‘Snivelling malingerers. Never known a day’s hard work . . .’
‘. . . so to avoid the press he arrives at his own wedding ceremony in the back of a butcher’s van . . .’
‘ . . . A toast to the gods of rashness and misadventure . . . May they keep us and inspire us . . .!’
‘ . . . it’s a form of courage, you see, refusing to give in, no matter what the critics say . . .’
She tried to catch Adie’s eye, but he was never looking her way.
The Greek biologist on her right had a sweet manner and a wild mane of dry brown hair. The playwright to her left was prickly. He did not venture his name. Conversation with both was easy in that a few quiet questions set each off on his pet topic.
‘ . . . when the little bastard gave me a second bad review all it made me think was, what would really ruin his day . . .? Well, it’s the prospect of me writing more, and making a lot more than he does, living in his crummy Brooklyn penthouse not an original thought between his ears, the little shite . . .
‘Have you met Veronica?’ the playwright broke off to demand, nodding at someone over her shoulder.
Elizabeth turned.
An attractive but pursed-lipped woman was now standing behind her chair. A hard, assessing gaze was embedded in her bony face. She held out a hand which slithered briefly past Elizabeth’s. In her very early middle age, she had smooth, expensively maintained skin, but with deep lines cutting from nose to mouth and between the shaped, lined brows where she frowned. She was dressed in a neat pink suit, and a girlish scarf tied as a headband over stiff controlled brown curls,
‘Are you one of his daughter’s friends?’ The emphasis was unmistakeably rude and she was addressing Elizabeth.
‘Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I thought as much.’
Veronica signalled to a waiter to squeeze a chair into the confined space between Elizabeth and the playwright, and wiggled in. A drink was brought for her. It looked like whisky.
Veronica drank deeply, and flicked a glance up the table where Adie was deep in conversation with the woman to his side, managing to make it seem as if she were the only person worth talking to in the room. Elizabeth wondered whether she might not be the only one feeling she had been brought here under false pretences.
Not that it should matter to me, thought Elizabeth. I don’t even know the man. But all the same it was disconcerting, realising she was disappointed. Her attempts at conversation with the American woman kept stuttering and failing, mainly because the latter’s efforts to keep tabs on Adie were becoming less and less discreet. At one point her glance became a loaded stare. She speared a piece of pepper delicately, allowed it to dangle in a greasy yellow ribbon from her fork, contemplated it with disdain and slight puzzlement, then put it down again untouched. Then she laughed in the back of her throat.
‘Word of advice, never believe a word men say. That’s the best way.’ A crack in her voice hinted at an over-emotional state of mind. But there was an abrasiveness about her that precluded any empathy. ‘I learned that from my second husband.’
Elizabeth said nothing.
‘Divorced now,’ she continued bitterly. ‘That’s the best way too.’
It was impossible to ignore the woman’s compulsion to observe Julian Adie. To Elizabeth it was unseemly, obscene almost, to be that obvious.
‘Are you and Julian . . . together?’ she asked boldly.
Veronica crinkled her nose. ‘Does it look like we are?’
‘I . . . well, no . . .’ Elizabeth was stumped again.
Noise levels rose. Always among the top notes was Adie’s staccato laugh. His stories inflated into theatrical performances. At one point he got up on his chair to demonstrate the agonising plight of an opera singer with piles and a top C to hit. She was just part of the audience.
He was really something, thought Elizabeth. It was fascinating to see him in action. He dominated the table, even when he was listening rather than speaking. His effervescence was tangible, like a fizzy drink. There was such abandon in his amusement. She had never been this close to anyone like him. The evening was hardly what she’d expected, but that was all right. She was glad she had met him and had the conversation with him at Clive and Mary’s party – it would be a story to tell one day.
‘You heard what happened to his wife?’ Veronica interrupted her thoughts. The harshness in her voice made Elizabeth wonder if it hurt her throat to speak like that.
‘Only that she died.’
