The Island

by Victoria Hislop

  Fotini accepted with huge enthusiasm the letter which Alexis held out to her, hugging it to her chest as though Sofia herself were there in person. ‘I am so happy. I haven’t heard from her since her aunt died a few years ago. Until then she used to write to me every month, then she just stopped. I was very worried when some of my last letters went unanswered. ’

  All of this was news to Alexis. She had been unaware that her mother used to send letters to Crete so regularly - and certainly had no idea that she had ever received any. How odd during all those years that Alexis herself had never once seen a letter bearing a Greek postmark - she felt sure she would have remembered it, since she had always been an early riser, and invariably the one to sweep up any letters from the doormat. It seemed that her mother had gone to great lengths to conceal this correspondence.

  By now Fotini was holding Alexis by the shoulders and scrutinising her face with her almond-shaped eyes.

  ‘Let me see - yes, yes, you do look a bit like her. You look even more like poor Anna.’

  Anna? On all those occasions when she had tried to extract information from her mother about the sepia-toned aunt and uncle who had brought her up, Alexis had never heard this name.

  ‘Your mother’s mother,’ Fotini added quickly, immediately spotting the quizzical look on the girl’s face. Something like a shudder went down Alexis’s spine. Standing in the dusky half-light, with the now ink-black sea behind her, she was all but knocked backwards by the scale of her mother’s secretiveness, and the realisation that she was talking to someone who might hold some of the answers.

  ‘Come on, sit down, sit down. You must eat the barbouni,’ said Fotini. By now Alexis had almost lost her appetite, but she felt it polite to co-operate and the two women sat down.

  In spite of the fact that she wanted to ask all the questions - she was bursting with them - Alexis allowed herself to be interviewed by Fotini, whose enquiries were all more searching than they appeared. How was her mother? Was she happy? What was her father like? What had brought her to Crete?

  Fotini was as warm as the night, and Alexis found herself answering her questions very openly. This woman was old enough to be her grandmother, and yet was so unlike how she would expect a grandmother to be. Fotini Davaras was the antithesis of the bent old lady in black that she had imagined when her mother had handed her the letter. Her interest in Alexis seemed totally genuine. It was a long time - if it had ever happened at all - since Alexis had talked to someone like this. Her university tutor had occasionally listened to her as though what she said really mattered, but in her heart she knew that was only because she was paid to do so. It wasn’t long before Alexis was confiding in Fotini.

  ‘My mother has always been terribly secretive about her early life,’ she said. ‘All I really know is that she was born near here and brought up by her uncle and aunt - and that she left altogether when she was eighteen and never came back.’

  ‘Is that really all you know?’ Fotini asked. ‘Hasn’t she told you any more than that?’

  ‘No, nothing at all. That’s partly why I’m here. I want to know more. I want to know what made her turn her back on the past like that.’

  ‘But why now?’ enquired Fotini.

  ‘Oh, lots of reasons,’ said Alexis, looking down at her plate. ‘But mostly it’s to do with my boyfriend. I’ve realised lately how lucky my mother was to find my father - I’d always assumed that their relationship was typical.’

  ‘I’m glad they’re happy. It was a bit of a whirlwind at the time, but we were all very hopeful because they seemed so blissfully content.’

  ‘It’s odd, though. I know so little about my mother. She never talks about her childhood, never talks about living here—’

  ‘Doesn’t she?’ interjected Fotini.

  ‘What I feel,’ said Alexis, ‘is that to find out more about my mother might help me. She was fortunate to meet someone she could care so much about, but how did she know he would be the right person for ever? I’ve been with Ed for more than five years, and I’m not sure whether we should be together or not.’

  This statement was very uncharacteristic of the normally pragmatic Alexis, and she was aware that it might sound rather nebulous, almost fanciful, to someone she had known for less than two hours. Besides, she had strayed off the agenda; how could she expect this Greek woman, kindly as she was, to be interested in her?

  Stephanos approached at this moment to clear the dishes, and within minutes he was back with cups of coffee and two generous balloons of molasses-coloured brandy. Other customers had come and gone during the evening and, once again, the table Alexis occupied was the only one in use.

  Warmed by the hot coffee and even more so by the fiery Metaxa, Alexis asked Fotini how long she had known her mother.

  ‘Practically from the day she was born,’ the older woman replied. But she stopped there, feeling a great weight of responsibility. Who was she, Fotini Davaras, to tell this girl things about her family’s past that her own mother had clearly wanted to conceal from her? It was only at that moment that Fotini remembered the letter she had tucked into her apron. She pulled it out and, picking up a knife from the next table, quickly slit it open.

  Dear Fotini,

  Please forgive me for being out of touch for so long. I know I don’t need to explain the reasons to you, but believe me when I tell you that I think of you often. This is my daughter, Alexis. Will you treat her as kindly as you always treated me - I hardly need to ask it, do I?

  Alexis is very curious about her history - it’s understandable, but I have found it almost impossible to tell her anything. Isn’t it odd how the passage of time can make it harder than ever to bring things out into the open?

