“I lost my job. I think that’s all you need to be aware of.”
“It’s not the end of the world to have lost your job, it happens all the time. But one thing you can’t do is just pretend that nothing happened and then expect us not to ask any questions. We have a perfect right to ask questions.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t.”
“Darling,” Jimmie said to his daughter, “I’d rather like to know why you were fired, if you were fired. Were you fired?”
Naomi put down her fork, and her whole body tensed.
“It’s a private matter,” she stammered. “I would have thought it was obvious why—”
“But if you want me to help you—”
“I don’t. I just need a place to think it over.”
“You have that and you will always have that. But we need to know what happened so we can help you. Don’t you think? Phaine says that honesty is the best principle, and I’m bound to say I agree with her.”
“You can tell us,” Phaine said emphatically, putting down her fork as well. “We can’t be in the dark about things like this.”
“I know you were having trouble with your boss—”
“It wasn’t that, it wasn’t. It’s more complicated.”
Naomi felt herself crumpling; she wanted to put her hands over her ears and drown out both them and the Sinatra with a long scream.
“Was it the Weaver case?” Jimmie persisted. “You told me about that and I googled it.”
“What if it was? The only thing that matters is that they fired me. So yes, they fired me.”
“I see.” Phaine sighed triumphantly.
“Did they really?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“What a despicable thing to do. What was the reason, then?”
“I’m not sure I even know.”
“Then it was despicable for them to fire you.”
“Is there something you’re not telling your father?” Phaine insisted.
“You mean the reason?” Jimmie burst out.
“Do you want me to say it, Naomi?” Phaine said.
“I can say it. Though there’s not much to say. They claimed I manipulated evidence to get a defendant off.”
She gave up and laid out the details of the crisis that had cost her her job. She had volunteered to defend a Turkish restaurant owner in Dalston who had beaten two men with the butt of a shotgun during an attempted robbery. The case against the restaurant owner had obviously been brought by the two men and the attacks—or self-defense—had been witnessed by two other people who had been in the street at the time. It was politically sensitive, her partners had told her, and they had been inclined to refuse the case. She had made an argument for defending the man and used the two witnesses to great effect. The Turk was acquitted, but one of the men he had beaten suffered permanent brain damage. A scandal had erupted. Attention turned to the two witnesses. A journalist had discovered that they were friends of the defendant and had then gone on to allege that she had known this beforehand. To her father she insisted that she hadn’t, but in reality she had known. The partners were given irrefutable proof of this. In the end, it had been an instinctual call on her part: she wanted to defend a Muslim against his tormentors. There was nothing ignoble in that. Just because the three men were friends didn’t make the testimony of the two who had been in the street false. It was, she said, a setup and a matter of scapegoating.
“Well,” Jimmie said, keeping his voice flat and trying to control his indignation, “misunderstandings and mistakes at law firms happen all the time, if we’re to be honest. You made a mistake in good faith. It’s a matter for the public prosecutors, or whatever they’re called. I simply can’t understand why your own firm would turn on you like that, or take such accusations seriously. Were they afraid of another investigation?”
“They decided I’d broken their rules—”
“Had you?”
She was evasive: “In their interpretation.”
“But that’s extraordinary. We can’t have that!”
He threw down his napkin dramatically and stared at his wife as if she would take up the challenge of his exclamation. But she sat back, bit her lower lip, and shook her head.
“Calm down, Jimmie. Have a drink and calm down. I’m glad you told us the truth finally, Naomi. I knew it was more serious than you were letting on.”
But from then on Naomi said nothing, reaching for her wineglass. Her father eventually relaxed a little and wiped the unctuous sweat from his forehead—the evening was warm. Then he went back to his fish and potatoes and they let the subject go for a while.
