When her mobile shrilled into life a few hours later, she almost jumped out of her skin.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is that Melissa?’ A man’s voice, but not Richard’s. The surge of anxiety cooled to the uneasy blend of relief and a disappointment she wished she did not feel.
‘Ye-es.’
‘This is Alexandros Catzeflis.’
‘Oh . . . yes. Hello!’
‘Eleni tells me you have been asking about the St Arsenius shrine.’ He sounded brusque.
‘Yes . . . that’s right.’
‘Why are you so interested?’
‘I – I thought . . . it seems important if I’m visiting places that Julian Adie wrote about . . . He wrote about it so often.’
Silence.
‘This is part of your literary research?’
So he knew about the questions she had already asked.
She crossed her fingers. ‘Well, yes . . .’
He was clearly reluctant. Under pressure from Eleni and Manolis too, maybe.
But then, a sigh. ‘I suppose, in that case . . . I am going there tomorrow. To take oil for the . . . er, saint,’ he said, in the diffident way that was already becoming familiar. ‘If you would like to come along, I would be pleased to take you there for your . . . literary researches.’
Was that an unnecessary emphasis, verging on sarcasm? Melissa decided to ignore it.
‘I would like that very much. Thank you.’
He hesitatingly ventured the news that the weather would change for the better by the next afternoon. In the light of that they made halting, mutually polite arrangements.
V
THE SUN DID not rise the next morning until a quarter past eight. In strange citrus light, a vast flock of birds wheeled in silhouette around the bay, clustered in pointillism into the shape of a fish one moment, stretched into a sword the next. A lone black cloud smudged the sky’s fragile freshness.
There was a cheerful scent of honeysuckle in the lane as Melissa went down to the shop to buy breakfast, hoping for fresh rolls.
‘Kalimera!’
She started. It was Christos, the Adonis of the tourist office. He stopped at the entrance to the shop, making it impossible for her to avoid him.
‘How are you liking it here? What did you do last night?’
‘I stayed in, reading.’
‘Oh, no. That is not right.’
‘It’s perfectly right. I’m having a lovely time.’
Clearly it was his idea of hell. ‘Have dinner with me tonight.’
‘Oh, no . . . thank you, but really I –’
He put his head on one side and pressed his palms together in supplication. Melissa laughed and he winked. ‘You are a beautiful woman on your own. I am on my own. It’s very sad.’
She shook her head, still laughing.
‘Why not?’ he persisted.
Now there was a question.
‘I know a very, very good restaurant. Nice food. Wonderful views . . . the real Corfu – the old Corfu . . .’
How could she resist? Melissa let the eye meet run on for a while. Then she said, ‘All right, then. I’ll come.’
He was incorrigible. And also the youngest and most handsome man that she had flirted with for a long time. Sitting reading on the balcony later she couldn’t help but smile, not in anticipation but amusement.
Impossible to pretend the thought of Richard and Sarah had nothing to do with it. Could she find it in herself to give Richard another chance? One last chance? Or did the person she loved no longer exist, the good times overwritten by hurt and betrayal?
The sea was bright jade as she passed by the White House, on her way to meet Alexandros at four. His weather predictions had proved accurate, and the sun had returned, bringing several more degrees of warmth.
The water was so clear now that the rock shelf jutting from under the house was visible two or three feet down. It ended abruptly over deep water, and she understood with a single glance how Adie and Grace had lounged at its edge as if it were their own vast natural lido. The bottom of their pool was a swirl of sea grass, black streaks of which now littered the stony beach, along with oranges wrenched from their branches by the storm and flung down where salty tongues of sea water licked inside their split skins.
The roaring of waves in the bay had gone now. Only mermaid whispers teased the shingle.
She left the beach behind and climbed into the first olive grove. The quietness had the effect of making her feel distanced from her surroundings. It lasted until the descent into the neighbouring bay and a waft of homely scent, one that had felt familiar from the very beginning, stole into her senses: the wild mint growing at the base of a vigorous patch of prickly pear.
