by Alison Fell
He copied the address and telephone number off the monitor screen. Apparently Elpis, which meant ‘hope’, was the title used by the Cultural Association of Athinganoi in the Heraklion prefecture. Athinganoi, according to the Sokadre man, was the preferred appellation these days – tsinganoi -gypsies – being considered derogatory.
Behind him Sotiris was lurking far too close for comfort. Proprioceptively speaking, the guy was definitely challenged. If there was a doorway, his shoulder would collide with the jamb; if there was a table, Sotiris would set his plate perilously on the edge. Passing him in the narrow corridor that led to the gents was positively hazardous. He’d often thought that if the world were recalibrated six inches to the left, Sotiris wouldn’t have a problem.
Sotiris peered over his shoulder at the screen. ‘It means ‘untouchables’ he said complacently. Eyeing the coffee Sotiris seemed to be about to set down in the gap between the desks, Yiannis put him straight. Actually it meant the opposite, he told him, relaying the lecture he’d had from the horse’s mouth, as it were – ‘Touch-me-nots’. The original Athinganoi were a heretical sect in 14th century Byzantium whose members shunned physical contact with outsiders for fear of defilement. If Yiannis hadn’t quite seen the connection, he didn’t feel like arguing with the expert.
65
Like a child, stretched out in the summer of a child, she lies face down under the globosa tree, bare limbs spreadeagled, daisies tickling at her nose. Gravity presses on her, gluing her to the grass. In her mind’s eye she sees her cartoon silhouette like Tom’s, flattened by the steamroller, thin as a slice of processed cheese.
Elsa and Alastair are in the shed; she can hear them through the open door, totalling up orders, their voices interspersed by the chattering of the keyboard. As soon as they’ve finished she’ll get up and check her emails, access what Elsa calls Her Own Life. What Elsa really means by this is Yiannis, who has been mentioned, but only in passing.
Last night, as they kept company with Elsa’s best Glen Farclas, she’d prodded, ‘But you haven’t been in touch?’
‘No,’ Ingrid said, for that much was true, even if part of her mind has been keeping a furtive tally, like a prisoner scratching off the days on a cell wall. She knows, for instance, that they’ve already been apart longer than they were together. A statistic that seems to underline the inevitable. That and the silence.
‘Well that’s a pity,’ Elsa persisted, the empty whisky glass dangling from her fingers. ‘I got the feeling he was a bit special.’
A few sandwiches short of a picnic, she thought. Clearly her aunt wasn’t up to speed on current parlance.
‘Aye, well,’ Elsa said mournfully. Pouring them both another nip, she raised her glass. ‘Here’s tae us, wha’s like us, gey few and they’re a’ deid!’
There’s no beating the Scots when it comes to looking on the dark side.
Two inches from her outstretched arm a black slug slides into view, harbinger of rain. She feels the vibration of Elsa’s feet before she sees her. When she lifts her head her aunt is standing over her, holding out a tumbler which clinks with ice.
‘Thought you’d be needing your aperitif by now. I certainly am.’
On the patio table pretzels and olives are already laid out, as well as the ashtray she brought Elsa from Provence years ago: a Ricard one, made of Bakelite. Retro yellow with red lettering.
‘Alastair caught us some trout. I was thinking of doing them cold, with a green mayonnaise, if you fancy that?’
While no domestic goddess, Elsa is a more than capable cook She’s been making it her business to tempt Ingrid’s listless appetite with burly flavours: mackerel with gooseberries, smoked eel from the upmarket deli in the village, rabbit stuffed with anchovies and capers.
‘We should eat outside, don’t you think?’ Elsa says, surveying the western sky. ‘Could be the last fine night.’ Waving away offers of help, she goes indoors to put the fish in the oven.
Sparrows are gathering more or less politely on the edge of the patio. Ingrid puts her feet up on a chair and gives in gracefully to the gin and tonic. The computer, she decides, can wait for another day. As can Her Own Life. She crushes a pretzel and distributes the crumbs equally, surrendering it to the sparrows.
When Elsa reappears she’s wearing a striped apron over her Bermudas. Her glass has been topped up, and her face is sweaty from the oven.
‘Have you been in yet to see my Hendersonii?’
