by Lucy Gordon
‘As old as she needs to be at any one moment. She was seventeen when she had me. My father didn’t want any responsibility, so he just dumped her, and she struggled alone for a while. Believe me, anyone who just sees her as a film star should see the back streets of London where we lived in those years.
‘Then my father’s parents got in touch to say that he’d just died in a road accident. They hadn’t even known we existed until he admitted it on his deathbed. They were Greek, with strong ideas about family, and I was all the family they had left. Luckily, they were nice people and we all got on well. They looked after me while Estelle built her career. My grandfather was a scholar who’d originally come to England to run a course in Greek at university. At first I didn’t even go to school because he reckoned he could teach me better, and he was right.’
‘So you grew up as the one with common sense?’
‘Well, one of us had to have some,’ she chuckled.
‘How did you manage with all those stepfathers?’
‘They were OK. Mostly they were lovelorn and a bit dopey, so I had a hard job keeping a straight face.’
‘What about the one in Las Vegas?’
‘Let’s see, he was the-no, that was the other one-or was he? Oh, never mind. They’re all the same, anyway. I think he was an aspiring actor who thought Estelle could help his ambitions. When she finally saw through him she tossed him out. She was in love with someone else by then.’
‘You’re very cool about it all. Doesn’t all this “eternal love” affect you?’
‘Eternal love?’ She seemed to consider this. ‘Would that be eternal love as in he tried to take every penny she had, or as in he haunted the set, throwing a fit whenever she had a love scene, or as in-?’
‘All right, I get the picture. Evidently the male sex doesn’t impress you.’
‘However did you guess?’
‘But what about your own experience? There must have been one or two brave enough to defy the rockets you fire at them?’
Her lips twitched. ‘Of course. I don’t look at them unless they’re brave enough to do that.’
‘That’s the first of your requirements, is it? Courage?’
‘Among other things. But even that’s overrated. The man I married was a professional sportsman, a skier who could do the most death-defying stuff. The trouble was, it was all he could do, so in the end he was boring too.’
‘You’re married?’ he asked slowly.
‘Not any more,’ she said in a tone of such devout thankfulness that he was forced to smile.
‘What happened? Was it very soon after our meeting?’
‘No, I went to college and studied hard. It was the same college where my grandfather had been a professor, and it was wonderful because people couldn’t care less that I was a film star’s daughter, but they were impressed that I was his granddaughter. I had to do him credit. I studied to improve my knowledge of the Greek language, learned the history, passed exams. We were going to come here and explore together, but then he and my grandmother both died. It’s not the same without him. I so much wanted to make him proud of me.’
She hesitated, while a shadow crossed her face, making him lean forward.
‘What is it?’ he asked gently.
‘Oh-nothing.’
‘Tell me,’ he persisted, still gentle.
‘I was just remembering how much I loved them and they loved me. They needed me, because I was all that was left to them after their son died. They liked Estelle, but she wasn’t part of them as I was.’
‘Wasn’t your mother jealous of your closeness to them?’
Petra shook her head. ‘She’s a loving mother, in her way, but I’ve never been vital to her as I was to them.’
‘How sad,’ he said slowly.
‘Not really. As long as you have someone who needs you, you can cope with the others who don’t.’
At that moment all the others who hadn’t needed her seemed to be there in the shadows, starting with Estelle, always surrounded by people whose job it was to minister to her-hairdressers, make-up artists, lawyers, psychologists, professional comfort-givers, lovers, husbands. Whatever she wanted, there was always someone paid to provide it.
She was sweet-tempered and had showered her daughter with a genuine, if slightly theatrical affection, but when a heavy cold had forced Petra to miss one of her weddings- Fourth? Fifth?-she’d shrugged, said, “Never mind” and merely saved her an extra large piece of cake.
Petra had soon understood. She was loved, but she wasn’t essential. She’d tried to take it lightly, saying that it didn’t matter, because she’d found that this was one way to cope. Eventually it had become the way she coped with the whole of life.
But it had mattered. There, always at the back of her mind, had been the little sadness, part of her on the lookout for someone to whom she was vitally necessary. Her. Not the money and glamour with which her mother’s life surrounded her, but her.
And perhaps that was why a young man’s agony and desperation had pierced her heart on a roof in Las Vegas fifteen years ago.
‘But your grandparents died,’ Lysandros said. ‘Who do you have now?’
She pulled herself together. ‘Are you kidding? My life is crowded with people. It’s like living with a flock of geese.’
‘Including your mother’s husbands?’
‘Well, she didn’t bother to marry them all. She said there wasn’t enough time.’
‘Boyfriends?’ he asked carefully.
‘Some. But half of them were simply trying to get close to my mother, which didn’t do my self-confidence any good. I learnt to keep my feelings to myself until I’d sized them up.’ She gave a soft chuckle. ‘I got a reputation for being frigid.’
They were mad, he thought. No woman who was frigid had that warmth and resonance in her voice, or that glow on her skin.
‘And then I met Derek,’ she recalled. ‘Estelle was making a film with a winter sports background and he was one of the advisors. He was so handsome, I fell for him hook, line and sinker. I thought it had happened at last. We were happy enough for a couple of years, but then-’ she shrugged ‘-I guess he got bored with me.’