Jimmie was thinking. What was she planning to do with herself now that she had nothing to go back to? He hadn’t realized that it was this bad. How could she have got herself in such a stupid position? She had a knack for doing that, he had to admit to himself. It was, he feared, more than a slipup or a personality clash. She had done something she didn’t want to fully own up to. It was the damnedest thing, the way she kept secrets about herself. He was sure this talent for secrecy had found its way into her way of handling controversial cases. This time she hadn’t got away with it and she had paid the price. It was a bad deal for the Codrington name.
When they were finished, Carissa came in again with three coconut puddings she had made from an Asian cookbook that Phaine had given her. The lamps shook in gusts of wind, they could hear awnings and lines around other houses rattle and snap, and somewhere on the trail to the top of the mountain a flashlight suddenly shot a beam of light into the emptiness.
“Did you see that?” Jimmie said to his wife. “Are they hunting foxes up there?”
He reached for his cigar box again. He called over the maid and asked her to put some Theodorakis on the music system. There was a song called “The One Unforgivable Sin” that he wanted to hear before bed. It would put him in a better mood. Then, like the sudden remembrance of a dentist’s appointment, he recalled that the following morning they had to go on a cruise with the Americans. He cursed silently. But then he had an inspiration.
“Nobbins, is it entirely necessary that Phaine and I go around the island with you tomorrow? You can take the boat and the staff—show your friends a good time. We don’t have to be there. You’ve done it a hundred times, so I’m not worried. Just don’t end up in Turkey.”
Naomi suppressed a wild expression of relief and merely nodded. But she and Phaine exchanged bitter glances.
“Are you sure?” the latter said to her husband.
Naomi accepted a shot of ouzo as a nightcap. The stars had been out for some time, but she had not yet noticed them. Their cold glamour provided a link to forgotten centuries. Her eye, instead, was drawn up to the silhouette of the mountain from where the flashlight had come. For a moment something moved against the darkness of the slopes, a figure scrambling up toward the little church at the summit like a giant cockroach. She downed the ouzo and forced back the tears that threatened the surfaces of her eyes, and held herself steady until it was time for a second shot. There was a brief protest from her stepmother, but father and daughter took the second one and there was a moment of healing between them. Over the years she had discovered from experience that the best moments between them were when they drank ouzo together. That double-edged and flavorless drink was their dark truce, their mutual anonymity.
FOUR
At the port the Haldane sister and brother arrived with only their father and met Naomi at the Pirate Cove for a coffee before they embarked. Amy had preferred to stay at home and do some painting and cooking, and even Jeffrey looked as if he had been prevailed upon to come by his children. He put a brave face on it, however, and drank cup after cup of sketos.
The three-member crew of the Black Orchid were also there and they all sat together. The three Greeks were suddenly interested in the explosive beauty of the American girl, and Jeffrey bristled with protective annoyance as the caffeine went to his head. Naomi was observant. The Haldane
males were wearing similar khaki shorts and black-top sneakers, the same University of Pittsburgh sweatshirts and the same baseball caps. A family whose men had a uniform. It was fantastical—she had seen such things in movies—and it made them, in some way, easier to deal with. The boy was in a good mood but said nothing. He obviously didn’t need to. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do on that day.
“It’s a real yacht,” he eventually did say to Naomi, his face bright with appreciation. “Do you guys fish on it? You could catch bluefins.”
Naomi caught Sam’s eye at last and there was silent laughter between them. As they walked to the boat along the gangplanks, they exchanged a private Yassou, and to Naomi Sam looked exceptionally vibrant, more so even than the previous day. Perhaps it was the dowdy uniform that played to her strengths. There was also a blush from the sun.
They boarded the yacht and the boy rushed around inspecting everything with many a guttural “Wow!”
“There’s a bedroom down there,” he called up to his father. “There’s a sign over the bed that says Disgrace.”
“That’s an artwork,” Naomi explained.
