Songs of Blue and Gold (19 page)

The interior of the bus was infused with garlic and diesel fumes, but she was happy enough. Somehow she hadn't felt up to hiring a car, even though the Blue Bay travel office and its functional little white Fiats for rent were easy to find. The idea of the mountain road snaking around Nissiki and down to Barbati was dizzying even without the lorries and buses hurtling around the narrow bends.

From her seat over the wheel arch, Melissa was high enough to see over walls and hedges, and stare into private spaces. Olive trees were being cut and burned. Severed branches littered the road, and they were stopped at one point by a man with a red flag as a farm vehicle cleared the knotty limbs and curling bayonets of wood. The unmistakable scent of bonfires
seeped under the rattling, badly-fitting window frames as the bus pitched and jolted south.

In contrast, as if the seasons had become confused, a profusion of flowers bloomed, white-blue solanum scrambling everywhere it could get a hold, and the raspberry and cream of the Marvel of Peru, so delicate-seeming yet hardy, rooted in cracks between road and wall. And above, looming cloud-topped was the great surge of Mount Pantokrator, shrugging off small scattered settlements like so many colonies of white lice.

The bus took the east road into Corfu Town. In the old port, cruise ships were docked as if they had simply pulled up and parked on the seaward side of the road. Italianate arches on the buildings opposite still formed the first glimpse at the town for travellers. Now tired hotels and shipping offices, they must have been the same ones in essence that had once greeted Adie and Grace. A version of the same dust and noise would have set their nerves jangling in anticipation, the smells of the docks pungent in the heat.

The traffic was dreadful. The bus finally stopped with a tired wheeze under the authoritarian blank walls of the New Fortress. Melissa climbed down and followed her fellow passengers. They disappeared quickly, bustling away with scrap-paper lists and baskets.

A market was in progress: stalls on both sides of the street held tumbling banks of velvety figs, red plums, apples, oranges, grapes, prickly pears. Between these, other stands released pungent sea smells where silvery fish caught lustrous streaks of green and lilac on their speckled skin, squid lay
milky and spent on marble slabs, streaming tangled black-streaked ribbons, and octopus offered tan suckers to the air. Vegetables were displayed shining as if polished, while others were left still dusted with earth.

It was a while before she realised they were in the dry moat of the fortress, which might have accounted for the vague but uneasy sense of oppression. Further on were a few clothes stalls offering sweatshirts and trainers, aprons and leather coats. After nearly a week in a quiet village, Corfu Town seemed crowded and noisy. Melissa felt more vulnerable here, exposed to the hydraulic hiss of dirty buses, the ill-tempered blares of car horns and the hustle of people on the main pavements. The streets were unexpectedly imposing and sophisticated.

Suddenly uncomfortable in one of the hubs, a square full of shoppers and office workers as well as tourists, she sheered off down a wide emptier street, gambling that it was in the direction of the sea. A pervasive smell of drains counterpointed the elegant buildings from the turn of the last century, and apartment blocks like those found in well-to-do towns on the French Riviera. She passed a museum housed in a villa that must once have been a great symbol of wealth.

At the end of the street lay a sea wall of low stone, and to the left, a fair walk away was framed the intriguing scene she had found on a postcard back in Kalami: a perfect Greek temple on a rocky mound. It took her by surprise, if only because she had thought of trying to find it and had assumed it was an isolated site, perhaps in the south of the island, not here as a centrepiece in the capital. But a glance at the map showed clearly that this was the Old Fortress. She was
charmed by the ease of stumbling so effortlessly across something she'd wanted to see. Soon the fortifications above the temple came into focus, and left her wondering how she could possibly have interpreted them simply as rocks between the green trees when she saw the postcard, or even missed all signs that the whole was set on a tiny island.

Opposite was a park with a rotunda. This was the Esplanade she had to cross to get to the Liston, stepping to the side of roller-bladers, families with prams and pushchairs, gangs of organised tourists, drifting groups of teenagers and solitary old ladies in black. Cafés under the trees were noisy and full, the atmosphere sociable.