‘He once said she was the only one who could keep up with him. She was such a tiny woman, but she would match him drink for drink. They drank when they were happy and when they were sad. They’d drink brandy together at breakfast and not stop at one.’
The woman leaned in and Elizabeth could smell the fumes on her breath.
‘Simone would keep pace with him. Smoking, drinking, fighting, shouting. He threw a plate, she’d throw one back. He thought that was wonderful. Anyone who met them wondered how she could do it. And it seems she couldn’t. She got sick at Christmas. They thought she had pleurisy. But by the New Year she was dead. A tumour in one lung and another in the liver. Completely inoperable.’
Veronica nodded as if Elizabeth was doubting her.
‘Poor woman,’ she murmured.
Poor Julian, too. It was hard to reconcile the show he was giving with the shock of losing his wife like that. But who was to say that there were inappropriate ways of dealing with devastation? Elizabeth was uncomfortable discussing either of them at his table. She tried to change the subject but Veronica was oblivious.
‘She was tough, though – make no mistake. She left her husband for him. She persuaded him to move to France and went out to work as a secretary so that he could write all day. She wanted him and nothing was going to stop her.’
Veronica’s attitude was a strange cocktail of admiration and anger. She was drinking rapidly. She could have been trying to emulate Simone. Her words slurred into a hiss: ‘He must have been worth it.’
Hours later, Julian was still going strong. He had barely glanced in her direction. Elizabeth slipped out. She could not get round the table to where Adie was sitting with his back to the mirrored wall, and she could not catch his eye, so she raised her hand to say thanks and goodnight. No one noticed.
Just as he said he would be, Clive was waiting for her at the Hellenic Club.
‘Thank you,’ she said, meaning for all his many kindnesses, not just that night.
He put down the glass of brandy she knew he would have nursed for hours.
‘How was it?’
‘Interesting. I’m glad I went.’
Perhaps it was the defiance with which the words came out that ensured Clive asked no more. She sat back in the passenger seat of the car. The scene in the restaurant played in her head all through the dark cinema of the drive back to Kouloura.
III
‘YOU IGNORED ME!’
Elizabeth gasped at the injustice. ‘What?’
Fat droplets of water rolled out of her hair and down her arms. Still out of breath after her swim off the rocky beach, and the climb up the path, she stopped abruptly and took in the group sitting under the idleness tree: Clive and Mary, a man she did not recognise, and Julian Adie, who had more accusations to fling.
‘Never even said goodnight!’
From the soft shade, they all stared at her, exposed in her bikini in the fierce afternoon sun.
‘I’m sorry, I—’
But he was grinning at her.
‘Here’s a wrap for you, dear,’ said Mary pointedly, tossing a gauzy garment from the back of a chair. ‘Cup of tea?’
Elizabeth accepted both.
She turned to Adie, uncertain what she was expected to say, but he got in first.
‘Actually, I’ve come to apologise to you.’
‘Oh?’ She was conscious that everyone else was listening. ‘There’s no need . . .’
‘On the
contrary. Last night – I simply had no idea until it was too late that my brother and assorted company would take upon themselves to follow me to my favourite restaurant and take over the entire event, completely unbidden, and scooping up undesirables on the way . . . It was appalling, quite appalling. And then I looked up and you had gone – and quite rightly too.’
‘Well, I—’
‘You will give me another chance, won’t you?’
‘Another chance?’
Elizabeth did not know what to say. She was not aware that a previous chance had existed.
‘You are awfully pretty, and very intelligent too. You might take pity on me.’
He seemed oblivious to the fact that they were not alone. ‘Besides, I have a very strong feeling that we could be soul-mates.’ His astonishingly blue eyes twinkled, but there was indelible sadness under the charm. ‘And I always act on my instincts.’
Elizabeth just caught sight of Mary raising her eyes to heaven.