She and Sam went out onto the back deck and sat in the chairs there. The sun hit them and the crew set up the awning. The table had been arranged with an ice bucket, a cooler, glasses, and china plates. Sam looked up at the burned brown hills and something in her bristled. It was like the Middle East, a corner of Lebanon or Syria centuries ago. Slaves moving among the saddled donkeys in the caves high up among the glaring rocks. It had its enigma. It wasn’t quite what she had expected. As they moved off into open sea the mountain named for Eros rose above the toytown of cafes and discos and scuba shops. She saw people walking along the path above Sunset and the early-morning swimmers on the flat rocks below it. The collective pantomime of a holiday. Then the crew turned up the engines and they moved swiftly along the coast, passing Vlychos and the Haldanes’ house. And then Amy was there waiting for them with an energetic wave, like a gaunt lone figure in an Andrew Wyeth painting; the yacht sounded its horn. They went past Molos and the remoter headlands, Cape Bisti and Tsigri Island and the Aghios Konstandinos. Then they turned in to follow the edge of the island as it led to Cape Aghios Ioannis. On this far side there were no houses or roads; the beaches were hemmed in by dramatic cliffs and rock formations. The sea looked darker and more volatile. When they anchored for a first stop the waves came hard against one side of the boat, shaking it gently. Under the awning the group was served with fruit juice and coffee, croissants and tulumba. Some music was put on—calypso, Naomi explained, and some Louis Armstrong from the soundtrack of High Society. Her father loved it. She took Sam down to the bedroom and they changed into their bathing suits. Sam saw that there was indeed a tubular neon light above the bed that spelled out the word Disgrace.
“It’s sick, isn’t it?” Naomi whispered. “It cost him twenty thousand dollars.”
Sam looked around the disorderly melange of art, the bedside lamps made of solid glass and the Keith Haring panels inset into the walls. It could have been so cool, she thought, but somehow it wasn’t.
They went back up to the deck and found the crew lowering the steps into the water. Jeffrey and the boy peered over at long thin gar speeding through the blue like animate needles. The shore was about a hundred meters away, a comfortable swim. From the boat the sandy bottom was now visible, a shimmer of dark gold. Sam and Naomi put on rubber flippers and masks but decided to do without the snorkels. They slipped down into the water and quietly swam away from the calypso, the brilliant silverware, and the anxious fatherly gaze. Jeffrey was thinking that, after all, he was not so sure about this self-assured British girl. She had prized his daughter away from them a little, and he and his wife were both aware of it. But it seemed to him that it was not deliberate. Naomi was one of those people who exert an entirely unconscious influence on others and who cannot be held responsible for the effects. It was tropism, not conspiracy. This, of course, made her more dangerous. His earnest and upright mind was, moreover, ruffled by her ease of movement and her offhand manners—they seemed to him proof of a superiority that he would have to belittle in order to survive.
—
They were at the shore in minutes, hauling themselves back into the air and lying flat on boulders facing the yacht. They could still hear Louis Armstrong and the calypso rhythms, and the crew had broken out a bottle of champagne, probably as much for themselves as for their unknown and unimportant guests. The foam shone for a second as it spewed into the water. “Eviva!” Naomi shook out her wet hair and leaned back. Once again, that aristocratic ease of movement and gesture, and Sam did the same, stretching out her toes with their crimson warlike paint. She had painted them the night before. There was a rustle of lizards darting under rocks and she turned, but they were faster than her eye.
After a few minutes they got up and climbed a steep hillside. They had soon reached a platform from where they could look down at the boat and the father and son hunched together playing chess under the awning. Sam thought how restful it was to be separated from them finally, away from the bickering and the family trivia. One of the crew was swimming around the boat, his voice carrying up to them with great clarity. “To nero einai gamo kryo!” one of the others called back to him. Their tongues had loosened in the absence of any Greek speakers.
