Songs of Blue and Gold

by Deborah Lawrenson

  ‘Let me help you,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It will be all right!’

  ‘You can’t.’

  He was dismissing her.

  The realisation stunned her. She wanted to turn the clock back. To dive into sunlit water with him. To hold him like before.

  ‘Whatever happens, I will never forget this summer—’ she whispered.

  But Julian turned his back.

  Swallowing her pride, her voice breaking, she reminded him of the name of the gallery in London through which he could contact her. She gave him a brush of her lips on the side of his mouth, and left.

  She was empty, numb. Elizabeth did not confide her discomfort to the Stilwells. Not even to Clive, who would have brought his gentle certainties to bear on her distress. To do so would have meant revealing the extent of her feelings for Julian Adie, and by implication, the truth about her affair with him. She was caught: on the one hand feeling too young and inexperienced to have entangled herself in such adult games; and on the other too mature to be seeking a second opinion of the manoeuvrings like an adolescent.

  The loss of the baby, of David and the married life that never was, the future that would not be; all returned now, intensified in a swift blow. But far worse was the certainty that the golden summer with Julian was over.

  It began that evening, the odd pressing in of fear, like a low-level hum. The bruise around her wrist throbbed. Was it guilt as much as misery that was driving Adie away from Corfu? In any case, shouldn’t he stay while there was some kind of official investigation? Had he told her the whole truth about what had happened that night? Elizabeth pushed the suspicion away immediately. But it gnawed at her assumptions.

  How angry he had been when he accused her of not believing him. His hand tight as a vice on her wrist.

  ‘You’re hurting me! Of course I believe you. I was there, wasn’t I?’ she had cried. It was only afterwards, long afterwards, that she realised that only one of those statements was completely true. The pain around her wrist left the imprint of a livid dark bruise which took a long time to fade.

  Elizabeth left Corfu at the end of August.

  By then she was haunted by images of the pinched face and the silver dress being swallowed by the blackness. The strange cruel gods of the sea that always frolicked close to any haven Julian Adie made from mortality. She missed him and their dazzling dream world with a wrenching ache.

  Julian Adie, Behind the Myth

  Martin Braxton

  The weather turned suddenly on 20 August 1968. Adie stood alone on the stone jetty, his back to the White House as the storm struck. The sea was a sheet of crow-black sullenness, rippled like mourning crêpe. Darts of cold rain pierced the cotton of his shirt.

  For a second time he was leaving this place harried by the knowledge that his paradise had imploded.

  He knew what happened when a human drowned. His meticulous and macabre description of a death at sea is the centrepiece of The Cairo Triptych. He was intimately acquainted with the physiological process by which water began to enter the lungs, followed by a brief period of laryngospasm – the desperate tightening of the vocal cords – which kept the inrush at bay for a few vital minutes, but then, when the force of the sea engulfed the lungs, the lack of oxygen to the brain and body tissues. In long heady sentences his prose builds and swells as he recreates the waves of panic, the minute composition of the bacteria, algae, sand and microscopic sea life in the mouthfuls of water, the frantic fatal gulps. The terrible suffocation as the body remains submerged, the trauma and collapse of the central nervous system, the stopping of the heart.

  Julian Adie’s dark side was habitually concealed under the gilt of sociability and laughter. It emerged most often in the work, but it could be unleashed at any time. Since childhood, when he was bullied for his lack of height, he had had a propensity for violence, both physical and emotional.

  Surveying the water which, the day before, had carried the body of Veronica Rae before nudging it ashore on Avlaki beach south of Kassiope, Adie must surely have thought back to that other departure, decades before in the teeth of war: south first to Athens, then on to Egypt, alone.

  The Cairo he found was a hellhole. The city cowered under the khamseen, the hot spring winds that blew up, sand-laden, from the Sahara to the south. The sky was dun-coloured with choking grit that swirled into every weak spot, the eyes, the mouth and nose, the psyche. The traffic was unspeakable, fouled and confounded by animals wandering in its midst.

