by Alison Fell
Farther out, the Filips Marina taxi-boat laboured eastwards on its way to Agios Nikolas. It was a large open dinghy with a canvas sun-shade, maximum load 28, and far too low in the water. Some of the passengers were standing up, clinging to the poles that supported the awning. Although even from here Yiannis could see there were at least 40 aboard, well over the limit, he didn’t feel like intervening – just as, earlier, he’d driven past Katomeli station without the slightest desire to call in. Evidently his secondment to Heraklion had spoiled his appetite for tackling minor infringements of the law: the break-ins, the domestic quarrels, the beer-fuelled blood-lettings of British youth.
When someone waved at him from the taxi-boat he waved back and watched it go, content on this occasion to leave the safety of the passengers in the purview of the gods.
Snug in the stern with his hand resting lightly on the tiller, he watched the Dimitroula’s prow cutting through the wake, heading for the rise and fall of the horizon. Its intentful motion absolved him of responsibility – for finding a purpose, perhaps, for charting a life’s course? – and at least for a little while kept self-castigation at bay.
Once he’d cleared the coastal traffic he killed the engine and stretched out in the bottom of the boat, cradling his head on his arms. No longer trying to argue with the voice which told him he was a two time loser, he closed his eyes and with a kind of mournful relief surrendered himself to the sensation of being doubly cast adrift.
He woke from his doze with his heart ticking loudly in his ears. The sun was high and brassy overhead, scorching down on his forehead. He had been dreaming of a clock, one that operated on the same principle as a cuckoo clock, except that when the hand reached the hour it was a dolphin, not a cuckoo, which leapt out from a fretwork of wooden waves. His father had made it for Irini’s fifth birthday – even as a little girl she’d been fascinated by the tiny ratchets and cogs, how they moved against one another. He remembered how she’d shrieked with delight when the dolphin jumped out and waved its flippers at her. And how his father had laughed, his face lit up by what he could now see had been absolute, unconditional love.
As a boy he’d been accustomed to thinking of himself as the centre of attention, and because to this day he’d been unable to get Irini to say what effect their mother’s unconcealed preference had had on her, the guilt of it had lingered. So if their father’s love had somehow balanced the deficit and salved his sister’s wounds, surely that was all well and good. But why did he suddenly feel so jealous, and so bereft?
Yiannis felt overheated and headachey. The tick of the clock still echoed in his ears. He stripped to his shorts, dived overboard, and paddled in ever-increasing circles round the boat, treading water from time to time, and trying not to think of the empty house that awaited him.
Suddenly his cellphone rang. Cursing, he took a breath, shoved his head under, and did his fastest crawl back to the boat. Just as he heaved himself over the gunwale the ringing stopped.
Kyriaki had left a message to call her. He dried his hands on his shirt and scrolled through in the vain hope that something from Ingrid might be lurking there unread. It was too early, he knew: she probably wasn’t even in Glasgow yet. When he pressed callback Kyriaki answered immediately.
‘Yianni! Are you okay?’
‘Etsi-ketsi’ he snapped. ‘What do you think?’
Kyriaki hesitated. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the DNA too. It’s a real downer. Guess what, though …’ Her voice was taut with excitement. ‘Wiltraud made a statement. It was Manoli Dimeros who helped her!’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Seems they were an item. Or had been. Were you aware of that?’
‘No I was not.’ Yiannis cast his mind back to the Medusa: had he seen the two of them exchanging heedful glances? Or was it simply Ingrid’s presence that cast a retrospective fog of eroticism over the entire evening? ‘And I bet the family weren’t aware of it either.’ Aglaia, he imagined, would have had a thing or two to say about that particular liaison. ‘So you’ve pulled Manoli in?’
‘On his way as we speak. Seems she panicked when she found the body, and called him.’
‘She didn’t call Wolfgang?’
‘He wouldn’t have been able to get there. Prys and Jean-Yves had the truck that night. She says they wrapped the body in the compost bag, drove to the Panomeli road, and dragged it down through the olive grove … all because she was terrified suspicion would fall on the commune!’
‘But why Stavlakis’ patch, for God’s sake?’
‘She said Dimeros told her no one went there, it was a wilderness.’
