hide, and Amanda suspected that she had been crying. The square, plain face with its pale blue eyes, sandy lashes and entire absence of make-up, looked sensible and efficient. An impression that was somewhat belied by Miss Ford’s choice of costume, for she wore a gaily coloured and full-skirted cotton frock which did nothing to improve either her thick waist or her unadorned complexion. To this she had added as a final incongruous touch a necklace and earrings of large plastic flowers and a liberal application of some cheap scent that smelt like violet hair oil.
Amanda suspected that the ear-rings at least were a recent and unusual adornment, for Monica Ford could not keep her hands from them. She kept touching them while she talked, as though they worried her; loosening the screws and tightening them again; her strong, square-fingered, sensible hands with their short unvarnished nails providing a sharp contrast to the glittering transparent petals of the plastic flowers.
She had arrived in Cyprus less than a year ago, she told Amanda, at the instigation of Mr Oswin Derington in whose office she had previously worked for over five years: ‘He thought that Mr Barton needed someone to help him,’ explained Miss Ford. ‘Things were not going so well at first, and these little local typists are often worse than useless. There was a great deal of work. You’ve no idea what Glenn has had to contend with. Labour troubles and customs troubles and local prejudice, and no one to give him any help or encouragement. It’s been an uphill fight. He ought to go on leave, but he won’t. He works himself until he drops. He doesn’t know how to spare himself. Some men are like that—Bobby was like that too…’
Her voice suddenly broke and stopped and Amanda saw to her horror that the pale eyes had filled with tears.
Miss Ford fumbled in one of the large pockets that ornamented her skirt and producing a damp handkerchief blew her nose fiercely. ‘Do forgive me. I–I’m not quite myself today. I–Hay fever you know____’
‘How horrid for you,’ said Amanda politely. ‘But I’m not surprised, with all these gorgeous flowers around.’
‘They are lovely, aren’t they?’ said Miss Ford recovering herself. ‘It’s odd to think that I didn’t want to come out to Cyprus at all.’
‘Then you like it here?’
‘Oh yes!’ said Monica Ford clasping her hands together in a sudden convulsive gesture. ‘It’s–it’s a beautiful island. I couldn’t bear to leave! I won’t leave!–I won’t–I____’
She stopped abruptly and the colour flamed up into her sallow cheeks. There was a brief embarrassed pause and Amanda said sympathetically: ‘I suppose Uncle Oswin is trying to drag you back to London or Liverpool or somewhere? He is an old bully, isn’t he? Pay no attention to him! I was scared stiff of him for years and then one day I suddenly realized that I wasn’t a schoolgirl any longer, and I staged a token strike and got away with it. All you’ve got to do is to stand up to him.’
Monica Ford smiled uncertainly and said: ‘Have some more coffee?’
‘I’d love some.’ Amanda held out her glass and said: ‘I’m sorry to hear that Mrs Barton is ill. What’s the matter with her? I didn’t like to ask her husband; he seemed rather upset about it. Is she really bad?’
Inexplicably the hot colour deepened in Monica Ford’s plain face and she fumbled with the jug so that the coffee spilt in a pale brown stream down the skirt of her gaily patterned cotton frock. She sprang up hurriedly, her face crimson, and said in a muffled voice: ‘Oh dear!—and it stains so! Excuse me just a minute____’ and fled.
Amanda looked after her in considerable surprise. What was the matter with Mrs Barton? Had she perhaps gone off her head? Or contracted some illness like poliomyelitis that the authorities wished to hush up for fear of creating a panic? It was all rather mysterious and Amanda was suddenly intensely sorry for Glenn Barton. What with work and worry, a wife who was ill—or worse—and a secretary who was quite obviously suffering from nerves (Amanda did not believe the hay fever story) her own arrival at this juncture must have seemed to him like the proverbial last straw.
A door at the far end of the verandah opened and Mr Barton himself walked quickly towards her.
‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope that Monica kept you entertained. Where is she?’
‘She spilt some coffee down her frock and she’s gone to mop it off,’ said Amanda, rising. ‘I don’t think she’s feeling very well.’
A shadow crossed Glenn Barton’s pleasant face and he glanced towards the door and lowered his voice:
‘I know. Poor Monica. She’s had a ghastly shock, but she’s taking it splendidly. She’s got lots of guts. She only heard yesterday that her brother was shot by Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya. He had a farm out there, and they attacked the place and wiped it out. He was all the family she had. There don’t seem to be any other relations, and she was devoted to him.’
‘I am sorry!’ said Amanda, smitten. ‘How dreadful for her. No wonder she seemed so upset.’
She turned to look out across the sun-drenched garden with its blaze of flowers, and all at once, in that hot, quiet verandah, she shivered as though she were cold.
‘What is it?’ asked Glenn Barton, his voice suddenly gentle.
‘Nothing. I–I was only thinking that–that it’s such a lovely day, and it doesn’t seem possible that awful, tragic things can happen to people. And yet they do. To ordinary, nice people like Alastair Blaine—and Miss Ford____’
‘I shouldn’t have told you about it,’ said Glenn Barton contritely. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve had quite enough to upset you already. Tragedy is not for the young. Forget it and enjoy yourself. It is a lovely day!’