  Life was cheap and brutal. Teeming crowds deformed by disease and poverty snagged on beggars’ bony feet as they passed. Shrouds of black flies covered dead bodies in the streets. Goats and strings of camels silted up the streets with defecation.

  Yet being alone had its advantages. Adie launched himself day and night into finding work and somewhere to live, calling as ever on contacts and friends of friends, tapping, perhaps more confidently than he felt, into the British Council and diplomatic network. He was still only twenty-seven, and possessed of huge energy, an endless stream of entertaining anecdotes, a capacity for serious discussion too, of literature and philosophy, and a cast-iron head for liquor. It was not long before his powers of persuasion, added to his fluent Greek and brief experience working in propaganda in Athens, landed him a junior post in the Foreign Press department at the British Embassy.

  Cairo began to open up for him. At night, lights blazed. Every exotic delicacy was on offer, from the restaurants packed with locals and Europeans, to the plethora of brothels catering for every taste and perversion. Despite the bombing of the harbour at Alexandria, it was an open city and as such did not come under attack. The atmosphere was a heady mix of guilty excitement and seediness, from which death was only ever a few paces away, where stained and patched-up soldiers came in from the desert battlefields to seek oblivion from the fighting.

  Adie was a fixture at the Black Mamba club, not far from the smart Shepheard’s Hotel, on the terrace of which the supply of pre-war champagne and hock served to those who could afford it, did not run dry until 1943.

  ‘He would stand barely taller than the top of the bar, glass always in hand, mesmerised by the abdominal rippling of a particularly abundantly fleshed belly dancer named Hekmat,’ recalled Bernard Bressens, British Council official, would-be poet and one of the new circle Adie met at the Anglo-Egyptian Union, another establishment to promote closer cultural understanding, in this instance through literary debate. ‘He was dedicated to the idea of encountering as many women of as many different nationalities as he could, and as far as I saw, he enjoyed unparalleled success. He never spoke about a wife.’

  This was a time and a place where beggars with weeping sores shivered outside Shepheard’s and offered their sisters for sale, a clash of cultures where anything was available to be discovered by those with money or curiosity, or a taste for human abasement. For the foreigners in the city there were no moral constraints: no rules; no families to embarrass; no past form to live up to. Julian Adie embraced it all: the atmosphere, the license.

  It afforded him the freedom to explore a new erotic landscape in a way he could scarcely have imagined on his rock in Corfu. In that sense, he was never to return.

  Part Six: Landlocked

  I

  THE BERGERIE WAS a modest low-slung farm building. It was built into an escarpment so that the hill rose from the first floor at the rear which gave a sense of protected privacy to the stone, barn-like structure that Elizabeth always talked about extending, but never did.

  Its land, a couple of acres on a scrubby hillside, was scented by wild lavender, thyme and rosemary baked and dried in the wind and sun. Pine needles and blown olive leaves crunched underfoot. Then the view opened: orange earth, rocks, green slopes and indigo hills.

  The key stuck, the way it always did.

  The house looked the same as ever. Melissa expected Elizabeth to call out to her at any moment; she felt her presence at her shoulder, at the end of the corridor, outside the k
itchen door. This refuge had been a constant of her childhood. Her parents had bought it together a long time ago, so long ago that she had never wondered how they had ever come here in the first place. Long summers had been idled away here, and one hard biting winter of mistral and floods, the year her father died.

  Missing her physical presence rather than his, Melissa welled up, not at the sight of the chair where Elizabeth would sit, but at the sight of a geranium straining itself into life on the tiny terrace outside the kitchen, and the sunny patch of garden where her mother had tried so doggedly to cultivate bushes of red hibiscus but succeeded only with pale pink.

  Melissa was thrown, and vulnerable. But she knew that coming here was the right thing to do.

  ‘Are you going to keep the house?’ Richard had asked when she first suggested making the trip.

