The Tower of the Winds

by Elizabeth Hunter

  Afterwards, she stood beside Loukos at the door of his parents' house and welcomed their guests with a fixed smile, wondering who all these people could be. The celebrations went on all day and the Greek flowed back and forth around her with her not understanding a single word of it. Occasionally someone would address a remark to her in English and she would start like a fawn and stand a little closer to Loukos, who would answer for her, giving her a reassuring smile. She found she liked having him beside her, but then she liked everything about him.

  It was quite late when the last of the guests had gone and Loukos packed Electra and Alexander into the back seat of the car and then handed her into the seat beside his, still in her wedding finery. She didn't utter a single word the whole way back to his apartment, for a new worry had come to her. She followed Electra into the lift, inordinately relieved that Loukos had still to put away the car.

  'I think I'd like to go to bed straight away,' she said to the older woman. Electra only smiled and opened the door of one of the bedrooms, bidding her enter by a nod of her head.

  'Sleep well,' was all she said. 'I shall see to Alexander for tonight and until you get used to his ways.'

  Charity nodded, feeling depressed. She spent a long time in the bath and an even longer time brushing her hair before she got into bed. It seemed such an anticlimax after all the splendour of the wedding.

  Even so, she was quite unprepared for Loukos' entrance when he came into the room. She drew the bedclothes up round her neck and swallowed. 'This my room,' she said faintly.

  He raised his eyebrows. 'Yours? Until today it was mine alone, but I'm willing to share it with you. It's a big bed for one as small as you are!'

  'But it isn't that sort of marriage! It's only an arrangement - for Alexander!'

  'So you keep saying,' he smiled at her, seating himself beside her on the bed. 'I would do much for Alexander, but I can find a nanny for him without having to marry her! You made me certain promises today. Now is the time for you to fulfil those vows. I thought you understood that?'

  'Yes,' she said desperately. 'But—'

  He moved a little closer and she could feel the warmth of his thigh through the thin bedclothes. 'If 'I go now it will not be a marriage at all. You will go back to London and Alexander will stay here with me. It will be annulled - finished!

  Is that what you want?'

  If he had uttered one word of love she would have begged him to stay. But he did not.

  'Loukos, I need time. Is that so much to ask?'

  He put a possessive hand on her cheek, drawing a line along her jaw and down the curve of her throat to the neckline of her nightdress, bringing the hot colour flooding in the wake of his touch. 'Foolish Charity. Fight me all you want, ylikia,it will all be the same in the end.' He kissed her lips with a deliberate ease, holding both her hands in one of his behind her back. She thought her heart would explode within her and that he must surely know it, just as he knew how much she wanted to give way to him. He pulled back a little, smiling into her eyes. 'Well? Do I have a willing wife?'

  'You can't make me—' she began. He kissed her again and she was lost. She tore her hands free and wound them round his neck, giving herself up to the delight of his caresses.

  'Well?' he said again.

  She thought she would drown in the brilliance of his eyes, and it would be the loveliest death imaginable. The radiance of Apollo, with all the glory of the sun to warm her.

  'I'd like you to stay,' she said, her voice catching on the words.

  'Please,' he prompted her.

  She veiled her eyes from him and smiled at him. 'Para-kalolshe whispered. 'Please, Loukos!'

  His answer was in Greek and therefore incomprehensible to her, but there was no doubt at all about the message of his lips on hers and the strength of his arms about her. She kissed him warmly and then she thought, Poor Ariadne, to have lost all this! And then she didn't think at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Alexander was crying. Charity slipped out of bed without disturbing Loukos. She pulled on her dressing-gown, looking down at his sleeping form, her heart overflowing with love for him. With his eyes hidden from her, he looked less like Apollo, but his mouth was as firm and as beautifully moulded as ever. Alexander began to cry all the harder for being ignored. Charity smothered a yawn and reluctantly stopped admiring her husband and went to pick up her nephew. Electra was right, she thought as she took a clean nappy out of the drawer. The Greek woman was too old to be a mother to Alexander. If she could sleep through that uproar, she could sleep through anything, and the fact was she ought to be allowed to do just that!

  Charity plonked the baby down on her knee, crooning to him softly as she changed him and put on his day clothes. If she hurried, she promised herself, she could creep back into bed before Loukos woke up. The thought made her tremble. How gentle he had been with her! She had never thought that the consummation of her marriage could be such a glorious thing. His patience had been inexhaustible and, if she had been afraid in that first moment when her body had accommodated itself to his, she had quickly been carried away on a passionate tide of love for him, carried far out of her depth into a new and, to her, completely uncharted sea that contained only Loukos and the overflowing love she bore him.

