Aphrodite's Smile

by Stuart Harrison

  When she emerged, she offered a wan smile and led the way to a kefenio where we sat on a shady terrace. Stavros was built on top of a hill where several routes converged. From where we sat we looked down on Polis Bay where a yacht drifted at anchor, gleaming white against the deep blue of the sea. Irene and the owner of the kefenio knew each other and when he brought us menus he greeted her as an old friend.

  ‘Yassou Irene,’ he said warmly and kissed her cheek.

  They spoke rapidly in Greek and though I didn’t understand what they were saying I heard my father’s name mentioned.

  ‘Kalos-orissate,’ the man said before reverting to English. ‘Welcome to Ithaca, Mr French. I am sorry for your father. I know him a long time. He is a good man.’

  I thanked him, and when he’d left with our order Irene said, ‘Johnny was very popular on Ithaca. He will be missed.’

  We hadn’t talked about what had happened yet, but now I said, ‘I assume it was another heart attack.’

  She hesitated. ‘It is not yet certain. There will have to be an examination.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘I do not know the right word in English.’

  ‘You mean an autopsy?’

  ‘Yes. That is it. An autopsy. Your father was found in the harbour, Robert. At the marina where he kept the Swallow. The police think he may have drowned. They are bringing somebody from Kephalonia.’

  I was surprised, not so much about where he was found but at the circumstances. After my parents were divorced, I eventually spent part of the school summer holidays each year on Ithaca. It was an arrangement I went along with grudgingly because I wasn’t given a choice, but the one part of it I’d always looked forward to was spending time on my father’s boat. For a while at least I was able to put aside the resentment I felt towards him. I could picture him vividly as he dived off the side into the cool, clear sea. His body was brown and powerful and though he was beginning to run to fat, he swam like a seal. ‘I can’t imagine him drowning,’ I said to Irene.

  ‘They think he may have fallen from the boat after he had another heart attack.’

  I could see how it might have happened. Perhaps as he climbed aboard he was hit with a sudden crushing pain and he stumbled backwards into the water. But I had read somewhere that drowning victims quickly float to the surface buoyed by gases in the body. He had been missing for three days. ‘Why did it take so long for anybody to find him?’

  ‘Apparently his clothes were caught up with the propeller.’

  I imagined my dad struggling to free himself, eyes wide, his mouth opening in a silent cry, only a stream of bubbles escaping. Horror plucked at my insides and I banished the vision with a hasty gulp of wine.

  Belatedly I realised that tears were sliding unchecked down Irene’s cheeks and I reached out for her hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. They had been together ever since my father had come to Ithaca, almost twenty-five years earlier. Whatever my own feelings towards him, I knew Irene had always loved him.

  ‘It is my fault,’ she said heavily.

  ‘It isn’t anybody’s fault.’ I was surprised that she was blaming herself. ‘It was an accident.’

  Irene shook her head. ‘He was supposed to be resting. I should not have let him leave the house.’

  ‘But didn’t you say he left before you were awake?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Then there was nothing you could do. You couldn’t watch him every minute of the day. Besides,’ I added, voicing a feeling that had been forming since I had arrived, ‘if anyone should feel guilty it’s me. I should have come earlier.’

  ‘You should not feel badly. You have a busy life in London. Your father knew that.’

  Both of us knew that wasn’t the reason I’d delayed my trip, but I was grateful for the gesture. ‘Then nobody’s to blame. You always stood by him, Irene. He was bloody lucky to have you.’

  I thought back to the times I’d spoken to him on the phone over the last couple of years as he’d begun to sound increasingly defeated, and especially the last six months, when he was often half drunk. I was subjected to long self-pitying monologues during which he bemoaned a wasted life. I thought Irene must have had to put up with a hell of a lot and I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t offered her any support. Before Dad’s heart attack I hadn’t even spoken to her for months. I couldn’t remember exactly when the last time had been. It was clear now just how much strain she had been under. She was pale, her eyes were dull and she looked a little thin.

  ‘You do not understand, Robert,’ she insisted sadly. ‘Your father was not so lucky as you think. There is something I must tell you. Before his heart attack, Johnny and I had not been living together.’

  I gaped at her in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Last year, I left Johnny. You see, I am not such a good person after all.’

  ‘You left him? But I’ve always thought of the two of you as being so happy together.’ Even as I spoke I realised that I hadn’t actually seen them for a long time. A lot can change in eight years. I thought about Alicia. Things could change in the blink of an eye, which is about how long it took for me to see her flush her pill down the sink.

  ‘I should have told you when it happened,’ Irene said. ‘But of course I did not because I was afraid of what you would think of me. I have always been a little bit frightened that you would see me as the wicked stepmother. Like in the fairy-tales.’

  ‘I never thought about you that way.’

  ‘Is that true, Robert? I always wondered. After all you did not know me when you first came here. And you were so angry even though you were not much more than a little boy. How old were you?’