Early the next morning, she went out with him in a borrowed sailing boat. At the helm of the sloop, he was a different man. Gone was the cocksure repartee, and in its place a seriousness she could relate to.
Out on the wide blue strait, he followed the coast round to the north of the island, past Kassiope, skimming past scrubby headlands and shallow deserted bays of clear green, towards the great brown-bear mountains of Albania lumbering ahead to the east. The wind in her hair, she sat in the prow, exhilarated by the movement and the spray. Her nervousness at being in his company lasted no longer than getting used to the movement of the boat.
At noon they anchored at a wide sandy beach and walked inland to a lake surrounded by white flowers.
Julian stood still for some time, hands on hips, surveying the roll of the hills and the patterns etched by the sun and breeze on the water. ‘It hasn’t changed,’ he said at last.
‘Is this somewhere you used to know well?’ she asked.
‘Several lifetimes ago,’ he said.
For once he was still. The extraordinary stinging blue of his eyes rarely fell away from hers when he talked.
‘But the trouble with coming back to somewhere like this,’ he went on, ‘is that it’s always the same.’
‘Isn’t that good?’
‘It makes you realise how much you’ve changed. Where is that other person who used to exist? Drugged on lily scent – embalmed, perhaps . . .’
He unpacked wine and food. They sat and drank. It was odd, she thought, she didn’t feel a moment of nervousness in his company. The indefinable warmth she had felt in his presence that night at the party was stronger than ever. He asked all kinds of questions in the direct way he had, and she found herself telling him easily about David, the son of family friends in the village where her parents lived in Suffolk. A handsome boy – she still thought of him as a boy – who was kind and in love with her. How he had waited for her to finish her studies. And how she knew, little by little, that when she graduated from the Byam Shaw, she would not be able to marry him after all, as both families had determined.
How she liked David, but liking was not enough. There was something missing, she confided (faintly astonished to be giving the thoughts form in words that she was speaking aloud), some vital spark that had never quite ignited for her. Of course she regretted the hurt she had caused, the embarrassment to their parents in the village, the wasted expense and the non-returnable deposits, the booked church and London hotel for the reception, but surely it was better, less hurtful, to stop it all before rather than six weeks after the ceremony.
‘We should have been coming back from our honeymoon about now. . . .’
Julian laughed. ‘I’ve always taken the opposite view. Never shirked a wedding – but then paid the price!’
They sat in silence.
‘There was a baby. I had an abortion,’ said Elizabeth.
The sand was hot under their bare legs. Warm breaths of wind played in the air between them.
‘I know how it feels, to lose a child,’ he murmured.
She had to lean in closer to hear.
His powerful shoulder muscles clenched as he turned to face the sea. The handsome tanned features crinkled in the searing brightness. ‘First my Greek daughter, then my Egyptian child.’
‘Tell me,’ said Elizabeth.
So he did.
He told her how he had arrived in Egypt heartsick and battered, watching the coastline emerge through a cold white dawn from the deck of an Australian transport ship that limped into the Western Harbour at Alexandria. Harried through the darkness by the Luftwaffe, the crossing from Crete had been a violent plunge south for survival.
Other less fortunate vessels lay ripped open inside the arms of the docks. The stench of spilled oil, its viscous blackness slicking the still water, permeated every pore.
As the sun rose hot and oppressive, he was directed to an army truck bound for a transit camp. The green flats and reeds of Lake Mareotis were the last landmarks before the desert road struck out into flat nothingness.
‘I had lost a wife, a daughter, and my island.’
‘Lost?’ It was an involuntary interruption of the urgent fluency of his story, but she had been puzzling since the first time he said it. Did he mean they had died?
‘She left me, taking the baby. She went back to the bleak homeland.’
Still staring out at the horizon he paused, then exhaled. His voice was so soft, the rhythm so lulling, the words seemed to float on the warm air.
‘But then I met Loula and I knew there was no going back for me.’
