Melissa nodded, exhausted suddenly. ‘Thanks, that was kind of you. But how did you know I would be—’ She stopped as she worked it out, feeling stupid for being so slow. ‘Theodora.’
His eyes softened. ‘She called me. I had already spoken to her – she knew I was here today.’
‘She told me to come here,’ said Melissa.
A pause.
‘I’m driving back to Kalami now. Would you like to come with me?’
‘Yes, please.’
In the car, he was as quiet as she was.
‘What are you going to do the rest of the afternoon?’ she asked eventually.
‘I’m going to take my boat out. I might want to swim.’
The thought of cold water on her body made her long for the sea.
‘Could I come too?’
Alexandros collected her at the jetty on Kalami beach. His boat was sharp and sleek, an old-fashioned cutter with a scrubbed wooden deck.
Out on the water she could see the fabled indigo and gold of the Ionian, sparkling on the swell. The lush greens of the headlands. The brown smudged hills of Albania. You could half-close your eyes and imagine the scene had never changed.
He was using the engine – they would not be going far. On the edge of Yaliscary bay, she mentally saluted the flat yellow rock where she had sat for so many hours the previous year.
‘Do you want to stop here?’
‘No . . . go on further.’
Alexandros waved as they passed the little row of tavernas at Agni. A figure on the forecourt of the middle one waved two wide arcs in return.
‘I know where I’d like to go,’ she said quietly.
He was expressionless. He understood, though. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
The boat cut through the water, its roll long and smooth.
She sat at the prow as they passed the rocky headlands where the tides nibbled and fretted at the stony land. And there it was: the shrine at the base of the cliff, perched on its strange frozen waves of rock. She remembered with a pang how she felt when she had driven herself in Manolis’s hire boat. The shrine was just as it had been; it was as if the year might not have passed. It was just a funny little hut. But where then it had been charged only with her curiosity and longing to understand, now it was full of meaning, new layers of experience and knowledge.
Melissa did not care if the water was deep and cold at the base of the cliff. She was going to swim. A new, expensive snorkel mask would ensure she saw it all clearly. She had done this so many times in her imagination.
Alexandros anchored about five metres away from the rocks.
‘Will you come in?’ she asked.
‘I’ll wait here. I like sitting in the boat – it’s good thinking time. Take as long as you want, I don’t mind.’
Any embarrassment she might have had about exposing herself in a swimsuit in front of him was overridden by the intense need to do this. Besides, she was grateful he was there, for many reasons, not the least of them practical. Splashing into the water would be easy, but it would be hard, maybe even impossible, for anyone to grapple their way back up into the boat alone.
She lowered herself into the water, braced for iciness. It was warm as a bath. Buoyant and comfortable, she struck out for the green shallows ahead. Black ribbons of seaweed were satin caresses on her legs as she swam over them.
Inside the pool of jade and turquoise, the water was clear as glass. Six feet down, the floor of white pebbles sparkled. She could see the blood-red cherries pulsing on the stones, and Grace Adie’s sudden graceful dive, effervescence on her brown outstretched arms as she swooped down to harvest them. And Elizabeth, decades later, young and euphoric in her fantasia, kicking her legs while Adie flicked and turned like a fish, splashing sea sequins.
Somewhere to the left of her was the cave with the shelf where the statue to Pan once stood – perhaps it stood there still.
Now the pool was hers. There was nothing bad here, only the silky salt of the sea on her skin. She had no idea how long she floated there. It was a whole world, a real world and a dream world. The sea that rocked a child to sleep. There was a fleeting moment, like a sudden play of light on the sea bed, when she felt she understood it all: how we all brought our past to present experience; how chronology is irrelevant to our own tiny histories. The past mattered. It manipulated and controlled us, just as the ancient gods once did. All was clear, just as Adie had said.
Back in the boat, Alexandros was waiting.
She swam back, reinvigorated yet calm. High on the bobbing boat he was impassive. When she reached the ladder he bent forward and took her hand, pulling her up smoothly despite their slippery connection. Suddenly waking up to her near nakedness with him, she grappled for a towel.
