“I can’t disagree with that one. But you’re sure he said something to you about leaving for Italy?”
“Yes. He was getting tired of Hydra.”
“Were the two of you arguing? I mean, do you think that was part of him feeling tired of it?”
She flinched a little but didn’t turn.
“How should I know? He kept himself to himself. All I mean is that I wasn’t surprised that they left without saying anything.”
Was he really free as the wind? Rupert thought.
She wondered what her uncle knew about her, if anything; over the years they had had very little contact. Not enough contact, in fact, for him to fall into an easy suspicion of her. It occurred to her that most of what he knew might well have come from Rockhold. Would that make it close to the truth, or far away from it? He explained all the intricacies of the estate now that there was a presumption of death. It was about what she would inherit, which was in essence the house in Hydra, the house in London, and a large block in the company shares. It was a standard arrangement for an only child and nobody would contest it. Indeed, the only person who could realistically contest it was Rupert, and he had no intention of doing any such thing. It was the only compensation for such a horrifying trauma, and he knew that Jimmie would never have put such things into his will if he had not meant them. There was just the question of Phaine’s share of that same will. He had granted her the house in Italy, but since she was presumed dead as well they would have to come to an arrangement. Personally, he didn’t care much himself. Perhaps something for the nieces and nephews, then, though they were already very well provided for. She might give it a thought.
“So we’re assuming they’re dead?” was all she said.
“I’m afraid they must be at this point. The Italian police said they would carry on looking. They’re combing all the roads, but between you and me, it’s an all but impossible task. They’re not going to find them. I know it’s hard.”
“That’s the hardest part.”
“Not knowing where they are?”
“Yes. It’s obscene.”
“I would agree with you. But there’s always a chance they’ll get lucky.”
“Who was the suspect?”
Rupert felt like smoking, but it didn’t seem to be a good moment for it. He stroked his chin and wondered what to say.
“They have no idea. He had no ID. None whatsoever. One of these bloody migrants. There’s no way of knowing where he came from. Even the fingerprints led nowhere.”
“A nonperson, then?”
“Yes, you could say that. A nonperson to us, anyway. A person to someone somewhere.”
“And we can’t even guess his nationality?”
“No. No way of knowing. The police more or less said it was a closed case. Of course, they’ll run fingerprint checks for a while, but I expect it’ll go nowhere. He made a grab for the car and it got out of control. They even said it didn’t mean he was a criminal. Just desperate.”
“He didn’t have to kill them.”
“We don’t know—like I say, it might have just spun out of control. If you steal someone’s car, it usually does.”
“I can’t believe,” she said, “that no one at the ferry terminal remembered them crossing.”
“But they did. They remembered them perfectly. That’s the funny thing with people. They remember things perfectly even if they didn’t happen.”
“People are morons,” she said bitterly.
“That they are,” he said, and laughed. “It’s an undeniable fact.”
“And what did the authorities in Italy do with his body?”
Rupert was slow with his words, as deliberate as he could be. There was something odd in her tone.
“They cremated it after a week, I believe. There wasn’t much else to do. I think they did the right thing.”
So they’ve all disappeared without a trace, she thought.
It was slowly dawning on her that she was now very rich on her own account, and it was curious that this obvious fact had not occurred to her at all in the previous weeks. It was like a new fact that had suddenly dropped into her lap courtesy of Uncle Rupert. She was a millionaire now. How did nice left-wing millionaires behave?
They went on their quiet rampages, which often were conducted purely inside their own heads. But they might also burn a few barns in the real world. They might look for a little vengeance.
“Are you going to stay in London?” her uncle asked. “It’s a very nice house. It must have a few memories for you too.”
“It has a lot of memories. But anyway, I don’t know. I may go back to Greece. London drains everything out of me. I can’t stand the place.”
“Fair enough. What will you do on Hydra?”
“What I’ve always done—nothing and everything. Maybe I’ll paint the house. It would be therapeutic.”
“I daresay it might.”
Rockhold had once said to him long ago, “That girl is a piece of work. She is Jimmie’s negative image.” He smiled to remember it. But what did it mean?
They walked back to the car.
“There’s a family gathering in the restaurant at the hotel tonight, if you feel like coming. The kids will drink champagne and all that. If you don’t want to come, I’ll understand.”
“I’m a bit exhausted now. The funeral was too much.”
“Yes, pity about poor old Rockhold. He was always a bit zealous to my mind. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not really. Zealous?”
“Yes, a bit of a fanatic. Not that that’s a bad quality in a man like that. What did he grill you about when he was over there?”
“My childhood, mainly. But strangely, it didn’t feel nosy. I rather liked him. He was just worried when Jimmie didn’t return his phone calls. His curiosity seemed completely normal to me at the time, and it still does. That was his job, after all. I couldn’t resent him doing his job.”
“True enough.”
“Besides, he paid for dinner.”
Rupert smiled, and she did too.
In some way, he reflected, he had cleared the matter up and he had done it without a ruckus. He congratulated himself. They drove in his Jaguar along the looping roads contained within wire fences on the way back to Brighton, and as they came to the first traffic circle, a silver light broke over the sea as it came into view. The sea of the Normans, she thought, not my sea. There’s no blue to it.
