He could be cruel, too, even if it was unthinkingly so. One evening he met two young ballerinas at a party in Corfu Town. For the rest of the summer, these girls were regular guests in Kalami, and he would cavort openly with either one or both on the rock below the White House, uncaring who saw him, especially if it should happen to be Grace.
It was all a journey to Julian Adie. ‘I want to swim in the great flow,’ he stated in his essay ‘The Discrete Universe’, written during that following autumn, and it was the one path from which he never deviated. It was also the beginning of a pattern of behaviour, which, while it may have brought him the joy of experience and the illusion of freedom, also brought great unhappiness in its wake.
Part Three: Ashore
I
Corfu, 1968
IN 1968, ELIZABETH was twenty-three.
Arriving in Corfu in mid-June, she described the villa where she stayed at Kouloura as ‘the perfect place to get over the awfulness of it all’. It was high on a drowsy hillside above the wide silent smile of the sea. During the day, the sound of the cicadas was a rapid pulse in the olive groves. A path led down to a stony beach where she lay out and closed her eyes. The cold waves of early summer tickled her legs like melting ice.
‘I am coming back to life at last,’ Elizabeth wrote. ‘The past months have wrung me out. The hardest and worst thing I have ever done.’
The villa belonged to Clive and Mary Stilwell, friends of her parents. Clive was her godfather, though the fact was never mentioned between them, as if it were an embarrassment, just as the decision to cancel the life she would have led (and worse) had not been discussed. A tall, thin man, with a stoop but a kindly manner, he had become an author of well-received but poorly selling books since his retirement from teaching history at various eminent public schools. He had a particular interest in the archaeologists Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans, excavators of Troy and Knossos, delighting in their reckless pragmatism – the dramatic streak that saw Evans build red pillars and a throne room above the rubble of the minotaur’s lair on Crete – while remaining, himself, ever the meticulous schoolmaster.
The villa, converted from two old cottages and linked with glass, was Mary’s achievement, bought through a family trust years before. Her grandparents had been Corfiot, but her mother was born in Athens and was destined to expand the family horizons even further by marrying an American industrialist from Pittsburgh. Mary herself was a round-bodied force of nature, with coarse black hair, a ready wit and a determination that no problem was insoluble.
If there were times that summer when Elizabeth felt she herself might be Mary’s latest project, she dismissed the suspicion, preferring to focus on her hostess’s ebullient kindness and the island’s healing sun.
On the ground floor of the stone and glass house were light marble floors laid with bright rugs from Turkey. On white walls hung wild swirls of paint on canvas from some local with a good deal more enthusiasm than talent. It was cool within the thick walls even when the temperature outside climbed over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
From the open doors, the view was of olive groves flickering black and silver down to the dark blue sea. The only other building visible was the pink fortress across the strait that guarded the Albanian coast. Elizabeth would sit for hours in the long low library, reading through midday heat, sketching and writing. What began as a record of her activities and the people she met in the closed island circle, (to avoid the humiliation, she noted, of forgetting names and basic details at a time when she was upset) soon became a repository for her thoughts. It grew by pages every day – sometimes five or six pages, illustrated by drawings, some beautifully detailed, a few tiny watercolours, tickets for boat rides, or a theatre programme.
The Stilwells gave a party a week or so after Elizabeth arrived. It was an evening of sultry stillness. Across the water the fort was half obscured in a dusty peach cloud. The mountains glowed violet. The air was almost too heavy to breathe.
Guests arriving on the wide stone terrace as the sun began to flame were soon equally red-faced. Wet patches appeared on shirts, in rings under arms. Women dabbed at their faces with white handkerchiefs. Stiffly lacquered hair congealed into perspiring hanks.
It was dark, but not noticeably cooler when Julian Adie arrived. In an open-necked white shirt and light-coloured trousers, he burst into the party like a dervish. Shouting to Clive in jangling Greek, kissing Mary extravagantly, he circled around sparking loud conversations, scooping up drinks and draining them before the ripple in the crowd caused by his appearance had completed its detonation into heartier laughter and louder gossip.
He alone seemed unaffected by the humid heat, standing relaxed and squat. At several paces away, his square brown face and sun-dipped hair, as well as his small boyish stature, gave the impression of an improbably youthful figure. Then a group closed around him and the noise level rose again on guffaws, gurgling laughter and snorts of mirth.
Mary was beaming, a sheen of perspiration on her forehead and chin. ‘I didn’t think he would come,’ she confided as Elizabeth brought out a tray of food.
‘Why not?’
‘He’s been in a bad state. His wife died.’
‘Oh.’
‘We haven’t seen him at all this summer – knew he was here, of course, but didn’t like to impose, you know. Just thought we might as well put an invitation in the post, he could always ignore it . . .’
‘Well, that’s good, then, that he’s come. Do you know him well?’
‘We’ve seen quite a bit of him here in the summer the last couple of years. Clive and he have mutual friends. He’s good company, Julian. And Simone – his French wife – she was fun too. It’s very sad.’
A roar of barracking from the huddle around Adie made them both turn.
‘Seems to be coping,’ Elizabeth said wryly.