‘And that’s all Manoli helped her with?’ Yiannis asked suspiciously.
‘According to her statement, yes. Of course Dimeros could deny the lot, if we don’t get prints off the compost bag. Why do you ask?’
‘I just can’t see him as a knight in shining armour, that’s all,’ said Yiannis. Then he had a thought. Wiltraud’s phone had been conveniently disposed of in the eco-cull, but Manoli’s had not. ‘His mobile!’ he said. ‘Did they get their hands on that?’
‘I expect so.’ Kyriaki sounded doubtful. ‘I’ll call now and check.’
‘Right,’ said Yiannis, savouring the minor satisfaction of having scored a point. ‘So that’s it?’ he demanded after a moment, tired of waiting for her to tell him whether he was in or out.
‘Well, Vasilakis is sure she’ll go down, although with no previous it could be a suspended. Dimeros too, you’d think.’
‘Depending,’ Yiannis said.
There was a heavy silence which Kyriaki broke with a fruity cough – clearly she’d gone back to inhaling. ‘Look Yianni, I’d feel exactly the same …’
‘Would you?’ Immediately he was embarrassed by his own pettiness: he sounded like a five-year-old kid with the hump.
‘Where are you, anyway?’
Standing in the boat, he surveyed the empty horizon. ‘Lost at sea. Does it matter?’
Kyriaki let out a sigh of exasperation. ‘Yianni, he’s busy singing your praises! The boss. Think you could feed that into the loop?’
57
Ingrid wakes sweating in a tight girdle of blankets. The slithery pink quilt, which has fallen off the single bed during the night, lies in a heap on the floor. For a moment she wonders who and where she is: transported back to childhood, maybe, consigned to celibacy. Crammed into the alcove of the dormer window is a small table on which sit her laptop and files; she might be Alice Kober herself, waking in her lone eyrie, facing yet another day in a life of contemplation.
In the spare room little has changed since she was a girl – the tongue-and-groove boarding on the slanted ceiling, the ornithological prints of Scottish birds on the walls: the curlew and the grouse, the golden eagle and the garishly plumaged capercailzie. In the centre of the floor lies the same white sheepskin rug, the long-haired kind that fleas adore. The shabby veneer bookcase still stands by the door, groaning with Elsa’s walking maps, box-games, and old Penguin editions of Agatha Christie.
After a delay at Athens, there were cancellations at Heathrow. By the time she landed at Glasgow it was too late to get to Buncranna House.
‘They have the poor blighters in their beds by 9,’ Elsa complained. ‘As if they needed any more sleep!’
Instead they’d driven straight to Calderbank, through squally weather and occasional flashes of a sun that seemed puzzlingly reluctant to set, until she remembered how far north they were, how in summer you could fish up here as late as midnight.
Cooking smells rise from the kitchen below. A bluish haze of bacon fat percolates up the stairwell. She puts on the old candlewick dressing gown that hangs on the back of the door and goes downstairs. The kitchen door is open to the garden to let out the fumes.
‘Do you want your breakfast outside?’ Elsa asks, bending to take a plate from the oven. ‘It’s nice enough.’ She sets the plate on a tray and takes off her oven gloves. As well as bacon there’s black pudding, egg, mush
rooms, fried potato scone. The Full Scottish. ‘Mind out, the plate’s hot.’
‘Aren’t you having any?’
Elsa grimaces. ‘Nah. Rabbit food for me these days. Cholesterol, you know?’
Ingrid is startled. Elsa slaves in the garden all summer, tramps the hills with the Ramblers all year round. ‘That’s hard to believe!’
Elsa’s shrug suggests that she isn’t inclined to believe it either. ‘Bloody doctors. Once you’re past sixty they just won’t leave you be. Tests for this, tests for that. I’d rather be kept in the dark about my ‘risk factors’, thank you very much!’ Parking a mug of coffee on the tray, she lights a cigarette and inhales with gusto. ‘I mean, it’s not as if you expect to live for ever, is it?’
‘Well, you look in great shape to me,’ she says loyally. Elsa’s skin, although weathered by outdoor work, stretches tautly over strong cheekbones, and her blue eyes are quick and bright. Her grey hair, cropped close at the back, falls in dashing long wings to her jawline. She looks trim and vigorous in her jeans and checked shirt – for a seventy-year-old, Ingrid reminds herself. If she’s always pooh-poohed any possibility of frailty in her aunt, perhaps that’s because she can’t afford to recognise it.
