The Island

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘Look, I don’t mind doing the talking,’ said Nikolaos. ‘I just think the time for procrastination is over.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know you’re right,’ Maria said, taking a deep breath. ‘Let’s tell her tonight.’

  They sat in the warmth of the summer night, watching moths twirl like ballerinas in the candlelight. Occasionally the silence would be disturbed by the rustle of a lizard, its tail catching a dry leaf before it made its vertical dash up the wall of the house. What did those bright stars have in store for her family? wondered Maria. They seemed always to be watching, knowing the next chapter before she did. It grew late and still Sofia did not return, but they were not going to give up and retire to bed. They could not postpone what they had to do for yet another day. By a quarter to eleven the temperature had dropped and Maria was shivering.

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ she said.

  Time dragged its heels for the next fifteen minutes, but eventually they heard the front door slam. Sofia was back.

  Part 4

  Chapter Twenty-five

  AS FOTINI REACHED this point in the story, she was suddenly overwhelmed by the responsibility of describing the emotions of someone who was more than capable of telling her own tale. Although Fotini knew as well as anyone else alive how Sofia must have felt, who could tell the story better than she who had taken the blows of truth first hand? It was Sofia who, on that August night, had tried and repeatedly failed to catch her breath when her parents revealed that they were not really her parents at all; she who had had to face the fact that her real mother was no longer alive, and that there was no certainty about the identity of her natural father. She could never be sure of anything ever again. If the earth had undulated beneath her feet and the island of Crete been shaken by a great seismic movement she could not have felt more insecure.

  Fotini realised there was only one thing to do, and all it would take was a phone call to Sofia in London. She slipped away, leaving Alexis to contemplate the now familiar view of Spinalonga.

  As soon as she picked up the telephone, Sofia knew who it was who was calling.

  ‘Fotini! Is that you?’

  ‘It is me. How are you, Sofia?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. Has my daughter Alexis been to visit you? I gave her a letter for you.’

  ‘She most certainly has been to see me and she’s still here now. We’ve had a very rewarding time together and I’ve done almost everything you asked.’

  There was a moment’s hesitation at the other end of the line. Fotini felt a sense of urgency.

  ‘Sofia, how long would it take for you to get here? I’ve told Alexis all I can, but there are some things that I don’t feel right about telling her. She has to leave soon to meet up with her boyfriend, but if you could get here before she goes, we could all have a couple of days together. What do you think?’

  Again, silence at the other end.

  ‘Sofia? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m still here . . .’

  It was such a spontaneous invitation. There were a thousand reasons why Sofia could not drop everything and fly out to Greece, but there were enough very good reasons why she should, and almost instantly she decided to put the objections to one side. She would get herself to Crete by the following day, come what may.

  ‘Look, I’ll see if I can get a flight. It would be lovely to come to Plaka after all this time.’

  ‘Good. I shan’t tell Alexis, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed you’ll be able to get here.’

  Sofia had no problem getting a seat on a flight to Athens. At this stage of the season there was little demand and there was a plane leaving Heathrow that afternoon. She hurriedly packed a small bag and left a message on Marcus’s answer phone to explain where she was going. Take-off was on time, and by eight o’clock that night she was speeding in a taxi towards Piraeus, where she caught the night boat to Iraklion. As the ferry tilted this way and that on its southward course, Sofia had plenty of time to become anxious about what she was going to face when she arrived. She could not quite believe she had made this decision. Going to Plaka would be a journey so laden with memories that she was surprised at herself, but Fotini had sounded so insistent. Perhaps it really was about time she faced her past.

  The following morning, less than twenty-four hours since the telephone conversation between the two women, Fotini saw a car drawing up in the side road near the taverna. A well-rounded blonde woman stepped out. Though it was twenty years since she had seen her and her fair hair could have thrown her off the scent, Fotini realised immediately who it was. She hurried out to meet her.

  ‘Sofia, you’re here. I can’t believe it!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come!’

  ‘Of course I’ve come. I’ve wanted to come back for years but there just never seemed the right moment. And anyway, you never invited me,’ she added teasingly.

  ‘You know you don’t have to wait for invitations to come here. You could have come any time you liked.’

  ‘I know.’ Sofia paused and looked around her. ‘It all looks just the same.’

  ‘Nothing much has changed,’ Fotini said. ‘You know what these villages are like. The local shop paints its shutters a different colour and there’s an outcry!’

  As she had promised, Fotini had not breathed a word to Alexis about her mother’s impending arrival, and when the younger woman appeared on the terrace, bleary-eyed with sleep, she was astounded to see her mother, and wondered at first whether the previous evening’s brandy was responsible for giving her hallucinations.

  ‘Mum?’ was all she could say.