‘He’s unpredictable.’
Mary did not offer to introduce her to Adie, but whether this was out of practicality or protectiveness was not clear. She introduced her instead to a middle-aged couple, Bob and Netta Cooper, who advertised their recent travels to Goa by wearing almost matching silk kaftans.
Most of the guests were in their fifties or sixties. A smattering of younger guests made their base close to the drinks table, quickly becoming loud. When Elizabeth went over to them, they turned out to be the children and, in a few cases, the grandchildren of the semi-retired academics, writers and amateur painters who were the backbone of the party. They left early, pumped up with free alcohol, to drive down to the bars and discotheques of Ipsos and Corfu Town. Elizabeth declined an invitation to join them. She had no desire to dance, or try to hold a conversation by screaming over loud music. ‘I was feeling older than my years, tired, with a stone in my heart. They must have thought I was very dull, and so I must have been,’ she confided to her diary.
Directly below the house, a mulberry tree spread over a lower terrace. Clive called it his ‘Tree of Idleness’ and had put a low wooden table and some comfortable sun chairs under it.
Elizabeth was sitting there alone, lost in her own thoughts after the younger guests had left, when she heard footsteps cross the brittle grass. A bottle of wine was thrust on the table, and two glasses. She looked up to find a man standing straight in front of her.
In the light of the hurricane lamps behind, his white shirt glowed yellow, cracked by deep shadows. She could barely make out his face.
‘May I?’ he asked, already pouring black wine.
He held out his hand. ‘I’m Julian.’
His palm was firm, warm and dry, Elizabeth noted.
She introduced herself nervously.
He took a seat, and raised his glass before draining it in one. ‘Yammas!’ he said to the empty glass.
She felt awkward. Why had Julian Adie chosen her to talk to? Should she start to discuss his work? Was that expected, or unacceptable in the circumstances? She had genuinely admired the books set in Cairo and ther
e was a copy of The Gates of Paradise on the bookshelves in the cool low library room which she had picked up and dipped into. Should she offer some praise or would that seem too desperate? What about his wife – should she offer her condolences, or make no mention to remind him of his sorrows?
‘I-I like your books – very much. Especially The Cairo Triptych. I thought it was . . . mesmerising.’
‘It’s very kind of you to say so.’
He poured himself more wine and added a few more drops to her glass, which was still full.
‘What brings you to Corfu, Elizabeth?’
‘I needed a holiday.’
‘Why?’ He sprang right to the heart of it. ‘What had exhausted you at home?’
‘I, er –’
‘Tell me about yourself.’ His voice was exceptionally cultured, but well modulated like a smooth musical instrument.
She still could barely see his features but his presence was strong, and she sensed sympathy. Warmth emanated from him. It was an immediate and compelling sense of intimacy which caught her by surprise.
So Elizabeth told him she had graduated from the Byam Shaw a year previously, had gone there to study after completing her university degree in French, a condition imposed by conventionally conservative parents. With all the optimism of youth and the glory of Albemarle Street where she had recently recorded the triumphant sale of four pictures, Elizabeth announced herself as an artist.
He asked her to describe her pictures and he listened intently.
Against the dull throb of music from the house above, they discussed art and photography. ‘The world is not a coherent story: it is a sequence of events, and glimpses of events, and colours and impressions,’ he told her. ‘It is light hitting objects and what that represents.’
Hardly knowing what she was doing, she told him about Goethe’s colour wheel, and he made her expand on all that she knew.
‘The idea was “to marvel at colour’s occurrences and meanings . . . to uncover colour’s secrets”,’ she said. ‘He was a scientist as well as a poet and novelist.’
‘Go on.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘I hate party chit-chat.’
She wondered if she could believe him. He said nothing more.
‘Well, all right then . . . Goethe arranged the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue in a triangle, each colour taking a vertice. Between them, are the colours that are made when they are mixed, so that – for example – between blue at the apex of the triangle and yellow at the right foot of the triangle, is green. Opposite green on the other side of the triangle is purple: the mix of blue at the top and red at the left foot. The triangular spaces between these then form tertiary colours, further mixtures.
He was interested in trying to interpret human reaction to colour, and its effect on mood and understanding. He linked each colour with different emotions.’
‘For instance?’
‘OK. Yellow was splendid and noble, making a warm and comfortable effect. It was the polar opposite to blue, which stood for shadow, darkness, coldness, distance, but also emotional understanding and a quiet reflective mood.’
‘Red? Danger, I suppose?’
‘Not really. More . . . festive . . . and of the imagination.’
‘Tell me something more.’
‘Goethe called it the sensual-moral effect of colour on the sense of the eye. Different combinations could indicate complex emotions such as melancholia and lucidity, seriousness and serenity . . . He said that the emotional aspect of colour should be considered and taken into account by artists, insisting that it was all part of consciousness.’
Adie stared at her, silent for once. She had no idea what he was thinking. Most likely that she had bored him.
‘Tell you what,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going off to lay my hands on another bottle of this rather splendid wine, but to send me on my way, tell me how long you are staying here.’
‘As long as I can.’