Yaliscary was deserted, apart from a boatman packing up his summer hideaway. Time after time he walked the makeshift jetty in the far corner, shifting plastic chairs and a table, umbrellas, crates, and finally the white-painted car tyres which acted as bumpers on the side of the wooden walkway. All was piled at the end, and then he began to load his boat.
She went on towards the tavernas at Agni, where Alexandros had specified the middle one of the three. And there he was, waiting in the courtyard, standing rather rigidly by two old trees, their gnarled and whitewashed trunks intertwined like the mythical trees formed from the bodies of Philemon and Baucis after they entertained the gods unawares.
His greeting was polite but serious, old-world courtesy. He had not taken a seat; they were clearly not staying for a cup of coffee or social diversion. He said something to the waiter, whose response and parting shot implied they knew each other well, and walked off straight away leaving her to skitter after his long loping strides.
He let her chatter nervously, inconsequentially, for a few minutes until she managed to match his pace and let the breeze in the trees and the rhythm of their footsteps fill the silence between them.
The serpent path rose again into untended olives and scrub. Alexandros led the way as if this procession held in deep thought was part of the ceremony. Melissa shrank back into herself, not wanting to be an irritation or encumbrance.
Above them hung the winding road to the north of the island. Now and then the sound of a truck or bus rumbling by confirmed its existence, but silence predominated. No cicadas, no birdsong, only soles crunching over the path. She looked for landmarks she might have passed before, wanting to see where she had gone wrong and missed the tiny trail down to the shrine. The sea glistened far below to the left.
Melissa stumbled, experiencing a moment of disorientation, a sense of electric foreignness all around, the purple sound of words not understood, a warning ripple of madness. Here she was, with the history man (she still had no idea what that meant, and had missed all chances to ask), on an island where they kissed the feet bones of St Spyridon in his casket. Dead since the fourteenth century, yet his blackened mummy was still being paraded in the streets and routinely asked for protection and advice. Centuries were no time at all. It put her own tiny quest into context, tiptoe-ing across the dusty footprints laid down by someone else only a matter of decades ago. But did those faint traces still exist?
Then she calmed herself. It was, as Adie had written, ‘A day when the flowers trembled and the blue reached down from Heaven’. This was a place of beauty and hope. A land of heroes and stories.
Alexandros stopped a few feet in front, and turned. ‘Not far now. Are you all right?’
His expression was distant.
She nodded.
‘It’s down here, but steep. Be careful.’
The turning was unmarked. There was no way she would have found it on her own. You simply had to know where it was. Grabbing at bushes and large stones on the way, she half slithered down the precipitous grass and ochre dust.
From this approach the shrine was unprepossessing. Dwarfed by its guards of cypress, rather more of them than shown in the photographs in the biography, it was little more than a hut cut into the foot o
f the rocky slope.
Alexandros took a small key from his pocket. There was no ornate weathered lock on the door to the shrine, but a modern padlock. It snapped open, and he tugged on the peeling wooden door.
It was dark inside, with only a feeble shaft of light from an ineffectual seaward window high up in the wall. Alexandros placed his rucksack on the floor by the door and switched on a torch. He then drew out a thick glass bottle of olive oil and took it over to the far wall where a narrow altar stood.
Goosebumps prickled Melissa’s bare arms. It was not only the sudden gloom and drop in temperature. It was a sense of trespass. The strange thrill of re-enacting a scene from the past that did not belong to her.
‘There’s a description Julian Adie wrote, of going to the shrine with his landlord, old Manos. Do you know it?’ asked Alexandros, so quietly and presciently she shivered even as she strained to hear him against a crash of waves outside. He propped the torch on the altar and began to pour oil into a battered tin lamp. The delicate stream of liquid shone like a line of burnished gold in the half-light, catching a metal cross set in a turned wooden base.
