He spoke slowly. ‘When we’re in the middle of an awful situation, it’s never as clear to the one inside as it is to those looking in from the outside.’
‘No . . . that’s what my friends told me.’
‘It’s true. It’s only after you come through, and there’s some distance, that you can see what everyone else could see all along.’
Melissa tucked her feet up under her on the sofa.
‘How many years was it just you and your mother?’ he asked gently.
‘Most of my life. Even when my father was supposed to be with us, he wasn’t – not really.’
‘So she is the one you learned from.’
‘Of course.’
It was so obvious.
At about midnight, she went upstairs to fetch a sweater. She felt confused, scared of making a mistake. Were they just friends? What about the conversation they had just had – was that a clearing of the way, or a trading of intimacies as friends? It was not the same as that night in Corfu. It was more serious now that they were both free to make a move. It was extraordinary that he was here.
She brushed her hair, checked her make-up and sat longer than she intended in her room. Uncertain what she wanted to happen, she stayed where she was.
When she went down, she found him soundly asleep on his chair. He seemed comfortable, so she fetched a bedspread and laid it over him as gently as she could, resisting the urge to touch his handsome creased face.
And part of her was relieved she did not have to take the decision.
The next day was Saturday. The market in St Martin de Londres was swarming, the crowds swollen with the first spring tourists from the north. They bumped through the melee breathing the concentrated scents of the south in the soaps, dried herbs, the oozing cheeses and the barrels of oil and herb-soaked olives, walnuts, olive oil, spicy sausage and wine. They squeezed past baskets loaded with aubergines, courgettes, great misshapen red peppers, cut melons.
At the café Melissa sat down; a sudden pang of loss and sadness locking her chest. Without thinking she had led the way to the spot where she had sat with Elizabeth so often over the years, just as she had followed the familiar trajectories of the old route through the stalls.
The air felt solid in her lungs. A trickle of sweat made its way down her back.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Alexandros.
She nodded. ‘It just hits me, sometimes. Most of the time I don’t let myself feel upset. Mum . . . sorry.’
He reached out across the table and put a hand on her forearm. ‘It’s natural. You need time, you know.’
Tears were clotting, compressed and painful, behind her eyes. She would not let them go, could not. She would rather they ossified, same as the hard bony hurt.
He was so kind.
They drank coffee in silence, letting their own thoughts be carried on the flow of scents and colours, the lines of life etched deep on other faces passing, the stories of survival they would never hear, the shuffle of the elderly men and women in their rough black and dark blue country work clothes, the shouts of the vendors, the parents with young children, the relaxed well-dressed couples in late middle age.
A plane cut across the blue, high and soundless.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I think the, ah, travelling had made me more tired than I thought last night.’
They were lying out on steamer chairs in the garden. A susurrus in the olives, hot sun on skin, clear skies above; it could almost have been summer.
Elizabeth felt close by. Melissa could see her willowy shape by the fig tree, breathing in its sweet sensual August scent, and by the wall of the courtyard pulling the destructive ivy from the dry cracks of the stone wall. We can only make assumptions based on the parts we know of the full picture, or believe we can remember, she wanted to say.
Distant hills slumped on the horizon, giving a sense of space all around. They were facing down the slope where wild flowers had colonised clumps of the meadow, splashing blue and yellow on the ringing spring green of the grasses.
He reached out and took her hand. The warmth of his hand was soothing. Richard’s had so often been cold. Her heart seemed to expand with hope. That night in Corfu. Then the optimism was rapidly replaced by dread.
Melissa felt panicky. A churning of the emotions that was made sharper by not knowing why she should feel this way.
Alexandros leaned over to her. His eyes were the same melting brown as she recalled. Just like she had rerun in her head all those months since that night. Suddenly it seemed too good to be true that he was here.
She was even more attracted to him than she had been in Corfu. He had lost the pained brittleness she had seen when they first met. He was decisive and confident now. He had come back into himself. Physically as well as mentally, he was stronger. He was more than she remembered, perhaps more than she could handle.
She did not respond when he cupped her face. Or rather she must have done, because he dropped his hand as soon as she looked at him.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought—’
She could only look at his shoes, at the grass, and the smooth red-stained wood of the chairs.
‘Is it too soon?’
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘I did not know that you had, er, gone back to your husband.’
‘No . . . you couldn’t have known that . . .’ Melissa picked at wood, unable to explain why she was so confused. She was drawn to him, more than ever, and flattered that he had come to find her, but what was his motive in doing so?
‘I don’t really know why you’re here. We hardly know each other.’ There. It was said. She regretted it as soon as the words were out. She closed her eyes tightly, wishing this was not happening.
The chair creaked as he stood up. Wind rustled lightly in the walnut tree above.
‘I came because – because—’ He cleared his throat but did not continue.
A mad notion surfaced that he had not been honest with her. That there was another reason he had turned up. Perhaps that was to do with Braxton and his theories too. She should have been suspicious earlier.
‘What did you want from me?’ she whispered.
He looked broken. His face was all angles and incomprehension.
‘I did not want anything. I was hoping that we could give to each other. I thought about you so much after . . . that night. Thought that if I gave it time, it might be special between us.’