‘No one waiting for you back home?’
‘No. Absolutely not, in fact. I’m afraid I behaved rather badly.’
‘How wonderful! Don’t move an inch.’
‘It wasn’t wonderful, it was—’
Adie turned and moved away. He was just a shadow on the rim of light from above.
‘—awful . . .’ she said to his wake. Then she began to laugh. She was drunk after all, she realised far too late. The novelistic cliché was suddenly funny. She thought he might enjoy it. ‘I’m a runaway bride!’ she shouted into the darkness after him.
Adie may or may not have run into more wine, but he did not return.
The next day, as she dozed by the swimming pool in the Stilwells’ garden, spent by critical self-examination as much as by the long late night (how could she have rambled on about colour wheels – what on earth had she been thinking?), a shadow fell over her. Clive was standing, hand outstretched with an envelope.
‘Just found this on the hall floor,’ he said.
It was a handwritten note from Julian Adie. ‘I enjoyed our conversation last night,’ he wrote. ‘Come to dinner tonight.’ He named a restaurant in Corfu Town on Capodistria Street, and the time, nine o’clock. The invitation was not extended to the Stilwells.
‘Should I go?’ she asked Mary.
Mary was chopping vegetables in the cool of the cavernous kitchen. She sliced an aubergine with a deft stroke, exposing spongy, faintly green flesh.
‘It’s up to you. Do you want to?’ she returned the question, smoothly wiping her hands on her apron as she kept her eyes on Elizabeth.
‘Well . . .’ Of course she did. As soon as she had read the message she had felt a shiver of excitement. But she had to keep that to herself. ‘What do you think? You know him.’
‘It’s not for me to say.’
No, Mary would never say. Whatever was happening in Elizabeth’s life was her own business; unless Elizabeth made it clear she wanted to discuss the reasons she had called off the wedding, her current thoughts, her fears for the future, Mary would never pronounce judgement. That was why, Elizabeth realised in a rush of grateful affection, she had felt as comfortable as she did coming to them in the first place.
‘If you want to go, do so.’
No mention of him being twice her age.
‘I’m assuming . . .’ Elizabeth was looking for confirmation of what she hoped would be the case. ‘If he hasn’t written the invitation to all of us – that it will be just me?’
Mary gave a short laugh, disconcertingly as ever omitting the normal progression of exchanges on any vital subject. She picked up the knife and pierced the mysterious black sheen of another aubergine. A curl at the corner of one side of her mouth might just have been mischievous.
‘Julian Adie has a terrible reputation with women,’ she said.
II
SHINY-FACED AND nervous, Elizabeth sat as still as she could in the car. The road wound down and down towards Corfu Town. By her side, Clive drove with his fastidious schoolmaster’s style: caution in all matters, especially on foreign soil; a mixture of deference to native custom and the historian’s knowledge that events might spiral out of control at any time.
She was sure that he had not had a longstanding arrangement to meet a friend at the Liston, that his insistence that he was going into town anyway was a kindly excuse for making sure she was safe. The travel issue, and her safe passage back, he could control; Julian Adie he patently could not.
Elizabeth was torn between wanting to know more about their famous friend and not wishing to seem overly interested. Most of the journey, they spent in companionable silence.
They drew up at the edge of the Esplanade, where Clive parked, punctiliously observing the marked bays which Greek drivers took only as vague suggestions. She was conscious that she was more jittery than she had expected to be, that she was fiddling mindlessly with her hair.
They strolled across the darkening park, and he walked her to the restauran
t.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I have plenty of time,’ he said firmly. ‘I shall be at the Hellenic Club from ten o’clock onwards. It’s very easy to find, at the end of the Capodistria, opposite the palace. You can ask anyone. I’ll be there waiting for you.’
The restaurant was smoky and crowded. Groups of Greek men overpowered most of the tables, so many of them clinging so desperately to the sides of each one that the effect was of a shipwreck with too few lifeboats. Roars of laughter and the clatter of plates cannoned off the walls. It was definitely not what she had been expecting.
Feeling conspicuous in her lacy white mini dress, Elizabeth stopped at the door. She almost turned and went out again, thinking she had come to the wrong place.
Then she saw him, at a long table the length of the wall. There must have been twenty people around it, the party mostly men but including a few women. Behind, a dingy mirror, speckled with brown age spots, reflected his blond head, bobbing as he talked and drank at equal speed and jabbed a finger to emphasise a point. To one side of him was a stocky man with a beard who made him rock back with mirth, to the other an equally cheerful woman with short brown hair and a frisky grin.
Elizabeth was both relieved and disappointed.
‘You came!’ Adie stood up as soon as he noticed her. There was no denying he seemed rather unsteady on his feet. ‘Come and meet everyone – everyone, this is Elizabeth.’ He made a rapid-fire round of introductions, none of which hit home.
A chair was found and she was squeezed in between a Greek biologist and a bald American who said he wrote plays.
Plates of food were piled on the table: bowls of glistening olives, bread, aubergines, fried peppers, and tiny fish. And carafe upon carafe of thin red wine.
The talk swelled over and around her.
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