For a moment Ingrid envies Elsa her obsessiveness. Obsessions are what keep you going as you get older. Golf or gun-dogs or rock-gardens, consuming interests to keep you company. Although Elsa’s been experimenting for years – pottering, she calls it, for she’s in it more for love than money – she hasn’t yet produced what she would deem a worthy cultivar: a cross reliable enough to be registered and marketed.
Ingrid follows her past the large greenhouse to the low-span house at the back. Inside, opaque polythene sheets have been stapled to the sash-bars. The benches for seedlings and grafts are shrouded by overlapping plastic strips which look rather like shower-curtains; pressurised pipes with nozzles for misting the young plants have been bolted along the ceiling.
A worktop by the sink holds the wherewithal for alchemy: clippers and surgical scalpels, tape, sable brushes, paraffin wax.
By all accounts, usurping the bees’ business is a hit-and-miss affair. Out of a series of hand pollinations, Elsa says, only one may produce a viable seed cone, and of five plants grown from that seed – which may take years to flower – three could be pink, one white, and one striated. Ingrid can’t help feeling a certain satisfaction that Nature doesn’t capitulate too easily.
Elsa has rolled up two of the plastic strips and attached them to hooks on the sash bars. The plants, segregated by year of planting, show various stages of development. Plastic tags list their parentage: Campbellii x heptopata, Campbellii x acuminata, and so on. Some of the larger plants are in flower, and have been given provisional names. A saucer-sized ice-pink bloom with a lavender rim is called May Queen; a smaller bloom with a magenta stripe is Greta.
Elsa touches Greta’s petals with a fingertip. ‘She’s quite promising, her. But there’s many a slip between cup and lip, as they say. Likely I’ll be long gone by the time this lot are established.’
Ingrid looks warily at her aunt. That pensive expression on her face spells trouble. ‘Aye, acts of faith.’ Elsa takes a gulp of her G&T, eyeing Ingrid over the glass. ‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you a favour, pet.’
Her response is automatic. ‘Of course.’ She wonders if Elsa is a little bit tipsy.
‘It’s all in the will, of course … but well … afterwards, if you’d just tip the, you know, doings, in among these wee lassies here, then I’d rest content.’
Although she knows perfectly well what Elsa means, Ingrid can’t quite bring herself to say the word ‘ashes’. Her first instinct is to tease her out of it. ‘As in, pushing up the magnolias?’
Elsa manages a half-hearted grin. ‘Aye, that’s about the size of it’
Remorseful, Ingrid says of course she will. It’s a small enough favour to ask, and if it comes to that, who else is Elsa to ask it of?
Nodding briskly, as if to say that’s that done and dusted, Elsa turns her attention to the bud-scales on one of the grafts. The rootstock and the cutting, which Ingrid remembers is called the scion, are joined at a 45 degree angle, the joint spiral-bound and sealed with wax. Scion, she recalls, also means descendant, heir, or young member of a family.
Campbellii are a reliable understock. If Hendersonii ever move from myth to reality, they’ll be glossy-leaved, May-flowering, hardy enough for the severest northern climes.
Elsa is pricking the bud-scales with a scalpel. Ingrid leans against the sink, arms folded, watching her. The air in the greenhouse is humid, infused with fertility. She has a sense of sap rising; all around her, cells are transpiring, leaves busying away at their photosynthesis. The pea
ty compost gives off a dark, encouraging smell. She thinks of Kruja’s Osiris Beds, with their rich Nile silt, their tender shoots of barley.
As she watches Elsa reach up to unhook the polythene strips it strikes her that Alice the barren woman, Alice of the ‘frigid logic’ was nothing of the sort. For a startled, spacious moment she can see Alice as the seed. The sperma. Not dead at all, but generously sown, so that those who came after her could reap the crop: Michael Ventris and Emmett Bennett, and the Cambridge philologist John Chadwick – the sleuths, as Ventris cosily referred to them.
Wishful thinking, unfortunately, isn’t going to help her write her conclusion, but even if all belief is suspect – in that it isn’t supported by reason, can neither be proved nor disproved – the relief of it weakens her knees and loosens the warmth of tears in her throat. It could, of course, be the effects of the gin. Soothing, psychotropic. Really she ought to sprinkle some on the Hendersonii, grace Elsa’s wee lassies with a libation.
