‘Right . . .’
He gestured at the door with an open palm, so Melissa put the key in the lock and opened it. On the floor was a folded piece of paper, which read:
We hope you can come to tea at the house called Seraphina on the hill behind the boat office at five o’clock today. Manos and Ekaterina Kiotzas.
‘You can ask them about Julian Adie,’ said Manolis.
‘That’s lovely! Thank you so much . . . will you thank them, and say yes, please!’ She was burbling, she knew, embarrassed by her ungracious misreading of the situation.
He nodded. ‘I’ll tell them you are coming.’
It was warm enough, if wrapped up, to lie reading on the egg-shaped stones of Kalami beach. There were few other people on its wide crescent that morning. None of them braved the sea. A stiff wind had brewed up a few grey clouds to which were thrown upward, indignant glances.
At lunchtime Melissa wondered about trying to find the shrine path again after trying one of the three promising-looking tavernas at Agni, but in the end she packed up her bag and wandered in the other direction. The road rose up over the northern headland, and swiftly dipped down again to Kouloura.
It was enchanting: another deserted blue bay, clearly still mainly used for fishing. Brightly coloured wooden boats lay upturned on the shingle and bobbed in the tiny harbour. The only buildings were clustered around the toy port, capped by the Byzantine roundels of a solitary white villa. She sat in sunshine by the wall, feeling relaxed. One day at a time, she’d told herself. If every day could have been like that blue afternoon, just as Julian Adie experienced it when he was on the island, she too would have felt like the king of the world.
The path to the house called Seraphina twisted up through an orchard of oranges and lemons. Here, too, were blankets of pink cyclamen that grew so profusely in the olive groves that she was having to pick her way through carefully to avoid crushing them underfoot. Notes of music threaded down through the trees from a house to one side.
The idyll was rudely interrupted as Melissa drew closer.
‘Ay-ooo! Po-po-po! Aaayyyy-oooooo!’
‘Po-po-po!’
The terrace of the modest stone house was abandoned for all that there was a sewing box and some mending on the table along with a glass of water. Uncertain what to do, she followed the wails towards an open door into the house, where a bead curtain was partially pulled back. She wondered whether it was not, after all, a good time and she should melt away again. She was about to turn back when a hand pulled the clinking beads back further and Manolis sauntered out.
‘Ah! Hello!’ he greeted her as the noise intensified. ‘Come in!’
As if nothing untoward was happening, he ushered her into a wide white room with a shiny tiled floor. The screams echoed slightly. They came from an older man with a sweating forehead who was waving a large white handkerchief as if in surrender to his fate.
‘He’s got a clove in his tooth,’ explained Manolis. ‘This is Eleni, my wife.’
A plump woman with smooth golden skin and a prominent mole above her lip stepped forward. She too was smiling warmly, following the rules of hospitality.
They shook hands. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Melissa, ridiculously, trying to follow their lead and keep a sociable tone against the background roars of pain.
An elderly woman she took to be the older man’s wife launched a stream of withering invective.
‘Ay-ooooo. . . .’
The older man was clutching his jaw, bobbing until he was bending double, and pulling an agonised face. The wife, a tiny woman with a helmet of short grey hair, crossed her arms and stood by, nodding grimly.
‘My father . . . Manos. He’s got a toothache but he won’t go to the dentist.’
‘Nasty,’ Melissa agreed.
There was another outburst to which they listened politely. Melissa glanced quizzically at Manolis and Eleni.
‘My mother is saying, “You stupid man, brains of a donkey, when we said clove, we meant oil of cloves, not a hard brown clove from the kitchen. To wedge it into the hole – you’ve probably cracked it further open and done some damage more terrible than the first!”’ said Manolis.
The man then counter-attacked in a furious eruption.
Manolis cocked his head, listening. ‘Hmm,’ he said, and pulled down the sides of his mouth.
Melissa couldn’t help herself. ‘What now?’
‘My father has said my mother is surely the most ineffective wise woman in the whole of the Ionian Islands, one who could not tell the difference between a goat’s bottom and a bee sting, and if she can cure headaches by telephone then why cannot she lift her own loyal husband’s dreadful suffering . . .’
‘Or something like that,’ said Eleni, as Manos’s cries rose to a blood-curdling pitch. His eyes rolled in his head, then at last he seemed to realise Melissa was in the room. Manos sank suddenly into a chair with a surprising change of tone.
‘Ah!’ he said, in English. ‘Time for tea.’
‘Greeks like to shout a lot,’ said Manolis. ‘It makes us feel better.’
The cup and saucer rattled slightly in Melissa’s hand. ‘I’ll remember that.’
The second surprise, obviously on a more minor scale, was that when Eleni helped her mother-in-law from the kitchen it was with a tray of Indian tea with milk and sugar, and a plate of ginger biscuits. The elder Mrs Kiotzas had taken off her apron to reveal a flower-patterned dress.
‘This is what we always have, for visitors,’ explained Manolis. ‘My father’s father, old Manos, he learned it from the Adies. It’s a family tradition now. Like the way we speak English. We passed that on too, in the traditional way.’
