The Realms of Gold

by Elizabeth Hunter

  She looked up at him with deliberation. ‘And what do I have to do to prove I am grown up?’

  Demis gave her his whole attention, ignoring Patrick altogether. ‘Have you grown up enough to kiss me of your own accord?’

  ‘I might have,’ she said slowly.

  His golden skin blurred before her eyes as she hastily lowered her ashes. Her heart pounded against her ribs as she reached up and put her lips against his. The kiss began with a touch as soft as the wings of a butterfly, but his lips were as hard and demanding as hers were tentative. She emerged from his embrace breathless and dishevelled and very conscious of her brother’s interested eyes watching the scene. ‘Now tell me I’m still a child!’ she invited.

  He smiled. ‘When you can kiss me like that without any help from me, then you’ll be completely grown up!’

  ‘As grown up as Hermione?’ she hit out before she could stop herself.

  His face hardened. ‘Hermione has nothing to do with you.’ He turned on his heel. ‘I’ll leave the two of you to dispose of Aphrodite as you think fit.’

  And he was gone before Emily could think of anything to delay him. She shrugged her shoulders, principally for Patrick’s benefit. Then, she looked the goddess straight in the eyes and noticed for the first time the quizzical tolerance in her expression as she lifted her sandal preparatory to delivering a telling blow across the goat-man’s cheek. It was almost as if she were amused by the emotional turmoil that ran like a hurricane through Emily’s bloodstream every time Demis came near her.

  ‘Hermione?’ Patrick asked her.

  ‘Who else? What chance have I against a woman like that?’

  ‘Not having met the lady I really couldn’t say,’ her brother answered. ‘But I shouldn’t have said you had much to worry about. Mother and Margaret were green with envy that this beautiful Greek should have come along and swept you off your feet, and, even allowing for their powers of exaggeration, something must have made you cast yourself off into the unknown. Knowing your prejudice against romantic gestures, I presumed it was the full-blown love bit. I haven’t seen anything here yet to make me change my mind. So, was I wrong?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘You are in love with him, then?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ she said in a carefully controlled voice, ‘but he still hankers after Hermione, you see.’

  ‘He married you.’

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t know each other—not then. I met him on the train home for Christmas. He gave me his seat. And then Mother said he had rung up at home and asked to speak to me, but that was before we had set eyes on each other, so he couldn’t have done, could he?’

  ‘Why not? He certainly rang me several times—’

  ‘You mean you already knew him? Nobody told me that!’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know him exactly. I knew of him, though. He and Father had put through one or two deals together through the firm. I don’t think father had actually met him either, but he liked doing business with him.’

  ‘But you don’t have anything to do with Father’s business,’ Emily said. ‘Why should he get in touch with you?’

  ‘He was concerned about Father.’

  ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘I didn’t either. I told him I had no interest in the firm, that none of us had—including you—I may have talked about you a bit. He was pretty tight-lipped about it all. Said perhaps I should show more interest in the future, and rang off. I didn’t think anything more about it at the time. I asked Margaret if she had heard of a Greek customer of Father’s and she spun me a whole yarn about receiving so many calls from strange men that if she heard a man’s voice she didn’t know nowadays she put the receiver down as soon as he spoke.’

  How like Margaret that was!

  ‘But what did he want?’ Emily pressed.

  ‘That was the one thing none of us knew. Next thing I heard, he had married you and taken you back to Greece with him. But he was back in England a few days later—’

  ‘I know,’ Emily said, and added, ‘With Hermione!’

  ‘Rubbish. He didn’t have anyone with him when I saw him. He had the lot of us there—Mother included—and told us exactly what he thought of us. It was pretty humiliating, because it had never occurred to any of us that Father was having a sticky time of it. Peter summoned up enough spirit to ask him what it had to do with him, and he told us he was taking over the business in return for paying Father a whacking great pension for the rest of his life—’

  ‘That’s why he married me, to get his hands on the business. He insisted Father handed it over to him as my dowry. They arranged it between them.’

  ‘Emily, you’ve got to be joking! We had the full bit at that memorable meeting about you being the only one of us worth her salt. He’d left you behind in Greece only so that you wouldn’t hear what he thought about the rest of us. We may have battened on Father all our lives, but we weren’t going to batten on him! Come to think of it, he excepted Mother from that, and Margaret up to a point because as a female dependent he didn’t expect her to stand on her own feet, but to be guided by her husband. Poor Peter’s face was a study! Between us, we bore the brunt of the dressing-down, which I have to admit I think we deserved.’

  Emily felt moved to protest against her will. ‘He had no right—’

  ‘Why not? You made him part of the family.’

  ‘He had the business in payment for me.’

  ‘What a bargain! I’m trying to tell you, Emily love, that since Father’s illness the business is practically bankrupt—and none of us had been interested enough to see the signs of the coming crash. Father had always managed, and it didn’t occur to one of us to wonder how he was going on managing from his bed.’

