It took a few seconds after she woke the next morning to remember what was wrong. That she had been half-awake all night, irritated by the constant whine of mosquitoes. Why she felt heartsick. Several replays of his callousness made her get up blearily. It was still early – there was no sign of Clive or Mary. Still wearing her nightdress she shuffled into the kitchen for some coffee and took it outside on the terrace. The sun was too bright. It made her head hurt.
‘She walks in beauty, like the night . . .’
The familiar ringing voice made her jump. Julian was sitting below, under the idleness tree. He bounded up the steps, and thrust a vast untidy bunch of wild flowers at her. His hair was tousled, still wet from a swim.
‘I am so sorry I upset you,’ he said. ‘I behaved like a pig.’
Sorry for upsetting her, she noted. Not sorry for whatever he had been doing with Veronica.
He shrugged with his arms out for her. How can I help what I am, he seemed to be saying. Sometimes I’m bad. The crinkling, twinkling eyes.
She must have hesitated for all of thirty seconds.
The trouble was, she wanted him. His emotional hold over her was like a strong undertow. She would not call it love; that would be too dangerous, would leave her too open to hurt. She knew for certain it would be the kind of hurt she had never felt when she was with David. Even now, just imagining losing it was sharp and intense.
Elizabeth was starting to accept that he meant more to her than she did to him. But that was no reason to forgo the pleasure of being with him.
From then on, when she did not see him she suspected he was with Veronica.
The other woman’s catty and dismissive remarks to Elizabeth continued when their paths occasionally crossed, but at least assured her that she was as much a thorn in the other woman’s side as Veronica was proving in hers.
She resolved to stride out harder and longer on her walks, pour her energies into her drawings, and to make some new friends. She went out a few times with the young set she’d met at the Stilwells’ fateful party, dancing at the beachside clubs at Ipsos, but never felt a hundredth of the excitement she had with Julian Adie.
II
IN KASSIOPE, THE dark quayside was transformed. Tents and stalls selling sweets and fripperies jostled for space with nut and melon-seed vendors, and tables and chairs laid out on three sides of the square. Strings of electric lights winked and hummed in the trees.
‘The festival of midsummer’s eve, and the eve of St John’s feast day. A paneyiri!’ said Julian, leading the way. The entourage trotted to keep up, including Clive and Mary.
Elizabeth felt her spirits lift as she saw how the setting and the anticipation of a Greek feast were balm to Julian’s tricky mood. For days he had been alternately quiet and argumentative. None of it had been directed at her, but listening as he sounded off about the world in general, and bourgeois prejudice in particular, had been sapping. Now, his enthusiasm was infectious.
The aroma of lambs roasting on the spit mingled with the smell of oil from boats recently docked and sweet honey cakes and red-hot charcoal.
Church bells rang, and the door to the chapel was open. In every direction the streets were full, the crowds meandering down to the water and the spot where three fires would be lit, currently ragged wigwams of twigs and branches.
‘There!’ Julian pointed to the table he wanted to claim. Elizabeth laughed as he pulled her along, and kissed her playfully as they sat down.
The wine began to flow.
The three fires were lit, burning in the middle of the party.
‘The same is happening in villages all across the island,’ said Mary. ‘The fire is supposed to be purifying. It drives out bad spirits and uplifts the soul.’
It certainly seemed to be having that effect on Julian. He was in high good humour, waving at people as they passed and clapping to the music that had started.
‘The local men will jump through the fires wearing headdresses of olive branches,’ Mary continued. ‘They jump through the fires three times calling for the blessing of God from St John.’
Right on cue there was a cheer from the crowd as the first supplicants appeared, heads bowed under rough leafy crowns.
‘I’m in too!’ cried Julian. ‘Spyro, you got the hats? Come on, Clive, you could do with blessing!’ He was thoroughly enjoying himself.
After the ritual, they hurled the headdresses into the fires and whooped as they burned.
