Opposite was a park with a rotunda. This was the Esplanade she had to cross to get to the Liston, stepping to the side of roller-bladers, families with prams and pushchairs, gangs of organised tourists, drifting groups of teenagers and solitary old ladies in black. Cafés under the trees were noisy and full, the atmosphere sociable.
There were even more people in the Liston. The architecture was unmistakably French, modelled on the Rue de Rivoli: a walkers’ boulevard of elegantly arcaded buildings facing the park and the sea. There was no other side of the street, as if the architect had decided the island should not be allowed to have too much of a good thing. Almost all the space under the arches, which would originally have been built to protect the passers-by from excessive heat and light in summer, and the rain and wind in winter, was filled with bar tables and chairs. On the other side of the street were more of the same, this time under canvas and trees.
The broad stone arches were weathered and crumbling in places. In each arch swung a cast-iron lamp, many decidedly rusty and fragile at the joints. Above, slim windows were shuttered and a few narrow balconies jutted on stone brackets.
Melissa found the Liston Bar about halfway down. The place was crammed. Waiters wove with snake hips around the many groups, and shouts and bursts of laughter reverberated slightly under the high vaulted roof. She was just wondering how she would get a table when one of the shouts formed itself into her name. She spun round, and saw Alexandros standing, waiting in the shy, defensive pose that she was coming to recognise.
Almost the first words she spoke to Theodora were a lie. ‘I’m doing some research on Julian Adie,’ she said. The words came out glib as you please. She didn’t even know why she said it. It might have been aimed at Alexandros, to show he was not the only one who could deal in omissions.
‘Re-eally?’ Theodora’s voice was a smoker’s drawl, the accent unplaceable.
She was of indeterminate age – in her seventies, maybe. Self-consciously artistic, she sat plumply upholstered in flowing clothes of batik prints. A vast necklace of beads clinked on the shelf of her chest.
Her glass of cloudy ouzo was going down rapidly.
‘Well, just beginning, at least,’ Melissa said nervously, trying to patch the gaping flaws in this concept. ‘It . . . it’s still just an idea really.’
It could have been worse. She might have said ‘book’, and then she would have been stuck with talk of publishers, and invented deadlines and contracts. It was best to press on swiftly.
‘Alexandros tells me you knew Julian Adie well.’
He had said nothing of the sort, but Theodora beamed in the light of implied flattery. She raised a gnarled hand, further knobbled by large rings, into her dyed red hair, and smiled with tombstone veneers.
‘Yes . . . well, quite well, let’s say. Lovely man, but perfectly impossible. Great fun though, totally unpredictable. What’s the phrase –? Lust for life. That was him.’
A yapping from somewhere nearby had her bobbing to investigate the underside of the table. A waft of strong musky perfume was released by her sudden dive. Alexandros sat impassive. It was impossible to guess what he was thinking.
‘Roger, Mummy’s got it for you here . . . yes, she has,’ rasped Theodora. ‘Yes, she has . . . good boy.’ She raked through a substantial leather handbag and put her hand under the table.
‘Roger . . . my Pekingese,’ she said when the whiny yaps had been assuaged.
‘Ah,’ said Melissa.
‘Named for Mr Moore, one of my all-time favourites. Charming man, don’t you think?’
‘I’m sure he is.’
‘And not half bad as an actor either, despite what they say.’
Alexandros took charge at this point, summoning a waiter, and ordering lunch without consultation.
Melissa was riveted by Theodora: the red hair too long for her age, fringe separating on her shiny wrinkled forehead, the lumpy nose – possibly she was a committed drinker of wine and Greek spirits. Melissa would not have been surprised if she had put a cigarette in a long ivory holder.
Roger growled menacingly. Alexandros took a turn at giving him something from his pocket. ‘You knew Julian Adie when he returned to Corfu to spend summers here, later on when he was a successful writer. That’s right, isn’t it?’ he prompted.
‘Oh, yes, he was well-known by then. The Cairo books had made his name. He was popular on the island too: he seemed to have friends everywhere, from the Greeks who remembered him from before the war; to the ex-pat set who’d arrived in the intervening years. And he loved a party. Drank like a fish of course, but he was a spiritual person, too. He always wanted to understand, to get on the right wavelengths with people, loved to hear their stories – as well as being a virtuoso teller of his own, of course. The way he would speak . . . you’ve never heard anyone quite so witty and engaging, and all with such charm . . . but afterwards you could feel quite exhausted with it all, as if you’d been sandblasted by the sheer torrent of words that used to come out of him!’
Melissa glanced at Alexandros. Amusement danced briefly in the lines around his mouth. He was certainly not disagreeing with her.
‘You also said he was unpredictable,’ said Melissa. ‘In what way do you mean?’
She paused, gazing into the middle distance with narrowed eyes while taking a drink.
‘Well, for a start you never knew whether he’d turn up, or when . . . or with whom. Sometimes that could be exciting – he’d arrive with someone quite extraordinary, maybe someone famous and you wouldn’t believe your luck, but other times the people he had in tow could be dreadful old bores that only he seemed to find fascinating. He was definitely a collector of people . . .’
