by Teresa Crane
‘Leon told me that your grandmother was upset. That we married so suddenly. That we didn’t invite you.’ She watched him for a moment. ‘It may seem odd — it was odd, I suppose — but we didn’t invite anyone. Not even Adam. It was my fault. I —’ she spread her hands, ‘I didn’t want a fuss. It was the second time for both of us. I just felt it was an intensely personal thing. It was very selfish, I see that now. I didn’t mean to upset anyone, I promise.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ It had at the time. It had mattered very much indeed. It had been the beginning of an estrangement all the worse for not being openly acknowledged. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Four years,’ she said. Four years. Four strange and often turbulent years since she had finally — and against her better judgement — succumbed to Leon’s ardent and single-minded pursuit of her. Four years, and in truth she knew him no better now than she had then. And now, here was the son, so unlike the father, through no fault of his own disturbing her peace and invading her precious privacy — she knew the thought to be unworthy, tried to stifle it. Where the devil was Leon that he hadn’t met the poor boy and taken him to London as had been planned? The man was impossible; self-centred and unreliable. Sympathy for this young lost soul easily overcame the small stirrings of resentment. ‘Rest a while,’ she said, ‘I’ll be downstairs if you need anything. Perhaps you’d like to come down for a drink later?’
‘That would be nice. Thank you.’
Was he always so wearingly polite? She thought of her own son’s casual and cheerful offhandedness and wondered, not for the first time, why the young always had to be so extreme. ‘There are some woollies and some heavy trousers in the wardrobe. I’m sure Adam won’t mind if you borrow them. They’ll be warmer and more comfortable for you. It’s a bit late now, but tomorrow, if you’d like you can take a bath. It’s in the kitchen —’ She laughed at his startled expression. ‘I know it sounds primitive, but you’ll see. It’s less uncivilised than it sounds, and since the electricity arrived last year a great deal less than it was!’
‘I’m sure it is.’
She hesitated at the door. ‘Is there anything I can get you now?’
He lifted his head. His smooth olive-skinned face looked suddenly drawn, the extraordinary eyes were tired and red-rimmed. ‘No, thank you.’ She had turned to leave when he added, ‘I’m sorry — it’s silly I know but I don’t know what to call you.’
She smiled over her shoulder. ‘As you know, I’m Catherine. Leon calls me Kati. Everyone else — even Adam — calls me Cathy, though he will occasionally resort to “Ma” under stress. So why not make it “Cathy”, since I don’t somehow fancy “Step-ma”? Now — get some rest. I’ll see you later. Supper will be about eight.’
She left the room quietly. Nikos sat quite still for a long time, listening to the wind and to the crackle of the fire.
Where the hell was his father? Why hadn’t he been at Southampton to meet him as he had promised? What was he doing alone in this God-forsaken place? Why had things changed so terribly? Why couldn’t they have stayed as they were?
Once again the anguished grief and homesickness, that in his stepmother’s presence he had stubbornly held at bay, rose in a wave that this time engulfed him entirely.
In weary misery he buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook.
Chapter Two
Nikos woke the next morning to an eerie silence and a heavy head, that thumped painfully as he rolled on his side to look at the clock.
Ten o’clock.
‘Christ!’ He sat up. Winced. Rubbed his forehead, hard. He shouldn’t drink whisky. He knew it. He especially shouldn’t drink whisky when he was tired and emotional.
‘You might as well have another,’ Cathy had said, watching him sympathetically and nursing her own small drink. ‘It might help you to sleep.’ And so he had, and it had. And now he regretted it, in spades.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and pulled himself to a sitting position before hauling himself gingerly to his feet and crossing to the window to open the curtains. Dense fog billowed to the panes, drifting ominously around the house, writhing through the bare boughs of the trees. In contrast to the wild wind of the day before, the air was still, and dank. Everything was sodden; water dripped from leaf and branch. Through the shifting, murky veil he glimpsed the sheen of the waters of the marshes that lay behind the house. ‘Sandlings is a water-house with a vengeance,’ Cathy had said the night before, smiling. ‘The sea in front and the marshes behind. It’s one of the things I love about it.’
He had watched her curiously. ‘What about the Greek house?’ he had asked. ‘When it’s finished will you and Pa live there?’
The curl of her eyelashes had hidden the expression in her eyes as she looked down into her glass. ‘Some of the time, I expect.’ Her voice had been cool, neutral. ‘I don’t want to give up my own life entirely.’ Her glance had flickered to his and then away ‘The painting may not pay much but I do love it. And my publishers are in London…’
He had already seen and admired the sketches she had done in preparation for the children’s book that she had been commissioned to illustrate. ‘So you won’t sell this house?’
‘No.’ The word was swift, almost sharp. She softened it with a quick smile. ‘No, I won’t. My grandfather left it to me. I’ve always loved it. It’s my home.’
