Songs of Blue and Gold (12 page)

Then she calmed herself. It was, as Adie had written, ‘
A day when the flowers trembled and the blue reached down from Heaven
'. This was a place of beauty and hope. A land of heroes and stories.

Alexandros stopped a few feet in front, and turned. ‘Not far now. Are you all right?'

His expression was distant.

She nodded.

‘It's down here, but steep. Be careful.'

The turning was unmarked. There was no way she would have found it on her own. You simply had to know where it was. Grabbing at bushes and large stones on the way, she half slithered down the precipitous grass and ochre dust.

From this approach the shrine was unprepossessing. Dwarfed by its guards of cypress, rather more of them than shown in the photographs in the biography, it was little more than a hut cut into the foot of the rocky slope.

Alexandros took a small key from his pocket. There was no ornate weathered lock on the door to the shrine, but a modern padlock. It snapped open, and he tugged on the peeling wooden door.

It was dark inside, with only a feeble shaft of light from an ineffectual seaward window high up in the wall. Alexandros placed his rucksack on the floor by the door and switched on a torch. He then drew out a thick glass bottle of olive oil and took it over to the far wall where a narrow altar stood.

Goosebumps prickled Melissa's bare arms. It was not only the sudden gloom and drop in temperature. It was a sense of trespass. The strange thrill of re-enacting a scene from the past that did not belong to her.

‘There's a description Julian Adie wrote, of going to the shrine with his landlord, old Manos. Do you know it?' asked Alexandros, so quietly and presciently she shivered even as she strained to hear him against a crash of waves outside. He propped the torch on the altar and began to pour oil into a
battered tin lamp. The delicate stream of liquid shone like a line of burnished gold in the half-light, catching a metal cross set in a turned wooden base.

‘Actually going into the shrine? No . . . I'm sure I haven't.' She could only recall reading about him being outside it, below it, bathing and diving, its magical lure for him. The pool below was where he had felt himself reborn. ‘In
The Gates of Paradise
?'

‘It was not in
The Gates of Paradise
. It was published in a magazine, many years later. But the odd thing was that he wrote it as if the years had never intervened, and he was still living at the White House with his wife.'

‘Strange.'

‘Perhaps, yes. That's what he did, anyway.'

‘I'd be fascinated to read it,' she said.

‘I can find it for you if you like.'

With the lamps lit they stood quietly taking in the interior. The walls were bare and damp. The dark icon on the altar was in a poor state too. The venerable, bearded face was barely visible in its frame, as if caught staring out of an unlit window.

‘St Arsenius, I presume?' asked Melissa.

It was hard to make out any of his features. This was no museum piece, but a homely relic of faith. They lingered a while, each wrapped in private contemplations.

Then Alexandros left the bottle of oil on the floor by the side of the altar, and they left the saint to his lonely flame.

‘Why
are
you so interested?' he asked again, knowing she had still not given him a satisfactory answer. The hesitancy in his speech seemed to have gone.

They were standing on the ledge above the pool. From here
the water was pale green, so clear the stony outlines of its curious perfection seemed man-made, a calculated, precision-cut fairy bath.

‘That part in the book, where he and Grace lie baking here on the rocks, and she dives for cherries,' Melissa said, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘You wonder if you stare hard enough you'll be able to see them by sheer force of imagination and will.'

He gave a little laugh at this romantic absurdity.

A couple of small brown fish broke surface with a tiny ripple.

‘Did you ever meet Julian Adie?' she asked.

‘Of course I did.'

‘So that would have been – when? When he returned to the island in the nineteen-sixties? You must have been very young then.' How much would a very young boy remember anyway? Almost certainly nothing of relevance to an adult's life.

‘I was a child when he first came back. But he continued to visit, right into the late seventies. He would take a villa in Paleokastritsa, or here, or once an apartment in Corfu Town.'

‘But would he come to Kalami and see his old friends?'

‘Always.'

‘You seem very certain.'

‘I am. He was a friend of my parents.'

Melissa was unsure how to proceed.

‘He always took an interest in what I was doing,' continued Alexandros, sparing her the onus of finding a suitable prompt. If anything he sounded defensive, as if she might not believe him. ‘When I was old enough to read his books, he was always happy to discuss literature and science with me. He always wanted to talk.'

‘What about his other friends on the island – the ones he wrote about in
The Gates of Paradise
: the man who kept his dead mistress's skull on his writing desk, the Count B, the mad expatriates, and the visitors from England and France? Did you ever meet any of them?'

‘The old Count B was dead long before I was born, as were quite a few of the colourful characters of the book. Some were composites of several people.'

‘What about people who knew him later, in the nineteen sixties – I'm thinking about the expatriates? Are any of them still here?'

He frowned, and asked again, ‘Why are you so interested in all this?'

She could not ignore the question a third time. But seconds passed before she replied.

‘Funnily enough, I discovered I have a family connection to him as well.'

There was something about Alexandros that made it impossible to lie, or even obfuscate. He made no response beyond giving his full concentration, eyes fixed and receptive.

‘My mother knew him here,' she said, stumbling on, not knowing how much to say or how to explain that the obsession had taken root now. ‘I only recently found out.'

Alexandros was looking out to sea. A Minoan Lines ferry was cutting across the straits. She felt the light wind and watched as it caught the olives in a silver frenzy, the undersides of leaves dancing and whispering.

‘He loved it here, didn't he – Adie?' she said softly to break the silence, sensing it was wiser to stay on neutral ground, at least for the moment. ‘He must have done, the way he reproduced it so sensuously.'

Alexandros turned and started back up the elusive rocky path towards Agni. She followed.

‘All those heady scents he's surrounded by, the voluptuousness of everything from sirens to figs, “the symphonies of wave on rock, the land where miracles might occur” . . .' she quoted.