  ‘Yes, it is me,’ replied Sofia. ‘Fotini invited me and it seemed a good opportunity to come over.’

  ‘It’s such a surprise!’ her daughter replied.

  The three women sat around a table and sipped cold drinks in the shade of an awning.

  ‘How has your trip been?’ asked Sofia.

  ‘Oh, so-so,’ said Alexis with a noncommittal shrug of her shoulders. ‘Until I got here. And then it became much more interesting. I’ve had a fantastic time in Plaka.’

  ‘Is Ed here with you?’ Sofia asked.

  ‘No. I left him in Hania,’ Alexis said, looking down at her coffee. She had scarcely given him a thought in the past few days and suddenly felt a pang of guilt that she had abandoned him for so long. ‘But I plan to go back tomorrow,’ she added.

  ‘So soon?’ exclaimed Sofia. ‘But I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fotini carrying more drinks to the table, ‘we haven’t got much time then.’

  All three of them knew that there was an agenda. Why else would Sofia have come? Alexis’s head was still spinning from everything that Fotini had told her over the past few days, but she knew there was a final chapter. This was what her mother was here to provide.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  IT WAS THE night before Sofia was to leave for Athens to begin her life as a student at the university. Her trunk only had to be transported a few hundred metres down the road to the port and loaded on to the ferry, and its next stop, like hers, would be the capital of Greece, three hundred kilometres away to the north. Sofia’s resolve to spread her wings was balanced by an equal amount of anxiety and fear. Earlier that day she had fought the temptation to unpack each and every item and put them back where they had always belonged: clothes, books, pens, alarm clock, radio, pictures. Leaving the known for the unknown was hard, and she perceived Athens as a gateway to either adventure or disaster. The eighteen-year-old Sofia could not imagine a middle ground. Every bone in her body ached with the anticipation of homesickness, but there was no going back now. At six o’clock she went out to meet her friends, to say goodbye to the people she was leaving behind. It would be a good distraction.

  When she returned, on the stroke of eleven, she found her father pacing up and down the room. Her mother sat on the edge of a chair, her hands clasped tightly together, her knuckles white with tension. Every muscle in h
er face was taut.

  ‘You’re still up! I’m sorry I’m so late,’ Sofia said. ‘But you didn’t have to wait up.’

  ‘Sofia, we wanted to talk to you,’ said her father gently.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down,’ suggested her mother.

  Sofia immediately felt uncomfortable.

  ‘This all seems a bit formal,’ she said, throwing herself into a chair.

  ‘There are one or two things we feel you ought to know before you go off to Athens tomorrow,’ said her father.

  Now her mother took over. After all, most of it was her story.

  ‘It’s hard to know where to begin,’ she said. ‘But there are a few things we want to tell you about our family . . .’

  That night they told her everything, just as Fotini had related it to Alexis. Not the slightest suspicion or unguarded word had given Sofia any forewarning, and she was totally ill equipped to deal with such revelations. She saw herself standing on a high mountain where layers of secrecy had been laid down over the millennia, each stratum of rock and stone hardening across the previous one. They had kept every last detail from her. It seemed like a conspiracy. When she reflected on it, there must have been dozens of people who knew about her mother’s murder, and each and every one of them had maintained their silence for all those years. And what about the speculation and gossip that must have ensued? Perhaps people who knew her still whispered behind her back as she passed: ‘Poor girl. I wonder if she ever found out who her father was?’ And she could imagine the malicious susurration, the mutterings about leprosy: ‘Fancy that,’ they must have said. ‘Not just one, but two cases in her family!’ All those stigma that she had blithely carried about with her for years and years but not been in the least bit aware of. A disfiguring disease, an immoral mother, a murderer for a father. She was utterly repulsed. Her ignorance had been nothing less than bliss.

  She had never questioned that she was the product of these two people who sat in front of her. Why should she? She had always imagined that her looks were a mixture of Maria’s and Kyritsis’s. People had even said so. But she was no more a blood relation of the man she had always called father than of any man she might meet in the street. She had loved her parents unquestioningly, but now that they were not her parents, were her feelings for them different? In the space of an hour, her entire life history had changed. It had dissolved behind her and when she looked back, there was a void. A blank. A nothingness.

  She received the news silently and felt sick. Not for a moment did she think of how Maria and Kyritsis might be feeling or what it had cost them to tell her the truth after all this time. No. This was her story, her life that they had falsified, and she was angry.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ she screamed.

  ‘We wanted to protect you,’ said Kyritsis firmly. ‘There seemed no need to tell you before.’

  ‘We have loved you as your own parents would have loved you,’ interjected Maria pleadingly.