‘My father taught Julian and his wife to speak Greek, and in return they learned English from them,’ said Manos, in confident and unmistakably cultured tones. Were they an echo from Adie’s own voice? It was possible.
‘They brought us good business, and they gave us the language to build on it with the foreigners,’ said Manolis, dunking a biscuit in his tea.
‘So . . . you would put it that strongly? Julian Adie really did bring you prosperity?’ asked Melissa.
There was a chorus of consent.
‘Julian Adie paid for the building of the apartment at the top of the White House,’ said Manolis. ‘It was his idea. He wanted to live there for ever. But—’
‘After Julian wrote his book the tourists began to come,’ Manos took over. ‘Slowly at first, then more and more of them, looking for his paradise. Always before we had lived by fishing and cultivating our olives, working in the fields. But now the boats from Kerkyra stop in the bay and let the visitors come to the taverna for lunch. They all want to see where he lived. And people still do, although maybe not so many now as before.’
‘A book he wrote that none of them could read . . . what a world!’ Ekaterina Kiotzas shook her head.
‘Except he didn’t write the book here, did he?’
‘Didn’t he?’ Manolis frowned.
‘He wrote it about five years after he left – I think he was living in Egypt by then. Not that it matters,’ Melissa added swiftly.
‘He was writing something,’ said Manos. ‘He liked to look over the sea when he was working. We would hear the noise from his writing machine like the fire from an army of guns!’ He drummed his fingers on the edge of the table at maniacal speed.
‘My father could not read very well,’ Manos went on. ‘He had never learned in school, and he did not need to for his life here. It was a tiny place, only a beach and a wide rock and a few other houses – maybe only ten families in the village. But after Julian came, it changed the way he looked at the world. Before it was just the seas and the mountains of Albania he could see. He had never been to Athens.’
‘Julian was a big talker,’ said Ekaterina. She had fetched her sewing from the table outside, and stabbed a needle into a linen square.
‘He would sit in the family room at the White House and t
alk and talk – in English and Greek – about England and India and . . . Paris and Tibet . . .’ nodded Manos. ‘I was a child, but it was wonderful to hear him. Always full of descriptions and ideas and plans. And laughing, too. I remember him always laughing, and wanting to know things. How do we do this? What happens here?’
‘He had bright yellow hair and blue, blue eyes,’ put in Ekaterina. ‘I thought he looked so strange at first, but later I thought he looked like a god. I was—’ she broke off, searching for the right word, and spoke rapidly in Greek to Manolis.
‘Quiet . . . shy,’ he answered.
‘I was shy when he was there.’
‘You remember him from that time too?’ Melissa asked her.
‘Oh, yes. Manos and I . . . we were friends as children. My family also lived in the village.’
‘Do you remember his wife Grace too?’
‘Yes – she was very beautiful and very gentle. Her hair was light too, and she was kind to all the children.’
‘She was the one who gave us tea and biscuits from tins that were sent from England,’ said Manos. ‘Tins with pictures of funny little houses, and roses . . .’
‘Do you think they were as happy in real life as they were in the book?’
The elder pair exchanged comments which no one translated.
‘Later on, they used to shout at each other,’ said Manos, rubbing his cheek and wincing. ‘So we thought everything was fine.’
The conversation switched to the question of when Manos would see sense and visit the dentist up the coast in Kassiope.
A fierce exchange in Greek threatened to reopen cathartic hostilities between the old couple, before Manolis stepped in with some soothing words.
Eleni caught Melissa’s eye. ‘Ekaterina is what we call the wise woman of the village. But this toothache is too big for her,’ she shrugged.
‘What does it mean, to be a wise woman?’
‘She can make the cures. No one likes going to see the doctor.’
‘Really? So . . . people come to her instead of the doctor then?’ Melissa tried hard to hide her scepticism.
‘For small problems, yes. She can cure headaches by speaking a cure.’
‘So, they just come to the house when they think she can help?’
‘Or she can do it by telephone.’
‘How extraordinary.’
‘She has the power of vision, too,’ Eleni went on.
Melissa frowned. ‘You mean second sight – she can see into the future?’
‘Mmm, not so much that. She can tell all about a person, what kind of person they are.’
‘Psychic, you mean?’
‘Yes! I think that is right.’
As if to demonstrate, Ekaterina gave her persuasive powers one final flourish. She was clearly miming an explosion of the lower jaw as a warning to Manos of what horrors lay in store for him if he did not consult a specialist on this one. At any rate there was no more shouting as she went over to the phone and fixed him with a no-nonsense stare as she spoke to someone at the other end, presumably a dentist’s receptionist.
Manos raised his hands and slumped in mock despair, beaten, both by tooth and reason.
After another animated discussion, Manolis came over and announced he was driving his father to Kassiope straight away. ‘I’m sorry it was not a very good day to talk about Julian Adie after all. Perhaps be better another time?’
She wanted to sit alone, with the books and her thoughts. It wasn’t clear what more she had actually learned about Adie from tea with the exuberant Kiotzas family. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but they had flown out of her head while so much else was going on. For Melissa, it had been strange being in the middle of a family again, with all the talk and unspoken connections; another indicator of how much time she had spent alone the past few months.
