The Honey Is Bitter

by Violet Winspear

  When the three young people paused some steps away from him, he dug a hand into his basket and brought it out with charms cupped in his large brown palm. He said something in Greek, and Nikos informed Domini that they were being invited to choose and buy a charm. He would tell their fortunes from the charms they chose.

  Kara couldn't resist the idea and she ran forward to take a look at the charms. She chose an anchor of brass and crossed the old man's palm with silver. She was anxious about something, he told her. She wished for stability and felt herself to be adrift; also the sea was in her blood, and one day she would cross it with a tall dark man who was not a stranger.

  "Can he mean Paul?" Kara said wonderingly, and Domini smiled a little at her innocence.

  "Now it is your turn, kyria." Nikos gave Domini a cheeky smile. "Find out what fate is in store for you."

  "No—" she stepped back reluctantly as the gipsy thrust out his charm-filled palm, his eyes fixed upon her face. .

  "Come, it is only a game," Nikos laughed. "A beauti­ful girl need not fear that fate is going to be unkind."

  Domini's heart was beating very fast. She knew it was silly of her not to want to join in the game, but the gipsy had said some curiously perceptive things about Kara. The girl was troubled by a sense of insecurity at the present time, and her feeling for Nikki went deeper than she suspected . . . Nikos, the tall dark man who was not a stranger.

  "Be a sport and take a charm, Domini," Kara coaxed.

  And almost blindly Domini delved into the out­stretched palm and took the first charm that her fingers touched ... a tiny female figure with long brass hair binding her body. Domini crossed the gipsy's palm with silver and felt the jetty scrutiny of his eyes. He spoke to her in Greek, but she couldn't understand him, and Nikos translated what he said to her.

  "Why," Nikos gave a laugh of frustration, "the old rogue says, kyria, that you know already what the charm signifies and he need not tell you. Do you know?"

  Domini was glad that the wide brim of her raffia hat shielded her eyes, for it had shaken her that she had chosen so significant a charm from the gipsy. She was bound and could not escape, and her fingers clenched over the charm as she said: "Come on, you two," and ran down some nearby steps to the seashore. There were several caiques drawn up on the sands and their shadows had hidden her before Kara, lingering with Nikos beside the gipsy, realised the direction she had taken. They turned back into the market-place thinking she had gone that way, and it was several minutes before Domini glanced over her shoulder and saw that she was walking alone on the seashore.

  She stood hesitant there at the water's edge, the sea breeze blowing against her face and neck. How cool and tangy those breezes, and how peaceful to be utterly alone for a few minutes. She was reluctant to turn back towards the noisy market area, and spotting a bollard lie made for it and rested there. She knew where Nikos' car was parked and she told herself she would make for it as soon as the sea air had driven away the slight ache at her temples.

  Domini drew off her raffia hat and let the breeze blow through her hair. There were only a few bare-footed fishermen mending nets on the shore, and a woman with hoisted black skirts was hunting for shellfish. It was a tranquil scene, with the varying blues of the sea as a background, and the distant mountains above the Balkans.

  Too tranquil these moments to last, and a chill feathered along Domini's neck and arms as a cloud rolled over the sun and the shore turned dull and grey. She picked up her raffia bag and rose from the bollard, She turned to go in search of Kara and Nikos . . . then backed away with a small startled cry as she found herself face to face with the person she had least expected to see this morning—Barry Sothern.

  They stood looking at each other, the rising wind ruffling the blond hair above Barry's slow-smiling eyes. Eyes that appraised the coming and going colour in Domini's cheeks. "I saw your honey hair blowing in the breeze, but I came warily in case my wishful thinking had made a Greek fishergirl look for all the world like Domini Dane."

  “Domini Stephanos," she reminded him.

  He shook his blond head and tossed the stub of his cigarette into a rockpool. "I know the girl I saw as I came down on the shore." He raised his eyes and took in the darkening sky. "We're in for a downpour from the look of those clouds. Look, Domini, my cottage isn't far from here—how about coming back for a drink?"