  Emily gave him a quick look. ‘But if the firm was bankrupt, why should Demis want it?’

  Patrick shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me! When he rang me up he was busy washing his hands of the lot of us. He only told me to look into Father’s affairs out of a sense of duty towards an elderly, sick man. What a dowry! All you brought him was a lot of bills and the obligation to pick up the tab on Father’s pension for the rest of his and Mother’s life!’

  ‘But why didn’t he tell me? Didn’t I have a right to know?’

  Patrick chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. ‘If you ask me,’ he said finally, ‘he didn’t want you to know anything about it. He probably had some idea that he wanted you to love him for himself and not for what he could give you—’

  ‘But I do!’

  ‘But have you told him that? It seems to me that he’s under the impression you’re neither his, nor not his, at the moment, if you see what I mean. What reason did you give him for marrying him?’

  ‘It was rather complicated,’ she said delicately. ‘Mother had told Father that this Greek had rung up inquiring for me and—and that he was very much in love with me. No, I think it was that I had fallen in love with him! You know what Mother is! And Father was so excited about it all that I hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth. I couldn’t see that it would do any harm to pretend that I had met someone I was interested in—Father looked so ill and said that I would have done anything to make him feel better. Well, anyway, he asked me what the man’s name was and I told him it was Demis Kaladonis. I thought I’d invented the name, but I hadn’t. I must have seen it on his briefcase when he gave me his seat on the train. Then the next thing I knew he was at the front door and nothing I said would make him go away! He went upstairs and talked to Father for a while. And then he took me out to lunch and told me he and Father had agreed that I should marry him right away.’

  Patrick’s astonishment now was as great as her own, when she looked back at her own meek acceptance of the fate which had been held out to her.

  ‘You mean you went along with that?’ Patrick was still amazed.

  ‘What else could I do? I had told Father I was in love with him. Then he said if things didn’t work out he’d arrange to get the marriag
e annulled and would set me up in a restaurant of my own. But that wouldn’t have been enough in itself. I think—I think I wanted to marry him!’

  Patrick’s jaw sagged as he gazed at her. ‘No wonder he thinks you’re the most romantic of us all! My God, you really do things properly, don’t you? Even Margaret looks before she leaps into space, whereas you—you take off like that eagle that tried to fly up into the sun!’

  ‘I couldn’t help myself.’ She spoke almost as though she was in a trance. ‘But oh, Patrick, wouldn’t it be marvellous if I made it to the sun, after all?’

  ‘And be burned to a crisp?’

  ‘Not with my sun! Not with Demis!’

  A couple of gardeners approached, and Patrick said hurriedly, ‘Spare me the star-spangled details! But you’re a fool if you don’t tell him how you feel. He’s bound to know sooner or later.’

  ‘And what about Hermione?’ Emily’s tone was as matter-of-fact as she could make it.

  ‘Oh, hang Hermione!’ her brother retorted, and bent to help the gardeners with their removal of the statue.

  Epidaurus was deserted.

  A wintry sunshine filtered through the pine trees whose scent lay heavy on the air. It was every bit as beautiful as Emily had expected it to be, and yet it was not in the least pretty. The famous theatre was particularly fine, and only partly restored for the benefit of the summer crowds who flocked there to see the classic plays in their original setting. It was one of the few theatres of ancient Greece that had not been altered to suit the changing tastes of their later Roman masters. It meant that one could sit anywhere on the step-like seats and look out across the magnificent view beyond. And it was not just modern man who had marvelled at this particular theatre. Pausanius, a doctor of the first century after Christ, had said of it: ‘... in size the theatre of Megalopolis in Arcadia is superior, but for harmony and beauty, what architect could vie with Polyclitos? For it was Polyclitos who made this theatre and the round building also.’

  Emily had not yet visited the round building, or tholos, where it was thought the sacred snakes had been housed, the same snakes that had effected many of the cures at this most famous Asklepeion of them all. Like some Lourdes of a pre-Christian era, it was here that the sick had come in their hundreds to bathe in the sacred waters and to be cured in their dreams while they slept. The cult of Asklepios had spread far and wide, and many other centres of healing had come into being, but it was here that the god had first earned his famous name among men, and it was here that modern man still came to pay him honour, as they do also by using his serpent as the symbol of the medical man to this very day.

  Emily climbed to the very top of the theatre, leaving her husband far down below her. She could not see Patrick and Chrisoula at all, and she half suspected that they had deliberately taken off by themselves. From where she was seated she could see over the tops of the piffe trees to the tawny hills beyond. It was possible to glimpse the complex of ruined buildings that had once made up the ancient hospital, with temples dedicated to Artemis, to the Egyptian Apollo and Asklepios, to Aphrodite, to Themis, to Asklepios himself, this time on his own, as well as the great altar that was also dedicated to him. There had been baths and a library, and dormitories where the sick had lain waiting their turn for a possible cure, a hotel, and even a gymnasium.