‘He got bored with you?’ he asked with an involuntary emphasis.
She chuckled as though her husband’s betrayal was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. He was becoming familiar with that defensive note in her laughter. It touched an echo in himself.
‘I don’t think I was ever the attraction,’ she said. ‘He needed money and he thought Estelle Radnor’s daughter would have plenty. Anyway, he started sleeping around, I lost my temper and I think it scared him a little.’
‘You? A temper?’
‘Most people think I don’t have one because I only lose it once in a blue moon. Now and then I really let fly. I try not to because what’s the point? But it’s there, and it can make me say things I wish I hadn’t. Anyway, that was five years ago. It’s all over. Why are you smiling?’
When had anyone last asked him that? When had anyone had cause to? How often did he smile?
‘I didn’t know I was smiling,’ he said hastily.
‘You looked like you’d seen some private joke. Come on. Share.’
Private joke! If his board of directors, his bank manager, his underlings heard that they’d think she was delusional.
But the smile was there, growing larger, happier, being drawn forth by her teasing demand.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What did I say that was so funny?’
‘It’s not-it’s just the way you said “It’s all over”, as though you’d airbrushed the entire male sex out of your life.’
‘Or out of the universe,’ she agreed. ‘Best thing for them.’
‘For them, or for you?’
‘Definitely for me. Men no longer exist. Now my world is this country, my work, my investigations.’
‘But the ancient Greeks had members of the male sex,’ he pointed out. ‘Unf
ortunate, but true.’
‘Yes, but I can afford to be tolerant about them. They helped start my career. I wrote a book about Greek heroes just before I left university, and actually got it published. Later I was asked to revise it into a less academic version, for schools, and the royalties have been nice. So I feel fairly charitable about the legendary Greek men.’
‘Especially since they’re safely dead?’
‘You’re getting the idea.’
‘Let’s eat,’ he said hastily.
The waiter produced chicken and onion pie, washed down with sparkling wine, and for a while there was no more talking. Watching her eat, relishing every mouthful, he wondered about her assertion that men no longer existed for her. With any other woman he would have said it was a front, a pretence to fool the world while she carried on a life of sensual indulgence. But this woman was different. She inhabited her own universe, one he’d never encountered before.
‘So that’s how you came to know so much that night in Las Vegas,’ he said at last. ‘You gave me a shock, lecturing me about Achilles.’
She gave a rueful laugh. ‘Lecturing. That just about says it all. I’m afraid I do, and people get fed up. I can’t blame them. I remember I made you very cross.’
‘I wasn’t thrilled to be told I was sulking,’ he admitted, ‘but I was only twenty-three. And besides-’
‘And besides, you were very unhappy, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Because of her.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’
Her gentle eyes said that she didn’t believe him.
‘She made you trust her, but then you found you couldn’t trust her,’ she encouraged. ‘You don’t forget something like that.’
‘Would you like some more wine?’ he asked politely.
So he wasn’t ready to tell her the things she yearned to know, about the catastrophe that had smashed his life. She let it go, knowing that hurrying him would be fatal.
‘So your grandfather taught you Greek,’ he said, clearly determined to change the subject.
‘Inside me, I feel as much Greek as English. He made sure of that.’
‘That’s how you knew about Achilles? I thought you’d been learning about him at school.’
‘Much more than that. I read about him in Homer’s Iliad, how he was a hero of the Trojan war. I thought that story was so romantic. There was Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and all those men fighting over her. She’s married to Menelaus but she falls in love with Paris, who takes her to Troy. But Menelaus won’t give up and the Greek troops besiege Troy for ten years, trying to get her back.
‘And there were all those handsome Greek heroes, especially Achilles,’ she went on, giving him a cheeky smile. ‘What made your mother admire Achilles rather than any of the others?’
‘She came from Corfu where, as you probably know, his influence is very strong. Her own mother used to take her to the Achilleion Palace, although that was chiefly because she was fascinated by Sisi.’
Petra nodded. ‘Sisi’ had been Elizabeth of Bavaria, a romantic heroine of the nineteenth century, and reputedly the loveliest woman of her day. Her beauty had caused Franz Joseph, the young Emperor of Austria, to fall madly in love with her and sweep her into marriage when she was only sixteen.
But the marriage had faltered. For years she’d roamed the world, isolated, wandering from place to place, until she’d bought a palace on the island of Corfu.
The greatest tragedy of her life was the death of her son Rudolph, at Mayerling, in an apparent suicide pact with his mistress. A year later Sisi had begun to transform the Palace into a tribute to Achilles, but soon she too was dead, at the hands of an assassin. The Palace had subsequently been sold and turned into a museum, dedicated to honouring Achilles.
‘The bravest and the most handsome of them all, yet hiding a secret weakness,’ Petra mused.
She was referring to the legend of Achilles’ mother, who’d sought to protect her baby son by dipping him in the River Styx, that ran between earth and the underworld. Where the waters of the Styx touched they were held to make a man immortal. But she’d held him by the heel, leaving him mortal in the one place where the waters had not touched him. Down the centuries that story resonated so that the term ‘Achilles heel’ still meant the place where a strong person was unexpectedly vulnerable.
