Leonie butted in. ‘That’s just it. It never did develop into the marriage you wanted it to be. Go on, be honest. Did you ever entirely trust him?’
Melissa bit her lip, forcing herself to remember the way it really was.
‘You didn’t, did you?’ Leonie said softly.
‘No.’
‘And did all the rows and fresh deals ever make any difference?’
‘No.’ It came out as a whisper.
‘No one can ever say that you didn’t try to make it work, Mel. You are so strong – stronger than you realise. The steel it took to keep it all going – for years! But we are not our mothers. We don’t have to stay with a husband for any of their reasons: economics, shame, stigma. Richard, he’s—’
‘It’s not just him.’
Melissa was going to tell her. She had to tell someone, to release the thought that had been choking her for a week, maybe for longer, floating namelessly, wordlessly in her subconscious. ‘I think that . . . it’s possible . . . Julian Adie was my father.’
She went over how it would make so much sense. How it would explain why Elizabeth had given her the book – and the trail – while she still could, why it was the one important thing she had left to tell her, why Dr Braxton had tracked her down. And back so much further, how her father Edward had always been such a distant entity, how Elizabeth’s marriage to him had fallen apart so quickly, its ties to conventionality so threadbare. Leonie was shocked, she could tell. Incredulous, too.
‘But your mother . . . she never even hinted at this before?’
‘No, but –’
‘You and she were close, Mel. I just can’t believe she would have kept something like this from you. She was such a lovely person, with a real sense of fairness. I can remember you telling me how she would try to make sure your father saw you and took you for outings even when he wasn’t living with you. I just can’t . . .’
‘She would never show weakness. Look how long it took for me to find out how ill she was. She wouldn’t say!’
Leonie was not convinced.
‘It’s like . . . not knowing my own history, having to revise my own story halfway through.’
‘You can’t think that way.’
‘What if I could prove it?’
‘You won’t be able to prove it. Mel, all this Julian Adie stuff . . .’
Leonie was clearly uncomfortable.
‘It might seem odd, but it’s making me feel better not worse. Depression, obsession – I know what you’re thinking. But the way I see it I’m not running away from the demons, I’m facing them head on. Trying to find answers. What else would you suggest? That I run back to Kent, picking over the remains and wailing on about how he can’t have loved me properly or he wouldn’t have done this? Where does that get me?’
It wouldn’t quite go into spoken words, but she knew deep down that if she could understand her mother, she would have more insight into everything; and that if she could understand how a man moved on from wife to wife, she might take comfort from knowing that Richard had genuinely loved her, at least for a while.
Biography was important. In the story of another person’s life was all the evidence you needed of the courage required to clear the world’s hurdles, or even to dare take the new step. You could find out how other people handled bad situations. Whether in retrospect they made the right decisions. The key was in the human love of narrative, of wanting to know what happened next.
For Julian Adie it was documented; for Elizabeth it was not. There was no smooth transition between phases of life and events neatly arranged in chapters, only a jumble of unreliable memory.
She barely left St Cyrice the following week.
One evening, as she was physically exhausted from trying to reinstate her mother’s control of the garden, pruning suckers from plum trees and cutting down the ash-grey branches of a dead cherry tree, her mobile shrilled. Caller unknown.
‘Hello.’ Her tone was flat, she could hear it herself.
‘Is that Melissa?’
That voice – surely it couldn’t be, not after all this time?
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Alexandros.’
She had never been so happy to hear from anyone. She struggled to keep control of her voice. ‘How are you? How’s Kalami?’
‘Fine, and yes, fine, I’m sure. I – er, I’m not in Kalami. I’m in Lyon.’
‘What are you doing there – I mean, are you working there?’
‘No. I’m waiting for a train. I flew in this morning. When I got your postcard I had this crazy idea that I should come and see you – but now I’m here, I’m feeling I might have been a little . . . reckless. I should have called you before. Should have given you er . . . more notice . . .’
‘Alexandros,’ she said firmly. ‘I would so love to see you. Please come.’
There was no one she wanted to see more.
When she saw him, the tension she’d been carrying seemed to melt away. A rush of elation at the sight of him on the doorstep of the bergerie, made her taller and lighter than she had been for weeks. More hopeful, too.
‘This is a lovely surprise!’ She was grinning uncontrollably.
His face had filled out a bit since she was in Corfu. He looked healthier and happier, if a touch travel-worn. The wild hair had been cut too, no longer trailing past his ears, though the curls still fell over his forehead.
Too much staring. ‘Come in, come in . . .’ she said. She was self-conscious that she must be looking a lot worse than when he had last seen her.
In the dark flagged hall, he dropped his leather bag and looked around, taking in the thick walls of exposed stone and the wooden staircase. It was odd seeing him in this new context, and so unexpectedly. He might well have been thinking the same of her.
The moment when they might have exchanged a friendly kiss in greeting had passed. ‘Tea . . . coffee . . . wine . . .?’ she bustled nervously.
He followed her into the kitchen.