  "I don't think I ought to, Barry. Kara and Nikos will be waiting for me at the car—I came with them to have a look round the market and we got separated."

  "Will it matter if you stay separated another half hour?" He smiled down at her coaxingly. "Domini, you were always a little too dutiful. Do you remember how you used to worry about creeping out of school to meet me?"

  "I—don't want to talk about the old days." Her fin­gernails bit through the raffia rim of the hat she was holding. "It's been nice seeing you again, Barry—"

  "Here," he closed a restraining hand about her arm, "you aren't running away from me like that."

  "I must, Barry." She gazed up at him pleadingly. "Be a good boy and let me go."

  He broke into a grin that made him look as sardonic as Pan, the god of mischief. "I'm inviting you to my cot­tage for a drink, not to a pied-à-terre for some clandes­tine lovemaking—anyway, you don't have to tell anyone that you came with me."

  "Someone might see us," she hedged.

  "You could always say that you came to look at my paintings." His eyes were mocking her, and then he gave a gasping laugh and swept an arm around her as the clouds broke and the rain came pelting down.

  "Come on, run," he said, and there was no escaping him as he ran her across the sands, up some winding steps, and across rows of shiny wet cobbles to a lane where a whitewashed cottage was tucked away. She stood under the porch with her white dress clinging to her as he opened the door and hustled her along a pas­sage and into his sitting room. She took off her hat and gave it a shake, looking round her and smiling at the bachelor untidiness of the room. A divan heaped with Greek cushions, breakfast things still on the table, can­vases stacked against a wall, a profusion of pot plants on the wide sill of the small-paned window.

  "My studio is upstairs," Barry said, taking her raffia bag and her hat. "Your dress is wet, you ought to take it off and let it dry."

  She looked at him swiftly. "I'll get you a dressing-robe," he added mischievously.

  Domini felt her dress and found it pretty damp. "All right," she said, without looking at him.

  He went out of the room and a minute later tossed in to her a bold Paisley dressing-robe. "I'll make coffee while you're disrobing, Domini," she heard the smile in his voice. "Do you like Turkish coffee?"

  "Yes, please." She could smell English cigarette smoke on his robe, and as she tied the waist-cord and felt the silk against her bare arms and shoulders, she gave a little shiver of stolen pleasure at being here in Barry's cottage . . . where, as lightning clashed like crossed rapiers in the sky, it looked as though she was going to be marooned for an hour or more. During that time Kara and Nikos would be bound to give up their search for her and return home . . . she didn't dare to think what Paul would assume.

  She arranged her dress over the back of a chair to dry, then carried Barry's breakfast tray out to the kitchen. "Haven't you a housekeeper?" she asked.

  "I need the freedom of living in a muddle," he said lazily. He was at the stove brewing their coffee, and his wet hair looked as though it had been combed with his fingers. The tousled look made him very endearing, and the years fell away as Domini gazed at him in his paint­-splashed cords and striped T-shirt.

  "You should always wear a masculine robe that's miles too big for you." He took her in from head to toe. "You look cuddly and rather helpless."

  Domini scraped eggshells into the bin under the sink and when she straightened up her cheeks were faintly pink. "I hope you're going to show me some of your Greek paintings now I'm here," she said.

  "Warning me to behave myself?" He came over
and stood looking down at her as she started to wash up his breakfast things. "What are we going to do about us, Domini?" he murmured.

  "Look at your paintings and drink Turkish coffee." She scraped busily at a blob of yolk on the side of an eggcup.

  '"And pretend we're mere acquaintances?" He in­sinuated a hand up the wide sleeve of his robe. "It won't work, darling. We belong together, you and I. Circumstances tried to part us, but we met again on this faraway Greek island, a sure indication that it isn't just a legend that an unbreakable cord of love binds some people together from birth. Inevitably, over the years, it tightens to draw them together and nothing, not time, distance, or anyone can keep them from finding unity."

