He had been sitting in profile, now he turned to look at her. "How can you tell?" he asked, sounding faintly amused.
"By your eyes—when I can see them. And your build."
"My grandmother was English." He broke into a smile that showed his firm white teeth. "What has my build to do with my not being a hundred per cent Greek? Were not the ancient Greeks tall men?"
"Apollo must have been very tall," she smiled, then glanced down and filtered sand through her fingers. "Is that why you chose to marry an Englishwoman, because of your grandmother?"
"Not entirely." His fingers found hers in the sand. "British women have a certain magic, a cool, and tantalising quality."
"You mean we don't put everything in the shop window," she half laughed.
"Just so," he smiled. "Always a man can expect the unexpected from them."
"Have you known many of my countrywomen, Paul?"
"Do I detect a certain jealousy?" he mocked.
“No ..." Then she gave a nervous laugh as his fingers gripped hers. She couldn't escape them and was drawn close against his chest. "You barbarian!" She hid her face against him, scorched by shyness of the feelings aroused in her as she felt and breathed the maleness of him.
"Ultra-civilised people are not very real, my Sabine." He spoke in her hair. "Do I still frighten you? Am I so sinister, scar and all, after last night? Come, you were not frightened when I held you so close and our hearts beat as one."
I—can't talk about it," she said in a shy, muffled voice. "I have no Greek in me."
Not even in your heart?" She felt his chest lift under her burning cheek, then the half smoked cheroot was flicked from his fingers and as both his arms came round her she went boneless. It was both an alarming and an exciting sensation, but this time when he kissed her, he seemed to be laying claim to her. And as her soft mouth suffered the aggression of his, she felt she would never understand him, or the forces that drove him.
What was it he wanted? Her love? But how could she tell him she loved him, when she didn't know herself what she really felt for him?
They went home to the villa in the fading sunshine, and as they entered the hall their eyes fell simultaneously on a yellow envelope on the letter salver beside the telephone.
It was a telegram. It was for Domini, and she opened the envelope with fingers that were suddenly nerveless. Paul watched her as she read the telegram, his face an impassive mask when at last she glanced up at him. She looked him over from head to foot, and it was as though she had been asleep and dreaming for the past eighteen hours. Now she was awake again. Awake to the hate that had only slumbered in her for a while.
“It is from your uncle, of course?” Paul spoke almost casually.
She handed the telegram to him, without speaking. It read: “Know about cheques from Doug. Phoned Paul last night. Darling, come home!”
“So my uncle phoned here last night?” Domini said coldly.
“That is so, my dear.” He folded the telegram with fingers that were utterly steady.
“And knowing Doug had told his father about what he had done, you deliberately came to me and—and—“
“Not deliberately, Domini—and I don’t think we will stand shouting at one another in the hall.” He forcibly took her wrist and made her go with him into the lounge. There he closed the door and stood with his back against it.
“I came to you last night,” he said quietly, “because you cried out in you sleep and I was anxious about you. I kissed you, but if you had repulsed me, just once, I should have returned to my own room. You did not repulse me, so I made love to you. Call me all the names you want to. Say, even, that I took advantage of you, but that will not alter the fact that you forgot to hate me last night, and that you have been sweet to me today.”
“Ah, yes,” he shrugged in that foreign way of his, “It was a stolen sweetness, but I would not have stolen it if you had not let me.”
“Really?” She laughed, quite humourlessly, and his dark power and grace held no more enchantment for her. “You meant all along to enjoy your new toy—you new possession. You said so in this very room last night. I was to abide by my marriage vows, willingly or the other way, therefore it must have given you a lot of satisfaction, Paul, to have got what you wanted without a struggle. No wonder,” her breath caught in her throat, “no wonder you laughed to yourself when I asked if I could go to sleep in your arms.”
