Metro Winds (23 page)

He forced himself to stop at last, only after he had twice all but accosted tall slender women. Somehow he had failed to notice that one had been close to sixty, with white hair, and the other a redhead in a grey trouser suit. All he had noticed was that both had exhibited an echo of the remoteness and stillness that he had sensed in the woman in the white suit.

Striving for humour, he reminded himself that obsession was when everyone started looking like the person you were searching for. But he was astonished by the strength of his desire to find the woman. He was struggling against the impulse to get up and go hunting again when he heard his name announced.

‘Will passenger Casey Heath please come immediately to boarding gate six. This is a final call for Mr Casey Heath for A3 flight 54 to Santorini.'

He was shocked, because he had never heard his name announced at an airport before. He looked at his watch and saw he had fifteen minutes before the gate closed, but by the time he reached the final length of concourse, he was moving too fast and sweating heavily, his heart racing unpleasantly. He told himself to cool it. He did not normally get flustered. It was the woman.

Stepping onto one of the moving walkways, he imagined a tracking shot following him from one walkway to another until he reached his gate. He calmed down when he saw there were still people lined up. He concentrated on sliding his laptop out of his backpack before the security checkpoint, removing coat, belt and shoes in the prescribed order. Then he waited until the airport official waved him through the metal detector. It beeped as he passed through, and the official ran a portable detector over him before waving him on. He repacked his stuff, put on his shoes and passed into the waiting room where there were a few people still waiting to board.

It was only as he joined the queue that he noticed the woman in the white suit was standing at the front.

Seated on the plane as it taxied to the runway, he wondered what was the matter with him. It was not as if he had not seen his share of glowing people. The film industry was full of them. The truth was that what most people called beauty was so often really just youth and the health that naturally went with it, combined with regular features. That was why all gorgeous people looked more alike than ordinary people. On screen you had to find a way to contrast beauty, to surround it with ugliness and irregularity so that it would stand out. That was probably why, he suspected, beautiful people often chose plain or even ugly partners.

The woman had been beautiful in that same way, and yet her face had burned into his memory. It seemed to him that he could still see her when he blinked, like the afterimage of a firework. The detail of the memory was amazing. He could summon up the startling pallor of her skin, the slightly heavy, crow-black brows and lashes and the sharp angles of the framing hair. She had worn a maroon lipstick that was nearly black. His ex-wife had used a Chanel nail polish called
rouge noir
, the colour of this woman's lips. The eyes in a face like that ought to have been dark and lustrous, but instead they had been twin skylights.

He wondered, bewildered, if this was
l'amour à première vue
. Certainly he had never experienced such intense feelings before for a woman, not even for his ex-wife. But if this was love at first sight, it was not as he had imagined. His heart did not seize with a longing to possess her or even to know her. Indeed, his desire was not so much to see the woman, but to be seen by her.

Once the plane was in the air, he strolled up the aisle, ostensibly to stretch his legs, but he was looking for her. She must have been in the washroom, he thought, disappointed after having lapped the whole plane. Returning to his seat he told himself that he was acting like a schoolboy. He lay back and closed his eyes, but the noise of the plane seemed too loud and the vibrating of the armrest too insistent to allow him to sleep. Even the soft snore of the old Greek woman next to him was too loud. He was not usually so over-sensitive, and he pushed his thumbs against the bony roof of his eye sockets and then pressed the heels of his hands hard against his forehead to ease the stiffness in his neck and shoulders. To stop himself from getting up and searching the plane again, he tried scripting a meeting with the woman on Santorini. He sited the accidental meeting on a walkway so narrow that one of them had to back up.

Man: ‘I am a stranger here.'

In his imagination, she did not answer. She only looked at him enigmatically. Maybe she was Greek? He didn't speak the language but surely he could find what he needed in a phrase-book. He thought of her face again and it struck him suddenly that she looked more Slavic than Greek. That white skin, the high almost prominent cheekbones and heavy brows, and the way her eyes narrowed at the outer corners. They were the sort of eyes his grandmother had called sideways tears. ‘Never love a woman with eyes like that, for she will steal your soul,' she had once told him. He smiled, but a queer shiver went down his spine.

He thought of something one of the lecturers at the Binger had once said. There was only one basic dramatic circumstance. Someone wanted something very badly and was having trouble getting it. Before this moment, he had never wanted anything much, save to understand why he was the way he was. But now his desire to meet the woman filled his thoughts. He wanted to hear her voice and feel the chilly potency of her eyes on him.

He lapped the plane twice more before the seatbelt sign came on and the flight attendant shooed him back to his seat. Fastening his seatbelt, he wondered how it was possible that he had not set eyes on the woman. He had even, in some desperation, described her to a flight attendant, explaining that he thought he knew her and wished to say hello.

He made up his mind to get off the plane quickly so he could watch the other passengers disembark, but in the end he was trapped in his seat by the old woman sitting beside him, orthodox cross hanging golden on her chest, in no hurry to get up. As passenger after passenger filed past, she conducted a rapid and voluble conversation in Greek with the woman across the aisle. By the time Case managed to get out, most of the other passengers had already disembarked. Just the same, he waited, pretending to be adjusting the strap on his laptop bag, certain that the woman had not passed him, even though she was not among the remaining passengers. She must have been seated in first class.

He headed determinedly for the baggage carousel, passing smoothly through the passport checkpoint, but the woman was not among those collecting luggage. Taking his own bag, he headed out, imagining a scene in which she was being met by the blond guy who played Jason Bourne. What was his name? He frowned, hating not being able to remember an actor's name, but he had been having trouble with names lately. It was absurd, because he could remember that the guy had played in
Good Will Hunting
, and the two Bourne follow-ups, but not his name.

‘Damn,' he muttered under his breath, because she was not in the arrivals hall.

