Alex leaned over, but she didn’t understand what I meant.
‘That’s about a foot. The police captain I spoke to said if there was any blood it would have been washed away, but there’s virtually no tide here, and the water’s like glass. No waves.’
‘But if it had been windy …?’
‘Possibly,’ I said, though I wasn’t convinced. The weather was generally fairly stable. I could see that Alex didn’t understand what I was getting at. ‘The day I arrived, Irene told me something a bit strange. Apparently my dad thought somebody had tried to kill him.’
I could see that Alex didn’t quite know whether I was serious or not. ‘Are you saying he was murdered?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I’m sure it was an accident. You have to know what he was like. He’d been drinking pretty heavily for quite a while. Either he imagined it or it was a play for sympathy.’
‘Sympathy?’
‘He and Irene had problems. Last year she left him. There was another man involved. Actually, he’s the local police captain. Maybe after his heart attack, Dad decided it was a way to get her back.’
‘So he said that somebody had tried to kill him?’
I shrugged. Out loud it did seem like a bizarre idea, but not as bizarre as the notion that there might be any truth to his claim. If he’d really believed it, then why had he later denied saying it? And as Theonas had pointed out, what possible reason could anybody have for wanting to harm somebody like my father? I explained the whole sequence of events to Alex, including Theonas’s suggestion that my father’s claim might have been prompted by the argument he’d had that night with a fisherman in the bar where he was drinking.
Despite my rationalising however, I couldn’t entirely dispel a lingering doubt. Theonas had been quick to explain away the wound to my father’s head, but now his explanation struck me as ill-conceived, even glib. I also had to wonder what my father had been doing at the marina in the first place. I didn’t think he could have been planning to take the Swallow out alone. But what bothered me mostly was that Irene hadn’t seemed convinced. I also had the vague feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. I wondered again about her comment that Theonas may have been the reason for my dad’s secrecy. In the end though, there was nothing substantial in any of it.
‘Come on,’ I said to Alex, ‘help me get these things on board.’ I picked up the cooler and a bag and slung them over the rail onto the deck.
It had been a long time since I’d been on board the Swallow and it took a few minutes to re-familiarise myself with everything. She was in perfect condition. The brass gleamed, the varnished wood shone with a deep lustre and when I started the engine it ran smoothly with a rhythmic thump.
I went forward and slipped the bowline and asked Alex to release the stern, then I put the Swallow in gear, idled her out of the berth and we headed for the mouth of the harbour. I found a set of charts below and among them was one which showed the eastern coast of the island. There were plenty of small coves to choose from, but I picked one out that was only a few miles south and appeared to be only accessible by sea. Once we left Molos Bay beyond the harbour I handed the wheel over to Alex.
‘Just aim for that headland,’ I told her, pointing to a landmark about a mile ahead of us. While she concentrated on holding our course, I went on deck to raise the sails. There wasn’t much wind, but it was steady from the south-east so it was taking us in the right direction. When I was done I went back into the wheelhouse and turned off the engine. All at once the vibration under our feet ceased and the only sounds were the hull slipping through the sea and the breeze in the sails.
‘It’ll take us a while this way,’ I said to Alex, ‘but it’s pretty relaxing.’
She grinned but kept her eyes on the point she was aiming for. ‘It’s fantastic. Where did you learn about boats?’
‘It was the one thing I used to like about coming here when I was young. Dad used to spend part of every summer looking for the wreck of the Antounnetta. Apparently there’s supposed to be a statue on board which the Germans looted from a monastery.’
At the reminder of the war and its connotations for her family Alex frowned. ‘Before I came here I read some books about the German occupation of Greece. Some pretty awful things happened. I was thinking about that old man we saw in Exoghi yesterday. He was probably old enough to remember it all. And what you said just now about the Germans looting a monastery? It made me realise that one of them might have been my grandfather.’
‘I suppose that’s true,’ I agreed, though I guessed she was thinking of things far worse than looting. ‘Would that bother you?’
‘Do you think it should?’
‘It depends. Have you considered the possibility that if you’re determined to find out about your grandmother you might not like everything you learn?’
‘I hadn’t before I came here to be honest. But the way that old man looked at me made me think about it. Why? Do you know something?’
‘No. But the man I told you about, Mr Kounidis, he did say I should warn you to be careful who you speak to. And Irene has made a couple of remarks about certain things being better left in the past. I was going to tell you later.’
Alex thought for a moment, and then she said, ‘But I don’t think it’s right to bury our heads in the sand just because we might not like what we see, do you? I want to know what Nana was like when she was young. I want to know what happened to her. But I want the truth, not just some palatable version of it. We can’t understand anything unless we’re prepared to be honest about the past, can we?’
‘I just wanted to warn you.’
‘Because you’re worried that if I find out something unpleasant I won’t be able to deal with it?’
‘No.’
‘I couldn’t blame you if you did think that. But I’m not really some pathetic female who goes jumping off wharves in the middle of the night every time something goes wrong in my life.’
‘I didn’t think you were.’
She studied me for a moment to see if I was telling the truth. ‘Tell me about you,’ she said suddenly. ‘You know my darkest secrets and I don’t know anything about you.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘What do you want to tell me? Where do you live?’