Elizabeth held her breath, willing him to go on, to confide more. He poured more wine then settled back. A light breeze caught the opening of his white cotton shirt and he visibly relaxed.
‘I was at the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo. A press gathering. She stood a little apart from the crowd, so proud and silent. Loula Habib, they told me when I asked who she was.
‘I was hooked straight away. This was no English rose; this was another species of woman, with soft cinnamon breath, skin of golden silk and claws that cut deep. She was wearing a dress of tight scarlet silk, with a darn under the arm.
‘The second time I saw her it was at a party where a woman fainted. Loula brought her round so calmly and capably, yet her hands trembled afterwards. I was drawn to her like a magnet.’
Loula was twenty-two years old, estranged from her middle-class parents in Alexandria, and working as a nurse. Her father, a banker, was part Syrian, part French and Spanish, with a strong dash of Jewish blood; her mother was French Alexandrian with Lebanese.
‘She had such a strong beautiful face – lotus-petal cheeks, dark burning eyes. Neither of us had any money. The scratching of beetles wore away at the nights in her bed-sitting room. But the way she held her head proudly away from the stench of the drains and squeals from the abattoir a street away . . .
‘Then I was seconded to Alexandria to work at the British Information Office and Loula went with me. We took rooms in a Jewish philanthropist’s mansion in the Moharrem Bey area.
‘At the top of the house, there was a tower rising two storeys from the roof, high above the garden full of banyan trees and ginger lilies and snakes, and a view of Lake Mareotis to one side and the pockmarked shaft of Pompey’s Pillar to the other. At last it was peaceful enough to start writing again.
‘I picked away at a borrowed typewriter, my mind elsewhere.’
‘Elsewhere?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘That was where I wrote The Gates of Paradise.’
Julian lay back, propped up on his elbows. He said nothing. Elizabeth gazed around at the soft green hills and across the lake towards the sea beyond, let the heat unknot the tightness she had been carrying for months.
She felt no awkwardness as the minutes went by, just the warmth.
After a while he resumed his story.
‘At the end of the war, I got what I wanted – a return to Greek soil. I was posted to the island of Rhode
s to work as an Information Officer for the occupying forces and I took Loula with me. As soon as I finally got my divorce papers from Grace and we could square it with her family, Loula and I got married there.’
‘You were happy again?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘Blissfully. The happiest two years of my life.’
‘What happened?’
‘Loula fell pregnant – and we were so delighted. The time had come to leave Rhodes, the hand-over to Greece after the war was complete, so we travelled back to England for her to have the baby. All went well, or so I thought. The most ravishing little dark creature was born. We called her Hero. The baby was perfect. But sadly . . . all was not so well for Loula. She tipped down and down.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She went mad.’
He said it so matter-of-factly. Elizabeth was searching for the right words to convey her horror, when he went on, this time more kindly, ‘There was nothing anyone could do for her – she went down into a spiral of madness.’
‘A depression after the birth?’
‘I suppose so. It was appalling, shocking. She would rave and threaten to harm herself. Psychiatrists were called in and retired without helping. No one knew what to do.’
In the circumstances, he took what he considered the best option. He installed Loula with friends near his family home at Bournemouth, while he went to Cyprus to take up a new part-time post and set up home as they had planned. The domestic situation would be taken care of, and all prepared for her. But he was to await Loula’s arrival for more than a year.
On Cyprus he found an old Turkish cottage at Bellapaix, a few miles inland from Kyrenia on the northern coast, and for a few sunny months, despite his worries, it seemed he had finally achieved what he wanted so desperately: to free himself to write while living relatively cheaply abroad. He had an idea for a serious and ambitious novel – perhaps a series of novels – set in Cairo and Alexandria.
But again he was thwarted. In order to keep himself and send back enough money for Loula and the child – as well as contributions to his elder daughter Artemis’s upbringing, even though Grace had married again back in Britain – he supplemented his part-time government post with a teaching job in a Greek-Cypriot school which ate up his writing hours.
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