She shook her head.
‘I’m sorry, I got it wrong.’ He was bitter again, with the old clipped edge to his speech.
Wretched, she began to explain, but was not up to the argument. It was too soon after Richard. It was painful to think of him, of the way he had manipulated her emotions and screwed up her trust and trampled over her judgement. Thinking about the past months made her tense up. Richard had spoiled everything for her. But the ugly truth was that she had let him do so. Her judgement really was terrible. She was angry with herself for being such a sap.
‘I will go,’ said Alexandros.
She wanted to stop him but could not think how to do so.
He was walking back towards the house, and she was saying nothing. She could not call him back. It was too soon. She was too wounded.
When he came down with his travel bag, he proudly refused her offer of a lift to Nîmes. She clasped his hand, willing him to understand what she couldn’t say. It was a stilted goodbye – another stilted goodbye – and then he was gone.
The place felt desolate without him.
VI
MELISSA THREW EVERY shutter open in a symbolic gesture to spring cleaning, poked into forgotten cupboards and hung rugs outside for beating.
Afterwards, feigning optimism, she went into town to the agence immobiliere to find out what rental she might expect, should she decide to put the bergerie into their hands for the coming year.
That was the impetus, born out of a renewed sense that she was at last moving on and concentrating on the practic
alities, no matter how turbulent her inner life, that sent her into the locked room at the side of the house.
At the far end of the bergerie was a flight of six ragged steps to a pale green door from which paint unfurled in flakes. It was a simple cell-like room used for storage. But perhaps, she thought, it would be possible to convert it into another bedroom, which would add to the rental price. It would be a good practical project, satisfying and profitable, to complete her journey back into the present.
The key was in the drawer of the kitchen table, a blunt rusty weight in her hand which left brown-red dust in the palm. Perhaps it would not even turn in the lock. She took a cloth and some oil, hoping that might work. She need not have worried. Once jiggled into position, the key turned easily.
It was dark inside, with a slight scent of damp. In the light from the door, Melissa stared in. Heavy curtains were drawn over the single small window. She remembered the walls as knobbly grey plaster, but now they were whitewashed. A few cobwebs hung down, and there were patches of crumbly dust, and what might have been mouse-droppings perhaps, on the plain wooden floor. But this was no storeroom as she recalled it.
A single bed, with a mean frame of black iron, was pushed lengthways against the far wall. On it were cushions and folded cotton spreads. Against the walls to either side were low bookcases, of assorted sizes, old and cheap, the kind that might have been brought back from a flea market. On the floor was a wide tray, holding several ballpoint pens.
Finally, a small pine table. On top was a radio, three candlesticks and a half-full box of candles.
It looked as if Elizabeth had been using it as a kind of study.
Wondering when she had done this, and why she had never mentioned it, Melissa went over to the bookshelves and looked closer. Her heart skipped a beat.
Travel books, on India and Greece, the Greek islands, Egypt, old ones featuring Yugoslavia, were crammed against books by Julian Adie. His poetry was there, and his novels too. The Mason biography, much read.
There was a collection of interviews Adie had given, transcripts from radio and television programmes catalogued by an academic; critical assessments of his work; volumes dedicated to the study of his Spirit of Place. Then there were the biographies of other men and women who had known Julian Adie. She picked out one at random, and turned to the index, heart beating faster, feeling sweaty, knowing what she would see. Adie’s name, underlined, and a string of page numbers.
Most of the books were twenty, thirty, forty years old. Had Elizabeth haunted antiquarian and second-hand bookshops to get them? Melissa worked her way along. Picture books of Greek Islands. A book of photographs by Grace Heald.
And then, when she had barely assimilated the first, another discovery.
An old sketchbook, dropping its pages. A foolscap notebook, lined pages, a white sticky note on the front in her handwriting: ‘Precious. My life in parts. Very roughly written.’
Part Seven: Discoveries
Julian Adie, Behind the Myth
Martin Braxton
Temporal conventions are irrelevant in Adie’s oeuvre. Time is pulled continuously out of shape; the present distorts the past, and what was once fact is relegated to unreliable recall, even in his autobiographical work.
Adie shows us how memory subtly reorders the past, playing up certain incidents and compressing others by the importance to which they are assigned by the mind. But in his obsession with the tricks of memory, he is highly susceptible to nostalgia in its cruellest form, and this trait is crucial to an examination of his state of mind in the summer of 1968.
This is the turning point of the myth: his descent into the underworld.
In May, still shell-shocked by Simone’s sudden death, Julian Adie returned once again to Corfu. He set off east through France in a stink of petrol from the jerry cans strapped to the inside of the camper van. The student unrest in Paris had spread to the rest of the country in a great wave of belligerence, blockades and disruptions. Many filling stations were closed, but nothing would deter him from making this journey to a spiritual home. And for a free spirit, his views on the political situation were surprisingly conservative. ‘I would kick them all back into the Sorbonne,’ he told Peter Commin. ‘They don’t know how lucky they are.’