‘Actually going into the shrine? No . . . I’m sure I haven’t.’ She could only recall reading about him being outside it, below it, bathing and diving, its magical lure for him. The pool below was where he had felt himself reborn. ‘In The Gates of Paradise?’
‘It was not in The Gates of Paradise. It was published in a magazine, many years later. But the odd thing was that he wrote it as if the years had never intervened, and he was still living at the White House with his wife.’
‘Strange.’
‘Perhaps, yes. That’s what he did, anyway.’
‘I’d be fascinated to read it,’ she said.
‘I can find it for you if you like.’
With the lamps lit they stood quietly taking in the interior. The walls were bare and damp. The dark icon on the altar was in a poor state too. The venerable, bearded face was barely visible in its frame, as if caught staring out of an unlit window.
‘St Arsenius, I presume?’ asked Melissa.
It was hard to make out any of his features. This was no museum piece, but a homely relic of faith. They lingered a while, each wrapped in private contemplations.
Then Alexandros left the bottle of oil on the floor by the side of the altar, and they left the saint to his lonely flame.
‘Why are you so interested?’ he asked again, knowing she had still not given him a satisfactory answer. The hesitancy in his speech seemed to have gone.
They were standing on the ledge above the pool. From here the water was pale green, so clear the stony outlines of its curious perfection seemed man-made, a calculated, precision-cut fairy bath.
‘That part in the book, where he and Grace lie baking here on the rocks, and she dives for cherries,’ Melissa said, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘You wonder if you stare hard enough you’ll be able to see them by sheer force of imagination and will.’
He gave a little laugh at this romantic absurdity.
A couple of small brown fish broke surface with a tiny ripple.
‘Did you ever meet Julian Adie?’ she asked.
‘Of course I did.’
‘So that would have been – when? When he returned to the island in the nineteen-sixties? You must have been very young then.’ How much would a very young boy remember anyway? Almost certainly nothing of relevance to an adult’s life.
‘I was a child when he first came back. But he continued to visit, right into the late seventies. He would take a villa in Paleokastritsa, or here, or once an apartment in Corfu Town.’
‘But would he come to Kalami and see his old friends?’
‘Always.’
‘You seem very certain.’
‘I am. He was a friend of my parents.’
Melissa was unsure how to proceed.
‘He always took an interest in what I was doing,’ continued Alexandros, sparing her the onus of finding a suitable prompt. If anything he sounded defensive, as if she might not believe him. ‘When I was old enough to read his books, he was always happy to discuss literature and science with me. He always wanted to talk.’
‘What about his other friends on the island – the ones he wrote about in The Gates of Paradise: the man who kept his dead mistress’s skull on his writing desk, the Count B, the mad expatriates, and the visitors from England and France? Did you ever meet any of them?’
‘The old Count B was dead long before I was born, as were quite a few of the colourful characters of the book. Some were composites of several people.’
‘What about people who knew him later, in the nineteen sixties – I’m thinking about the expatriates? Are any of them still here?’
He frowned, and asked again, ‘Why are you so interested in all this?’
She could not ignore the question a third time. But seconds passed before she replied.
‘Funnily enough, I discovered I have a family connection to him as well.’
There was something about Alexandros that made it impossible to lie, or even obfuscate. He made no response beyond giving his full concentration, eyes fixed and receptive.
‘My mother knew him here,’ she said, stumbling on, not knowing how much to say or how to explain that the obsession had taken root now. ‘I only recently found out.’
Alexandros was looking out to sea. A Minoan Lines ferry was cutting across the straits. She felt the light wind and watched as it caught the olives in a silver frenzy, the undersides of leaves dancing and whispering.
‘He loved it here, didn’t he – Adie?’ she said softly to break the silence, sensing it was wiser to stay on neutral ground, at least for the moment. ‘He must have done, the way he reproduced it so sensuously.’
