by Anne Mather
She glanced at the watch on her wrist. It was after ten, she saw with some misgivings. The butterflies in her stomach responded with an increasing burst of activity, and she glanced about her anxiously, wondering whether she had mistaken the directions she had been given.
‘Martha!’
The accented masculine tones made her heart skip a beat, and as she turned to face the man who had addressed her, her knees felt ridiculously weak. The similarity to Dion’s voice was unmistakable, but to her intense relief the man confronting her was not her husband, but a stockier, younger facsimile.
‘Alex!’ Martha’s voice betrayed her agitation, and she cast a worried look about her. ‘Alex, what are you doing here?’
Dion’s youngest brother surveyed her unsmilingly. He looked much older somehow than when she had last seen him, and although she realised that five years would have wrought some changes, Alex’s transformation from an easygoing teenager into this serious-looking young man was quite startling. Gone were the jeans and sweat shirt, and in their place was an immaculate cream lounge-suit, and a matching silk shirt and tie. In her simple skirt and cotton shirt, Martha felt absurdly youthful, and she wished she had worn something more formal.
‘Martha,’ he said again, inclining his head, but making no move to kiss her, or shake her hand, or offer her any greeting other than his use of her name. ‘If you will come with me…’
He gestured towards a sleek limousine that was waiting at the kerb a few yards further on, and Martha gave him a curious glance before saying doubtfully:
‘Your father? He’s waiting in the car?’
‘Come.’ Alex spread his hands politely. ‘I will explain.’
Martha hesitated. ‘Your father said he would meet me here,’ she insisted, faint colour invading her cheeks as she realised he was not the ally he had once been. ‘Alex, what’s going on? Where is your father? Can’t you at least tell me that?’
Alex pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers, and rocked back and forth on his heels and toes. Then, with a sigh, he said: ‘My father is not here, Martha. I am to take you to him. That is all. Now, will you come?’
Martha still resisted. ‘Where is he?’
‘Mycos. Where else?’
‘Mycos!’ Martha gasped. ‘Oh, Alex, I can’t come to Mycos!’
‘You do not wish to see him?’
‘Of course I do.’ Martha’s tongue appeared to moisten her lower lip. ‘Alex, I arranged to meet your father in Rhodes. Not Mycos. I—well, visiting the island was not what we agreed.’
Alex shrugged, the dark brows drawn together over darker eyes. ‘So you are refusing to come?’
‘Alex, Mycos is at least five hours from here!’
‘Not by air.’
‘You have a plane?’ she exclaimed, aghast.
‘A helicopter,’ he amended evenly. ‘Endaksi?’
‘No! That is…’ Martha put an uncertain hand to her forehead, ‘I would rather not meet your father at the villa.’
There was silence for a few moments after she had made this statement, a silence during which she became aware of the people going on with their lives around her, unaware of the intense upheaval she was suffering.
At last Alex spoke again. ‘That is your final word?’ he enquired. Then, after a pause: ‘Dionysus went to Amsterdam—two days ago.’
Martha expelled her breath, hardly realising until that moment that she had been holding it. So she was not to meet with her husband. It was quite a relief. Despite what she had told Roger and Sarah, she had been apprehensive of seeing him again, not least because of the rawness of the wounds he had inflicted, and their vulnerability to any kind of abrasion. They were healed, but the scars remained, and she was not yet ready to test their strength.
Alex shifted his weight from one foot to the other, glancing expressively towards the car. He was growing impatient, and she had still to come to a decision.
‘How long will your father be at the villa?’ she asked, wondering whether she ought to telephone him, but Alex was not helpful.
‘My sister Minerva is to be married in three days,’ he declared. ‘My father will be returning to Athens tomorrow for the wedding.’
‘Minerva?’ For a moment Martha was distracted. ‘Little Minerva is getting married?’ It hardly seemed possible.
‘She is eighteen,’ declared Alex flatly. ‘In our country, marriage is the natural ambition of every woman.’
‘Oh!’ Martha accepted this with a rueful sigh. It was becoming increasingly obvious where Alex’s sympathies lay, and no doubt in his eyes, she had committed an unforgivable sin by leaving her husband.
‘Etsi…’ He spread his hands now. ‘What will you do?’
What could she do? Martha’s palms were moist as she looped the strap of her bag over one shoulder. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, and Alex strode away abruptly towards the car, swinging open the nearside door so that she could climb inside.
The car was chauffeur-driven, and, as Alex climbed in beside her and the windows were rolled up, air-conditioned. It was quite a relief to get out of the heat of the sun, and she remembered belatedly that she had not bought herself the oil for her skin as she had intended. Still, she would have little enough time to sunbathe today, and if all went well she would be returning to England tomorrow.
It was a good half hour to the airport, and realising she could not sit in silence for the whole of that time, Martha decided she would have to try and break down Alex’s unnatural restraint. They had been such good friends. She couldn’t believe he had condemned her so completely.