Soon after Greta went into Buncranna, Elsa revised her will, bequeathing the Calderbank cottage, as well as the nursery, to Ingrid. Elsa told her that the will included instructions for her funeral, and the funds to pay for it, so that Ingrid wouldn’t be left to foot the bill. Appalled by this new morbid Elsa, she’d tried to laugh her out of it. Although she still has the copy of the will her aunt insisted on giving her, to this day she hasn’t been able to bring herself to read it.
Elsa is her rock, after all; she simply isn’t allowed to crumble.
She carries the laden tray out to the garden, where the morning air has a cool dewy edge to it. She pulls the table into the triangle of sun at the outer edge of the patio, and fetches a garden chair.
From here she has a view past the greenhouses – one large one, abutted by a smaller low-span shed for grafting and propagation – to the hazel thicket at the bottom of the garden, and thence to the fields and hills of Breadalbane beyond. Before the glasshouses were built the lawn had sloped all the way down to the burn, but now what’s left of it is largely taken up by the spreading foliage of the old magnolia tree – a Globosa, summer-flowering, with creamy white petals.
To her right, against the high south-facing wall, grows an espaliered greengage which has been here since she was a child – she’d always found it marvellous that three dimensions could be flattened into two, and branches trained to grow first horizontally, then angled up, like the hieratic arms of Kali – and, underneath, a border of old-fashioned perennials: stocks and delphiniums and sweet william.
The gravel drive which leads past the white pebble-dash wall of the garage has been tarmacked and widened to provide parking space for customers, and a smart new shed has been built of wood the colour of preserved ginger; this is Elsa’s office, where she does the books and conducts the online part of the business.
Elsa comes out with a plate of buttered toast and sets it in front of Ingrid; in her other hand she’s carrying a pail full of eggshells and vegetable peelings.
‘Have you still got the kitchen garden, then?’ Ingrid indicates the compost pail.
‘Oh aye, you just can’t see it from here, not any more. The rasps are no great shakes this year, too much rain for them. There’ll be enough for your tea, though. And we should have a good crop of gooseberries, they don’t mind a soaking.’ She smiles at Ingrid, whose love of home-grown berries is legendary. ‘Look at the colour of you, though! Greece must have done you good, eh?’
Ingrid surveys her arms: in the morning sun they look brown and smooth, undeniably well-holidayed. ‘I was working too, you know.’ Even though it’s the honest truth it sounds like a cover-up. She squints a smile up at her aunt. Now’s the time to say, I’ve met someone, Elsa, but she can’t bring herself to say it. The feeling that binds her to Yiannis exists in some other, wordless element; like the baby hedgehog on the terrace of the Minimarket, it’s too young and frail to walk into the world unaided.
She watches her aunt stride off in the direction of the compost heap, swinging the plastic pail. She’s also afraid Elsa will worry about her, give her the kind of careful forbearing glance which reminds you that passion is a dangerous, unstable force, one which can make a goat walk on its hind legs or strike sparks fom a belt-buckle at a hundred paces.
A nice, stable, boring relationship. That’s what Tim thinks she needs: the sort of thing you can rely on. She can just see it. Give her a month and she’d be tearing it limb from limb.
When she bites into the black pudding her eyes fill with tears of grief and pleasure.
A taste for blood, is it? Your Aunt Elsa’s been turning you into a wee barbarian!
What surprises her is the glow, as if something bright is trying to surface from a meagre bank of memories. She remembers the photographs laid out across Elsa’s kitchen table: holiday snaps of wherever it was her parents had been – Corfu, perhaps, or Amalfi. Greta in a spotted bikini, tanned as a movie star. Greta at cocktail time, Greta smiling in sunglasses on an open boat.
Ingrid’s father had said he was taking her away for a rest but he didn’t say what from. Greta had always loved the sun, and complained bitterly about the miserly ration she had to be content with. But now it was as if two whole weeks of it spilled out of her and shone, for once, on Ingrid. She remembers sitting at her breakfast in Elsa’s kitchen, and her mother hugging her, sparkling with high spirits, as if nothing could delight her more than the sight of a daughter’s healthy appetite.