But while she was in the water he had stripped off his shirt. There was no inequality between them. So she let the wind dry her, as the boat tipped gently at anchor.
‘Thank you – again. That was wonderful. Do you want to swim now?’
‘I have done.’
She hadn’t seen him, not a splash or ripple.
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘I called to you but you didn’t hear me either. Are you OK – do you want to go back?’
She shook her head. It was perfect. It was the present, the vibrantly alive and happy present and she wanted to stay in it.
They sat for a while in silence, watching the light dapple the swell.
‘I love it here,’ he said. ‘When I’m away this is what I miss.’
The sea sighed and crumpled on the pebbled rim of beach.
‘I’ve become a fatalist,’ she said. ‘Since I found that book.’
Citrus-scented, a breeze danced lightly in the air between them. His voice was soft and low, barely rising above a murmur. She had to lean in towards him across the boat to catch the words.
‘Good decision.’
It was too soon, their bond was too newly born and fragile to say what she now believed: that happiness is simply a feeling that anything is possible.
The coast burned red and orange, then the sunset left the boat adrift in a purple luminescence. Under the magic lantern, the sea seemed black. They rocked on darkness. Neither suggested going back to shore.
Wavelets sucked at the hull. In the quiet, suspended in a vast cloud of colour, the hills all around rose protectively.
‘I’ve thought of you often,’ he said.
‘I’ve thought of you too.’
‘But then . . . I could do nothing. I – it seemed too difficult. There was never a good time for us. It seemed it was not meant to be.’
Birds wheeled above. The scrubbed deck was bone white in the strange light, the wood still warm under the backs of her bare legs. She did not feel cold, just faintly shivery.
She was shy of putting into words the way he had saved her from herself and the constraints her mother’s story had so subtly imposed on her choices. How, after he had left her at St Cyrice, she had wanted him so ferociously that every olive tree, every crumb of red earth, every black hill crinkling in the distance was a reminder of Corfu, by which she meant him, Alexandros. How she had so gradually built up her own understanding on the bulwark of knowing that a man like him existed, even if she carried him only in her mind. So faint was the hope that she hardly knew it was there.
Melissa moved closer and put one hand over his.
For a few seconds, as they touched, she could feel the unheard creak of rock as layers settled, the shiver of the cypresses so close on the rocky shore, the soft hollows of the dimpled hills, sense the ripe grapes popping on the vine, see the nacreous sheen in the white morning sunlight, hear the clock of the sea.
This was when it was hard, being older, wary of taking a risk. Being too full of other stories.
He took his hand away, and it felt as if the tide had receded, leaving her stranded with burning cheeks. Then his touch on one shoulder, tentative yet infinitely reassuring. It was too dark to see the colour of his
eyes, only the contours of his face. She leaned towards him and felt his breath in her hair.
A sigh and he pulled her in, his hands warm and solid on her back. His mouth brushed hers like the touch of a feather, then was confident and serious. In the dark and secret interior land of a kiss, its surprising new contours and rhythms, the intimate exchanges and growing understanding, they were holding fast together, part of the metronomic rock of the boat.
All was brought alive in the intimate universe of their mouths and hands. The boat at anchor was an independent island, unearthly sky above and the busy sea below.
Reluctantly they pulled apart.
Wordlessly, she opened her eyes.
All around, the sea was patched with low green and gold lights.
He clasped her hand and took it with his as he pointed. ‘Look!’
Dipping over the side, he lifted jewelled strings of emeralds.
‘Phosphorescence.’
He was laughing as he dripped the magical skeins of gems over their bodies. The water and the ribbons seemed to marble the deck.
‘Imagine you are in a sea of green,’ she murmured. ‘Beneath you the boat is rocking gently . . .’
This was the ancient tale, which we always want to hear again. At last she understood, that she had been searching for this place – the only fixed element in the story – not to relive the story but to find her own version of it.