  She glanced up at him, her every instinct in accord with what he said. Love didn't just happen. A mystic force did work to draw two people together, so closely that nothing, not even death could ever part them again.

  "What about Paul?" she asked quietly. "You seem to be forgetting him."

  "There is a way of forgetting him." Barry took her by the shoulders and his eyes were a dark serious brown as he gazed down at her. "Domini, we could go away together."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  "DO you hear me, Domini?" Barry's hands tightened on her shoulders. "We'll run away together, and Stephanos will quietly divorce you—"

  "He wouldn't." Domini shook her head, knowing too well the ruthless side to Paul. "He would never make it possible for us to be happy together, Barry."

  "Would you find it so hard to be happy without the legalities, honey?" Barry started to draw her against him, but she pressed her hands to his chest and held off from his embrace.

  "If you snatch at what you want, Barry, it doesn't bring happiness," she said with conviction. "I've already tasted the bitterness of that ... I know all about the distrust that can haunt two people who aren't sure of each other. We would never know the security and peace of a true marriage. Never feel sure of each other, knowing that I belong in every legal sense to another man."

  "You don't love him, Domini." Barry's eyes were storm-dark under his fair, tousled hair. "I know full well he forced you to marry him—he's that sort. This island abounds with tales about the Stephanos clan and how ruthlessly they fought in the rebellion. The islanders still boast about Paul's fierceness as a sixteen-year-old andarte and how he crawled yards, still tossing grenades after having taken one almost in his face. From all accounts he should have died from that wound. There's more than a hint of superstition attached to the fact that he recovered from something that would have killed a normal man."

  Domini thought of the jagged scar that marred Paul's temple, and the headaches from which he still suffered after all these years, and she felt an urge to defend him. He was Greek to his bones, he loved fiercely the land for which he would have died, a mere boy.

  "The coffee's bubbling over," she said.

  "Darn the coffee—!"

  "Please," she broke free of Barry, crossed the room and took the pot off the stove. "You carry in the cups and we'll have our coffee in your sitting-room," she added.

  They shared a long silence as they sat in the other room, listening to the rain and watching the lightning dispel the shadows for fleeting seconds. "I should never have done it, should I, Domini," Barry spoke raggedly, "left you in England when I loved you—when I knew you loved me. God, what makes us do the things we do, the misguided, driven things that mess up our lives?"

  "You were ambitious, and we were both very young." Domini met the regret of Barry's eyes. "Did we really believe that we would meet again, or did we share a dream that we didn't really wish to put to the test of reality?"

  "Believing that, Domini, won't absolve us from the regret we're now feeling," he said moodily. "I was a fool, the biggest. You were always too lovely to have escaped the eye of other men, but I went away as though I left you an enchanted schoolgirl sitting on the keel of a boat with your honey hair blowing in the sea breezes there to stay until I returned to kiss you awake. It drags out my heart that it was Paul Stephanos who did that." Barry stared at her. "How did you meet? You haven't told me."

  Domini explained that her cousin had worked in a shipping-line office of Paul's, and that their eventual meeting had been inevitable.

  "Was there a family reason for your marriage?" The question jumped at her, and she flinched as though at a flash of lightning. "What a Victorian question, Barry!" She gave a laugh that cost her a lot. "Girls these days aren't coerced into marriage by their families."

  "You admitted last night that someone else was in­volved." He leaned forward on the hassock on which he was sitting. "You said it was a man—was it Douglas?"

  Her heart took a leap into her throat. Barry had grown shrewd. The boy on the beach was lost in the man who had become a painter of some renown. Sud­denly she was afraid of him, aware of being far more vulnerable as the disillusioned wife of another man than she had been as a romantic girl of seventeen.

  And as though he read her mind, he said: "You look about seventeen at the moment, lost in my robe with your hair all tousled. Wouldn't do," a wicked glint came into his eyes, "for that husband of yours to walk in on us right now. He'd break my neck, eh?"