  He had soon forced a confession of that love, not once but many times during the night. It seemed he liked to hear her say it. But he had never once told her that he returned her love, not even when he had reached out for her a second, and then a third time, and had made ardent love to her all over

  again.

  She had, she remembered, told him other things too, things that she had never told a living soul, things that she had barely known herself. She had told him of her father's long silences and her loneliness when both her sisters had gone away and left her alone to cope with his lengthy illness and finally with his death. She had told him too how she had never succeeded in having an identity of her own. She had spent her whole life being the youngest sister, or her father's daughter, but never anybody in her own right.

  Loukos had held her close. 'And now you are to be Alexandros' aunt!' he had teased her.

  She had frowned into the darkness. ''I suppose so,' she had said. 'If he hadn't been so like Faith, I'd have turned tail and run back to England as fast as I could go!'

  'Never!' he had said, his lips on hers. ''I would have had something to say to that!'

  ''I love you,' she had said, out loud and quite deliberately. And he had laughed and whispered something in Greek right into her ear, and had kissed her again just as she had hoped he would.

  Alexander drank his botde a great deal too fast and was sick all over her dressing-gown. She cleaned up the mess with mild distaste, telling him just what she thought of him for holding her up when all she wanted to do was get back to Loukos.

  ''I should have left you to cry yourself back to sleep!' she rebuked him.

  'Why didn't you?' Loukos said from the doorway. His hair was still awry from sleeping, his feet were bare, and he was still in the process of putting on his dressing-gown.

  She flushed at the sight of him, a little shocked that he should wander about the apartment practically naked. 'Electra will see you!' she warned him.

  He laughed out loud, coming over to her and slipping his hand beneath the curtain of her hair to caress the nape of her

  neck. 'Are you going to be as jealous as you are passionate?' he chuckled.

  She held up her face readily for his kiss. ''I hope not,' she said soberly. 'I've always thought jealousy was the sign of a small mind!'

  'Mmm.' He kissed her thoughtfully. 'Not in a woman. All women are jealous where they love.'

  'And men aren't?' she countered somewhat tardy.

  He laughed again. 'It is in a man's own hands to see that his wife gives him nothing to be jealous about!'

  She gave him a melting look. 'Then you don't think you have anything to worry about?'

  The twinkle in his eye made her ch
eeks hot. 'Not very much,' he drawled and, taking Alexander out of her arms, pulled her close against him. 'Do you?'

  She smiled, shaking her head. 'No,' she admitted. 'It's quite unseemly how much I love you!'

  He considered her choice of words with an arrogant tilt of his head while he placed the baby back in his cot. 'Unseemly,' he repeated, liking it. 'Good! That is how it ought to be!' He came back to her and kissed her soundly, breaking off only when they heard Electra's footsteps coming towards them in the corridor outside.

  Electra was apologetic that she hadn't heard Alexander's cries. 'It was such a busy day yesterday,' she explained, 'and I couldn't sleep, so I took one of Xenia's pills. I must have coffee to wake me up! Have you both had breakfast, or shall I make you some?'

  Loukos kissed his aunt's cheek. 'I was hoping someone would feed me soon,' he teased. 'What are you going to have, Charity? I have never asked you before, do you want to have eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade? Or will you eat rolls and coffee with me?'

  Charity didn't hesitate. 'Rolls and coffee, please.' She wished she had the courage to say that she would get Loukos' breakfast, but she was afraid of hurting Electra's

  feelings. It didn't seem much like a honeymoon at all with both her and the baby in the apartment with them, but as Loukos appeared to take it as a matter of course that his aunt should be there, Charity didn't feel in any position to object. She looked across the room at her husband and was struck anew by his gold-tanned skin and the beauty of his perfectly shaped, brilliant eyes. He really was Apollo come to life! She was seized by an urge to visit the Parthenon and see for herself the statue of Apollo that had been represented on the cover of the book she had been reading when she had first seen him. She would like to see if it was as like him as she imagined it to be.

  'Loukos, may we visit the Acropolis today?' she hazarded, just as Electra began to pour out their coffee.

  Loukos looked at his watch and shook his head. 'This afternoon, if you like,' he said, 'but I have something I must do this morning.' His mouth kicked up at the corners into a smile. 'I should have done it yesterday, but I was otherwise engaged!'

  Charity didn't say another word. It wasn't as though he could help it, but she did wish that they could have had a few days to themselves: a few days in which she could have grown used to loving him and, maybe, even have persuaded him that he not only wanted to possess her, but that he loved her a little too.