He was met outside by the taxi driver he had booked, holding up a piece of paper with his name, and on the way up to the village of Firostefano, he had offered an extravagant but mostly incomprehensible travelogue in a combination of Greek and contorted but enthusiastic English. Case only half listened. He knew from his research that the village was on a steeper part of the island where dazzling white buildings capped rocky cliffs. The slope on one side was so steep that the roofs and terraces of one row of villas were level with the path leading to the doors and gates of the row of villas behind them. His villa had two terraces, one the roof of the outside bathroom and the other the roof of the second and detached bedroom, both offering stunning panoramic views of the caldera. It was this view that he saw from the side window as the taxi pulled up on the stony stretch of ground running from the front of a whitewashed church to the edge of a precipitous drop to the sea.

For a long moment, Case stared out across the satin sea to the distant horizon, seeing several small islands which, along with Santorini, were part of the rim of what had once been a huge volcano, while the caldera in their midst had once been the fiery cauldron atop the volcano. Now the sea filled the caldera, save for two small volcanic islands that rose up like jagged teeth.

‘Caldera!' the taxi driver shouted, then tapped the front window of the taxi. Case looked obediently ahead and saw a line of whitewashed buildings on level ground broken by a narrow path. Gesticulating and talking in swift Greek and picturesque, fragmented English, the taxi driver went on until Case understood that the villa he had rented was to be found along this path, but that the taxi was too wide to take him further. He paid the driver and received a set of keys with the name of the villa on the tag, before the yellow Mercedes rattled away. Turning to face the view, he picked up his bag and walked towards the low stone wall that ran along the edge of the drop. The view from it was impressive, and yet it was so exactly the same view as he had seen on hundreds of postcards and coffee-table books that it was impossible to be properly impressed. What drew him to the edge was not the view, but the tall, ragged gumtrees flanking it.

The smell of eucalyptus was sharply – almost unbearably – familiar as he came to the wall, and he was filled with a fierce nostalgia that bewildered him with its intensity, for how could he experience such longing for a place to which he had only ever felt himself mildly attached? Sitting on the top of the wall, he felt as if he had never truly smelled gumtrees before, and he sat half dumbfounded until the sun had risen well above the horizon, stealing the last soft trace of dampness from the air.

Simple thirst made him stir, and as he picked up his bag and turned his back on the view, he saw the church. He had noticed it vaguely when the taxi pulled up from the steep street leading into the square, but now he saw that it was a small, whitewashed building with stained-glass windows set either side of an unusually wide timber door protected by a gilt metal security gate. The gate was locked, but the door was very slightly ajar. The ambiguity of a church that was both shut and open drew him closer, and he put his bag down and reached through the gap between the bars to push his fingertips against the door. It was very heavy and pitted with age. Indeed the door seemed older by far than the church, but beyond it he saw nothing but impenetrable darkness. Turning back to the path, he wondered what he had expected to see, and then his mind swerved convulsively back to the woman in the white suit, as he wondered where she was staying.

Dimly he noticed he had not thought of her since smelling the gumtrees, and recognised that both the woman and the gumtrees had evoked a level of feeling in him unusual enough to make him wonder if he was becoming ill. Some kinds of fever made you extremely vulnerable to sensation.

He followed the path through the oblique walls of whitewashed buildings until he came to a shop, its window crowded with groceries too mysterious and foreign to be appealing. Soon after, just as he had been told, there were steep steps leading down from the path. The name of the villa had been painted onto the wall alongside the steps, with a small arrow pointing down. He knew that the first path to the left leading away from the steps would bring him to the gated wall beyond which lay his villa.

Descending the steps, he found himself facing another dizzying view of the caldera, and that was when he heard, for the first time, the deep mournful call of a cruise ship coming to dock.

He had been told when he had first conceived of coming to Santorini that the tourist season finished at the end of August, and by the second week in September there would be almost no tourists staying on the island. But most restaurants and shops would remain open for the month of September and even some of October, because of the tour ships. These leviathans would continue to glide across the caldera and dock at the island until late in the month, because if weather was inclement they could merely adjust their course and stop elsewhere. An amount of uncertainty was, he had vaguely supposed, part of the romance of a sea journey. Unpacking his few clothes that first day in the slightly dank coolness of the main bedroom of the villa, built into the hill like many dwellings on that steep slope, he thought about the possibility of a conference. There had been so many people on the plane, and companies did stage such events in lavish locations as a perk. Except that none of the passengers on the plane had looked like delegates bound for a conference. The woman in the white suit had been the only person who had dressed well enough; the rest had been utterly nondescript. In fact, now that he thought about it, he did not think he had ever been on a plane with so many unremarkable people. He could not remember a single face. That in itself was remarkable.

His thoughts returned to the woman as he removed his clothes to sleep off his jetlag, having set his alarm for early evening. He had given himself time enough for a shower before heading out for dinner. He would walk around the area and maybe see the woman dining somewhere. He drifted to the edge of sleep and hovered there.

He dreamed of his ex-wife.

‘I love you,' he had told her, when she announced she wanted a divorce.

‘You don't listen. You don't hear. How can you love? Half the time you don't even see me. You're like one of those people at a party who spends the whole time they're talking to you looking over your shoulder waiting for someone else to come in. You've spent all of the time we have had together keeping most of yourself in reserve, and for what? For who?'

‘There is no one else!'

She had laughed scornfully. ‘I'm not accusing you of infidelity or having a roving eye, for Christ's sake! I'm telling you that you live like you're in a waiting room. You treat me like I am someone else in that waiting room.'

The dream changed and he saw again the woman in white, standing with her back to him for a long time, and at last, she was turning to him. Her pale eyes stabbed him and he gasped, for the pain defined him and gave him substance.