There were even more people in the Liston. The architecture was unmistakably French, modelled on the Rue de Rivoli: a walkers' boulevard of elegantly arcaded buildings facing the park and the sea. There was no other side of the street, as if the architect had decided the island should not be allowed to have too much of a good thing. Almost all the space under the arches, which would originally have been built to protect the passers-by from excessive heat and light in summer, and the rain and wind in winter, was filled with bar tables and chairs. On the other side of the street were more of the same, this time under canvas and trees.

The broad stone arches were weathered and crumbling in places. In each arch swung a cast-iron lamp, many decidedly rusty and fragile at the joints. Above, slim windows were shuttered and a few narrow balconies jutted on stone brackets.

Melissa found the Liston Bar about halfway down. The place was crammed. Waiters wove with snake hips around the many groups, and shouts and bursts of laughter reverberated slightly under the high vaulted roof. She was just
wondering how she would get a table when one of the shouts formed itself into her name. She spun round, and saw Alexandros standing, waiting in the shy, defensive pose that she was coming to recognise.

Almost the first words she spoke to Theodora were a lie. ‘I'm doing some research on Julian Adie,' she said. The words came out glib as you please. She didn't even know why she said it. It might have been aimed at Alexandros, to show he was not the only one who could deal in omissions.

‘
Re-eally?
' Theodora's voice was a smoker's drawl, the accent unplaceable.

She was of indeterminate age – in her seventies, maybe. Self-consciously artistic, she sat plumply upholstered in flowing clothes of batik prints. A vast necklace of beads clinked on the shelf of her chest.

Her glass of cloudy ouzo was going down rapidly.

‘Well, just beginning, at least,' Melissa said nervously, trying to patch the gaping flaws in this concept. ‘It . . . it's still just an idea really.'

It could have been worse. She might have said ‘book', and then she would have been stuck with talk of publishers, and invented deadlines and contracts. It was best to press on swiftly.

‘Alexandros tells me you knew Julian Adie well.'

He had said nothing of the sort, but Theodora beamed in the light of implied flattery. She raised a gnarled hand, further knobbled by large rings, into her dyed red hair, and smiled with tombstone veneers.

‘Yes . . . well,
quite
well, let's say. Lovely man, but perfectly impossible. Great fun though, totally unpredictable. What's the phrase –? Lust for life. That was him.'

A yapping from somewhere nearby had her bobbing to investigate the underside of the table. A waft of strong musky perfume was released by her sudden dive. Alexandros sat impassive. It was impossible to guess what he was thinking.

‘Roger, Mummy's got it for you here . . . yes, she has,' rasped Theodora. ‘Yes, she has . . .
good
boy.' She raked through a substantial leather handbag and put her hand under the table.

‘Roger . . . my Pekingese,' she said when the whiny yaps had been assuaged.

‘Ah,' said Melissa.

‘Named for Mr Moore, one of my all-time favourites. Charming man, don't you think?'

‘I'm sure he is.'

‘And not half bad as an actor either, despite what they say.'

Alexandros took charge at this point, summoning a waiter, and ordering lunch without consultation.

Melissa was riveted by Theodora: the red hair too long for her age, fringe separating on her shiny wrinkled forehead, the lumpy nose – possibly she was a committed drinker of wine and Greek spirits. Melissa would not have been surprised if she had put a cigarette in a long ivory holder.

Roger growled menacingly. Alexandros took a turn at giving him something from his pocket. ‘You knew Julian Adie when he returned to Corfu to spend summers here, later on when he was a successful writer. That's right, isn't it?' he prompted.

‘Oh, yes, he was well-known by then. The Cairo books
had made his name. He was popular on the island too: he seemed to have friends everywhere, from the Greeks who remembered him from before the war; to the ex-pat set who'd arrived in the intervening years. And he loved a party. Drank like a fish of course, but he was a spiritual person, too. He always wanted to understand, to get on the right wavelengths with people, loved to hear their stories – as well as being a virtuoso teller of his own, of course. The way he would speak . . . you've never heard anyone quite so witty and engaging, and all with such charm . . . but afterwards you could feel quite exhausted with it all, as if you'd been
sandblasted
by the sheer torrent of words that used to come out of him!'