  I know she will ask you plenty of questions - she is a natural historian. Will you answer them? Your eyes and ears witnessed the whole story - I think you will be able to give her a truer account than I ever could.

  Paint a picture of it all for her, Fotini. She will be eternally grateful. Who knows - she may even return to England and be able to tell me things I never knew. Will you show her where I was born - I know she will be interested in that - and take her to Agios Nikolaos?

  This comes with much love to you and Stephanos - and please send warm best wishes to your sons too.

  Thank you, Fotini.

  Yours ever,

  Sofia

  When she had finished reading the letter, Fotini folded it carefully and returned it to its envelope. She looked across at Alexis, who had been studying her every expression with curiosity as she scanned the crumpled sheet of paper.

  ‘Your mother has asked me to tell you all about your family,’ said Fotini, ‘but it’s not really a bed-time story. We close the taverna on Sunday and Monday and I have all the time in the world at this end of the season. Why don’t you stay with us for a couple of days? I would be delighted if you would.’ Fotini’s eyes glittered in the darkness. They looked watery - with tears or excitement, Alexis couldn’t tell.

  She knew instinctively that this might be the best investment of time she could ever make, and there was no doubt that her mother’s story could help her more in the long term than yet another museum visit. Why examine the cool relics of past civilisations when she could be breathing life into her own history? There was nothing to stop her staying. Just a brief text message telling Ed that she was going to be here for a day or so would be all it would take. Even though she knew it was an act of almost callous disregard for him, she felt this opportunity justified a little selfishness. She was essentially free to do what she pleased. It was a moment of stillness. The dark, flat sea almost seemed to hold its breath, and in the clear sky above, the brightest constellation of all, Orion, who had been killed and placed in the sky by the gods, seemed to wait for her decision.

  This might be the one chance Alexis was offered in her lifetime to grab at the fragments of her own history before they were dissipated in the breeze. She knew there was only one response to the invit
ation. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, suddenly overwhelmed with tiredness. ‘I’d love to stay.’

  Chapter Two

  ALEXIS SLEPT DEEPLY that night. When she and Fotini finally went to bed, it was after one o’clock in the morning, and the cumulative effect of the long drive to Plaka, the afternoon on Spinalonga and the heady mix of meze and Metaxa drew her into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  It was nearly ten when luminous sunshine came streaming through the gap between the thick hessian curtains and threw a beam across Alexis’s pillow. As it woke her, she instinctively slid further under the sheets to hide her face. In the past fortnight she had slept in several unfamiliar rooms, and each time she surfaced there was a moment of confusion as she adjusted to her surroundings and dragged herself into the here and now. Most of the mattresses in the cheap pensions where she and Ed had stayed had either sagged in the middle or had metal springs protruding through the ticking. It had never been hard to get up from those beds in the morning. But this bed was altogether different. In fact the whole room was different. The round table with a lace cloth, the stool with its faded woven seat, the group of framed watercolours on the wall, the candlestick thickly coated with organ pipes of wax, the fragrant lavender which hung in a bunch on the back of the door, and the walls painted in a soft blue to match the bed linen: all of these things made it homelier than home.

  When she drew back the curtains she was greeted by the dazzling vista of a sparkling sea and the island of Spinalonga, which, in the shimmering haze of heat, seemed further away, more remote than it had yesterday.

  When she had set off from Hania early the previous day, she had had no intention of staying in Plaka. She had imagined a brief meeting with the elderly woman from her mother’s childhood and a short tour of the village before rejoining Ed. For that reason she had brought nothing more than a map and her camera - and had certainly not anticipated needing spare clothes or a toothbrush. Fotini, however, had been quick to come to her rescue, lending her everything she needed - one of Stephanos’s shirts to sleep in, and a clean if rather threadbare towel. This morning, at the end of her bed, she found a floral shirt - not at all her style, but after the heat and dust of the previous day she was glad for the change of clothing. It was a gesture of such maternal kindness that she could hardly ignore it - even if the pale pinks and blues of the blouse looked rather incongruous with her khaki shorts, what did it really matter? Alexis splashed her face with cold water at the tiny sink in the corner and then scrutinised her tanned face in the mirror. She was as excited as a child who was about to be read the crucial chapter of a story. Today Fotini was going to be her Scheherazade.

  Dressed in the unfamiliar feel of crisp, ironed cotton, she wandered down the dark back stairway and found herself in the restaurant kitchen, drawn there by the powerful aroma of strong, freshly brewed coffee. Fotini sat at a huge, gnarled table in the middle of the room. Though thoroughly scrubbed, it still seemed to bear the stains from every piece of meat that had been pulverised there and every herb that had been crushed on its surface. It must have also witnessed a thousand moments of frayed temper which had simmered and boiled over in the intense heat of the kitchen. Fotini rose to greet her.

  ‘Kalimera, Alexis!’ she said warmly.