‘You've fallen for it then,' he said at last.

Was there an edge behind his words? She decided to take them at face value. ‘Completely! But there's something more that I can't put my finger on—'

Alexandros slowed. ‘An ingenious kind of despair, I think,' he said unexpectedly.

‘What do you mean?'

They walked on, faces set to the breeze.

‘In winter, the mud pours down these hillsides,' he said. ‘It's a . . . er, great oozing brown slide into the sea. It goes into the water like a path of sludge. It's a strange sight – as if it is polluting the blue. But at least it's blue. For weeks on end, before that, the rains will have closed in and everything has been brown. It's hard to believe then that all will be . . . er . . . bright again.'

Was he talking about more than just winter on the island? The hesitancy in his speech was beginning to reappear.

She wanted to let him know he was not the only one who was struggling emotionally, but was also sufficiently self-aware to see the dangers in that. She settled for safer ground.

‘He and Grace were young and healthy, living in what seemed like paradise. No wonder it seemed like the summer lasted for ever,' she said.

‘I agree,' said Alexandros. ‘He was trying to capture a kind of . . . immortality. There
was
a strong possibility that their lives
might be cut short. The war didn't break out suddenly, catching everyone by surprise in 1939. Throughout the whole of . . . ah, Europe, they had known it was coming for years. It was only ever a question of when. Living here was not quite the escape people in Britain may have thought. Don't forget how close the Italians are, and their military activities at that time were hardly reassuring.'

Now they had fallen comfortably into step.

‘Tell me about your mother,' he said abruptly. ‘Why is finding out about Julian Adie so important to you?'

They were almost on the main path. The mountains opposite were lined like an ageing face in the slanting afternoon light. He did not prompt her, simply waited.

‘My mother's name is Elizabeth Norden. She was an artist. It seems she met Julian Adie in Corfu. Most probably in the nineteen sixties. That's all I know. That, and the feeling that she wanted me to know something.' It sounded so lame.

‘You can't ask her?' His kind tone neutralised the question's sting.

‘She died earlier this month.'

He cleared his throat, as if slightly embarrassed. ‘I'm very sorry to hear that.'

She swallowed hard.

‘The nineteen sixties? There is someone I might be able to ask.'

‘That – that would be great. Eleni told me you're a historian. Is that right?'

‘Historian of . . . er, sorts. I'm thinking of Theodora. I could introduce you to her.'

He did not elaborate. It was only afterwards that she had the feeling he had chosen an effective way of closing down
the conversation while giving every impression of helpfulness.

They parted on the iron bridge over the dry river bed.

‘Now I understand why this is needed,' she said in an attempt at lightness, pointing down at the deep dry channel which cut through the hillside.

He looked blank.

‘The winter rains and all the mud?'

‘Oh, yes . . .' His mind was already elsewhere. He offered to walk her back to the apartment, but she said it wasn't necessary. The truth was, she too needed to be on her own. As he walked away, she felt slightly detached, light-headed, as if the intensity of the expedition and his company had been too much. She passed no one in the lane, which only heightened the sense of unreality.

A long hot bath, a glass of wine, a book and her own thoughts: that's what she needed. It was only when she was turning on the taps for a soak that she remembered Christos. Talking to him that morning already seemed like days ago.

She looked at her watch, still on the table where she had left it. Nearly half past six, and he would be picking her up at seven thirty.

Leaden-limbed, she showered quickly and changed into clean clothes, trying to recapture the amusement she'd felt that morning at the prospect of dinner with an attractive younger man. But there was nothing amusing left in it. She had brought no clothes appropriate for the occasion and the visit to the shrine had filled her head with ghosts. She wished she had never agreed to go.

CHRISTOS KNOCKED ON
the door only ten minutes late. He had donned a smart but slightly crumpled jacket and trousers which he filled with the fluid movements and grace of a practised predator. With the lion confidence of his dark hair, stubble, wide mouth and good teeth, the contrast in body language between him and Alexandros could not have been greater.

On the street, he led her to a shiny black Mercedes, with a cock-eyed number plate hanging off, a badge of honour perhaps, marking some perilous victory on the highway. Rock music filled the car, a fraction too loud.

He took a road into the sky. It was dark now. His headlights were bright around the switchback road winding up to the northernmost parts of the island, scraping round corners where the angles of a house or
kafeneion
jutted sharply into the thoroughfare. If there had been tables still outside, they would have been caught and tossed out of the way by the wings of the car.

Christos turned and grinned at one particularly close call. Melissa thought better of engaging him in any conversation that might detract from his concentration. After about ten
minutes, they drew up outside a small restaurant way up in the hills.

‘Where are we?' she asked.

‘This is near Loutses.'

Inside were simple white walls, one of which was filled with framed black-and-white photographs of old Corfu. A seductive aroma of herbs and baking meats stole from the direction of the kitchen. She bucked herself up with the thought that if nothing else, she was about to eat well.

A corpulent man in his fifties emerged from the kitchen, slapped Christos on the back and showed them to a cosy corner table. She suspected Christos had been bringing different women for dinner here for a long time. There were few other tables occupied, and from those that were, the conversation bubbled and rose volubly in Greek.

‘You will drink some
ouzo
?' Christos asked.

‘Not for me, if you don't mind.'

‘Some wine, then.'

‘Yes, please,' she said, making a mental note to go very easy on it.

Their orders placed, he settled back and gave her a long appraising stare. It had been so long since she had been on the receiving end of anything like it, that she dropped her eyes, which made her feel even more ridiculous and gauche.

She had felt awkward ever since she got in the car, sad and self-conscious. She should never have come. It was so long since she had been out with a man she had forgotten how to behave on a date – if that was even what this was.

Determined to get over it, she asked him about his summer, how the season had gone.