‘It is thought to drive away witches,’ said Adie, grinning. ‘Pagan, in origin, of course.’
Elizabeth gave concentrated thought to Veronica, then felt guilty.
The scent of roasting lambs grew stronger. Long tables were set out for the feast: bowls of herby tsatziki, spicy kebabs and sausage and colourful salads of red pepper, others of tomato, cucumber and crumbly chunks of feta cheese.
The band was in full flow. Rippling melodies played on the balalaika, guitar and flute were overlaid with mournful singing.
‘They’re old Corfiot songs. “Sea, you youth-swallower”,’ Julian translated, ‘“all the bodies of the young you have sucked into your insatiable maw . . .”
‘Traditions run deep in Greece. When I was young here no workman would ever take a nap under a tree because he feared the Nereids who waited in the shadows for the unwary.’
He listened, moving his head to the rhythm. ‘“The boat’s ripped sail and the cunning seas, the wind like the breath of Helen as she is snatched away” . . . Despair is never far away. In Greece, songs are history. Lyrics are poems that tell a true story.’
Soon there was dancing around the fire, those who remained seated singing and clapping in time.
At first it was mainly the girls and women dancing.
‘Do the men have their own dances?’ Elizabeth asked Spyros.
‘Traditionally the paneyiri attracted the young people who wanted to get married, and these were the dances performed by the unmarried women.’
‘A sanctioned flaunting of themselves to attract a male,’ said Julian.
Many of the women were wearing a country costume, headdresses ornately decorated with flowers, and tight bodices. Their black shoes were dusty from the several miles of tracks they had walked down from the hills.
When a men’s dance started, Julian and his Greek friend rushed to join in the frenzy. Clive stared to explain the kalamatianos and syrtos, but the music was too loud to speak over. Elizabeth watched as the spiral went first one way and then the other, ever-expanding to allow more revellers to join the line.
Then it was her turn.
‘Come on,’ said Mary. ‘Follow what I do. No one minds if you go wrong.’
Elizabeth allowed herself to be drawn in. She felt young and free. Her blonde hair swinging, she knew she was noticeable and enjoyed being seen. She danced for longer than she had intended. The line went round and round, ever longer, whipping round in a frenzy of music and stomping from the crowds. The lights were whirling above their heads.
When she was finally released she looked around, still laughing, for Julian, hoping he had been admiring her efforts. But she couldn’t see him anywhere.
‘Has anyone seen where Julian’s got to?’ she asked back at their table.
No one had. Neither did they seem unduly concerned. She sat down to drink a glass of water. His unpredictability was a given.
Half an hour went by. Elizabeth muttered that she was going to look at the stalls, and slid back into the throng. The band, still going strong, had slowed the tempo to a dirge. The singer wailed, his head thrown back.
She bought a paper twist of honeyed nuts. Still she expected to see his face at any moment bobbing among the dancers, or chatting at another table. But he did not materialise.
Unwilling to return to the party without him, she wandered into the town. Music and light blazed out of shops and cafés. Men called out to her.
A circuitous route took her back to the quay. She was about to rejoin the others at the
table when she saw him.
He was with Veronica.
They were pressed into the shadows of the harbourmaster’s office.
Elizabeth hesitated, then walked straight up to them.
‘Hello,’ she said with stiff civility.
Veronica ran a finger down Julian’s cheekbone in a defiantly intimate gesture.
Elizabeth turned to Julian, unsure what she expected him to do. He confounded her, though. He gave her a sheepish smile. Then he closed his eyes and clutched on to Veronica. For once, he seemed drunk.
‘We were just leaving,’ Veronica said.
Elizabeth stared. ‘I’ll say goodnight, then,’ she said to Julian.
He said nothing.
She worked her way round the knots of festoons and raucous groups. Her ears roared; it was like being in an echo chamber: voices from the party boomed and rang in the black air. This time she did mind.