He held out a hand to her: ‘Come on, or you will be late for luncheon and Miss Moon will never forgive me.’
6
The road from Nicosia to Kyrenia runs for a few miles across the plain and then begins to climb the long narrow barrier of the Kyrenia range that forms a rampart between the plain and the north coast of the Island.
The car topped the pass and began to descend, swinging and turning to the curves of the winding road, and there below them lay the sea—an impossible cerulean blue streaked with sapphire and viridian, with the white, beautiful coastline fading away into the heat haze until sky and sea and coast seemed to merge and melt into one.
Olive groves, the tree trunks so gnarled and twisted with age that some of them must surely have seen the Crusaders come and go, stood dark against the glittering expanse of blue, and below them the little white town of Kyrenia lay
basking in the noonday sun like a handful of pearls and white pebbles washed up by the sea.
They drove down a long road that wound and curved between olive, carob, cypress, mulberry and mountain fir, and which finally ran straight from the foot of the hills to the sea.
A quarter of a mile short of the harbour the car turned off into a side road and drew up before a large, square, two-storeyed house that was separated from the road by a white wall, a line of cypress trees and a tangle of oleanders.
‘Here we are,’ said Glenn Barton. ‘This is the Villa Oleander. Andreas will bring in your suitcases.’
The house was high and old, weather-worn and beautiful. Its walls had been colour-washed a flaking and discoloured pink that had bleached to a warm, uneven shade of apricot, and the wrought-iron balconies and wooden shutters at the windows were a soft, faded, dusty emerald green. The roof tiles had probably come from the South of France, for they were not red, but a deep beautiful pink, each one curved and marked with the outline of a heart.
A short, flagged walk and six shallow stone steps led up to a massive front door whose heavy bronze knocker was green with age, and the garden was a neglected tangle of orange and lemon trees, figs, plum trees, oleanders, roses, and cascades of yellow and white jasmine. A vine grew along the wrought-iron of a balcony to the right of the front door, and water trickled from the mouth of a bronze dolphin into a deep pool full of lily pads and reeds; the sound of its fall providing a tinkling counterpoint to the cooing of pigeons from among the warm shadows of a gnarled olive tree.
Amanda stood with her hands on the gate and looked about her with a feeling of awe. It was all so right. So exactly right—the quintessence of serenity and enchantment.
Glenn Barton, watching her, said a little anxiously: ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit neglected. But Miss Moon says that she can’t be bothered with keeping up the garden and that she likes it like this.’
‘So do I,’ said Amanda on a breath of rapture. ‘It’s beautiful! It’s just exactly like a picture I’ve always had in my mind of what a house on a Mediterranean island should look like, but I’ve always been afraid that it wouldn’t. It’s like a dream!’
Glenn Barton looked relieved but uncomprehending, and it was obvious that he himself saw little to admire in the shabby house and neglected overgrown garden. He led the way up the short flight of stone steps to the front door and banged on the knocker. There was a sound of quick footsteps and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges to show a stout black-eyed woman who wore a voluminous and rather dirty apron and a brightly coloured cotton handkerchief tied over her abundant greying hair.
‘Ah! Kyrie Barton! Kalossorisis. Ti habaria. Kopiase messa!’
‘This is Euridice,’ said Glenn Barton turning to Amanda. ‘She’s the cook and housekeeper and housemaid and everything rolled into one.’
Amanda smiled at her, and the woman beamed back and breaking into a flood of unintelligible speech, led the way across a wide hall into a large dim drawing-room full of old, beautiful furniture and dusty curio cabinets, where the shutters had been closed against the hot sunlight.
‘Can’t she speak English?’ whispered Amanda apprehensively.
‘Quite a lot. You’ll find that she speaks enough to manage on. But Miss Moon has always refused flatly to speak to her in Greek, so Euridice, who has been with her for over thirty years, refuses to admit to any English. It’s a point of honour with both of them.’
‘How do they manage?’
‘They both speak to each other very slowly and at the tops of their voices in their own languages. Here, I think, is your hostess____’
High heels clicked rapidly on the hall staircase: there was a jingle of jewellery and a strong scent of heliotrope, and Miss Moon was with them.
Miss Moon was small and bony and birdlike, and somehow managed to suggest a homely British sparrow that has gone to a fancy dress ball dressed as a peacock. Her thin hair, which she had thought fit to dye an improbable shade of scarlet, was dressed in innumerable frizzy curls and decorated with a bow of violet gauze. Her dress, also in shades of violet and mauve, was of the type known to an earlier generation as a ‘tea gown’, and she had confined it at the waist by a wide belt of silver filigree adorned by an enamel buckle in a design of irises. She wore a number of necklaces and bracelets of silver filigree, amethysts and opals, and a pair of amethyst ear-rings of rococo splendour.