“Domini, no—“
“Don’t touch me!” She took a sharp step back from him as he moved. “Don’t touch me again today or I shall be ill. Ill from my own sentimental stupidity. Ill from my own fantastic notion that you might, after all, be a man I could grow fond of. All day you must have been laughing at me! When you tore up those cheques, with the venom already extracted from them. When I let you kiss me in the sands of that cove. Well, if it’s just the shape of me that you want, then you’re welcome to what you bought. But all the money in the world won’t buy my trust, or my love, and a wife without them is pretty cold comfort, Paul.”
“Keep your love.” His face was a taut sculpture, chiseled out of stone—as she felt certain his heart was. “Did I ever ask for it?”
“No, not in words,” she threw at him. “But you’re not quite so inhuman as to enjoy for very long the companionship of a wife who hates you. How could you dare, Paul, to take from me the freedom to choose Fairdane or Andelos?”
“It is in a Greek to dare the Fates themselves,” he said cynically.
“The Fates!” she gasped, and thought wildly of her own strange conviction of that morning, when he had kissed her. But that was just superstitious nonsense! It would be his own conscience that would punish him for cheating her out of that telephone talk with her uncle.
“If I had let you speak to Martin Dane last night, you would have left me,” Paul said, biting out the words. "Andelos would not have been your choice. You would have run home to Fairdane, and the old-fashioned charm and courtesy of your good uncle. Is that all you asked of life, to be a maid of all work in a house that is mortgaged to its gables?"
"Fairdane was my home," she said coldly. "I loved every brick of it. I can't promise to feel the same about your house on the eagle's crag."
"But all the same you will live there with me?"
"I made a promise." She thrust up her firm chin. "I don't go back on my promises."
"Thank you, Domini," he said.
"Don't thank me, Paul." Her eyes were a frozen blue as they dwelt upon his dark face. "You might live to regret that you ever came to Fairdane and met me"
Tiredly, then, she brushed past him, pulled open the door and crossed the hall to the stairs. As she mounted them she had to hold on to the banister rail, for suddenly her legs felt weak and shaky. She was glad when she reached her room, where she fell across the bed and pressed her face to the cold silk of the cover.
She couldn't weep. Tears had set like ice in her, and the sweetness of today had turned to bitterness. The rings on her slim hands felt heavy. Manacles, she told herself. Shackles that bound her to a man without a heart. A man who had forced her into a loveless disaster of a marriage.
He had talked himself about the flaw in the fabric of their relationship. He had said that the first touch of disaster would rend it and ruin it. He had known she would never forgive him for deceiving her, for making a mockery of her trusting surrender last night. A shudder ran through her as she remembered the words she had whispered.
"Keep your arms around me, Paul. Let me fall asleep in them."
CHAPTER FOUR
NO matter how strong was Domini's desire to shut herself in her room and not have to see Paul, ever again, she found herself automatically dressing for dinner when the time came. Domini was very British. She couldn’t crawl away into a dark corner and hide herself because she had been wounded. She had to put on a face to tackle her enemy with the remnants of pride and courage he had left her.
Paul, watching her unobtrusively across the dinin
g-table, was aware that there had never been so wide a gulf between them. She was polite. She listened, and answered him, as he told her about the various cruising ships which his company owned. She even managed to smile a little at some of his amusing anecdotes about passengers.
That stark and hurtful scene in the lounge might never have taken place — but for the dark pain he glimpsed in her blue eyes now and again.
After dinner they went to the lounge, where Paul had set up a film projector and a screen. He entertained her by showing a selection of travel films he had made himself, a hobby of his. They were full of lovely views, but there wasn't a shot that showed him with a party of friends, or even one female companion. When he finally switched off the projector and turned on a lamp, Domini said to him: "Do you always go around on own when you're on holiday?"
He poured out sherry and smiled a little as he handed one of the fluted glasses. "I like—as you English would put it—to mooch about on my own. It is a harmless eccentricity, no? Anyway, I always take Yannis along for company, and because I am too lazy to keep my own clothes in order."