  Instinctively her gaze went to the door, and she heard Barry laugh in his throat, then felt his hand take hold of her left one. When she looked at him he was examining the wide gold band that was the symbol of Paul's ownership, and the sapphire, enclosed in twin swirls of diamonds afire with all that passion that Paul had a legal right to feel.

  His fingers tightened and the ring seemed to bite her to the bone. Their eyes locked, then he was kneeling by her chair and holding her, and after the first straggling moment she couldn't deny herself the comfort of pres­sing her face to his shoulder and breathing the smoke of English cigarettes that clung to him. She closed her eyes and pretended she was seventeen again and that the sound of the rain was the sound of the sea, lapping the beach at Knightley.

  "We'll find a way to be together," Barry murmured. "You shan't stay with Stephanos against your will."

  Domini heard him, and yet she wasn't really listening, for over his shoulder her gaze had been caught by a canvas hanging against the whitewashed wall. It was a beach after being racked by storm, the water seemed to heave in the aftermath of distress and there were rocks like the broken remnants of a fallen castle. Seaweed was strewn across the sands, taking the shape of arms with all emotion wrung out of them. A strange blue light shifted over the scene, and a tiny ray led the eye up­wards, through the clouds to where a patch of brightness gleamed in the sky.

  Art in all its forms, Domini knew, was a representa­tion of all human conflict, and she felt that impact of Barry's painting right through her being. Saw in it her own clamour of the heart, her yearning for the happi­ness that might be clutched at, won back, coaxed into more than a fitful ray.

  "When did you paint that beach scene, Barry?" she asked. "That one over there, on the wall by the window."

  He sat back on his heels and glanced over his shoulder at the painting. "I got the idea soon after we parted at Knightley. It's funny," his eyes came back to her face, "I've had several big offers for it, but I can't sell it. In some ways it's cruder than what I'm doing now, but it has something—depth, a sort of agony."

  "It has," she said quietly, "what has to be faced be­tween us, Barry—your painting takes first place in your life. It did when we met, and over the years we were apart. It does now, and in your heart you know it."

  "Yes, I know my painting's important to me," he admitted. "But so are you, Domini. I want you."

  She gave a little shiver, for Paul had said the same thing. I want you. She looked at Barry and she had to put to the test the love he had talked about. "Can't we just be friends?" she asked.

  He knelt on the Greek rug looking up at her, at the pale honey smoothness of her skin, the blue eyes set with a jewel-like precision under the fine eyebrows that were several shades darker than her honey-coloured hair. His glance dropped t
o her mouth with its sensitive upper lip and tempestuous lower one. His own mouth twisted savagely. "You're asking a lot, aren't you, Domini?" he said. "You're not the kind of a girl a man wants just for a friend—hasn't living with Paul Stephanos taught you what men want of you?"

  She had invited the truth, but still it hurt that he should say it outright. She got to her feet and went over to the window. The rain had long since lost its fury and the sky had cleared a little. The thunder had died away.

  "I'd better be making a move," she said. "Paul will come looking for me otherwise."

  Barry came behind her and swung her to face him. A nerve was kicking in his jaw. "What do you want, Domini, a boy-girl relationship such as we had at Knightley? Well, it just isn't possible. You must either go away with me on my terms, or stay with Stephanos on his."

  "I know." She spoke quietly. "I can't dictate the terms because I don't mean enough to either of you."

  "Domini!"

  "It's true, Barry." Her eyes were steady on his face. "I'd like to change into my dress now, and comb my hair. May I use your bedroom?"

  "Of course." He went over to the door and held it open, and as she passed him with her dress over her arm, she felt him looking at her with angry bewilder­ment. He directed her up a narrow winding stairway to his room, and she went in, closed the door behind her and proceeded to tidy herself up.

  She felt curiously empty of emotion as she combed her hair in front of a mirror on the chest of drawers. There were studs and a pair of hairbrushes lying here, also a box of sugared almonds and a piece of amethyst crystal he had probably picked up on the beach. She was applying a dab of lipstick when she heard footfalls on the cobbles under the window, and the gay drawl of American voices answered by a throaty laugh.