  ‘Thirteen. But if I was angry it wasn’t because of you.’

  ‘No. Of course I realised that it was your father who made you feel that way. It was very sad. But I thought perhaps you would not like me because you would think I had taken him away from you and so some of your anger was for me too.’

  ‘Maybe I wanted to feel that way to begin with. I hadn’t heard anything from him in two years and then suddenly he writes to announce he’s getting married again. I suppose part of me wanted to lay the blame on you. But you weren’t anything like I imagined. I’ve always liked you Irene. If I’d known about you and Dad I would have phoned to make sure you were OK.’

  She smiled sadly, but was grateful I think for the assurance.

  ‘He never mentioned it you know,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, he told me.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘In September, but things had been difficult for a long time. Your father had become depressed. He always hoped that one day he would achieve something important with his work. It was his dream. But with every year that went by I think he believed in his dream a little less. Do you remember the digs he used to work on every summer?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I recalled the trenches and excavated hollows where he would happily spend his days on his knees in the dirt carefully revealing some long-buried crumbling wall.

  ‘There is a temple that Homer mentions in The Odyssey. It has been lost since ancient times. It was dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite.’

  He had often talked about this temple where the fabled hero Odysseus had worshipped. In archaeological terms it was the equivalent of the Holy Grail. ‘He thought if he could find it, it would make him famous,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘It was not fame he wanted, Robert. He simply wanted to feel that his work meant something. But in the end after so many years when he did not find the temple he began to give up hope. He thought that he was a failure. He began to drink too much. At first I was not so worried because I thought it would pass. Often at the end of each summer he used to say that he would not make another excavation, then always after a few months he would change his mind. But last year for the first time since he came to Ithaca Johnny did not dig. Instead he was spending all of his time in the taverna.’

  She broke off for a moment, her g
aze drifting away from me across the bay. When she turned back to me she said, ‘Have you ever been in love, Robert?’

  ‘I suppose I have,’ I answered, surprised by the sudden change in direction.

  ‘It is a strange thing, don’t you think? When we love somebody we forgive them their weaknesses and their failings because we know we are not perfect ourselves. We can manage to overcome all kinds of troubles. Do they not say that to be with another person we must always compromise, and we must expect that there will be difficult times as well as good? And yet we need to know that the person we love cares for us equally. Without that the sacrifice is too great. It is all give, with no reward for our efforts.’

  I had some idea of what Irene was talking about. I had loved Alicia, though once I knew that she was trying to get pregnant I no longer believed that she loved me. How could she if she had made such a unilateral decision? I couldn’t help wondering if her intent hadn’t been to make sure that I would marry her. The instant I saw her that night in the bathroom I felt betrayed and afterwards I knew I could never trust her.

  In Irene’s case it wasn’t a betrayal that had driven her away, but my father’s repeated insistence that she should leave him. She told me that he began telling her that he was too old for her. When she tried to talk him out of his depression he said she ought to be with a younger man. I thought of his drunken phone calls and I could imagine how it must have been.

  ‘At first I told him that he was being foolish,’ she said, ‘but it was difficult. It is hard for me to explain. I loved Johnny, ever since we met I felt this way. But he changed and for so long I heard these same things. I did not feel that he loved me any more. How could he when he was always telling me to leave him? I did not know what to do.’

  She broke off, her voice choked with emotion. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said. ‘I understand what you’re saying.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. There is more that I must tell you. There was a man, an old friend. I needed somebody to talk to and he was there to listen.’

  I understood then why she felt guilty to the point of blaming herself for my father’s death. I listened quietly while she explained that when she realised that her friendship with this man was becoming something more than that, she decided that she couldn’t continue to live with my father.

  ‘I needed to be alone for a little while,’ she said, ‘so I rented a small house in the town and last September I moved in there. Of course I still saw Johnny, but it was difficult.’

  ‘He knew about the other man?’

  ‘Yes. He tried to pretend that he was happy for me, but I knew that it was not true. I felt very bad because I knew that I had hurt him.’

  ‘He hurt himself,’ I pointed out. ‘By the sound of it he practically drove you out.’

  ‘Perhaps. But only because he wanted me to be happy. He explained this when I went to him after his heart attack. He was different then. More like the old Johnny. I told him that when he came out of hospital I wanted to go home to take care of him.’

  ‘What about the other man?’ I wondered. ‘How did he feel about that?’

  ‘He understood. You see when I was afraid that your father would die I realised how much I loved him.’

  ‘Then you did everything you could, Irene. You went home and you took care of him. You can’t blame yourself for what happened.’

  I could see that my reassurances weren’t enough. There was something desperate in her eyes, some turmoil of uncertainty and I guessed at once that there was something else that she hadn’t told me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Why are you punishing yourself like this?’

  ‘Because I could have stopped Johnny that morning,’ she said finally. ‘If I had taken him seriously, perhaps he would not have gone to the marina without telling me.’