  She was desperate enough to be losing her only child to university, but even more distressed that the girl who stood in front of her and looked at her as though she was a stranger would no longer regard her as her mother. Months and years had gone by when the fact that Sofia was not their own flesh and blood had had no relevance, and they had loved her all the more perhaps because they had been unable to produce children of their own.

  At this moment, however, Sofia just saw them as people who had lied to her. She was eighteen, irrational, and resolved now in her desire to invent a future for herself where she would be in command of the facts. Her anger gave way to a froideur that brought her emotions under control but chilled the hearts of the people who loved her most in the world.

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she said, getting up. ‘The boat leaves at nine.’

  With that, she turned on her heel.

  The following morning Sofia was up at dawn doing her final packing, and at eight o’clock she and Kyritsis loaded her luggage into the car. Neither of them spoke. All three of them drove down to the port, and when the moment came, Sofia’s farewells were perfunctory.

  She kissed each of them on both cheeks.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘I’ll write.’

  There was a finality about her adieu that gave no promise of short-term reunion. They trusted her to write, but they knew already that there was no purpose in watching for letters. As the ferry pulled away from its moorings, Maria was certain this was the worst that life could bring. People standing beside them were waving a loved one a fond farewell, but of Sofia there was no sign. She was not even on deck.

  Maria and Kyritsis stood watching until the boat was a speck on the horizon. Only then did they turn away. The emptiness was unbearable.

  For Sofia, the journey to Athens became a flight from her past, from the stigma of leprosy and the uncertainty of her parentage. A few months into her first term, she was ready to write.

  Dear Mother and Father (or should I call you Uncle and Aunt? Neither seems quite right any more),

  I am sorry things were so difficult when I left. I was terribly shocked. I can’t even begin to put it into words and I still feel sick when I think about it all. Anyway, I am just writing to let you know that I am settling in well here. I am enjoying my lectures, and though Athens is much bigger and dustier than Agios Nikolaos, I am getting used to it all.

  I will write again. I promise.

  Love,

  Sofia

  The letter said everything and nothing. They continued to receive notes that were descriptive and often enthusiastic but gave away little of how Sofia was feeling. At the end of the first year, they were bitterly disappointed, if not entirely surprised, when she did not return for the vacation.

  She became obsessed with her past and decided to spend the summer trying to trace Manoli. At first the trail seemed warm and she followed a few leads around Athens and then other parts of Greece. Then her sources became imprecise, phone books and tax offices for example, and she simply knocked on the door of any stranger who happened to be called Vandoulakis; the two of them would then stand there awkwardly before Sofia briefly explained herself and apologised for troubling them. The trail, such as it was, went stone cold, and one morning she woke up in a hotel in Thessalonika wondering what on earth she was doing. Even if she found this man, she would not know for sure if he were her father. Would she, in any case, prefer her father to have been a murderer who had killed her mother, or an adulterer who had abandoned her? It was not much of a choice. Should she not turn away from the uncertainty of her past and build a future?

  At the beginning of her second year, she met someone who turned out to be a much more significant figure in her life than her father, whoever he might have been. He was an Englishman by the name of Marcus Fielding and he was on sabbatical at the university for a year. Sofia had never met anyone quite like him. He was big and bearish with a pale complexion that tended to blotchiness when he was embarrassed or hot, and he had very blue eyes, which were a rare thing to see in Greece. He also looked permanently crumpled in a way that only an Englishman could.

  Marcus had never had a real girlfriend. He had generally been too wrapped up in his studies or too shy to pursue women, and he had found the sexually liberated London of the early 1970s intimidating. Athens during the same period was well behind in this revolution. In his first month at the university he met Sofia in a whole group of other students and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Though she seemed quite wordly, she was not unapproachable, and he was astonished when she accepted an invitation from him.

  Within weeks they were inseparable, and when it was time for Marcus to return to England she made the decision that she would forgo the rest of her course in order to go with him.

  ‘I have no ties,’ she said one night. ‘I’m an orphan.’

  When he protested, she assured him it was true.

  ‘No, really, I am,’ she said. ‘I have an uncle and aunt who b
rought me up but they’re in Crete. They won’t mind me going to London.’

  She said no more about her upbringing and Marcus did not pursue it, but what he did insist was that they should marry. Sofia needed no persuasion. She was completely and passionately in love with this man and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would never let her down.

  One chilly February day, the kind when frost lingers until midday, they married in a south London registry office. The invitation, an informal one, had stood on the high shelf above Maria and Nikolaos’s fireplace for a few weeks. It would be the first time they had seen Sofia since the day she had sailed out of their lives. The searing pain of abandonment that they had felt so keenly at first gradually eased and gave way to the dull ache of acceptance. They both approached the wedding with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.