That night she stayed in her room at the hotel. From her window she watched, gin in hand, the rollers exploding against a dark shingle beach and a hurricane wind tearing at the fairy lights strung across pale turquoise lampposts with dolphin motifs. Even summers here were wintry on certain days. Her thoughts were already back in Hydra. Her isolation returned after a long, nervous day filled with meaningless pretense and chatter, and with it came her doubts and her guilt—however ephemeral—and her hatred of her family. It wasn’t that they were insufferable; it was that she hated them for what they were. The emotion was straightforward and natural. In the center of this sudden turmoil and returning hatred was the thought of Faoud’s cremation. The ashes must be somewhere even now, stored in a place where a person could pick them up eventually. What if she did so, just because she expressed curiosity to the Italians? I want to have the ashes of my father’s killer. Wasn’t there a certain logic to it? But she would never do it. The box of ashes would remain unclaimed and eventually someone would dispose of it on the quiet, unless a family member heard of the events from afar and came for them. It wouldn’t happen. There was something orphaned about Faoud, an unmistakable abandonment. Certain people don’t come back from the dead in other people’s minds—but nevertheless he existed in hers.
The following day she took the train to Victoria and a taxi to St. John’s Wood. Her father’s mews house there never looked as if anyone ever lived in it, despite the confusion of his study. They had gone through his papers already and someone, without her knowledge, had obviou
sly gone through his hard drive as well. Perhaps it had been Rupert. She wondered if he had talked to the Rockhold widow in that knowing and wheedling way of his. Rockhold must have talked to his wife about his comings and goings, his suspicions. It was impossible that she knew nothing. Perhaps she had let slip a thing or two. Things that he thought about the girl he was investigating. Things about the visitor at Episkopi and the Four Seasons that he could have easily found out about. Troubled by the possibilities that she would never be able to verify, she lay in her old room from schooldays—still filled with her cherished and stored school textbooks—and traced in her mind the paths of Hydra, the steps and squares and landings and the little churches high above the port, and especially the one near her house, the chapel of Agia Paraskevi. Since she was little she knew when it was open (it was usually closed) and she knew the story of the obscure saint whose face was painted above the door: a Greek woman of second-century Rome whose name means “Friday” and who was tortured by being forced to wear a steel helmet filled with nails. She was later decapitated after causing the idols in a temple of Apollo to disintegrate. It was her favorite building on Hydra, though it was not much frequented by Greeks.
A long shade was almost always drawn down from the top of the door to the ground, in the Greek way, and the waste lot opposite it was a mass of flowering weeds. Nearby stood ruined stone arches covered with teeming vegetation, paths that went nowhere. They were houses that the old had left years before and that no one had yet reclaimed. The prickly pears leaned out precariously from the walls as if colonizing yet more space and pools of odorous shade had formed under the trees: she roamed through every street in her mind as if looking for a mistake she might have made, a false turn somewhere in the past. One can only calculate a certain number of things. Mistakes are inevitable.
She opened the church door and went in. There was only an old woman alone in the dark, waiting for her reply from heaven. She knew the old woman somehow, she almost remembered her name. She had been young when Naomi was a little girl. So time passes and destroys them. Then she woke and heard the English rain on the mews. Above her, directly above in his study, she heard Jimmie padding about as he always did. He went to the door and opened it, and a light came on in the hallway outside her room. She sat up and gripped the sheet on either side of her, and for a moment she doubted that events had unfolded as she had imagined. But his foot never creaked on the first step downward. He hesitated, as if mocking her, and the result was that her terror did not abate. It went on until she recovered her normal breathing and she remembered that, unlike Faoud, he had not been cremated.
TWENTY-THREE
At the end of August the clear blue evenings in the port began to grow more unstable and sudden winds blew out of nowhere, bearing a veil of haze-like cloud. The elaborate awnings of the cafes flapped and shuddered while the waiters grappled with ropes as complex as nautical rigging, and with expressions of sedate anxiety. The late-summer crowds looked up and wondered if the fine weather would continue uninterrupted into September as it usually did, or whether it would now decline and force them to carry a light sweater in the evenings. Often Sam would sit there with Toby, sipping the tsipouro that Naomi had taught her how to drink, and she too would look up at the haze enveloping the sun and wonder if it was sand falling onto them after crossing the Mediterranean from Africa. She could feel it in her hair, on her lips. It was not the first time that summer, but it was now more pronounced, the grit more salty. Her anxiety simmered constantly. But perhaps it was also just her imagination. Since Naomi had left the island, her days had become more languorous and more self-absorbed. And she had her new boy.
“We’re leaving in a week,” she said one evening, when the little storm was blowing and the waiters were rushing back and forth in front of the Porto Fino bar, trying to catch napkins as they flew through the air. “It’s all right, though—it feels like time. It’s overdue actually. Are you all booked for the return trip?”
“We’re going to London for a few days—Dad has some work there. Then back.”
“Naomi says this place is like a tomb in winter.”