Melissa glanced at Alexandros. Amusement danced briefly in the lines around his mouth. He was certainly not disagreeing with her.

‘You also said he was unpredictable,' said Melissa. ‘In what way do you mean?'

She paused, gazing into the middle distance with narrowed eyes while taking a drink.

‘Well, for a start you never knew whether he'd turn up, or when . . . or with
whom
. Sometimes that could be exciting – he'd arrive with someone quite extraordinary, maybe someone famous and you wouldn't believe your luck, but other times the people he had in tow could be dreadful old bores that only he seemed to find fascinating. He was definitely a
collector
of people . . .'

A few more gulps of ouzo lubricated the process of remembering.

‘He was also unpredictable in that you never knew what he would say next. He was pretty opinionated, and he loved to shock. He would say the most
outrageous
things and you
never knew whether he was serious, because he would swear he
was
but with such a twinkle in his eye . . . And he was the most dreadful fibber, but it was all so much
embroidery –
just part of the act of being entertaining, so that most people let it go.'

‘He made up some of his stories, you mean?'

‘Oh, undoubtedly. You'd meet someone a few days later who'd featured in one of his yarns and say how it had kept a table in stitches, and how utterly hilarious when such and such happened, and the person would turn to you and say that it didn't actually happen that way
at all
!'

‘So . . .' Melissa frowned, ‘people didn't get upset with him then?'

‘No, no. It wasn't unpleasant. He wasn't doing it to
hurt
anyone, you see. It was only to amuse. Taking something quite ordinary, and tweaking the details into an account that could be quite side-splitting. And maybe people expected it anyway of a novelist.'

Theodora was hitting her stride, and luckily in the direction Melissa wanted to take.

‘You see, on that score we trusted him: we trusted him to make us laugh and be good company. Where you
really
wouldn't trust him was where women were concerned . . . I mean, he was married, and very happily so by all accounts, when he first came back to Corfu in the sixties, but you wouldn't have known it to see him in action.'

‘He was quite blatant about it?'

‘
Completely!
He was a rampant little devil – he'd try it on with any woman he could. And more often than not he succeeded as well! He was such a short man but no one ever seemed to notice that when he was actually there. It was as
if all the stories and the cleverness and the laughing made him ten feet tall. His wife was French, I think . . . small and blonde. Lively. He'd met her . . . I don't know, somewhere in the Med after the war. They lived in France, anyway, when I met them. Nice woman – good fun too. Very effective blind eye, she must have had as well.'

Alexandros looked thoughtful. Melissa thought he was going to say something, but he retained his air of interested bystander.

She took the plunge. ‘Back then, can you remember ever coming across a young artist called Elizabeth Norden – or rather Milne, as she was then?'

‘We were all young then, dear!' Her chuckle turned into a raspy cough.

Melissa smiled, sympathetically, she hoped. It was a trick of time that she thought of Theodora on Corfu as older than her mother. The air of bohemian dottiness gave her licence to play a part, and play it thoroughly. Had she always been like this, more pertinently when Adie knew her, or was this persona her defence against encroaching old age?

‘Did you ever meet her, though? Does the name Elizabeth Milne mean anything to you?'

Theodora looked away again, as if trying to recall.

‘Why do you ask?'

For the second time, Melissa was less than honest with her.

‘I know her,' she said.

‘I see.'

Was she struggling to remember a name that sounded familiar – or to hide the fact that she did know it?

‘It was all a long time ago,' said Theodora, switching her
attention to her glass, which she seemed surprised to find empty.

It was as evasive an answer as she could have given.

The food came soon after, the tastes a mixture of Italian and Greek cooking, sweetly spiced by the Middle East. Melissa took some rich meat stew sprinkled with salty feta cheese but had little appetite. Alexandros ate slowly but steadily. Theodora seemed more interested in several pitchers of wine.