Melissa filled the slight awkwardness with talk. ‘It’s great to see you,’ she said. ‘How have you been? Did you find all you were looking for, when you were in Egypt?’
Alexandros took his time answering, deliberately slowing down her rattling tempo. ‘In a way I did find what I was looking for. But maybe I knew it all along, and I was only proving it to myself.’
What did he mean by that? Did he intend her to read something into it? She picked up the packet of coffee grounds, and when he nodded, fired up the filter machine.
‘Tell me.’
He leaned, apparently comfortably, against the old pine table, filling that corner of the room with his height and presence. She thought he was going to talk about his wife, but all he said was, ‘The guide book stuff was relatively easy when I’d worked out how I was going to go about it.’
‘What about the Alexandrian women? Are they as beautiful as all the books describe?’ she asked, teasingly, hoping to lighten the tone.
‘I’m sure they were.’
He was so earnest that she laughed.
‘Let’s take our coffee through to the sitting room.’
She was unsure what their relationship was – friendship, shared interest, or was it stronger than that? Had that one night in Corfu been a stupid mistake, or the only honest part of a tentative game they were both playing?
All she knew for certain was that she had the same butterflies in her stomach as that night in Corfu she had relived so many times in her head.
‘I am so pleased you’re here,’ said Melissa. ‘There’s something I really need to ask you. To be honest, it’s why I sent you the postcard.’
Was she imagining it, or did his expression suddenly darken?
Calmly and objectively, she described her meeting with Martin Braxton.
‘That was him!’ There was no hesitation. Alexandros made an irritated gesture with his powerful brown hands. ‘Braxton. He was the one who came to Kalami just before you arrived last year.’<
br />
‘Greeting the locals with a shout of “Squid!” every morning!’ she grimaced, remembering. ‘Now I’ve met him I can just picture it.’
Perhaps a man that cloth-eared might not be a threat after all. She had worried unnecessarily.
‘I have to admit, I have been worried about what he intends to write.’
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think there’s anything I can do.’
His long face was a mask. ‘Perhaps not.’
‘You know, there is something that has been bothering me. Braxton said he was investigating the drowning of an American woman.’ She kept her voice soft and non-confrontational. ‘You never did answer my question about the drowning at the St Arsenius shrine, not properly. Why wouldn’t you tell me?’
It was impossible to gauge his reaction. The last time she asked she had received a short answer. She still recalled his words. ‘We don’t talk about it.’
Now, he sighed. He looked past her to the window and out at the sky. ‘It seems . . . that other people are claiming they know more about it now that any of us ever did,’ he said eventually. ‘We were never sure exactly what did happen.’
‘So . . . you never discussed it because—’
‘—because we did not want to add to the stories about it! No one knew what had really happened – but everyone had a wild theory. The woman was a foreigner, don’t forget.’
‘Was it out of loyalty to Julian Adie, then – because you knew he had a connection to her?’
Alexandros shrugged. ‘Perhaps that was part of it – especially on old Manos’s part. He was so proud to have been Adie’s landlord. Adie had paid for the enlargement of his house. But I imagine there was also an element of communal self-interest. The tourist industry was really beginning to be developed at that time. It was bringing astonishing prosperity to places that had never dreamed such things would be possible. It was not in anyone’s interest to make more of it than it was.’
‘Was there ever an official – a police – investigation?’
‘I don’t know. I was too young to know what happened.’
‘Maybe there wasn’t.’
‘Maybe so. If everyone was satisfied it was an accident . . .’
‘So there was no counterbalance,’ said Melissa. ‘Anyone could come along and interpret it how they wished, in a way that suited their purposes . . .’
She was thinking of Dr Braxton, but maybe they were all implicated in the web of supposition.
‘Braxton thinks my mother was there.’
Alexandros sat forward in his seat as she told him how she had gone to Sommières, thinking she was finding her own way into her mother’s story, only to find it was another trail Braxton had already covered.
‘He’s spoken to the same people I did in Sommières . . . but there’s not much that’s relevant there. Unless Annick wasn’t telling the truth when she told me how she knew who my mother was.’
‘Or only part of the truth.’
‘Do you think it’s worth trying her again – see if she’ll tell me any more this time?’
‘It’s getting a long way from the story Braxton is researching.’
‘Not if he’s set on finding out about my mum, it isn’t!’ She was amazed he didn’t get that. ‘He thinks she was involved in this . . . death. He even called it a killing! He’s going to write a book saying that my mother was Adie’s partner in murder!’
Her heart was pounding. Finally articulating the threat made it horrifying, as well as incomprehensible.
‘Why would he think that?’
‘I don’t know!’ wailed Melissa. ‘I simply don’t know. If you’d ever met her you’d know it was just ridiculous!’
‘It could simply be because of the time she was there . . .’ It was lame and he knew it. ‘Or someone remembered her name for another reason . . .’ That was worse.
He had no answers either.
‘Braxton wants to see her papers – but there are no papers. He doesn’t believe me. He lives in a world where everything can be found in a book or a library. And if it’s not written it can be teased out from between the lines.’