Lathes have been tacked to the bottom of the strips to make them hang properly. Her aunt has crouched down to settle the overlaps into place, and as she straightens up Ingrid notices how she braces her hands on her thighs to support herself.
Elsa is nothing if not gallant. She’d like to think that one day she’ll turn out to be as courageous.
66
Kruja’s belongings were stored in the basement at Dikeosinas Street. On his way to sign them out he saw Constable Nina beckoning him from her desk in the Co Ops room. She swallowed a mouthful of the sandwich she’d been eating and dabbed her mouth with a tissue. ‘I’m not sure if it’s important, sir, but something came through from Scotland Yard you might want to see?’
‘Scotland Yard?’ said Yiannis, mystified.
‘The passport check?’
‘Christ, they certainly took their time!’
Nina had printed out the report: a brief item, about a 5 year old case. He read the details with astonishment. Zoe Shapcott had had a twin sister, Miranda by name. On her way home from school the girl had been sexually assaulted, before being stabbed to death. The body had been found two months after her disappearance, in a copse by Regent’s Canal. Since the perpetrator had never been found, the case remained open.
Thanking Nina, he grabbed a coffee from the machine and escaped outside for some air. He sat down on a stone bench in the yard behind the Station and smoked a cigarette in the shade of an acacia tree, inhaling deeply and sighing the smoke out.
Was it important? Chilled to the bone, he revised the question. Of course it was important. Just because it had no bearing on the Kruja case didn’t mean it wasn’t tragic, devastating. The kind of blow you’d never recover from.
Who could ever tell what forces were at work beneath the surface of apparently normal lives? The jealous vigilance he’d sensed in Mr. Shapcott, and judged so casually to be unhealthy, even incestuous, took on a different complexion now. He stared blankly at the shadows the leaves cast on his bare arms, wishing he could apologise to the guy, whose fate, he could see now, was to suffer not only that agonising failure to keep one daughter safe from harm, but also constant fear for the safety of the other.
*
By now the raging heat of August was thoroughly entrenched; only a sporadic breeze from the Aegean mitigated the desperate temperatures. Tarmac melted, figs and pomegranates fell from the trees and split open to reveal their glistening scarlet seeds. Dogs panted in the shade, and Kore mewed resentfully when served milk that had soured in the fridge.Tourists wilted, clubbers collapsed from dehydration, and elderly locals expired.
It was as well, he thought, that his mother’s visit, first postponed, had been definitively cancelled: Aegina, for once, was a good few degrees cooler than Katomeli. Although he had postponed his summer leave, he was beginning to regret it. It was weather for early morning swims, long shady lunches, and even longer siestas, not for enforcing bylaws, recording lost passports, or collaring pickpockets.
Tassos and Irini had jetted off to the mountain freshness of Lake Maggiore – their final holiday à deux before the baby – and had sent him enviable texts, as well as a postcard of the snow-capped Matterhorn.
Even at nights the temperature remained in the high 30s, and Yiannis, unable to sleep, soaked a sheet in the shower, wrapped it round himself, and went back to bed. Imagining the steam rising from the conjunction of wet cotton and red-hot body. Towards dawn, in fitful sleep, he would dream wistfully of thunderstorms and rain-swept Scottish mountains.
One night when nothing worked he got up in the small hours, refreshed his sheet, and sat down at the computer. On Yahoo Maps he called up Tayside, and zoomed in on Calderbank. The Satellite Function showed a river, patchwork fields of grass-green and corn-yellow, and heathery-shaded uplands; here and there were small settlements he supposed were crofts. He zoomed in closer and peered at a cluster of buildings, some of which looked like glass-houses. He could make out a cottage, sheds, a sizeable area of land. For a moment he hovered on the airwaves, Zeus-like in his chiton, spying with his lammergeier’s eye. Although the scene below was frozen in time, obsession convinced him that at any moment he might see movement in a doorway, the tiny foreshortened figure of Ingrid crossing the yard, shielding her eyes from the sun as she glanced up to check some altered aspect of the sky.