  The followers of Asklepios had maintained that a radical healing could only take place when the mind itself was cured. If the disease of the mind lingered on, it could at any time call forth other disharmonies of the body. Was her sense of Hermione’s hold over Demis just a figment of her imagination? Would Asklepios come to her aid if she addressed him with the proper piety the ancient Greeks had considered so important?

  Looking down, she could see her husband in the centre of the stage, his head thrown back as he watched her every moment. He looked incredibly small and distant. And then he began to speak, and she was astonished to discover that she could hear his every word as clearly as if he had been sitting next to her. Was it possible that he was talking to her? The way he spoke it, it sounded like a love poem, and a fountain of delight grew inside her as she listened to him.

  ‘Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen

  Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold—’

  She had shut her eyes to listen the better to his rich, golden tones, but now opened them wide to see why he had stopped. It was impossible not to recognise the two figures who had joined him on the stage below. One of them was Keith, scuffing his feet like an ill-at-ease schoolboy; the other was Hermione—a well-groomed, confident Hermione.

  ‘Is this your latest conquest?’ she heard Demis ask her.

  ‘Certainly not. I don’t play around with children—as you should know, Demis mou.’

  ‘Not yours, now or ever!’ Emily heard him reply.

  ‘No? Well, Keith is your little wife’s conquest. He was getting lonely, he had seen so little of her in the last few days. I told him she was to be found on Hydra, and here we were discussing ways and means for him to join her. What happened? Did you leave her there on her own?’

  Emily saw her husband tauten almost imperceptibly. ‘How did you know she was on Hydra?’

  Hermione laughed her sexy, throaty laugh. ‘I saw her there. Didn’t she tell you? If you were kind—and you are sometimes, aren’t you, my sweet?—you’d let her go home to the nursery and indulge yourself with someone who understands the needs of a real man!’

  ‘Is that what you told her, Hermione?’

  ‘Of course not. I merely implied that while she was your wife—if wife you can call it—I hadn’t finished with you yet, not by a long way, and she was wise enough to listen to me. Forget her, agapon! I am much more of a woman than she’ll ever be!’

  Demis was too far away for Emily to see his expression, but the tone of his voice was forbidding.

  ‘I have tasted everything you have to offer, Hermione Kalayeropoulou, and the offering was stale then. For five years I have tolerated your insinuations and your hopes that I might return to your bed only because I like and respect your father. My wife has more to satisfy me in her little finger than you have in your whole body.’ He sounded suddenly amused, and Emily could imagine exactly what was in his mind as he said, ‘She shares the secrets of Aphrodite, the goddess of love herself, and is more than woman enough for me! You’re more of a fool than I think you are if you don’t realise the truth of that for yourself.’

  ‘But Barbara said—’

  ‘Ah yes, Barbara! Not even Emily is naive enough to believe anything Barbara could say about me. Her mistake was in listening to you. It’s a mistake I shall enjoy putting right at the very earliest opportunity. I’m in love with my wife, and I have reason to believe that she’s in love with me,’ he added reflectively. ‘Goodbye, Hermione.’

  ‘Goodbye? You think you can simply bid me goodbye after all the insults you have hurled at my head? Have I nothing to say—’

  ‘You never had,’ Emily heard him say simply. ‘Goodbye, Hermione.’

  Emily saw Keith pull Hermione away from the stage as the other girl shouted abuse. It came to Emily that it was not Demis’ love that Hermione had wanted—it never had been—it was his money.

  Demis turned his back on her, looking upwards to where Emily was sitting. ‘As I was saying,’ he went on calmly. He hesitated for an instant. ‘You are listening, aren’t you, Emily?’

  She nodded her head so slightly that she thought he hadn’t seen her consent, but it seemed he had, for he went on as if nothing had happened,

  ‘Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

  That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:

  Yet did I never breathe its purse serene

  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

 
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

  Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  ‘Now do you understand, Emily?’

  She almost fell a dozen times as she raced down the uneven steps into his arms. He gathered her close and, looking up, she saw his eyes were very kind.

  ‘Make me your golden realm, Demis!’ she burst out. ‘That’s all I ever wanted, right from the beginning!’

  ‘I intend to, my love. You were my expanse from the moment I set eyes on you on that train. Destiny spoke and there could never be another woman for me. Are you ready for me to enter my kingdom at last, my Aphrodite?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said.

  Sitting close beside her husband in the best marble seats that the theatre had to offer, Emily could almost believe that they were the joint rulers of the ancient world about them.

  ‘You didn’t take Hermione to England with you, did you?’ she said aloud. ‘But I thought you did.’

  His mouth tightened. ‘I shall never forgive her for deliberately setting out to hurt you! But then, I’m ashamed to say, I thought a little jealousy would do you no harm, that it could only make you more aware of me and what I hoped to mean to you.’

  ‘You took her to Athens?’