She studied him under her lashes, coolly, impersonally, and she told herself that a man with his looks had not always spent his evenings alone even if he spent his days alone. There must have been other women in his life; women who had felt his magnetism and been challenged to try to tame him. But there was no taming such as he!
"Tell me about Greece," she said on impulse. While he talked she could forget her painful thoughts for a while.
"Stin iyia sou." He raised his wine glass to her, and lay back in his chair with the lamp slanting its ruby-shaded shadows over the forceful moulding of his profile. "Greece is a land of contrasts. Of sunshine laced with shadow; of hospitality and vengeance. Some parts are barren, others are rich with the wild grape and the fig, the olive and pine tree. Ah, the pines! They fill the dusk with then resinous scent, and at dusk the sea is like a cup of wine."
He fell silent and his tawny eyes brooded on the fire. "Greece is a land to be loved or hated, like its people. The old legends are alive still in its ruins, and to see the city of Athens now makes it hard to believe that not many years ago it was torn by forces very horrible. Brother fought against brother, and later many of our children were herded like small cattle across the cold mountains into Albania and other hostile countries. You were but a baby, Domini, when all that occurred."
"You could not have been so very old yourself, Paul." She spoke gently because she knew he loved Greece.
"I was old enough—to see much," he said, and his smile was dry—dry and sad in the way of autumn leaves when they fall from the trees to die on the ground. "Domini, I am not speaking like this in order to gain your sympathy."
Of course not," she said. "It isn't sympathy you want from me, is it, Paul?"
A smile contorted briefly the compression of his lips. “I wonder if you believe in affinities," he said. "It could have been inevitable that we meet—for better or worse. What do you think?"
"I think the hidden powers are not always kind," she replied.
And now conversation became desultory between them. The pauses spacing their short remarks were growing longer, and each movement in the room was beginning to create a growing restlessness in both of them. When the wood shifted in the fireplace, scattering its sparks, their eyes sought the movement in unison. When the curtains stirred in one of those queer draughts that seem to invade a room when the fire burns low, their eyes again found the movement.
Domini clenched her hands together in her lap. Soon they must rise from their chairs, leave the room and go upstairs. They could not remain here indefinitely. The room itself, grown tired of human habitation, was willing them to go.
Then all at once the clock began to chime. It was midnight, and Paul got abruptly to his feet and Domini saw the sudden harshness of his face as he exclaimed: “Go upstairs, for the love of God! I am not going to touch you. I know you are shrinking from the very sight of me."
She rose to her feet and set aside her sherry glass. Her face was without expression. "Goodnight, Paul.” The words were almost inaudible.
"Kalé nichta!"
She walked out of the room, slim in her blue jersey dress, dragging her feet a little like a tired child. As Paul watched her go, and the door closed on her, his fingers slowly clenched on the stem of his wine glass. There was a small, sharp click as the stem snapped and the dregs of the wine spilled over his hand.
It very much later when Domini heard him enter the adjoining room. She lay tense and she thought: "I mustn't cry out tonight ... if I sleep." But in the end, worn out by her own torn emotions, she slept deeply, exhaustedly, until she was awoken by Lita with her morning tea.
They were leaving here at eight-thirty, but Domini just had to speak to her uncle on the phone before they left. A talk with him yesterday had been impossible. She had felt too upset to be able to speak composedly to Uncle Martin, but this morning a certain measure of calm was hers and she felt certain she could sound convincing when she told her uncle that she was looking forward to seeing the island where her husband had been born, and where they were going to live.
Paul was in the lounge checking over the luggage with Yannis when she dialled the number that would connect her with her girlhood home. She wanted desperately to assure Uncle Martin that there was no need for him to worry any more that Douglas would be prosecuted for the foolhardy thing he had done. She prayed silently that she would convince her guardian that she was happy married to Paul Stephanos.