A few more gulps of ouzo lubricated the process of remembering.
‘He was also unpredictable in that you never knew what he would say next. He was pretty opinionated, and he loved to shock. He would say the most outrageous things and you never knew whether he was serious, because he would swear he was but with such a twinkle in his eye . . . And he was the most dreadful fibber, but it was all so much embroidery – just part of the act of being entertaining, so that most people let it go.’
‘He made up some of his stories, you mean?’
‘Oh, undoubtedly. You’d meet someone a few days later who’d featured in one of his yarns and say how it had kept a table in stitches, and how utterly hilarious when such and such happened, and the person would turn to you and say that it didn’t actually happen that way at all!’
‘So . . .’ Melissa frowned, ‘people didn’t get upset with him then?’
‘No, no. It wasn’t unpleasant. He wasn’t doing it to hurt anyone, you see. It was only to amuse. Taking something quite ordinary, and tweaking the details into an account that could be quite side-splitting. And maybe people expected it anyway of a novelist.’
Theodora was hitting her stride, and luckily in the direction Melissa wanted to take.
‘You see, on that score we trusted him: we trusted him to make us laugh and be good company. Where you really wouldn’t trust him was where women were concerned . . . I mean, he was married, and very happily so by all accounts, when he first came back to Corfu in the sixties, but you wouldn’t have known it to see him in action.’
‘He was quite blatant about it?’
‘Completely! He was a rampant little devil – he’d try it on with any woman he could. And more often than not he succeeded as well! He was such a short man but no one ever seemed to notice that when he was actually there. It was as if all the stories and the cleverness and the laughing made him ten feet tall. His wife was French, I think . . . small and blonde. Lively. He’d met her . . . I don’t know, somewhere in the Med after the war. They lived in France, anyway, when I met them. Nice woman – good fun too. Very effective blind eye, she must have had as well.’
Alexandros looked thoughtful. Melissa thought he was going to say something, but he retained his air of interested bystander.
She took the plunge. ‘Back then, can you remember ever coming across a young artist called Elizabeth Norden – or rather Milne, as she was then?’
‘We were all young then, dear!’ Her chuckle turned into a raspy cough.
Melissa smiled, sympathetically, she hoped. It was a trick of time that she thought of Theodora on Corfu as older than her mother. The air of bohemian dottiness gave her licence to play a part, and play it thoroughly. Had she always been like this, more pertinently when Adie knew her, or was this persona her defence against encroaching old age?
‘Did you ever meet her, though? Does the name Elizabeth Milne mean anything to you?’
Theodora looked away again, as if trying to recall.
‘Why do you ask?’
For the second time, Melissa was less than honest with her.
‘I know her,’ she said.
‘I see.’
Was she struggling to remember a name that sounded familiar – or to hide the fact that she did know it?
‘It was all a long time ago,’ said Theodora, switching her attention to her glass, which she seemed surprised to find empty.
It was as evasive an answer as she could have given.
The food came soon after, the tastes a mixture of Italian and Greek cooking, sweetly spiced by the Middle East. Melissa took some rich meat stew sprinkled with salty feta cheese but had little appetite. Alexandros ate slowly but steadily. Theodora seemed more interested in several pitchers of wine.
She was eager to talk, but about herself; how she had been married to a Greek, who had died ten years ago. Leaving her relatively wealthy, it seemed. She chattered about his business – how he had come originally from Crete, where the family made a fortune from sultanas, and he had turned to other dried fruits and packaging. Rarely did she return to Britain.
She touched on life in Corfu when she arrived in 1965 – the voracious bedbugs and mosquitoes, the unspeakable smells and lack of modern drainage. ‘Of course I read the Paradise book. But despite what Adie wrote, it was never an Eden. He glossed over all the inconveniences and difficulties. It was still primitive when I first came here.’
‘You can still find the places, though,’ ventured Melissa, glad to be back on the subject. ‘It’s not as if they’ve vanished, or been demolished. And the colours are still there, the patterns in the sea, and the sunsets.’
‘Only in some places. Development – they went about it all the wrong way at first here. They’d ruined half the island before anyone woke up. Adie hated it. You should have heard him rant on. It was one of the rare times when his sense of humour deserted him. “They’ve spoiled it all!” he’d shout and he’d be in a rage. It made him angry – really angry.’
Over tiny cups of sweet coffee, the conversation meandered away again to other topics. Alexandros opened up enough to tell them about a trip he was planning to Egypt for some archaeological research, the grant from Athens University which would pay for it. Theodora asked about Melissa’s life in England and Melissa managed to avoid any more unnecessary untruths by telling her she was an archivist by training and had recently been living in Kent. She tried asking her again about Elizabeth, but Theodora shook her head as if a faint recall had slipped away again.
Lunch over, as they prepared to part, Theodora said, ‘Come and see me if you like. Villa Krassadikis in Sotiriotissa.’
Melissa doubted that she would, but smiled and thanked her.
Alexandros was thoughtful as they walked out of the café together.
‘She’s obviously lived quite a life,’ said Melissa. ‘How did you meet her?’
‘I’ve known her since I was a child.’