Alexandros turned and started back up the elusive rocky path towards Agni. She followed.
‘All those heady scents he’s surrounded by, the voluptuousness of everything from sirens to figs, “the symphonies of wave on rock, the land where miracles might occur” . . .’ she quoted.
‘You’ve fallen for it then,’ he said at last.
Was there an edge behind his words? She decided to take them at face value. ‘Completely! But there’s something more that I can’t put my finger on—’
Alexandros slowed. ‘An ingenious kind of despair, I think,’ he said unexpectedly.
‘What do you mean?’
They walked on, faces set to the breeze.
‘In winter, the mud pours down these hillsides,’ he said. ‘It’s a . . . er, great oozing brown slide into the sea. It goes into the water like a path of sludge. It’s a strange sight – as if it is polluting the blue. But at least it’s blue. For weeks on end, before that, the rains will have closed in and everything has been brown. It’s hard to believe then that all will be . . . er . . . bright again.’
Was he talking about more than just winter on the island? The hesitancy in his speech was beginning to reappear.
She wanted to let him know he was not the only one who was struggling emotionally, but was also sufficiently self-aware to see the dangers in that. She settled for safer ground.
‘He and Grace were young and healthy, living in what seemed like paradise. No wonder it seemed like the summer lasted for ever,’ she said.
‘I agree,’ said Alexandros. ‘He was trying to capture a kind of . . . immortality. There was a strong possibility that their lives might be cut short. The war didn’t break out suddenly, catching everyone by surprise in 1939. Throughout the whole of . . . ah, Europe, they had known it was coming for years. It was only ever a question of when. Living here was not quite the escape people in Britain may have thought. Don’t forget how close the Italians are, and their military activities at that time were hardly reassuring.’
Now they had fallen comfortably into step.
‘Tell me about your mother,’ he said abruptly. ‘Why is finding out about Julian Adie so important to you?’
They were almost on the
main path. The mountains opposite were lined like an ageing face in the slanting afternoon light. He did not prompt her, simply waited.
‘My mother’s name is Elizabeth Norden. She was an artist. It seems she met Julian Adie in Corfu. Most probably in the nineteen sixties. That’s all I know. That, and the feeling that she wanted me to know something.’ It sounded so lame.
‘You can’t ask her?’ His kind tone neutralised the question’s sting.
‘She died earlier this month.’
He cleared his throat, as if slightly embarrassed. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’
She swallowed hard.
‘The nineteen sixties? There is someone I might be able to ask.’
‘That – that would be great. Eleni told me you’re a historian. Is that right?’
‘Historian of . . . er, sorts. I’m thinking of Theodora. I could introduce you to her.’
He did not elaborate. It was only afterwards that she had the feeling he had chosen an effective way of closing down the conversation while giving every impression of helpfulness.
They parted on the iron bridge over the dry river bed.
‘Now I understand why this is needed,’ she said in an attempt at lightness, pointing down at the deep dry channel which cut through the hillside.
He looked blank.
‘The winter rains and all the mud?’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ His mind was already elsewhere. He offered to walk her back to the apartment, but she said it wasn’t necessary. The truth was, she too needed to be on her own. As he walked away, she felt slightly detached, light-headed, as if the intensity of the expedition and his company had been too much. She passed no one in the lane, which only heightened the sense of unreality.
A long hot bath, a glass of wine, a book and her own thoughts: that’s what she needed. It was only when she was turning on the taps for a soak that she remembered Christos. Talking to him that morning already seemed like days ago.
She looked at her watch, still on the table where she had left it. Nearly half past six, and he would be picking her up at seven thirty.
Leaden-limbed, she showered quickly and changed into clean clothes, trying to recapture the amusement she’d felt that morning at the prospect of dinner with an attractive younger man. But there was nothing amusing left in it. She had brought no clothes appropriate for the occasion and the visit to the shrine had filled her head with ghosts. She wished she had never agreed to go.
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