Clive and Mary drove her the few miles back to Kouloura. Stoutly, no one mentioned Julian.
He might have gone with Veronica that night, but he was still intent on seeing Elizabeth.
The night after that, he telephoned the Stilwells at four in the morning asking for Elizabeth. He demanded that she speak to him. ‘Tell her I’ll send a car for her now,’ he shouted. ‘I want to see her right now!’
He did not get his way.
Julian told her to make no demands on him, but then persisted in demanding she carry on with him as before. ‘But you are immeasurably more lovely than she is!’ he cried, as if that made it all right.
She knew what he was doing; he was playing games with them both.
Still she was drawn to him. The golden aura, the careless manner, his intense interior life, his exuberant insistence on mystery and exploration – it was all a great conjuring trick, one that fascinated her. She could not stop going back until she understood how it worked.
So Elizabeth continued to go out on the boat with him, to lie in the sun on the rocks, to make love by the sea, to listen to him talk, and to learn about his world beneath the surface. She would live in the moment, she had decided, never trying to possess him. After all wasn’t this what her generation was fighting for, the right of women to enjoy sex in the same way that men did? Everyone else was doing it, being free and laughing at the old constraints.
Although Mary and Clive said nothing, she felt their apprehension. And if they did say anything she would tell them she had no need of their concern. She was fine. If they thought she was out of her depth in the undersea world of other people’s motives, they were underestimating her. Maybe she had learned more than anyone realised from Julian.
For gradually, Elizabeth was becoming aware for the first time in her life that she had power too. The first time she felt it, it seemed too much for her, like too much horsepower in a car. Now, once she was used to it, she wanted to test out the surge. The ride was spectacular.
III
JULIAN SPEARED A piece of white fish with a kebab stick.
‘Veronica tells me I should give you up,’ he said.
The boat bobbed at the side of the jetty at Agios Stefanos where they had put in for a late lunch. Under the awning of the taverna, glad to be out of the glare of another perfect day, Elizabeth sat as still as she could.
There it was again. Possessiveness. Two counts of it, and neither on her part.
Elizabeth waited for him to qualify this statement, but he did not. ‘Please don’t think that I have any thoughts about you and her, or you and any other woman, come to that,’ she said calmly.
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Completely.’
He grinned. ‘I knew she was wrong.’
Steeling herself not to betray any emotion, Elizabeth met his eyes, playing the game too. He reached for the notebook he always carried, he pulled out the centre pages and started to write.
Elizabeth ate slowly, concentrating on taking in the burning blue of the tiny bay seemingly blocked at the end by the mass of purple-brown hills across the strait. The water glittered and she had to screw up her eyes to see.
‘There.’ He pushed the folded paper across the table.
‘Darling Elizabeth,’ he had scrawled. ‘Whatever idiocies I may commit, whichever stupid woman I might let drink persuade me I want in that irrational moment, know that I adore you. You are the one who has given me this summer and made me whole again. Remind me of this whenever you need to. I adore you. Julian.’
She kept her eyes down.
‘Keep it. Read it when you doubt me, when I’m a fool,’ he said.
It was hard to tell if he was mocking or sincere.
That night the party was held at a Swiss architect’s house, a pink palace above Nissaki, a few miles south of Kalami. A carnival theme had enticed guests to ‘Dress with Abandon’. Julian and Elizabeth turned up as they were, straight off the boat. The moon hung huge and low over the smooth black sea.
They climbed the steep steps from the mooring. Voices and notes of music drifted down the dark hillside. A scops owl called. Soon they reached a path lit by torches through the garden. It emerged from trees on the lawn where a juggler was throwing more flames into the night. Moving arcs and circles of orange light hung for a few seconds in the air.
Guests had spilled down from the house. Masked waiters in black dived in and out of the shadows.
At the head of the final flight of stairs up to the wide terrace, Veronica was waiting at the balustrade. She must have seen them coming.