  She was wearing a blouse similar to the one she had lent Alexis, though Fotini’s was in shades of ochre that matched the full skirt that billowed out from her slender waist and nearly reached her ankles. The first impression of her beauty that had struck Alexis so forcibly the night before in the kindly dusk light had not been wrong. The Cretan woman’s statuesque physique and large eyes reminded her of the images on the great Minoan fresco at Knossos, those vivid portraits which had survived several thousand years of time’s ravages and yet had a remarkable simplicity that made them seem so contemporary.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ asked Fotini.

  Alexis stifled a yawn, nodded and then smiled at Fotini, who was now busily loading a tray with a coffee pot, some generously proportioned cups and saucers and a loaf that she had just removed from the oven.

  ‘I’m sorry - it’s reheated. That’s the only bad thing about Sundays here - the baker doesn’t get out of bed. So it’s dry crusts or fresh air,’ Fotini said laughingly.

  ‘I’d be more than happy with fresh air, as long as it was washed down with fresh coffee,’ responded Alexis, following Fotini out through a set of the ubiquitous plastic strips and on to the terrace, where all last night’s tables had been stripped of their paper cloths and now looked strangely bare with their red Formica tops.

  The two women sat overlooking the sea which lapped the rocks below. Fotini poured and the dense black liquid gushed in a dark stream into the white china. After the endless disappointing cups of Nescafé, served as though the tasteless dissolving granules of instant coffee were a delicacy, Alexis felt no cup of coffee had ever tasted as powerful and delicious as this. It seemed that nobody had the heart to tell the Greeks that Nescafé was no longer a novelty - it was this old-fashioned thick and treacly fluid that everyone, including her, craved. The September sunshine had a clear brilliance and a kindly warmth that, after the intensity of the August heat, made it one of the most welcome months in Crete. The furnace-strong temperatures of midsummer had dropped and the hot, angry winds had gone too. The two women sat opposite each other beneath the shade of the awning and Fotini put her dark, lined hand on Alexis’s.

  ‘I’m so pleased you have come,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine how pleased. I was very hurt when your mother stopped writing - I understood perfectly, but it broke such an important link with the past.’

  ‘I had no idea she used to write to you,’ said Alexis, feeling as though she should apologise on her mother’s behalf.

  ‘The very beginning of her life was difficult,’ continued Fotini, ‘but we all tried, we really did, to make her happy and to do our best for her.’

  Looking at Alexis’s slightly puzzled expression, Fotini realised that she had to slow her pace. She poured them both another cup of coffee, giving herself a moment to think about where to start. It seemed she would have to go back even further than she had originally imagined would be necessary.

  ‘I could say, “I’ll begin at the beginning”, but there is no real beginning here,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s story is your grandmother’s story, and it is also your great-grandmother’s story. It’s your great-aunt’s story too. Their lives were intertwined, and that’s what we really mean when we talk about fate in Greece. Our so-called fate is largely ordained by our ancestors, not by the stars. When we talk about ancient history here we always refer to destiny - but we don’t really mean the uncontrollable. Of course events seem to take place out of the blue that change the course of our lives, but what really determines what happens to us are the actions of those around us now and those who came before us.’

  Alexis began to feel slightly edgy. The impregnable safe of her mother’s past, which had been so resolutely locked for her entire life, was now to be opened. All the secrets would come spilling out, and she found herself questioning whether she really wanted that. She stared out across the sea at the pale outline of Spinalonga and remembered her solitary afternoon there, already with nostalgia. Pandora regretted opening her box. Would it be the same for her?

  Fotini spotted the direction of her gaze.

  ‘Your great-grandmother lived on that island,’ she said. ‘She was a leper.’ She didn’t expect her words to sound quite so blunt, quite so heartless, and she saw straightaway that they had made Alexis wince.

  ‘A leper?’ Alexis asked in a voice that was almost choked with shock. She was repelled by this thought even though she knew her reaction was probably irrational, and found it difficult to hide her feelings. She had learned that the old boatman had been a leper and had seen for herself that he was not visibly disfigured. Nevertheless, she was horrified to hear that her own flesh and blood had been leprous. That was entirely different, and she felt strangely disgusted.r />
  For Fotini, who had grown up in the shadow of the colony, leprosy had always been a fact of life. She had seen more lepers arrive in Plaka to cross over the water to Spinalonga than she could count. She had also seen the varied states of the victims of the disease: some cripplingly disfigured, others apparently untouched. Untouchable had, in fact, been the last thing they seemed. But she understood Alexis’s reaction. It was the natural response for someone whose knowledge of leprosy came from Old Testament stories and the image of a bell-swinging sufferer crying, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’

  ‘Let me explain more,’ she offered. ‘I know what you imagine leprosy to be like, but it’s important that you know the truth of it, otherwise you will never understand the real Spinalonga, the Spinalonga that was home to so many good people.’

  Alexis continued to gaze at the little island across the shimmering water. Her visit there yesterday had seemed so full of conflicting images: the remains of elegant Italianate villas, gardens and even shops, and overshadowing them all the spectre of a disease which she had seen portrayed in epic films as a living death. She took another gulp of the thick coffee.