‘Glenn! Dear boy. How it warms me to see you! And this is Amanda? Let me look at you, child. Beautiful! You refresh my eyes. How good of you to come and stay with me. So few young people care to do a kindness to the old these days, alas! It will be delightful to have you in the house. Quite delightful—it needs cheering up, and so do I. You are looking at my dress. Not quite the thing to welcome a guest in. It should have been pink for that. Pink for joy! But it’s Tuesday you know, and so it had to be mauve. I always wear mauve on Tuesdays. Monday is my pink day. I do so resent it when people speak of black Monday. Why, Monday is a new start! A fresh week—anything might happen! And so, of course, I always wear pink. In welcome. I think that colours are so important, do not you? But here I am keeping you talking when you must be quite famished! Glenn, dear boy, will you not change your mind and stay to luncheon?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t. Nothing I would have liked better, but I have to meet Gavriledes at the Dome. He’s giving me lunch and we can get through our business at the same time.’
‘Oh dear. How disappointing. You know, of course, that Lumley Potter has taken the top floor of one of the houses on the harbour, don’t you? He arrives today.’
‘Potter—who told you?’ Glenn Barton’s face was suddenly white.
‘So you did not know! I think Anita should have told you. So awkward if you met. Lady Cooper-Foot told me. The flat—if you can call it that—belongs to her cook’s second cousin. Mr Potter intends to set up a studio.’
‘But–but I thought he was staying on in Famagusta.’
‘He wishes to paint in Kyrenia. Famagusta has not enough spiritual essence. I could have told him that.’
Glenn Barton’s eyes were wide and blank. He turned to Amanda as though he were about to say something, and checked. After a moment he said instead, in an uncertain, rather formal voice: ‘I must go now, I hope to see you again soon. If you are by any chance writing to your uncle, let me have the letter and I will see that it is sent with the office mail. It will go quicker that way. I will see that someone calls every day in case you should want to send anything. I am sure Miss Moon will look after you well. I won’t say good-bye. Only au revoir.’
He took Miss Moon’s withered, be-ringed hand and kissed it in an affectionate gesture that was entirely without affectation, and went quickly away.
Miss Moon drew a gusty sigh. ‘Poor boy! How that woman can____But I must not stay gossiping here all day, must I? I will show you your room. Andreas will have taken up your luggage. And then we will have luncheon and hear all about each other. So stimulating!’
She led the way back through the high, dark hall and up a wide, shallow stepped staircase. ‘This is the bathroom, dear, and there is a lavatory. That is my room, and here is yours____’
She opened a door and Amanda found herself in a large, high-ceilinged room that was painted a soft green and carpeted with coarse matting. There were flowers in tall jars and the furniture, like that in the drawing-room, was old and beautiful and dusty from neglect. A portrait of a girl in a green satin dress of the Restoration period hung on one wall, while on another a vast silvery looking glass, spotted with age and wreathed with garlands, ribbons and cupids of tarnished gilt, hung above a small painted French bureau that served as a dressing-table. A graceful Venetian glass chandelier, not entirely innocent of cobwebs, hung from the ceiling, and only the bed struck an incongruous note. It was a narrow cheap iron bedstead that supported, on four poles of varying size that had been lashed to it with string, a somewhat darned mosquito net. The shutters were closed against the heat of
the day and the room was dim and green and smelt of lilies and syringa, dry rot and dust.
Amanda turned to her hostess with shining eyes:
‘It is so good of you to have me. This is the most beautiful house!’
‘Oh, I am so glad that you should feel like that!’ said Miss Moon, suddenly embracing her. ‘I knew the moment I saw you that you were right, and that the house would like you. So many people are wrong. Such a pity! It is indeed beautiful—the whole island. I came here with dear Papa forty-three years ago. That is a very long time, is it not? I cannot have been much older than you are now. He died here, and I meant to go back to Norfolk. But somehow I never did. I had walked through the looking-glass like Alice, and I could not get back. The enchantment had got me. I bought this house and I have been here ever since. And when I die I shall be buried among the lemon trees and the oleanders in the garden. I have it all arranged. Ah, Kyrenia____! The very name sings, does it not? Like a warm wind through the olive trees. How delightful that you should feel it too. Are you ready, dear? Euridice will be waiting to serve luncheon.’
The dining-room looked out across a froth of lemon trees to an old stone wall with deep, arched embrasures, crumbling into ruin, in which fantailed pigeons strutted and cooed, and the meal began with fruit. Purple and green figs, melons, oranges, grapes, and tiny plums like balls of blue velvet: ice-cold and piled in careless, colourful profusion on shallow dishes of Venetian glass. There were tall green glasses flecked with gold, also Venetian, into one of which Miss Moon poured a white wine of local manufacture:
‘It is quite harmless, dear. A child could drink it. Glenn lets me have it. The firm exports it in bottles, but bottling seems to spoil the flavour, and it is never so good afterwards. This is straight from the cask, and really very pleasant. Or so I am told. I myself never take anything but barley water. Euridice makes it for me after breakfast, fresh every day.’
Amanda said: ‘You know, I think I am going to be very grateful to Mrs Barton for being ill.’