‘Do you have a number for Braxton?’ asked Alexandros.
‘He gave me his card.’
‘Perhaps we should meet him.’
‘Face him head on, you mean? But we know what he intends to write. The only thing we can do is prove him wrong,’ said Melissa. ‘And how do we do that?’
The situation seemed bizarre. But the idea of having someone like Alexandros on her side made all the difference to her spirits. The way he used the word ‘we’ was profoundly comforting.
She showed him upstairs, to the bedroom she had hurriedly prepared for him. Gauging his reaction to her lack of presumption was impossible. His face was granite as he thanked her.
Quickly she prepared a simple supper and opened a bottle of wine. Bread and olives went in Provençal dishes on the kitchen table. It would be making too much of a statement to have set it out in the more formal dining room, but she lit a couple of candles. They cast intimate shadows across the long wooden table. The mood was cosy.
Neither wanted to reopen the discussion about Braxton for the moment. Melissa asked him about looking for the ancient sites for the guidebook, and he chatted more easily.
‘There’s nothing left of the great Pharos of Alexandria. It’s almost all cleared out. Within folk memory, the two obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles were shipped to Britain and America. They built a tram station on the spot where they once stood, or rather one stood and the other – the one that went to London – lay on its side. The only ancient monument left is Pompey’s Pillar.’
She served the salad. ‘Go on.’
‘I also tried to find the house where my grandfather was born. I had always wanted to do that. Did I tell you I once had relatives in Alexandria? But whatever traces had once been were under blocks of modern apartments.’
He met her eyes. He mumbled a few words she didn’t catch, then resumed. It was possible he was also feeling awkward.
‘One early morning I took my maps and Cavafy’s anthology, and stood outside the building where he lived, and spoke some lines aloud. Then I walked through the back streets, an archaeologist, but of the imagination, looking for what was there no longer, and perhaps never had been.
‘As I say, the . . . ah, place names are all changed. In the end I took some very thin paper and traced an old map to a standard scale. Then I laid it over the new map of the city, and moved it until I found a m-match. I wasn’t going to give up.’
‘I found the old Rue Lepsius that way – where Cavafy lived. The building is renumbered, and the road is now called the Sharia Sharm el Sheikh. The Greek consulate has taken over Cavafy’s old apartment, made it into a small museum, but it was . . . sterile. The walls are white. You . . . er . . . had to look at the photographs to have any idea of what it was like when it was his home, with deep colours on the walls and idiosyncratic possessions jumbled on every space.’
‘Were you disappointed?’
‘A little. It could have been done with more thought.’
‘Did your pieces for the book turn out well?’
He pulled a face. ‘Quite well, I suppose. It’s hard to say.’
‘It’s been a difficult time.’
Melissa pushed back the molten lip of the nearest candle from where a wax stalactite was forming. She wanted to reach out to him so much, to assure him he was not alone, but held back, afraid of spoiling it all, of misreading the tension which had been building since his phone call.
‘Yes, but in a strange way that has helped.’
She saw him walking the dusty streets, picking his way through the foetid Egyptian air, his wife in Athens, with no intention of returning; looking around intently, in the process of mastering that knowledge, just as she had been coming to terms with being on her own again.
‘I do know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Stand
ing outside your own situation for a while, learning how to be alone again.’
Alexandros looked away. His expression was profoundly sad.
‘Did she come back?’ Melissa asked awkwardly. ‘Your wife?’
For a few seconds it seemed as if he was not going to reply. He shifted nervously in his seat. Then he looked up. ‘No.’
‘Are you – how do you feel about that now?’
Another long pause. ‘I’m all right. Mainly. My friends are kind. I have my interests, my work . . .’
‘My husband came back,’ she said boldly. ‘But so did the problem.’
After eating, they moved back to the sitting room. More relaxed there, they talked for a long time about their separate situations. How you felt you knew someone, and then discovered you had missed the fundamentals, the driving impulses of their personality. It was good to talk. It seemed a long time since she had imagined having this conversation with him in Corfu. But better late. There was so much she understood better now.
‘You aren’t still hoping it might work out somehow, are you? With Richard?’ he had been visibly jolted when she told him that Richard had been with her up until only a few weeks ago. That she had gone back to him.
The moon was silver bright through the window.
‘No. I told you. I feel relieved. I might have gone on trying for years, even when I was unhappy. But he gave me no choice. So for that, I’m grateful.’
‘But why did you have to keep on trying?’
That was the question she couldn’t answer.
‘I don’t know. I’ve gone round and round trying to work it out.’ She sighed. ‘Lack of confidence, perhaps. Things that happened in the past. Family. A need for security. How long have you got?’
‘As long as you want,’ he said seriously.
She smiled. ‘We don’t always feel what we are meant to feel,’ she began. It felt as if she were pulling the words out against a great counterweight. ‘When you’ve had a way of coping for so long, it’s incredibly hard to change the pattern. It’s like being one of those bloody dogs salivating at the bell.’
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