He clicked on Terrain, Hybrid, then back to Satellite, zooming till he could zoom no closer, telling himself he was simply getting acquainted with her territory. From the sofa Kore’s gaze disagreed, reminding him that he was embarrassingly old for geekish electronic reveries, not to mention virtual courtship.
Zeus the Stalker. If she had voicemail he’d be hacking it.
Abruptly he quit the file and shut down the machine. Breathless with agitation, he went out on to the terrace, trailing his sheet behind him, and wandered up and down, synapses still firing away, the low moon tracking him through the lemon trees. Clearly it was no longer possible to do nothing.
It was then he had what could even be called a brainwave. The idea that came to his mind – a light, graceful, unthreatening idea – demanded immediate action. He couldn’t run the risk of it fading away with the dawn.
It would have to be a simpler, older model. No fancy Blackberrys or iPhones. A basic Nokia, perhaps – a 6300 if they still made them.
On a wave of relief he surged indoors, threw the damp and sweaty sheet into the washing machine, and stepped into the shower. The hot water coursing down his back was comforting, and sluiced away his doubts. So what if he was shaved and dressed and breakfasted a good three hours before the shops opened?
67
After days of heavy heat the rain begins, slapping at the roof slates in the night, roaring down the overflow pipes from the gutters. Clouds slide down the heathered planes of the hills and roil whitely in the valley. A wind has got up, as if pummelled into motion by the force of the rain; in the bamboo-fenced enclosure, Alastair rushes to cover the more vulnerable shrubs with plastic sheeting.
Grumbling about her newly-washed French doors, Elsa shuts all the windows before they set out for Buncranna, lugging vanilla yoghurts, a blue angora bedjacket, and videos of The King and I and Brief Encounter. Although Elsa has suggested going in only every second day – (Why? To wean the mother off the daughter, or vice versa?) – Ingrid knows she couldn’t face the guilt. In any case the worry of staying away would be far worse, she suspects, than the ordinary torments of being there.
Down at the coast the squalls have passed over, and intermittent sunbeams glitter on the wet fir trees of Buncranna. On the patio of the High Care Unit Elsa’s rhododendron is flourishing. The mountainous Kelly, her hair in two long plaits which frame her earnest face, is sharing a bench with Donny the forester. Greta’s wheelchair has been pulled up to face them; on her lap is a tray with a padded base, on which cards are laid out. The three of them appear to be playing some kind of game.
Donny half-rises to greet them, cigarette in hand and wheezing manfully, his weathered face
wreathed in smiles. When Greta swivels her head to check out the vistors, he leans over and peeks at her hand.
‘Oh you!’ she scolds, and there’s a hint of the old flirtatiousness in the playful biff she gives him.
From the beginning Ingrid has sensed his interest in her mother, and now she wonders if it might even be reciprocated. After all, Donny is really quite a good-looking guy – if, she fears, a dying one. When he isn’t smoking on the patio, he’s watching TV in his room; she has glimpsed him through the open door, flat out on the bed, plugged into his oxygen cylinder. But at least he’s a man, and it has to be said that men are in short supply in Buncranna.
Greta looks neither pleased nor displeased to see them; her expression shows the mild surprise of one whose mind is thoroughly occupied elsewhere.
‘She likes her cards,’ Kelly announces with more than a hint of pride. ‘Isn’t that right, Greta?’
‘Don’t let us interrupt!’ Ingrid says hastily, kissing Greta’s cheek. She’s nicely powdered and lipsticked, her new short hair fluffed up flatteringly above her forehead; the scarf at her neck has been fastened with her best Cairngorm brooch: silver filigree set with smoky amethysts. When Ingrid tells her how pretty she looks, Greta receives the compliment as no more than her due.
Perhaps Kelly sees it as part of her brief to foster romance – although it’s hard to imagine what form that might take – sitting together at lunch, bitching about the multi-coloured purees? Hand-holding in front of Brief Encounter? For a second she wonders if there’s a ban on locking your door to entertain your boyfriend. Then she realises: no such ban is necessary, because there are no locks. Privacy is the prerogative of the healthy, for obvious reasons. She can just imagine what the nurses would say about it: Give them locks and they’ll only go and die behind them.