‘London. In Kensington. I’m thirty-six and I own a small property development company. What else? I like Italian food, going to the cinema, reading books, and I force myself to run for three or four miles several times a week.’
‘Are you married?’
‘No.’ I hesitated. ‘There was somebody who meant a lot to me. It was quite recently actually. But we’re not together any more.’
‘I’m sorry.’
It might have been an uncomfortable moment, but in fact it wasn’t, perhaps because failed relationships gave us something else in common. Alex looked towards the island half a mile off our starboard side. ‘I’m glad that I came,’ she remarked. ‘It’s beautiful. You said you used to come to Ithaca when you were young?’
‘Reluctantly. My dad moved here after he and my mother split up. I used to spend a couple of weeks here during the summer holidays.’
‘You didn’t get on with your father did you? Did you always feel that way?’
‘Not when I was very young. Most summers I used to go with him on whatever dig he was working on. He’d be unearthing some Roman villa in deepest Sussex and I’d be off roaming the fields and woods with a catapult looking for squirrels.’
‘A typical boy. Why do boys always want to kill things?’
‘It’s in our nature.’
‘Were you ever interested in archaeology?’
‘Not really. I suppose if Dad had dug up some old helmets or swords it might have been different, but mostly it seemed to be bits of mosaic.’ I remembered how in the evenings we’d all sit around the camp-fire eating sausages and fried potatoes and I’d half listen while my dad and his colleagues talked about what they
’d found that day. I’d pretend to be interested because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. ‘I think he was always worried that I thought his work was dull.’
‘Did you?’
‘His work maybe, but not him.’ It was around those summer camp-fires that he’d first told me he liked boats and the sea. As a child he’d grown up on the Norfolk coast where his father had owned a wooden sail-boat. My dad would sail to coves along the coast where he’d spend the day gathering shellfish or looking for fossils in the rocks.
The more I talked to Alex the easier I found it and I ended up explaining the whole sorry story of how we had become estranged.
‘One summer he was excavating a Saxon settlement,’ I said. ‘He had a particular theory about burial practices during the era he was interested in then. If he could have proved that he was right he would have set conventional thinking on its head and some of the finds he made that year seemed to validate his theory. He wrote a paper and had it published. The trouble was it turned out he’d manipulated some of the evidence. I’m sure it was an accident. He probably just got some of his calculations wrong or something, but by the time he realised it the paper was already attracting attention in archaeological circles. In the end he had to admit to his peers publicly that his findings were wrong. The professional fall-out ruined him.’
‘It doesn’t sound so terrible,’ Alex commented. ‘Not enough to ruin somebody.’
‘At Oxford a person’s reputation is everything. It’s far more important than money. The competitiveness is ruthless. There were rumours of cheating. Dad was forced to resign in the end.’
‘It must have been terrible for him.’
‘It was. I was only a kid, but I can guess what it would have been like. The whole petty social machinery of the place came into play. Suddenly people my mother thought were her friends were ringing her up cancelling invitations to afternoon tea parties on some pretext or other. Women she’d known for years ignored her on the street. It was vicious really. And it was especially hard for her because she’d grown up there. Her own father was a respected academic.’
‘How old were you when all this happened?’
‘Eleven.’
I told her how I was sent to a boarding school and that the fees were paid for by my grandfather. ‘It was his old school. The kind of place where children are taught to be small adults instead of kids. Or at least some outdated upper-class notion of what small adults should be. My mother was completely dominated by her father. He was entrenched in the snobbish hierarchical system at Oxford. I think my dad always felt he couldn’t compete, that he’d never be good enough in the eyes of his father-in-law. He was probably right. I expect that had a lot to do with everything that happened. Anyway, the next time I heard from him was almost two years later.’
‘And he’d been here all that time? Why didn’t you hear from him?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ I said cynically. ‘Anyway, I had a letter to say that he was getting married.’
‘Which you must have resented.’
‘I did, but it was the implication that he’d been merrily getting on with his life that hurt. I didn’t resent Irene. Not once I met her anyway. What got to me was that during those two years my life was a fucking misery. I spent the first six months believing he’d come and get me out of there, but gradually I realised that wasn’t going to happen. I felt …’ I paused, struggling to describe what it had been like. ‘… I suppose abandoned. Even betrayed. And when I finally heard from him and he talked about this terrific sunny island where he was living and that he’d met some woman he was going to marry …’
‘It made it worse.’
‘Yes. I never forgot.’
‘But didn’t he ever explain why?’
‘He tried. But what explanation could there be? He said he thought he was doing the right thing because he thought I was ashamed of him. He told me that for a long time he couldn’t face thinking about England. The whole experience had been humiliating I think. It wasn’t just his career and his reputation, it was his marriage too. His failure to live up to my mother’s or her father’s expectations of him. Or maybe in her father’s case it was the reverse. But people have to deal with things all the time. He had a child. Me. He had responsibilities. In the end he ran away. He took the easy option and he salved his conscience by convincing himself that he was doing the right thing.’