Her voice cut through the darkness. ‘I see you still have your silly little friend with you. She’s lasted longer than most of your young meat.’
She was encased in a skintight silver sequinned cocktail dress, in the moonlight she was a mermaid covered in thousands of winking scales, the material tight over her neat hips and flat stomach. Already drunk.
Julian smiled pleasantly. ‘And good evening to you, Veronica. How lovely to see you.’
She gave a malevolent squint. ‘He’s only using you, like all men do,’ she slurred in Elizabeth’s direction.
He swatted her away like a fly. They went up the steps to the villa, not looking back to see whether she was following.
The conversation at the party was the usual mixture of the inane and the spiky. Costumes were admired. A snatch of conversation floated over:
‘Never marry a foreigner. He seemed so nice before I could understand what he was saying.’
She caught Julian’s amusement and they both laughed. Through the swirling burlesque of the party Veronica was watching them. She hardly took her eyes off them wherever they were, even as she tilted her head back to tip more drink down her throat. For a few seconds, Elizabeth felt claustrophobic.
A man tried to determine her views on student activism. Another asked her whether this was her first time in Corfu. The music changed from subtle strings flying lightly on the dusky air, to the more earthbound sounds of the Rolling Stones. Couples had begun to dance, digging at the beat with their elbows, faintly ridiculous in formal evening dress or bizarre creations worn to approximate the idea of wanton hedonism but succeeding only in looking as if they had raided a dressing-up box.
Elizabeth found Julian was no longer at her side. He had been spun off by a succession of acquaintances and strangers, constantly in demand.
She smiled uncertainly at another woman about her own age.
The woman returned the smile and came over. She was dark with an hourglass figure encased in a slightly old-fashioned style of dress, a brightly made-up face and a ready smile. ‘I’m Theodora,’ she said.
‘You’re English!’ There was no mistaking the flat working-class vowels. ‘I thought you were Greek . . . you look—’
‘St Albans, originally. Married to a Greek,’ she said.
They exchanged brief histories. Theodora’s husband considered himself a foreigner too, as he came from Crete originally. Three years ago she had come to Greece on holiday, met Giorgios, and stayed. ‘The King of Greece u
sed to spend his summers in Corfu, so that’s what we do now,’ she giggled. ‘It’s that kind of family.’
Theodora was good company.
‘I’d like to have a go at painting,’ she said, when Elizabeth told her a little about herself. ‘But I probably won’t be much good. Seems like fun though.’ Then she added, quickly, ‘Hard work, I should think, to do it properly.’
‘Yes, well it can be . . .’
‘Sorry, is that boring?’
‘No . . . no . . .’
‘You look uncomfortable – what’s up?’
Elizabeth tried to concentrate. ‘Oh, nothing – it’s just—’
It was impossible to ignore Veronica. The dagger of her glare was between the vertebrae of her spine.
Elizabeth sighed. ‘It’s that woman. Do you know her?’
Opening a sparkly evening bag, Theodora took out a pair of glasses. ‘Can’t see much without them – silver sequins, you mean?’
Theodora peered, while Elizabeth wished she hadn’t asked.
‘Don’t think I do know her. Why do you ask?’
‘She’s always . . . oh, it doesn’t matter. Just wondered, that’s all.’
Another wave of claustrophobia.
Elizabeth made an excuse and left the room. The note he had written was still in her bag. She found a bathroom and leant against the basin to read it again. A kind of cruelty uncoiled in her gut. It was unpleasant to realise that was what it was.
If a possessive nature repulsed him, she might let Veronica do for herself. The woman was already drunk and behaving badly. All that was needed was to tip the edge. ‘Darling Elizabeth.’ Yes, Julian, she was thinking, I have learned such a lot from you.
Elizabeth folded the page neatly. Then she went back to the door of the room where most of the guests were circulating, and stopped a waiter as he went past. Indicating Veronica, she asked him to give her the note.
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