  ‘I don’t understand. If you had taken what seriously?’

  ‘When he told me that somebody had tried to kill him,’ she answered.

  I stared at her dumbfounded, not certain at first that she was serious, though it was clear that she was. ‘Kill him? Why the hell would anyone want to kill somebody like my father?’

  For a moment she hesitated and then she shook her head. ‘I do not know.’

  I remembered something he had said to me when I’d spoken to him on the phone when he was in hospital. He was talking about the gods saving his wretched life, as he put it, with their mysterious ways. ‘In the face of peril they struck me down.’

  FOUR

  After Irene’s startling revelation we drove back to Vathy from Stavros. Along the way she explained that my father had been in the hospital for two weeks before he told her that somebody had tried to kill him. Irene had moved to a nearby hotel. Every morning she would spend a few hours with him and then return again in the evening after he had rested for the afternoon, then together they would talk or watch television or perhaps read. He was no longer bitter, she told me. He would hold her hand and often told her that he had been a fool to drive her away. While I listened I couldn’t escape the suspicion that my father’s reformation was remarkably convenient, perhaps explained by his close brush with mortality.

  ‘But he was not quite the same,’ Irene said. ‘There was something on his mind. What is the English word for this? I felt he was thinking about something else, even when he was talking to me about coming home. I could sense that part of him was not with me.’

  ‘You mean he was preoccupied?’

  ‘Yes. That is it,’ she agreed. ‘When I asked him about it he denied that it was true, but he could not deceive me. When you have lived with somebody for a very long time there are things that you understand without the need for words. There was a time when Johnny would never keep anything from me. We had no secrets from one another. It is difficult, I think, for a relationship to be strong when one person hides things from the other.’

  ‘You felt he was deliberately hiding something?’

  ‘Yes. I think he did not trust me to tell me what it was. He was worried I think. But also excited.’

  ‘Excited?’

  Irene frowned as she drove. ‘I do not know how else to put it. He was not unhappy or depressed any more. Sometimes when we talked of the way things were before, how he had talked so much of failure, I had the feeling that there was something he wanted to tell me, but then he would draw back and it would be gone. And then one morning when I went to visit him I found him out of his bed demanding that the nurse bring him his clothes. He was very upset.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I do not know. He insisted that I take him home.’

  ‘You mean upset as in angry?’

  She thought about that. ‘Not angry. Perhaps a little with the nurse because she refused to fetch his clothes, though it was not her fault, she was only doing her job. It was more that he was in a hurry. I do not know how to explain it. As if he was anxious about something. When he saw me he was very pleased. He pleaded with me to make them bring his clothes. At first I did not know what to do. I told him I would have to speak to the doctors.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘That he was not well enough to leave.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t listen?’

  ‘No. And when they saw how upset Johnny was they became alarmed. They checked his medication because at first they wondered if the nurse had given him the wrong drugs. I felt sorry for her. She had not given him anything except what was written on his chart. She thought she was going to get into trouble but she told the doctors the same thing she had told me, that Johnny had seemed quite all right when she had brought him some juice and the newspaper after he had woken up. He had been sitting up in bed and talking to her, though of course he was complaining about being in hospital because he did not like being stuck in bed all day and he said the food was terrible, but Johnny always complained of these things, so it was nothing new. But when she went back later he had changed. He was very agitated and that was when he said that he was leaving.’r />
  Irene told me that after the doctors had checked him over they had taken her aside and warned her that though my father wasn’t ready to go home it was dangerous for him to be in such an excitable state. She had to try to calm him down or else they concluded it might actually be better if they agreed to his demand, though there were forms she would have to sign absolving them of culpability.

  ‘It was then that Johnny told me that somebody had tried to kill him,’ Irene continued. ‘He said that it was dangerous for him to stay in hospital and that was why he needed to go home.’

  ‘Maybe he was talking about the hospital food,’ I joked, though she didn’t see the humour.

  ‘No. He was talking about the night of his heart attack.’ She explained how a truck driver going home late at night had seen my father collapse on a road high above the town. ‘If Nikos had not seen him, Johnny would have died. But your father told me that he was being chased when he collapsed.’

  ‘Chased by whom?’ I tried to imagine him running under any circumstances. Even when I had last seen him he had been quite overweight.

  ‘He would not say at the time. Later he said that he did not know who it was.’

  ‘But whoever it was wanted to kill him? Why?’

  She shook her head. ‘I thought that it might be his medicine. The doctors had told me that there might be side-effects. He might have confusions.’

  ‘You mean delusions?’

  ‘Yes, that is the word. But when Johnny saw that I didn’t believe him he would not say any more. I think it hurt him. But later I thought about it again. I signed the forms and took him home and that night I wondered why he would say such a thing if it was not true.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘He was ill, and like you said he was probably on some pretty potent medicine. You don’t really think there was anything to it.’