  It hadn’t occurred to her to do otherwise.

  In the April after Elizabeth died, the southern breezes were already warm. Wild flowers splashed colour over the meadows. The Languedoc is rough and rugged country: a hard-thorn land where the sun beats with a pulse, heating and rushing the blood.

  This is the Roman province, the Provincia, south-west of Nîmes, reputedly the hottest town in France, not the tamed expensive land to the east of Avignon most people call Provence. The great aqueduct of the Pont du Gard arches over these valleys, the amphitheatres still used for bullfighting. True, stark white developments now lured droves of budget holidaymakers to the coast due south, but inland little had changed from the hamlet where Melissa had grown up, summer by summer. There was nothing to entice visitors to St Cyrice, only a homely bar-restaurant, and a small grocery store.

  The garrigue is all around: scrublands of thorns and wild herbs, scorched grass and holm oaks; dry ochre soil, so pitiful it seems miraculous that any plant could grow here, so barely does it cover the rock it lies on. Where the earth has stuck fast, the ground is cut by torrent beds from the winter rains. The plateau under the high limestone ridge of the Pic St Loup is an imperious presence, its cruel scraped fingers pointing up to the heavens. The landscape is pitted with caves and craters, and deep erosive wounds.

  She had forgiven Richard, it seemed.

  He brought the cases in from the car.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ he asked. He meant inside the house.

  ‘Appears to be,’ she said, meaning everything, and wondering if that could really be true. She turned on the tap at the sink. It spluttered and choked up brown water. She waited until it ran clearer then splashed her face.

  It was always like this when they arrived for the first visit of the year. Cobwebs swung from the beams. A scent of dried herbs struggled against the stronger smell of dust and damp and mouse which would dissipate as soon as the shutters were flung out and windows opened. Last year’s flies were crispy black corpses on the drainer. Already there was a faint hum from new battalions.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘It will be all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll do lots of trips – to the caves, maybe.’

  The first time she brought him here they went to the Grotte des Demoiselles. They climbed aboard a funicular railway which carried them deep inside the mountain peak, so cold and far that she was glad he was with her among the stalagmites and stalactites.

  Melissa nodded, looking him in the eye, remembering all the good times here together. ‘Lots of long lunches . . .’

  He took her hand.

  ‘We could go to St Martin.’

  They closed together, travel-grimy and safe. He kissed her deeply, and she kissed him back.

  Anger stowed away, recriminations suppressed, Melissa had allowed him to hold her during the bleakest winter months. Not to forget, but to take the first steps towards the forgiveness that is supposed to be the purest balm. Her doubts were stilled by the sad certainty that it would be a long journey back.

  But the truth was that her emotions were a brew of grief and contradiction where Richard was concerned. There was no point in her friends saying she was grieving for the end of her marriage as well as her mother. She knew the difference, could feel it, and they did not. She had not lost him for ever.

  ‘I know it will take a long time,’ she admitted to Leonie. ‘I will be suspicious. It will take a lot to get the trust back. But I’m prepared for that.’

  She supposed that was natural. It was amazing how it could be possible to carry on in an apparently normal routine, filling the day with practicalities, and not addressing the crisis. They had agreed they should have a serious discussion at the end of three months, and now it had been four, both afraid of what might be said, what might fly out of the box.

  They took it easy the first few days. Melissa, alone, told their village friends the sad news and checked the boundaries of the land, the two acres of scrub and trees. Brown bears and wolves still staked their territory in these parts, according to village talk. Certainly there was wild boar. Early on, a neighbour, Monsieur Lechal, advised Elizabeth against planting a row of hazel near the potager, as they were too much of a lure for the boar.

  Melissa had a knowledge of the local customs and lore gathered over the years from their neighbours. The way the farmers cut wood for building at full moon when the sap was high, and wood for fuel at new moon when the sap was low, for example. The way they would only grow Jerusalem artichokes for family consumption, never to be sold at market because people grew tired of them during the war when the Nazis requisitioned French crops for their armies but habitually rejected those mysterious knobbly tubers.