Turning towards him, she began by asking him whether he, too, was working for his father these days. ‘I always thought you wanted to be a lecturer,’ she commented. ‘All that classical literature we used to read. Do you remember teaching me about Aeschylus and Sophocles, and how we used to act out those plays on the beach—’
‘We all change,’ Alex interrupted her shortly. ‘We grow older—and wiser.’
Martha controlled the automatic rejoinder that sprang to her lips, and said instead: ‘So you’ve given up your ideas of philosophy? You’ve decided that the material world has more to offer than the mythical one?’
Alex shifted impatiently in his seat. ‘I do not think it matters to you what my opinions may be, Martha. I was a boy when you went away, now I am a man. That is all there is to it.’
‘I see.’ Martha made a negative gesture. ‘In other words, I should mind my own business, hmm?’
Alex moved his shoulders dismissingly. ‘You have not cared what has happened to us for five years. It is unreasonable to expect me to believe you care now.’
Martha accepted this broadside with a deep pang of regret. ‘You may not believe this, but I have had my problems, too, you know,’ she ventured. ‘And as for our relationship—you were already planning on going to university. There was no way I could write to you without—without your brother and your father knowing. And in the circumstances I don’t think that would have been a good idea, do you?’
Alex bent his head, pressing his lips together as he straightened the crease in his pants. He was obviously considering what she had said, but his loyalty to his brother, and to his family, was warring with the logic of her explanation.
‘It has not been easy—for any of us,’ he said at last, looking sideways at her. ‘We have all to make our own judgment of events.’
‘And what is your judgment?’ asked Martha quietly.
Alex shook his head, and resumed his interest in his trouser leg. ‘It is not up to me to say anything,’ he replied at last. ‘But I know what your leaving meant to my brother, and that I cannot forgive.’
Martha weathered this body blow with less fortitude. She had believed that of all of them, Alex might have kept an open mind. But it seemed he was as biased as the rest, and she did not look forward to this meeting with his father with any degree of anticipation.
A new airport had been built on Rhodes, far
superior to the airport Martha remembered, whose approach between two hills had been a source of danger to larger aircraft. The new airport lay on the coast, to the south of the island, with a big new runway suitable to take the powerful jumbo jets that used it daily throughout the summer months.
The Myconos car was known to the airport staff, and they were passed through with the minimum of delay. The helicopter awaited them, and Alex dismissed the chauffeur before assisting Martha up the steps and into the aircraft.
She recognised the pilot. He used to help crew the ocean-going yacht that Aristotle kept moored at Piraeus, and it was strange to hear herself addressed as Madame Myconos once more. Dion had never petitioned for a divorce, and she had assumed he had wanted to avoid the publicity it would undoubtedly attract, but she used her maiden name in England because it was easier that way.
She had never flown in a helicopter before. She seemed to remember a small hydroplane, but not a helicopter, and the curious lifting sensation she felt as they took off made her wish they had used the boat after all. Still, once they started moving forward, she forgot her fears, and the advantages it possessed over an aeroplane soon became evident. Flying at only several hundred feet instead of several thousand, she was able to distinguish the contours of every island they passed, and in her excitement she forgot that Alex had been offhand with her earlier.
‘Isn’t it tremendous?’ she asked, raising her voice above the level of the engines. ‘I mean, you can actually see how shallow the sea is in places. Oh, and look! Isn’t that a dolphin down there? That black thing in the water?’
‘I think it is more likely to be a fishing boat,’ remarked Alex drily, unable to completely hide his amusement. ‘We are not so low, you know. From this height a dolphin would hardly be visible.’
‘Oh!’ Martha pulled a rueful face, and for a moment Alex shared her disappointment. Then, quickly, he looked away again, but not before Martha had felt a slight uplift in her spirits. Given time, she was sure she could change Alex’s opinion of her, and it was good to know that he still had a sense of humour.
There were sails below them now, white sails, pristine pure against the aquamarine water. They reminded Martha of the ketch Dion had sailed, and of weekends spent cruising these waters, far, in spirit at least, from the problems their marriage was facing.
‘You’re not married, Alex?’ she enquired now, turning to look at her brother-in-law, and he shook his head.
‘No,’ he conceded, his voice almost inaudible beneath the throbbing of the propellers, and Martha guessed he was regretting his momentary lapse.
They were descending now, coming in low over the rocky contours of a headland, below which a narrow thread of sand glinted with burnished grains. There was a wooded hinterland rising to a barren summit, and then falling again more shallowly to a sheltered bay and a small harbour. The village, the island’s only community, nestled round the bay, colour-washed cottages set in gardens bright with hibiscus and oleander. Martha could see the windmill that had once irrigated the terraces, where grapes grew with such profusion, and the deserted monastery of St Demetrius, high on the hillside. It was all so real and familiar, despite the absence of years, and once more she wondered how she could justify depriving Josy of this.