But when he arrived on his beloved island this time, nothing was as it should have been. The rented villa in Paleokastritsa developed a sewage problem. He hated the atmosphere of the tourist town which had sprouted weed-like between the scallop bays. ‘The New Costa Brava,’ he called it, writing grouchily to Don Webber of the invasion of unattractive hordes wearing shorts and caring nothing for the history and classical resonances. His beloved landscape was despoiled by litter, and worse, building sites in the coastal olive groves from which grew monstrous cheap hotels, ugly and attractive only to an equally unappealing clientele. His old haunts, especially in the south of the island, had to be filtered through an ever-thicker imaginary gauze. The wounds he had come back to lick were deeper and more bloody than he had realised.
He returned to Kalami, refusing the offer of his old rooms at the White House then regretting his decision. He found a couple of rooms above an olive press off the path to Agni, close to his old cradle, the rock pool by the shrine. There, he could look out to a purple-sprinkled sea shielded by trees from all earthly disappointments.
Was he simply glutting himself on his particular pleasures: alcohol, sea and sun, and the cut and thrust of words which reassured him more than anything else that he was indeed alive? Surely he must have thought now and then of Grace, his long-ago wife.
He was an older, paunchier man. His hair was still thick and light although it must have been greying by then, but on a good day the engaging smile was undimmed in the sun-lined face. He was still extremely attractive to women.
To the world at large, Julian Adie was a success. He was still the great catalyst, the man who ‘pumped champagne bubbles into the air’, according to fellow poet Bernard Bressens. Stir in the hard-won fame and praise for his work, and it must have been a potent brew.
On the other hand . . . strip away the romance of his travels, his seductive powers, his fame – and what was left? A middle-aged man, a nomad in a camper van grieving for his dead wife. Anyone meeting him now, having read The Gates of Paradise, would see it clearly for what it was: an elegiac howl of pain for the author’s lost youth and idealism.
Drink helped: it enabled him to function relatively normally until he overshot the mark; it was his constant companion now. Words had dried, along with the effervescence and belly laughter. He went through his paces with women, but in a manner which suggested a tired old animal tied to biological habits. For the first time he felt old, and this time no amount of mythology could disguise the torture of his loss.
He could not bear to be alone. He would go to expatriate parties, occasionally behaving badly. His state of mind that spring and summer was impulsive, reckless even. He was alternately morose, roaming the island alone in his van in search of the past, sleeping out close to deserted beaches, or so gloriously drunk that he could steal a donkey and ride it one afternoon right up to the counter of his favourite bar on the Liston in town.
He raged at the state of the island, but he was also battling his own unsightly flaws. With the years, the successive losses, he had become more angry, embittered, and inclined to lash out. The pugnacious undertow of his work was showing up in real life. Julian Adie could be a violent man, and this was becoming more and more difficult to contain.
He had been seeing a wealthy divorcee, Veronica Rae from Santa Barbara, California, who had been introduced to Adie by Don Webber. They had first met when Adie went to Berkeley on a lecture tour the previous year. It is possible their affair started there. When she heard the news of Simone Adie’s death, Veronica had seized her chance. They exchanged letters, and he must have offered her enough encouragement to take a transatlantic plane to Greece as soon as she knew he would be there.
But then
one evening at a party, Adie meets a young Englishwoman called Elizabeth Milne. She is in her early twenties, compliant and star struck. Pretty, blonde and naïve, she provides consolation and asks nothing of him. She also bears a striking resemblance to his first wife Grace Heald.
And Julian Adie is an uxorious man, always happiest with a wife whether or not he is faithful to her. Some days, crazed by grief, drink and fury at the loss of Simone, he is barely able to control himself. He has alarmed some of the locals who have known him since the Kalami days with his unreasonable demands and embarrassing outbursts. He cries not only for Simone, but for Grace and Loula too.
It seems doubtful that Elizabeth Milne could have had much idea of the nature of the man. Flattered by his attentions, she would have been a stranger to his experiences and preoccupations: the grinning at death in Cairo, the rank, sweet odours of decay and degeneration, the macabre and cruel fascinations. She would have been oblivious to the objective reality which can be seen so clearly by anyone comparing a photograph of Elizabeth Milne with Grace Adie: that, subconsciously or not, he had cast her in Grace’s role before the fall from paradise.
His moods swing. One moment he is full of bonhomie, the next the bright blue eyes cloud and narrow. One night he is found sobbing inconsolably at the tourist spot of Kassiope, while fires are burning for a saint’s feast. His old Corfiot friends fear he might be close to the edge, that he might be suicidal.
Worse, he cannot write. He is trying, and failing. The fear is constant, he confides in a letter to Don Webber, dated the end of June: the fear that he has dried up, the fear of losing everything yet again. How many more times can he start again, can he ‘shuck off his skins like an old snake’?
But there is no doubt the man has courage. In his personal life, he has rebuilt himself time and again. He is certain he will do so again, even though this time his courage is more a kind of recklessness, or madness. After all, he has come back to his beginning as a writer, to those mythic Ionian waves that hold the sunlight in their blue swell. He had forgotten the way the sea changes temperature with the currents, the cruel caress of the undertow as it pulls towards the turtleback rocks, but that is good. He will revisit the start of his story again, and remake it with hard-edged experience.
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