Alex was quiet. I knew I sounded bitter, but even after all the years that had passed the hurt was still there. It had become a part of me. As much as any other facet of my make-up.
‘Anyway,’ I said finally, ‘none of it matters any more.’
‘Why not?’ Alex asked.
I was surprised at her question because I thought the answer was obvious. ‘Because he’s dead.’
She smiled uncertainly. ‘Oh, I see.’
Not long afterwards we approached the cove I’d picked out as our destination, so I went out on deck to lower the sails and we motored the rest of the way. As we rounded the headland we saw a strip of white pebbled beach fringing an aqua bay. The water was still and clear, protected from the breeze by the headland and steep rocky cliffs, which made access from the landward side all but impossible.
‘It’s lovely,’ Alex said with delighted surprise.
I dropped the anchor in ten yards of water and lowered the dinghy over the side, then Alex passed down the cooler and we rowed to shore. While I hauled the dinghy onto the beach she laid out a rug near the shade of a tree. As I turned around she had her back to me. I watched her unzip her skirt and let it fall to the ground revealing a bright red bikini cut high on her hips. When I went over to join her she was rubbing sun lotion into her legs, and as I sat down she handed me the bottle.
‘Can you put some on my back?’
She rolled over onto her stomach and I squeezed a blob of cream between her shoulder blades and spread it across her smoothly tanned skin, briefly envying her Mediterranean blood. When I was finished, I spread a towel beside her and lay down with a book.
‘Thanks,’ she murmured, her eyes closed.
The sun was fierce. Within ten minutes rivulets of sweat were running down my face. I glanced at Alex. She hadn’t moved and I thought she was asleep. Out in the cove the Swallow drifted serenely at anchor. With her twin masts against a cloudless sky and the deep blue of the bay behind she looked like something from a holiday brochure. I got up and walked down to the water’s edge. It was cool and refreshing after the baking heat of the sun. I began to swim out into the cove and when I’d gone a hundred yards I turned to look back towards the beach. Alex was sitting up, hugging her knees and watching me. Then she walked down to the water and with smooth, even strokes swam out to meet me.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, emphasising the planes of her features and the startling green of her eyes. She pointed to some rocks on one side of the cove. ‘I’ll race you.’
Without waiting for an answer she promptly kicked out and within seconds she had a five-yard advantage. I went after her but, though I swam hard, she kept inching away from me and by the time we were almost half-way there she had doubled her lead. I dug deep, putting everything I had into the race, but when we reached the rocks she was still ahead and I was gulping air like a beached fish. Alex climbed out and looked on with an amused expression as I hauled myself out and collapsed.
‘Where did you learn to swim like that?’ I managed to ask eventually.
She grinned smugly. ‘I was school champ in the hundred-yard dash.’
‘Christ,’ I moaned, but at least I felt less of a failure.
I closed my eyes, letting the sun warm me while my heart rate returned to something like normal. When I opened them again Alex was watching me with a distant, vaguely puzzled expression. She smiled self-consciously then unexpectedly reached out and touched my cheek. Her fingers lingered and impulsively I started to reach for her but, before I could, she turned and slipped back into the water.
I sat up and watched her swim back towards the beach.
For the rest of the afternoon that moment seemed to sit between us like some invisible barrier. I kept thinking about the questioning, almost perplexed look in her eyes, as if she couldn’t understand what she was feeling.
Later, when we were sailing back towards Vathy, I went below and fetched a couple of cold beers. When I took one up for Alex she thanked me and then said in a rush, ‘I’m sorry about what happened earlier. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.’
‘You haven’t.’ She glanced at me quickly and I realised that I’d sounded dismissive. ‘We’re both a bit off-kilter. Let’s forget it.’ I touched my beer to hers. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers,’ she responded tentatively.
It was late afternoon when we tied up at the marina again. Alex wanted to have a shower and freshen up before dinner, so I said that I’d drop her off and come back for her later. Before we left I took the chart I’d been using back down below and put it with the others. The one on top of the table covered the area to the south-east of the island, towards the mainland coast, and I noticed that it was covered with clusters of tiny crosses annotated with numbers. The markings puzzled me until I realised that the numbers were dates. Above the chart table a shelf held a number of leather-bound journals. I pulled one down at random and flicked through the pages. It was a record of my father’s search for the wreck of the Antounnetta, written in the neat hand possessed by people who have lived much of their lives before the proliferation of computer keyboards.
I turned to the front page, which was dated April 17, five years earlier. The final entry had been made at the end of October the same year, and during the intervening summer months my father had made notes for each day which he’d spent searching for the wreck, recording every location and dive and what had been found, or more accurately what had not been found. I looked through several more of the journals. They were arranged on the shelf in consecutive years and each of them followed the same pattern. The entries were sometimes weeks apart and at other times only days, and I soon figured out that the dates corresponded to the clusters of crosses on the chart. Over time a clear pattern had emerged. During twenty-odd years of searching, my father had covered a broad swathe of open sea to the east, beginning a mile or so off the coast of Ithaca. Looking at the vast expanse of water as a whole it was painfully evident that his task had been almost impossible. Towards the mainland coast there was a single large cross without any annotations beside it. I wondered what it meant.
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