As, despite what happened there — perhaps even because of it — the Greek house is Pa’s. He had not spoken the words aloud. Resting his aching forehead on the window and staring through the wraith-like trees to that glint of water he thought now, as he had thought several times since his arrival, how strangely mismatched his volatile and quintessentially Greek father and this English wife of his appeared to be. Artistic, cheerfully and openly disorganised, apparently utterly self-sufficient, she seemed to care little or nothing for those things that Nikos knew had become his father’s icons; power, position, money; the drive to succeed. Leon Kotsikas had lost everything in the war: a beloved wife, most of his family, his home and at the end very nearly his own life. Nikos still possessed the letter his father had sent him from the hospital in England where he had been recovering from wounds sustained in fighting the communists who had been trying through armed revolution to impose Red rule upon Greece. ‘One day this war will end. One day Greece will be whole again, and free. And I will rebuild, from the rains, our home and our family, and our name will be strong again —’ He knew the words by heart.
‘Huh!’ his American grandmother had said, drily dismissive, ‘Greek histrionics! He was born a peasant, and he will die one.’ Even three years after the death of her much-loved only daughter she still could not forgive the man whom — quite unjustifiably, Nikos knew — she held responsible. She had never cared for her son-in-law.
Nikos straightened, shivering a little. Christ, it was cold! He slipped his shirt on, picked up the trousers and jumper he had left on the floor the night before. He pulled them on, pushed the sleeves of the jumper up to his elbows; Cathy had been right, he and Adam must certainly be of a height, though it seemed that Cathy’s son was broader in the shoulder. He glanced at a photograph that stood on the dressing table, of a handsome, smiling, fair-haired young man of about his own age. He picked it up, studying it. There was, so far as he could see, little of Cathy about him apart from the thick and untameable hair, so presumably he took after his father. She had told him a little last night; Adam’s father had been killed in one of the last German raids on London in 1944, leaving Cathy with a fifteen-year-old boy to bring up alone. She had brought him here, to Suffolk, until the war had ended the following year and had then sold the London house to finance his education and to supplement her own income. Adam worked in the City - his mother was vague about his exact occupation — ‘He changes jobs so often it’s hard to keep up with him. But he seems to make a lot of money.’ She had pulled a small, smiling face ‘- and spends it as fast. Shades of his father!’
And his father had not been there to meet him.
He glanced out of the window again at the fog, that seemed to be getting thicker with each passing moment, at the dripping trees, the untidy, sodden garden. His head was still hammering. And there wasn’t any coffee.
He sat on the bed, pushed his feet into his shoes, lifting his foot on to a chair to tie the laces so as to avoid bending too far and having the top of his head come off altogether.
*
Cathy was in the kitchen, making bread, the wireless playing quietly beside her. This was one of the few domestic chores she really loved. The kitchen was warm and peaceful. Sandy was stretched companionably with his back to the comfort of the range. With tranquil patience she kneaded and turned the smooth dough. She acknowledged it as a failing, but she knew she was quite simply incapable of doing nothing. She had never acquired the knack of total inactivity. The moment her hands were not occupied her tiresome brain took over, and could occasionally put her through hoops far more wearing than physical exercise. This simple, mindless, productive activity was to her, like walking with the dogs, or pottering in the garden, the very essence of relaxation. Mozart helped. The music, measured and beautiful, filled her mind and washed it clear of thought. The fog beyond the window stood between her and the world, halting the eye and deadening sound, mysterious, ghostly. The house could have been floating in cloud. She loved these East Coast fogs, that crept so stealthily from the sea, that enveloped and isolated the cottage. She had never, even as a child, been afraid of darkness; had always, indeed, considered it to be positively friendly. It was light that was the danger; if no one could see you what possible danger could there be? You could hide in the fog.
Leon, bred in warmth and in sunshine, hated it of course. She sighed, her hands for a moment stilled, the moment spoiled. Where the hell was he? Why — why? — hadn’t he met his poor, brave, bewildered son off the boat as he had promised he would? How could one man combine in his character the exasperating and contradictory extremes that Leon could? Kindness and cruelty. Compassion and cavalier indifference to the feelings of others. Passionate loyalty and cold-blooded self-interest. The man was impossible. And at the same time hopelessly engaging. No one knew that better than Cathy, and she would not deny it. She had succumbed herself to his charm that heady summer five years ago when, convalescing at a nursing home in nearby Aldburgh he had met her, decided almost upon the instant and despite her protestations that she was to marry him, pursued her with that single—minded resolution that she now knew to be inherent in him, and within four months had made her his wife. Not so much a whirlwind romance, she had often told herself later, a little wryly, more a tornado. They had had a blissful and passionate ten days’ honeymoon at the cottage ending in a single and spectacular quarrel during which she had proved that, when direly provoked, she had a temper to match his, and he had performed the first of his disappearing acts, simply walking out of the house and coming back two weeks later with a huge bunch of roses, a bottle of Champagne, no apology whatsoever and the news that he had used the small sum she had lent him when they had married to set up in business in London. Since the subject of the row had been her firmly reiterated refusal to leave Suffolk and move to the capital — a stand she had taken from the start but which he had, despite promises, arbitrarily expected her to relinquish once she had become his wife - she had expected further trouble, but it had not come. ‘You are right, koukla mou,’ he had said, kissing her, ‘as you always are. London is no place for you. You stay here. You stay where you are happy. It breaks my heart. You know it.’ He had grinned widely, black eyes dancing, ‘But think — each time I return —’ a great, wide—shouldered man with the muscles of a wrestler he had swept her into his arms as if she had been a child and kissed her again, ‘— we have a new honeymoon!’