The Myconos villa was of typically Greek design. Palatial terraces, set about with gardens and fountains, and lily pools, thick with blossom. Marble pillars supported a first floor balcony, and shadowed the Italian tiles that covered the floor of the hall, and urns of flowering shrubs spilled scarlet petals across the veined mosaic of the entrance. Built on several levels, it sprawled among its pools and arbours, with all the elegant abandon of a reclining naiad.
A car took Martha and Alex from the landing field near the harbour, up the winding road to the villa. The chauffeur was another of the household staff, and like the pilot of the helicopter, he recognised his employer’s daughter-in-law. Martha seemed to recall that his name was Spiros or Spiro, she wasn’t certain which, but there had been so many names to remember, so many employees, who seemed to count it an honour to work for the Myconos family. And it was a family, in every sense of the word, a close-knit family, welded together by Aristotle Myconos’ influence, where sons—and daughters-in-law, daughters—and sons-in-law, all came within the suffocating circle of his omnipotence. Maybe, if she and Dion had had a home of their own, things would have been different, she mused, and then squashed the thought. Aristotle had not been to blame for Dion’s possessiveness, his absurd jealousy, his desire to confine his wife within the web of his family, and destroy all connections with her own…
Nothing could prevent her nerves from tightening as the limousine turned between the stone gateposts of the villa. There were no iron fortifications here, as there were at the villa in Athens. No visible guards, no burglar-proof locks to keep out intruders. The main access to the island was through the harbour, but just in case, Aristotle had the coastline patrolled both day and night.
Thick shrubs hid all but the roof of the villa as the car followed the winding curve of the drive, but eventually they emerged before its white-painted façade, and Martha saw again the imposing entrance of Dion’s island home. She remembered the first time she had seen it. She had been enchanted then—enchanted and bemused, that a man like Dionysus Myconos should want her for his wife.
The car stopped, and Alex thrust open his door to get out. The chauffeur alighted and opened Martha’s door, and with a feeling of unease she stepped out on to the gravelled forecourt.
It was slightly cooler here than in Rhodes, the soft breeze bringing a pleasant relief in the heat of the day. Yet the smell was the same, that tangy citrus smell, that mingled here with the salty taste of the sea. And it was quiet, so quiet after the noisy harbour at Rhodes, without even the peal of voices to disturb the stillness. She had thought Dion’s older sister, Helene, might be there, with her two sons, but there were no voices echoing from the pool as there would have been if there were children about.
‘My father is in his study,’ Alex said, at her elbow, and she looked up at him anxiously.
‘Is no one else here?’
‘You forget—I told you, my sister is getting married on Friday. The family are gathering in Athens for the celebrations.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Martha had forgotten. ‘Well, shall we get it over with?’
Alex raised his dark eyebrows, but he made no comment, merely led the way beneath the marble pillars, and into the cool, spacious hall.
Martha had forgotten the long windows at the back of the hall, which gave a magnificent view of the curve of the hillside, stretching up to the mellowed walls of the monastery. The hall itself was on two levels, with an iron-railed balcony providing an oasis of plants in the heart of the building. Alabaster balusters supported the rail of the staircase, that curved to the upper storey, and overhead a crystal chandelier glinted dully below the arch of the ceiling.
Aristotle’s study was some distance from the entrance hall, along corridors that gave tantalising glimpses of the sea between stone panels. The Aegean lay below them, somnolent in the noonday sun, a deeper blue than the sky above. It was so beautiful here, she thought with a pang. If only people were like places!
Her knees were knocking as they reached the leather-studded door, and in a spurt of panic she decided to dismiss any other motive she might have had for coming here. She would speak to Dion’s father on Roger’s behalf, and that was all. If he refused, she had done her best, and no one could do more. So far as her feelings towards Josy were concerned, they would have to wait. Maybe back in England, with the journey behind her, she would be able to view things less emotionally, but right now she wanted to turn and run, and that was not the frame of mind in which to come to a rational decision.
Alex knocked, and then gave her a faintly appealing look. It was as if for a moment he regretted their estrangement as much as she did, and impulsively, she put her fingers on his arm taut beneath the fine material of his suit.
>
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, with a little rush of nostalgia. ‘I did miss you, Alex—honestly!’
His lips were parting to make some response, when the door beside them opened. In that moment they were frozen in their adopted attitudes, caught for that fleeting split second in time, like two lovers planning an assignation. Then Martha’s head turned, her hand dropped away, and her eyes widened in chilling disbelief as she gazed up at the man confronting them. This was not Aristotle Myconos, not this tall man, with thin, slightly haggard features, and a lean, loose-limbed body. Aristotle was more like Alex, shorter, stockier, greyer—although this man’s dark hair was liberally sprinkled with that betraying filament. Besides, this man was younger, too young to have sired four grown sons and two daughters, yet like Alex, he too had suffered badly from the passage of years. His eyes seemed darker, deeper-set, his cheeks hollower, his frame more angular, thinner. This man was Dionysus Myconos, her husband, yet not her husband, but the man she had least wanted to meet.