“I can imagine.”
“Are you going to come back next year?”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Next year? I hadn’t even thought about it.”
“We could come back just by ourselves.”
“That would be cool.”
“Let’s think about it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’d probably run into Naomi all the time, though, wouldn’t we?”
Sam’s face lost its brightness for a moment, but she recovered.
“Would that matter?” she said quickly. “Do you not like her?”
“She’s all right. But you’re different around her.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, kind of. You start kind of acting like her.”
She wanted to say, “So what?” because it was not, of course, the first time that this had been pointed out to her.
But instead she merely said, “She’s older and interesting. Maybe I do change a little. It’s not that surprising.”
“I never said it was. But imagine a whole summer here just by ourselves. It would be so much better.”
“Maybe we should go to Spetses instead, then.”
He laughed. “Maybe we should.”
He went on to ask her if anything had been unearthed about the Codringtons, but she shook her head and brushed the question off. She was under orders from Naomi to say nothing to anyone.
They walked hand in hand through the port to Xeri Elia, the place where famous people once strummed their guitars under the trellises, with its twisted whitewashed trees and its outdoor tray of iced fish. They sat under the plumbago and ordered aubergines imam and fasolia. She had learned to read Greek characters by now and she spelled out every item on the menu for him, who could already read them. Stuffed tomatoes: tomat-tes gem-istes.
“I love the way,” he said, “they use the word ‘partheno’ in the phrase ‘virgin olive oil.’ ”
She read slowly: “Partheno elaiolado.”
“How beautiful is that? ‘Virgin olive oil’ just sounds silly.”
She said, “Let’s have a drink and toast to us.”
They made it Babatzim with anise.
“Slug it back,” he ordered.
It felt good on the throat.
“I don’t want to stay here forever,” she said when her head had cleared, “but then again, sometimes I want to stay here forever.”
“You don’t feel that everywhere.”
“You can say that again. It takes a special place to make you feel like that.”
“I feel it here from time to time. My parents don’t, I don’t think. They can’t wait to get back to the States now.”
“I think we should come back next year and not tell anyone.”
“Deal.”
They moved on to Manolis for dessert. It was just around the corner, and she loved the downstairs room with its dozens of pictures of ocean liners and schooners and old Greek frigates, if that was what they were called. They gorged on rice pudding and then sat at the two tables outside in the alley and drank ouzo. It was the most beautiful part of the summer. These lazy nights with Toby with no one to distract her, and the roiling tensions and dramas that Naomi’s presence seemed to create entirely absent. Even the “event,” as she called it to herself, had become abstract and unreal. Certainly, she was forcing herself to forget and erase it. But it was more than that. She was edging closer to the idea that—quite out of the blue—she had stumbled upon the boy she would eventually marry. This enormous event suddenly eclipsed the other one, and she felt superstitiously that one had led to the other. It was not fortuitous. And it was this idea that kept her sane. The idea, and the constant presence of the boy with the soft buzz cut.
She spent most nights at his house and her parents no longer seemed to mind. They had eventually asked about him and then invited him around for dinne
r. It had been a surprisingly relaxed affair on the terrace, and Toby had sagely groomed himself impeccably for the occasion, showing up in an oxford button-down and subtly stylish slip-ons. His family standing was thus discreetly advertised, though she was ashamed to admit that she noticed or even cared. He talked well through dinner, and he and her father got into some spirited and erudite exchanges in the finest WASP tradition. So much the better.
Mr. Haldane: “Of course, although Pinochet was a rat Chile’s economy also improved with the reformed pensions scheme. I won’t and can’t deny it. That’s the paradox.”
Toby: “So you credit the Chicago School with some successes?”
Mr. Haldane: “I’m ashamed to concede the point, but yes.”
And so on.
“How’s Princeton?” her father asked eventually. “Hated it there myself.”
“It’s fine for now,” came the suavely offhand reply. “I might go somewhere else for grad school, though. Maybe somewhere in Asia.”
“Oh?”
“I’m doing Japanese as a minor. It would be cool to spend a year or two over there.”
“A shame you can’t get your MA here on Hydra,” her mother said. “The beautiful places are always the most useless.”
Sam bit her tongue. Inadvertent profundity was always the worst kind, especially coming from her mother. Nevertheless, they drank a lot of coffee in a hot wind and it was glorious. Her father was intellectually revived and irritated, her mother gave her an approving eye that clearly referred to the young man, the bell from the little church up the road tolled, and they wondered who on earth went there at that time of the evening. The maid brought out a bottle of sweet liqueur of some kind and a companion bottle of Metaxas, and small thimble glasses were rapidly filled and emptied.
From time to time Sam’s thoughts wandered—out to sea, out into the winds where the other girl still existed. It was Toby who caught her eye moving outward and away from the faces around the table. He knew at once what it was, but he had enough discretion not to bring it up later. They played cards after the table had been cleared and, unsurprisingly, Toby turned out to be a good player, better than any of them. Her mother was extremely pleased. She asked him about his parents, their house in Hydra. Were they the usual bohemians (though she phrased it otherwise)?
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