Funny how, no sooner do you wake up to something than it seems to trigger confirmation everywhere. That evening she had a phone call from Richard. Or, strictly speaking, a voice message on her mobile which had been switched off for days.
‘Just wanted to see how you are,’ he said. ‘Give me a ring soon.’
Even now, at this distance, she could hardly bear to think about Richard; the way nothing was as she had imagined it to be. The way, when he said he’d been with Sarah, she had thought nothing of it. He was always with Sarah; they worked together and had done for a couple of years.
Melissa had met her, had even liked her as a friend, as far as it went, the few times they were introduced at work-related events: a day at Ascot, a client dinner, an evening at Glyndebourne. It wasn’t as if Sarah was markedly more lovely to look at than her, or even downright ugly, downright stupid, as you sometimes read men perversely opting for in the other woman.
Naturally they had drinks after work in the City. They had to do it, because it was a meeting, you see. It wasn’t just bottles of wine in a candlelit cellar, a man and a woman.
The reality of being betrayed is that you begin to question your own judgement, and that leads to the possibility that everything you once believed was a lie.
He was caught out. Caught out, note, rather than sorry and aware that he was doing something that hurt her deeply. He came out with all the clichés about wanting to put it behind them and start again, but with little about why he did it and certainly with nothing approaching shame about his behaviour or any concept of how it had made her feel.
It seemed, for him, it was all about making things look right, rather than really making things right. But going through the motions is not the same and it made her feel angry as well as sad. For Melissa had seen it all before, from a different perspective.
Her parents separated when she was nine. It didn’t come as a bolt from the blue. The only surprise was that it had taken so long, given that the atmosphere of restrained argument which could erupt at any moment into hissed recriminations was alleviated only by her father’s lengthy absences.
It was only years later – and at least here she did come to know the truth – that she realised that he had other women in London, and that even when he wasn’t with one of them, he was out drinking to drown the guilt. Elizabeth was short-tempered and easily provoked into snapping at her. She wasn’t angry with Melissa; she was on edge and simmering with suppressed rage at him. But how could Melissa have known that at the time?
Only now, I do know how she felt.
While Elizabeth had slept in the afternoons and Melissa walked in the lush summer valleys around Bell Cottage, she stupidly hardly thought of Richard. She was her mother’s only child. She was the only one to look after her. She thought he would understand that.
She went back to the flat in London thinking he would come home after work and they would have dinner together in one of the neighbourhood restaurants. It was a classic, really. Melissa remembered thinking it would be a surprise, but she meant for him, not herself.
That was where she caught them.
She didn’t call Richard back.
Instead, she spread the various books around on the sofa and got a pen for notes. Julian Adie was a womaniser, an ‘emotional expeditionary’ he called himself once. But did he pin his own life out like a butterfly on a board when he wrote? Or did he allow only glimpses of himself for others to interpret in the light of their own experience?
Watching, listening, snooping outside the door of Julian Adie’s life, she was seeing light occasionally like the twinkle of a supernova, millennia after the explosion.
She read some more of the poems, and passages she’d marked in the biography. Maybe it was not words but a mathematical flow, a mysterious algebra that had to be solved in order to answer the question. Why do men behave the way they do?
III
ELENI WAS CARRYING two large empty baskets when Melissa bumped into her the next morning on the village road.
After a broken night full of unwelcome thoughts, the worst night since she’d arrived, she was intending to swim again while t
he sun was warm in a windless sky. Heading over to the bay with the rock, hoping the sea would calm her as it had before, she was staring down at the suede of dust and pine needles on the path. Melissa didn’t see her before she called a friendly greeting.
Eleni had come out of the turning by the boat office, her broad smooth face alight with purpose. Wrapped around her buxom body was a vast and unflattering form of apron in green canvas, which was badged with a huge array of pockets in differing sizes. Her dark hair was tied back with a purple scarf.
A boy was with her, aged about seven, thin with big grazed knees and dirty hands. In that way that sometimes happens on holiday, Melissa had all but lost track of the days. It struck her that it must be Saturday because he was not at school.
‘How is Manos’s tooth?’ she asked.
‘He is fixed, but still he complains,’ Eleni laughed. ‘But it is normal – he is a man.’
They exchanged smiles.
‘I’m going to collect some herbs. Then we will make him some natural cures and make sure he uses them properly this time.’
‘Are you in training to be a wise woman too then?’ Melissa was teasing her gently, but Eleni took it entirely seriously. ‘No. That is a gift. But with some help from Manolis’s mother I have become interested in a different kind of helping. You have heard of aromatherapy?’
Melissa nodded.
‘It is very old, here in Greece. But now the people who come here have heard of it. This year I have started a little business for the tourists in summer. They like it very much, especially when the sun is very strong and they need some cooling for the skin. It’s very natural.’
‘You collect wild herbs?’
‘Sometimes, of course. But I have a special place where I grow what I want from seeds. And we have some secrets that give us success.’
Melissa was intrigued.
‘You want to come and see?’
The day seemed set fair, another October glory. There would be plenty of time for swimming.
‘Why not?’ she said.
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