Her husband came out of the lounge as she waited for the operator to connect her with Fairdane, and she watched his tall, dark-clad figure go up the stairs and along the landing to the lilac suite. He was leaving her to speak in privacy, but she felt no sense of gratitude. He could be magnanimous because he had got his own way, and that was all there was to it . . . "Uncle Martin?" The warmth flowed back into her voice. "How are you, dear?"
Domini and her uncle talked for fifteen minutes. He was not to worry about Doug, she said firmly. Everything was all right now, and she was sure he would steer clear of the gaming tables after—well, tangling with Paul—yes, Paul could be intimidating—no, of course he didn't intimidate her. What an idea!
She gave a laugh, and went on to say quickly that she had seen some home movies depicting Greece and it certainly looked an interesting and ruggedly beautiful country.
“I shall miss you, Domini." There was a gruff, moved note in her uncle's voice. "Are you sure—you're happy with Paul?"
She stared blindly at the wall above the telephone table, and fought not to give way to her fear of the life that lay ahead of her with a man who did not love her.
“He can be kind," she assured her uncle. "And he's a strangely lonely man ..."
Paul, at that moment, was coming down the stairs, She saw from his face that the time had come for her to say goodbye to her uncle. Now a huskiness in her voice would not sound alarming to him, for there was no keeping back the tears any longer.
“Goodbye . . . goodbye . . . I'll write as soon as we arrive in Athens." The words echoed in her mind as she went out to the taxi with Lita and Yannis. A minute later, after locking up the villa, Paul joined them, the door of the taxi slammed and they were on their way to the airport. They were flying from a West Coast airport to Paris. In Paris they would board a jet bound for Athens.
After the confusion of their arrival at Athens airport, they drove in a cab to the Hellenic Hotel, classic as any temple, with a terrace restaurant, a pavilion for dancing, and where from the windows of their suite the Acropolis could be seen by starlight, and dawnlight. At both these times, Paul added, something of its legendary beauty could be seen again.
Yannis and his wife had been released from their duties so they could take a holiday; they were to go across to the island of Andelos in three weeks' time, a week before Paul and his bride were due to arrive there.
Domini felt nervous about being alone with Paul—a strange
r's bride in a strange land—but it could not be avoided and she had to get used to him sooner or later.
She was tired after their long journey, so they ate in the sitting-room of their suite that evening and when Paul wished her kalé nichta, he bent his dark head and brushed a kiss across her cheek. Half a medal for being a good sport, she told herself, but much as she tried she couldn't keep her body from tautening at his touch. At once he turned away from her, looking impassive.
The Greek sun fairly leapt through her bedroom windows the following morning, waking her up with its brash golden stare.
They breakfasted on fruit juice, creamy butter and honey, and crisp rolls with sesame seeds scattered on their tops. Afterwards they ate amber-coloured figs with juicy purple centres, and drank Greek coffee. "Delicious," Domini murmured, and her eyes dwelt with pleasure on the lemon-flowers meshed in shiny leaves that cloaked their balcony.
"Don't drink your coffee to the dregs," Paul warned.
She nodded and toyed with the little cup. The dregs would be bitter, she knew, like so many things that seemed sweet at the time and yet left an aftermath that was embittering.
"What shall we do this morning?" he asked, leaning back in his cane chair to light a cigarette. Domini had shaken her head at his proffered case, but she couldn't avoid looking at him. His hair had a raven crispness under the sun; he wore a short-sleeved sports shirt and narrow slacks; and cigarette smoke wafted past his smoky-gold eyes so that they narrowed and had a tiger gleam.
"Some sightseeing would be nice," she said.
"Then I shall take you to the Plaka, the old part of Athens." His teeth showed white in a quick smile. Wear sandals, for the paving stones are old and uneven. After a look round the shops, perhaps you would like to see the Acropolis?"
"Very much," she assured him, and saw a small Greek medal glitter in the opening of his shirt as he leant forward to tip ash off his cigarette. The medal against his chest stabbed her to a memory she "was trying hard to forget . . . the feel of it against her in the darkness in the warmth of his arms . . .
The Honey Is Bitter Page 4