She put the smooth, elastic dough into a large bowl, covered it with a damp cloth and set it at the back of the stove to rise. Almost without thinking she reached for the kettle. With tea off the ration at last there need be no scraping and saving and re-using the sodden dregs from the teapot; another small sign that life was truly getting back to normal. She set the kettle on the hotplate, turned and leaned comfortably against the warm range, looking out pensively into the drifting fog.
She had come much later to the conclusion that Leon’s change of heart had been dictated more by shrewd practicalities than by any desire to indulge her. He had swiftly realised, she suspected, that whilst he was involved in the enterprising and cutthroat business of making money the fewer people who knew exactly where he was and what he was doing the better, and that included his unnervingly honest wife. Not that he didn’t love her; he did, she knew it. It was odd that, even after all that had happened since, she knew it still. Even after the broken promises, the long absences, the other women, she knew he loved her. The strange and unhappy thing was that she was no longer sure that she loved him, or even if she ever truly had. Oh, she was fond of him and, yes, she was still attracted to him physically. Most women were. Even now, at fifty, Leon Kotsikas had about him an almost animal energy that was impossible to ignore and hard to resist. She turned to take the steaming kettle from the range, smiling a little grimly; since his swift and early success many had not tried to resist. Money was the greatest aphrodisiac of all.
‘You’re getting cynical in your old age,’ she said aloud, shaking her head, pouring the water into the warmed teapot.
‘I — beg your pardon?’
She turned, startled. Nikos stood in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, his dark hair rumpled, his eyelids drooping. Her artist’s eye noted, as it had from the first, the extraordinary and quite unstudied grace of the boy. A heart-breaker, this one, if ever she’d seen one. Yet, oddly and rather endearingly he did not himself seem to know it. She laughed at his question. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a terrible habit. I’m afraid I talk to myself. Out loud. Everyone tells me it’s the first step on the road to lunacy. They’re probably right.’
He grinned and shook his head. Winced a little. ‘Oh, I’m sure not.’
She surveyed him, trying not to show that her sympathy was tinged with amusement. ‘Oh, dear. Is it bad?’
He blinked as if thinking about it.
She reached for the kettle again. ‘I know you don’t like tea. But try it weak, and black, just for now. As soon as the fog lifts a bit I’ll pop down to the village shop. They must have something approximating coffee.’
‘Oh, no - please — I really
don’t want you to put yourself out — you’ve been so kind already —’
‘Don’t be silly. I need to go to the Post Office anyway. They keep my letters for me — it doesn’t seem fair to drag the postman all the way out here, and Bert never gets any mail — Leon just might have deigned to drop us a note and tell us where he is —’ she paused as he dropped his gaze from hers. ‘Oh, Nikos, please don’t. I told you last night you mustn’t take it personally. There’s an explanation. You wait and see.‘
‘I guess,’ he said. But he did not sound convinced.
*
The fog lifted around lunchtime, though the day was grey and very overcast and mist still shrouded the heathland.
‘I wish you’d let me go,‘ Nikos said for at least the fourth time as Cathy wound her long woollen scarf about her neck.
‘Don’t be silly. You snuggle up and have a snooze around the fire. I’ll be back in no time.’
‘But —’
‘But nothing.’ She pushed him gently into a chair. ‘Just do as you’re told. I won’t be long.’
In truth it was a relief to step out of the house alone and, having ascertained that Bert did not want her to pick anything up from the shop for him, to set off up the sandy lane towards the bicycle. ‘Shape up, girl,’ she scolded herself. ‘You’re in danger of becoming some kind of bloody recluse! The poor boy can’t help it — it isn’t his fault if his father’s a thoughtless self-centred sod.‘ She grinned a little. There were advantages to talking aloud. In her time as a nurse in a military hospital during and for some time after the war she had picked up a vocabulary she rarely used in public but that afforded her, just occasionally, the most enormous and succinct satisfaction in private. She tossed her purse into the basket, clambered aboard the bicycle and wobbled down the lane, the heavy machine taking a moment or so to right itself. Once steady however, its very weight carried it on down the slight slope. She took her feet off the pedals and stuck her legs out straight, laughing like a girl. ‘I’m singin’ in the rain — da de da de da do da —’ She was still humming to herself as she turned, more decorously, into the lane that led to the village. ‘Afternoon, Mrs Burton.’ The woman, waiting at a bus stop, nodded a dour greeting. Cathy could feel her eyes follow her down the road; she resisted the sore temptation to take her feet off the pedals and sing again.