  Whereas, instead of loving her, he seemed to have forgotten all about her. He sugared his coffee and stirred it without even looking at it, his mind elsewhere. Electra handed him the morning's paper and he made a play of reading it so that Charity could no longer see his face. She tried to content herself by working out in her mind the sounds that the various strange letters of the Greek alphabet represented. She began to be afraid that she would never be able to read it, let alone speak it! It looked hideously complicated and not at all like English.

  Loukos finished his coffee, folded the paper, and rose to

  his feet without a backward glance. Charity blinked away the tears that came into her eyes and pretended an interest she was far from feeling in the sugar bowl in front of her.

  'What did you expect?' Electra asked her with a bracing frankness. 'His work has always come first with him, and it won't be different now.'

  Charity thought of what Hope had said on the telephone. ''I only wanted a few days,' she said. 'Hope says that he has a great deal of money, so surely he could take a few days off!'

  Electra shook her head in wonder. 'Did you need your sister to tell you that Loukos is a rich man? He is not Aristotle Onassis, but the Papandreous Shipping Line is well known all over the world. Spiro retired years ago and Nikos turned his back on the firm. It all came to Loukos then and with it a great deal of responsibility. A great deal depends on him. He can't come and go to please his wife. It is she who must fit in with his work.'

  ''I know! But not the day after our wedding!'

  'You are as spoilt as your sister!' Electra snapped impatiently. 'What do you want from him? That he should do nothing but pander to you?'

  Charity sighed. All she wanted was that he should love her - not as much as she loved him, but enough to want to be with her this particular day, and to make love to her again as he had last night.

  Electra gave her a not unkind half-smile. 'Have some more coffee! There is washing to be done for Alexandros, and Loukos has a button off one of his shirts. Am I to do it, or will you?'

  This was settling down to married life with a vengeance! Charity laughed suddenly. It served her right, she thought, for being sorry for herself! I'll do it,' she said. 'Every last bit of it! I can always go to the Acropolis some other time. If I'm going to live here, I'll probably get sick of the sight of it!'

  'Oh no, never that,' Electra assured her. 'Loukos will take you this afternoon and I will look after Alexandros for you, but this morning I must visit my sister and see how she is after yesterday. She is not very well these days and it is not good for her to get too tired.'

  Charity looked anxious. 'Will you give her my love? She was so kind to me yesterday, and I couldn't bear her to suffer for that!'

  'I will tell her,' Electra promised.

  Charity gathered up the washing and put it in the sink. She heard Electra going out the front door and Loukos whistling to himself in the living-room. It wouldn't do the nappies any harm to soak for a bit, she thought, and she hurried down the corridor to the bedroom to get dressed before she began the washing in earnest. She had hardly begun to put on her clothes, however, when the front door bell rang imperiously throughout the flat, making her jump. She reached out for the dressing-gown she had just taken off, when she heard Loukos' voice in the hall raised in greeting. Whoever the visitor was sounded more than welcome!

  She finished dressing in a hurry, thinking that she would offer whoever had come some coffee. She knew really that it was an excuse for seeing Loukos for a few minutes, but she wanted to show herself as being hospitable as well, so perhaps he wouldn't mind the interruption.

  The living-room door was shut. She hesitated outside for a moment and then opened it quietly, pushing it open a few inches, her eyes seeking Loukos' to find out from him if she would be welcome. It was then that she saw him, not seated on one of the chairs as she had expected, but standing by the window with Ariadne in his arms. And he was kissing her. She had her arms round his neck and was pressing herself against him, her eyes tight shut.

  Charity shut the door again, feeling physically sick. She tried to tell herself that she had known it all the time, but

  she had never seen them together, alone, before. It was the end of all her dreams! How could she make him love her when he felt like that about Ariadne? He must love her very much if he could kiss her like that this morning when last night—! But she wouldn't think about last night. She would not!

  She went back to the kitchen and did the washing like an automaton, the tears pouring down her cheeks and mingling with the soap-suds in the sink. When she had finished, her head had begun to ache and Alexander had started to cry again. She glared at Loukos' buttonless shirt and threw it quite deliberately on the floor. She would not sew on his buttons! Or do anything else for him! She wouldn't even stay in the same apartment with him, not while he had that woman with him! She would take Alexander and she would go somewhere for the day where he would never find her, and he was welcome to Ariadne - only she couldn't help hoping that some miracle would occur and he wouldn't want her after all and that it would somehow all come right, and she, and not the Greek girl, would prove to be the love of his life that very afternoon!