  You needed at least two relatives lying in the churchyard before you could be considered a local. But for Melissa it was still a home, a constant, a repository of memories.

  ‘We should put in a better pool,’ said Richard. ‘And finally do that extension your mother used to talk about, when we get the money from Bell Cottage. This is such a fantastic location – it could be a spectacular house.’

  Melissa kept quiet.

  ‘This is when it’s a good thing to be an only child,’ he continued. ‘No one else in the family who has to be bought out or compromised with. We can do exactly what we want and no family arguments.’

  Actually she liked it as it was. ‘I don’t see much point in changing it too much if I’m not going to sell it.’

  ‘Might want to rent it out for some of the summer though. It would be a good income, especially if you don’t want to go back to work.’

  ‘I will go back to work. But I need a change. I don’t want to go back to where I was. I want to find a project, perhaps on a freelance basis.’

  He still did not seem to understand how fundamentally she had been re-evaluating her life this past year, and how far he had prompted that. It was too easy to blame it all on Elizabeth’s illness and then her death.

  He took himself off happily to swimming pool constructors, and had several local builders come round to give quotes. Over bottles of red wine in the evenings, he grew expansive along with his plans.

  Words and plans flowed over her as if she had dived in and was swimming underwater already. They were both trying, but there was still a barrier between them. Melissa was starting to think it was her fault.

  In bed one morning, he reached out and pulled her to him. His hand was warm and heavy on her hip.

  ‘Let’s go to St Martin today.’

  The pressure of his hand, how easily she could shift position and turn it to pleasure. His blue-green eyes were soft, and sincere.

  St Martin.

  At St Martin de Londres, a village that grew in medieval times from an earlier priory, ‘Londres’ has nothing to do with London, as she had once thought. It derives from the Occitan word for swamp, which then begs the question whether the French for London is a sneaky Gallic joke.

  It is a gorgeous place, with its vanilla stone and cobbled passageways. The Place de la Fontaine is the entrance to an ancient world. When monks first arrived they were looking for hardship and suffering, faith being founded on survival. They
chose the rocky barren valleys and inhospitable peaks to prove themselves and their determination to worship, and came in that spirit to the ‘swamp’, the boggy marshlands which surrounded it. Hardship was the price of heaven.

  Richard and Melissa were married in St Martin. First there was a brief administrative ceremony at the Mairie, then they led the wedding party through the vaulted passage up from the square, to the church where the marriage was blessed.

  They drove there in quiet good spirits, Richard at the wheel. The way he drove was one of the things she had always liked about him: fast but safe, and with surprising consideration for other people on the road.

  In sidelong glances, she reassured herself. He was still the same person she had loved for so long. The tousled light brown hair, the pleasant profile as he concentrated, the iridescent chip of one blue-green eye, the mole on his left cheekbone; he was just the same.

  She had a sense of the landscape expanding to cradle all within it: the vast garrigue, the perched hillside villages, the region’s long-horned sheep, and Pyrenean fawns, beaver and otter in the rivers, all lay beating under the sun.

  The Romanesque church of St Martin de Londres was deserted. Melissa felt a stab of sadness as she took in the familiar pattern of arches on the rounded exterior; the porch decorated with a weatherworn relief of St Martin himself that she knew so well; and inside, the clover-shaped floor plan.

  Richard put his arm round her waist and they moved up to the altar. Empty space where the pews had once contained their families and friends, all bright silks and hats, and the anticipation of a grand celebration. She knew what he was trying to say.

  ‘Nearly seven years,’ he whispered.

  She was silent.

  He put his lips gently on her neck. A tingle ran along her collarbone. But beneath it was something unsettling. The sensation of a creeping panic. She willed herself to feel the romance of the moment, the vibrations from the past, when they had stood on this very spot with such happiness and certainty.