Of all the statues in the Achilleon, the most notable was the one showing him on the ground, vainly trying to pull the arrow from his heel as his life ebbed away.
‘In the end it was the thing that killed him,’ Lysandros said. ‘His weakness wasn’t so well-hidden after all. His assassin knew exactly where to aim an arrow, and to cover the tip with poison so that it would be fatal.’
‘Nobody is as safe as they believe they are,’ she mused.
‘My father’s motto was-never let anyone know what you’re thinking. That’s the real weakness.’
‘But that’s not true,’ she said. ‘Sometimes you’re stronger because other people understand you.’
His voice hardened. ‘I disagree. The wise man trusts nobody with his thoughts.’
‘Not even me?’ she asked softly.
She could tell the question disconcerted him, but his defences were too firmly riveted in place to come down easily.
‘If there was one person I could trust-I think it would be you, because of the past. But I am what I am.’ He gave a self-mocking smile. ‘I don’t think even you can change me.’
She regarded him gently before venturing to touch his hand.
‘Beware people you think you can trust?’ she whispered.
‘Did I say that?’ he asked quickly.
‘Something like it. In Las Vegas, you came to the edge of saying a lot more.’
‘I was in a bad way that night. I don’t know what I said.’
A silence came down over him. He stared into his glass, and she guessed that he was shocked at himself for having relented so far. Now he would retreat again behind walls of caution and suspicion.
Was there any way to get through to this man’s damaged heart? she wondered. And, if she tried, might she not do him more harm than good?
CHAPTER FOUR
‘I’M SORRY,’ Lysandros said quietly. ‘This is me; it’s who and what I am.’
‘You don’t let anyone in, do you?’ Petra said.
He shook his head with an air of finality. Suddenly then he said, ‘But I will tell you one thing. It may only be a coincidence, but it’s strange. After I’d taken you back to your room I returned to the tables and suddenly started winning back everything I’d lost. I just couldn’t lose, and somehow that was connected with you, as though you’d turned me into a winner. Why are you smiling?’
‘You, being superstitious. If I’d said all that you’d make some snooty masculine comment about women having overly vivid imaginations.’
‘Yes, I probably would,’ he admitted. ‘But perhaps you just exercise a more powerful brand of magic.’
‘Magic?’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve studied the Greek legends without discovering magic?’
‘Yes,’ she conceded, ‘you meet it in the most unexpected places, and the hard part is knowing how to tell it from wishful thinking.’
She spoke the last words so softly that he barely heard them, but they were enough to give him a strange sensation, part pleasure, part pain, part alarm.
‘Wishful thinking,’ he echoed slowly. ‘The most dangerous thing on earth.’
‘Or the most valuable,’ she countered quickly. ‘All the great ideas started life as wishful thinking. Wasn’t there an ancestor of yours who thought, I wish I could build a boat? So he built one, then another one, and here you are.’
‘You’re a very clever woman.’ He smiled. ‘You can turn anything around, just by the light you throw on it. The light doesn’t just illuminate; it transforms all the things that might have served as a warning.’
‘But perhaps they should be transformed,’ she
pointed out. ‘Some people become suspicious so quickly that they need to come off-guard and enjoy a bit of wishful thinking.’
‘I said you were clever. Talking like that, you almost convince me. Just as you convinced me back then. Maybe it really is magic. Perhaps you have a brand of magic denied to all other women.’
There was a noise behind him, reminding him that they were in a public place. Reluctantly he released her hand, assuming a calm demeanour, although with an effort.
A small buzz came from his inner pocket. He drew out his phone and grimaced at the text message he found there.
‘Damn! I was planning to go to Piraeus tomorrow in any case, but now I think I’d better go tonight. I’ll be away for a few days.’
Petra drew a long breath, keeping her face averted. Until then she’d told herself that she wasn’t quite sure how she wanted the evening to end, but now she had to be honest with herself. An evening spent talking, beginning to open their hearts, should have led to a night in each other’s arms, expressing their closeness in another way. And only now that it was being denied to her did she face how badly she wanted to make love with him.
‘Will you be here when I get back?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I’m staying for a while.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘We’d better go,’ she agreed. ‘You have to be on your way.’
‘I’m sorry-’
‘Don’t be,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s been a long day. I was fighting to stay awake.’
She wondered if he would actually believe that.
When they reached the Lukas villa the great gates swung open for them, almost as though someone had been watching for their arrival. At the house he opened the car door and came up the steps with her. She looked up at him, curious about his next move.
‘Do you remember that night?’ he asked gently. ‘You were such an innocent that I made you go to bed and saw you to the door.’
‘And told me to lock it,’ she recalled.
Neither of them mentioned the other thing he’d done, the kiss so soft that it had been barely a whisper against her lips-a kiss without passion, only gentle concern and tenderness. It had lingered with her long after that evening, through days and weeks, then through years. Since then she had known desire and love, but nothing had ever quite erased the memory of that moment. Looking at him now, she knew why, and when he bent his head she longed for it to be the same.