The hillside behind them cast a shadow far out into the water that just clipped the aft of the boat and dimmed the little Greek flag hanging there. Another disheveled slope led down to a cove congested with rocks and rubble, a place that must have been well out of sight of the boat. There was something tempting about it, with the absence of a track and the cactus proliferating across it. They got up. As they slipped out of view of the boat Jeffrey looked up and felt a moment of unease, but the crew didn’t notice. A small shadow had suddenly passed across his world. But the crew knew that Naomi was familiar with the island. In reality, the girls were exultant. The opalescent purity of the sky, the absence of cloud and contamination, made them feel secure. They skipped off down the shelving stones toward the second cove and the heat rose up toward their faces.
Sam felt freer as soon as she was out of her father’s sight. She remembered the warning her mother had uttered to her earlier in the day about the sun. To hell with her, though. To hell with the family brand. Her skin liked the sun’s ferocity.
“What does skatofatsa mean?” she asked as she trailed her guide.
Naomi turned and said, “Shitface.”
“Is it a useful word?”
“I use it pretty much every day.”
“Skata-fatso. Fantastic.”
“Fatsa. You can use it in America.”
At the far side of the cove they sat again and caught their breath. The boat had disappeared behind the land’s shape, but they could still hear the music from High Society. When the wind swept across the hillside, however, it vanished and all they could hear was dust and grit flying.
“Should we keep going?” Sam asked. “Maybe they’ll follow us and pick us up farther on.”
“I didn’t bring my phone. We’d have to wave to them from somewhere.”
“Then let’s wave.”
They turned and climbed up the next slopes until they could see the boat again. They waved, but no one saw them. Forgotten already, Sam thought with amusement and with a certain amount of satisfaction. They shouted and the abrupt echoes came back to them. They wondered what to do next; beyond their vantage point lay ravines and coves, desert scrub shining under dark blue light. It was so still and undisturbed that it provoked in them a childish desire to ruffle it up and make it less pure. Without even talking about it they walked on, plunging down toward the sea a second time, singing as they went, threading their way carefully through prickly pears to the words of “Paperback Writer.”
What beautiful animals we are, Sam thought, beautiful as panthers. When they reached the white rocks along the water she saw two red spots as she stepped past them.
Blood, she thought at once. She stopped and kneeled to look closer, and there was a sudden bafflement in her face. She had been right. They were two dried spots of blood, like small things that have been casually mislaid. She felt a quick thrill whose root was hidden to her.
“It can’t be,” Naomi said.
“They have animals here?” Sam wondered aloud.
“No one hunts in these parts.”
Something in Sam stiffened and her instincts kicked in. She touched one of the spots. “Just two spots? No, it’s a drip. From a height.”
“I guess so,” Naomi said.
“It must be from a person. Hikers, maybe?”
People did come here on private boats, like themselves. But Naomi was skeptical.
“We didn’t see any boats leaving before us.”
“Then they must’ve walked over the mountain.”
“No.”
They rose and looked around but saw nothing. A mood of doubt went through them, but they said nothing to each other. They merely kept walking, scaling the next rise until they were peering down at slopes thick with glistening thistles. There was a curve of rock and sheltered water beneath it, waves foaming a few feet out on the hidden stone. At first, nothing to see. But here, in the full sunlight, a figure lay stretched out in the thyme bushes, a man asleep on his side in a pile of rags with a plastic bottle on the ground beside him.
The man was half naked, in tracksuit pants, with thong sandals. A tattered sweater was laid out on the cactus a few feet away as if drying. He looked young to them, long-haired, the beard grown out and ungroomed. An exhausted hobo of the sea. Naomi could tell that he was not Greek. It was something about the clothes, the totality of his exhaustion. But Sam was thinking differently. She looked farther down the coast and saw nothing. Not even the flimsiest dinghy or a discarded paddle. She was an avid news reader, being the daughter of a journalist, and something had already occurred to her, and though she might have come to the same conclusion as Naomi she was less moralistic about it. They couldn’t now pretend that they hadn’t seen him, and they couldn’t walk back to the yacht without making sense of it. She was curious for a moment, but she then wondered about the extreme concentration that seemed to have come into Naomi’s face.
Beautiful Animals Page 4