The same answer he had given when she’d asked about Adie. It implied long-term familiarity, yet he had first described her as an acquaintance. Melissa had the distinct impression that Alexandros was not being as straight with her as he pretended.
‘Are you going back to work?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Oh, I thought . . .’
‘I have just finished a project. Now I’m doing some research for the next.’
Staring past him she watched a lizard slither up a crack in the stucco building. ‘What do you—?’ She was about to ask him exactly what he did, but he cut her off.
‘You ask all these questions,’ he said, ‘but you don’t answer any yourself.’
‘I do!’
‘Not really. You tell me one version, and Theodora another. Which is true?’
She hung her head.
‘Perhaps neither is true, or you can’t remember what you said? It doesn’t fill me with confidence that any of this has a chance of fair representation, whatever you are planning to do with it!’
‘I’m not planning anything. That’s not –’
He stopped walking abruptly. ‘What business is any of this of yours?’
‘I told you,’ she whispered.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said brusquely.
It was a full-blown argument. She could not believe how quickly it escalated. His anger was real.
‘Just leave it, OK?’ he said.
‘But—’
‘Forget it all.’
He strode off leaving her in the middle of the street. She stared at his back, watching the way his jacket swung loosely from his tense frame. It seemed a complete overreaction. She was at a loss to understand why he was so defensive.
Furious, Melissa turned into the maze of streets which sucked the crowds down into the old town. Tall, shuttered buildings rose on either side of the narrow lanes, giving a feel of Venice without the watery lanes.
She had done nothing to deserve the outburst from Alexandros. She took deep breaths and tried to put the conversation out of her mind.
Several shops were selling fancy-shaped bottles of the kumquat liqueur she’d tried with Christos, a viscous orange concoction that might have seemed palatable in small sips under candlelight, but which in daylight, uniformly present in everything from tiny glass citrus fruits, exotic bottles and huge flagons, hinted at cruel poisons, curiously sinister and factory-made.
Skeins of gold jewellery gleamed from windows on both sides of the street, beside kiosks selling fragrant custard doughnuts, leather goods, belts and handbags. Fur coats, suede coats and knitwear filled racks outside, ready for the first chills of winter.
She went into a few shops half-heartedly, buying nothing.
What should she make of Theodora? Had she seemed to recognise Elizabeth’s name at first? But then the moment had slipped away. Had she learned anything new? Not really. It was another near miss on the trail of the sinuous truth about Julian Adie. And all the while, looking for her mother was like trying to hold a melody in a minor key while a band is playing in the hard bright blare of C major.
III
IN KASSIOPE THE next morning boats were crowded into the harbour.
Melissa passed a couple of hours listlessly wandering and drinking coffee. It seemed a typical resort town on a Greek island, larger and more commercial than Kalami. A ruined castle perched above the town, its broken outline speared by trees. Down on the quayside a few whitewashed one- and two-storey buildings were testament to its past as a fishing port before the tourist hotels were built. In ancient times, she read in the guidebook, it provided refuge for sailors fleeing war as well as storms. The Roman emperor Nero once sang at the altar of the temple of Jupiter Cassius, a god of the seafarers.
In a shop selling video games and DVDs, she bought a cheap compact disc of Debussy’s piano music. ‘Clair de Lune’ was the third track.
Back in Kalami, she played it on the basic player in the apartment, and let the yearning notes pull her to the balcony, watching the light stroke the surface ripples of the sea, feeling the October chill and the sadness.
Her mother was gone. She would not find ways to deal with that loss here. The evolving patterns in the music tugged at her thoughts. In free fall, she was back in their tiny family – her mother, her father and her – but
with the disconcerting feeling that something was wrong with the version of events she had understood to be true but could not isolate quite what that was.
Yes, Elizabeth had always been quiet and reserved, but she had been honest with her daughter; too honest perhaps, when she had been too young really to understand adult problems. At the age of nine Melissa would rather not have known her father’s manifest shortcomings as a husband.
Now, of course, she wished she had taken more notice. As a child she had simply closed her ears because it was not information she wanted to possess, nor for it to possess her. She knew now of course that it had, although not in the way she had feared. It was an insidious knowing that undermined her now, as an adult, and made her wary of both separation and reconciliation.
She was back to the unpleasant reality of being betrayed: that you begin to question your own judgement. The feeling swells that nothing was ever as you believed at the time. Your husband is not the person you thought he was. And your hopes and dreams for the future are exposed as ridiculous.
Was that how Grace felt when she found out Adie had been unfaithful for the first time? And when he was caught out, was he sorry for his betrayal, or merely that he had failed to get away with it?
At about six o’clock a heavy knock on the door startled her.
Melissa wondered if she could ignore it. But the music was playing. Whoever it was would know she was there. Reluctantly, she opened the door.
It was Alexandros, clutching a bottle of wine.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said bluntly. ‘I should not have said all those things yesterday. I was wrong.’ He pushed a hand nervously through his wild curls.
There was nothing for it but to invite him in.
Standing inside the door, he came straight to the point. ‘Before you arrived there was someone else asking questions. A man – an American. I thought you were connected with him.’
‘An American man? Why would you presume we were connected?’
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