Pride, perhaps, is the word she’s looking for. Perhaps it was as simple as that – the shock of feeling, just for once, that she had the power to give her mother pleasure.
A van noses round the side of the house with Calderbank Nurseries painted on the door above a stencilled pink magnolia. The driver parks in front of the office and nods to her as he gets out. He’s only a youth, with a square red-cheeked face and a tuft of bleached hair, wearing a white T shirt with the magnolia logo, khaki shorts, and stout work boots. Just then Elsa reappears with her empty pail and stops to talk to him. As they go through the gate into the bamboo-fenced enclosure Ingrid hears the murmur of Scottish voices, low-pitched, like the sound of bees in lavender.
She’d forgotten how quiet the place is: no traffic noise, just invisible larks, and somewhere in the distance the faint thud of a farmer knocking in a fence post. When the youth emerges from the enclosure he’s carrying a sizeable bush with deep crimson flowers. Elsa opens the boot of her car and watches as he manoeuvers it inside.
‘I’ll leave you holding the fort, then.’
‘Right you are, Miss Henderson.’
Elsa comes towards the patio, bending to dead-head a rose on the way. ‘Alastair,’ she explains, ‘My right hand man. He does the local deliveries.’
Ingrid jumps up and begins to load the crockery on to the tray. ‘I’d better get dressed.’
‘Don’t hurry yourself, pet. Finish your cigarette. It’s not as if she’s going anywhere.’ She rinses the pail at a faucet under the kitchen window and sets it down on the step.’ I got her a couple more nighties at Marks. Doesn’t matter how many name-tapes I sew on, that laundry woman just keeps losing them!’ Picking a bacon rind off the plate she hurls it into the pristine centre of the lawn. ‘I’m taking in a rhododendron for that blasted prison yard. Give the poor buggers something to look at, for God’s sake’
In the silence Ingrid watches two sparrows swoop down from the globosa and peck at the rind until it jumps and wriggles like a worm.
Elsa lets out a sigh and stands back, shaking her head at herself. ‘Och, I’m sorry, dear. You know me. Madam Bigmouth!’
At Dunkeld they pick up the A9 and head down the dual carriageway to Perth. On either side of the road the Tay valley and its tractors lie under a Mediterranean she
en. Jet-lagged, her mind harks back to the frame of outing, holidays, the passive pleasure of being driven. She remembers hot air buffetting in though the open window, Yiannis’s hand on her knee – not pinning her down this time, but holding her steady.
Elsa nods towards a field of barley which is tufted and flattened, like hair after a sleepless night. ‘Aye, we need a few more days like this. Then they’ll be able to get the harvest in.’
Ingrid watches the passing landscape in a daze: rhododendrons have become oleanders, a myrtle tree transmutes into an olive. Higher up, the white granite outcrops have a fictional glitter. She’s unnerved by the traffic hammering along on the left. Ever since she arrived she’s been trying to get in at the wrong side of Elsa’s car.
From Bridgend they take the back road through the forest to Glencarse. Elsa accelerates up a short but steep hill and turns into the drive. ‘Here we go, then. Gird your loins, eh?’
Buncranna House comes into view through the beech trees, white and ornate as a wedding cake. Urns full of geraniums and petunias flank the Doric portico. The clipped lawns are deserted; apart from two nurses smoking on the steps, no one is out enjoying the sun. Elsa parks on the gravel forecourt and pauses with one hand on the door. The face she turns to Ingrid is neutral and composed. ‘I’m just warning you, dear. Don’t be too upset if she doesn’t recognise you straight away. It sometimes takes her a minute.’
She follows Elsa along a ground floor corridor, across the patio, and through the sliding doors of an empty conservatory. Another corridor with open doors which give on to single-bedded units leads to a carpeted lounge area, marked off by trellises decorated with artificial ivy trailers.
A TV at the far end blares out a children’s programme; either the reception is terrible or no one has got around to tuning it, for the images on the screen are raw neon, pixillating. Of the half-dozen inmates strapped into armchairs, or lolling back in the abominable hip-bath contraptions, not one is watching it.