‘It’s our time now,’ she said, reaching out for him.
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
The inspiration for this book came one gloomy winter afternoon when I rediscovered Prospero’s Cell on the bookshelves of a bedroom at the top of the house. Opening it and starting to read was like injecting the grey with vivid blues and emeralds. A richly evocative account of Lawrence Durrell’s life in Corfu in the 1930s, it was first published in 1945 and purports to be a diary in which he is a serious young writer living blissfully in the sun, deeply in love both with his new wife and with the idea of Greece. Durrell states that Prospero’s Cell is a ‘guide to the landscape and manners’ of Corfu but it never quite becomes this. It is a lyrical personal notebook, and what he leaves out is as poignant as what he includes.
Its content is almost unrecognisable as the same ground his younger brother, the zoologist Gerald, covers in his famous Corfu book My Family and Other Animals, in which ‘Larry’ lives with the family (which he never did) and is the ‘diminutive blond firework’ by turns pompously literary and hilarious. And by the time he wrote Prospero’s Cell Lawrence and his first wife Nancy had separated. He was already sadder and wiser, and living in wartime Egypt with Eve Cohen who would become his second wife.
I was intrigued. Further researches and a reading of several biographies soon revealed a complex and contradictory character. His work, over a period of nearly sixty years – most famously in The Alexandria Quartet – was concerned with duality: love and hate; truth and fiction; memory and misinterpretation. And running through it all, the transfiguring effect of time.
Lawrence Durrell wrote beguilingly, drawing constantly on his own experience and his many subsequent moves across the shores of the Mediterranean: to Rhodes (Reflections on a Marine Venus), Cyprus (Bitter Lemons), the former Yugoslavia, and finally to the South of France (Caesar’s Vast Ghost) where he settled for thirty years. Interwoven with this background were his many loves and four marriages. He seemed to pack so many different lives into one! And while he was a comet blazing, what of the women he collided with along the way, I wondered? How did their stories end? And what of those he met, whose lives he changed but who did not rate even a footnote in his biography? Soon, I was busy inventing Julian Adie and Elizabeth.
SELECTED BOOKS BY LAWRENCE DURRELL (1912-1990)
TRAVEL
Prospero’s Cell
Reflections on a Marine Venus
Bitter Lemons
The Greek Islands
Caesar’s Vast Ghost
NOVELS
The Alexandria Quartet
Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
The Avignon Quintet
Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, Quinx
POETRY
Collected Poems, ed. James A. Brigham
Selected Poems, ed. Peter Porter
BIOGRAPHICAL AND BACKGROUND READING
Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, A Biography.
This is the official biography, exhaustively researched with Durrell’s full cooperation in the years before he died.
Gordon Bowker, Through the Dark Labyrinth, A Biography of Lawrence Durrell.
The unofficial version and no less admiring of Durrell as a writer, but with a less restrained investigation of the darker episodes in his life.
Edmund Keeley, Inventing Paradise, The Greek Journey 1937-47.
This and the following are more academic volumes examining Durrell’s literary influences and setting his work in context.
Anna Lillios, (ed.), Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World.
Michael Haag, Alexandria, City of Memory.
A fabulous book, wonderfully written, which reveals the Alexandria of E M Forster and C P Cavafy as well as Durrell. Haag’s own photographs such as that of the now-derelict Ambron Villa (where Durrell lodged), as well as unusual ones missed by other biographical works, make this special.
Hilary Whitton Paipeti, In the Footsteps of Lawrence Durrell and Gerald Durrell in Corfu (1935-39), A Modern Guidebook.
This slim volume, packed with photographs and quirky facts, is as enjoyable for the armchair traveller as for the visitor to Corfu.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781407007304
Version 1.0
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published in Great Britain in 2008 by Arrow Books
Copyright © Deborah Lawrenson, 2008
Deborah Lawrenson has asserted her right, in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Please refer to the author’s acknowledgements here for details of any resemblance to actual persons.
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Arrow Books
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099505198
Songs of Blue and Gold Page 32