Songs of Blue and Gold (39 page)

‘Maybe.'

Melissa gave him a smile. Surely Elizabeth should never have doubted Bill's integrity. Had she missed a chance of real happiness with Bill?

It looked as if she had.

She gave him a lift back to his house on the common and carried on along the country lanes. Preoccupied by what he had told her, she drove along in a kind of trance. As the road wound down into the valley and she had to brake she gave a shiver because she had no idea how she had driven there. For the first time she had actually experienced being lost in thought. It had been a revelation to find out how deeply Bill had cared for Elizabeth.

What else was it he said? That we can all learn from the lives of other people, especially those close to us. Was it his way of offering her some sound advice about her own reluctance to trust?

It was not only Julian Adie who led many lives, she had finally realised – we all live several lives. The child Melissa and the younger Elizabeth were simply characters who had gone, buried in adult selves. It was as though she could now empathise with herself as Richard's betrayed wife, but she did not have to be that person any longer.

And what of all the lives not lived? The Elizabeth who
might have remarried, to a man who truly loved her? Melissa's own never-were lives, which might have been altered by Joe – or Alexandros.

Alexandros. He was like Bill in many ways: good-hearted and generous, serious yet willing to take a risk. Pictures crowded into her mind: Alexandros on the path down to Kalami, his eyes full of shy compassion, the wind pulling at his billowing shirt. The boat in the bay, and the bitter coffee on the breakfast table. The scorpion end. The sharp sting of longing when he had dared to come to her in France, and then when he had gone too soon, gone away – sent away – again because she could not trust herself to trust him.

So often it's not a single event but a succession of separate incidents that make a belief. Events filter down the consciousness until the mind makes a connection. Perspectives shift. Then, at last, there is conviction.

By the time she drew into the driveway at Bell Cottage, she was sure. She would go back to Corfu. If nothing else, she owed it to him to explain. The prospect both excited and terrified her at once.

But during the next few days that conviction faltered.

She questioned whether it was too late now. How could she simply present herself to him after the way they parted? Every time they tried tentatively to establish the relationship it came to grief. Perhaps neither of them was ready.

What happened next was so startling that at the time it felt as if fate had intervened.

In one of the last rooms she had to clear, a room under
the eaves, on bare floorboards and squeezed between unwanted furniture, under a patina of dust and a stiff calico sheet, stood several old suitcases, long forgotten. The lid on the last one felt loose on its hinges as she pulled it open. A layer of brown paper crackled with age. Beneath were holiday souvenirs: a Spanish doll, a moth-eaten hat, brochures for various attractions – and a wedding album Melissa had not seen since she was a small girl. A large brown envelope opened as it was moved, spilling photographs into the musty well. A puzzle of black-and-white interspersed with a splash of colour formed from the scattered images. Irritated in a numb, distant way, she reached in to pick them up.

Melissa retrieved handfuls of mismatched holiday snaps. Perhaps these were the rejects, the ones not good enough for the albums, the odd ones sent by friends and never arranged for display. Some were of Edward. A shaky shutter had blurred the outlines of his bluff features so that he appeared to be trying to avoid capture by bolting, making a break for the white deckled edges. No note of when or where they were taken.

At the bottom of the trunk, she found a heavy brown paper parcel, tied with string, and a plain card under the crossover. She sat back on her calves, holding it. The name on the card was Julian.

The parcel was a simple one of folded thick brown paper. Inside was a book, a first edition of Cavafy's poems in English. How long had it been there?

Not fate. The excuse she had been looking for.

Stalling, she contacted the British Film Institute in London and booked a viewing of an old television documentary held in their library. Down a side street from the sultry roar of Tottenham Court Road a few days later, she was directed along overheated, biscuit-scented corridors and staircases to the room where she took a seat in a row with four other anonymous researchers, each staring at an identical screen. The stuffy silence broken only by mechanical clicking and juddering from the video machines, she put on headphones.

She wanted to see his image moving on the screen, just once, and to hear whether his voice was anything like the one that resounded in her imagination. The programme, filmed in 1965, began in Corfu with the dawn of his creative life. A shot tracked across the sea. The grainy texture of the disintegrating colour pictures made a veil between the viewer and the water. Adie was a squat man of fifty, hair still blond, bobbing on a boat. Only a few years younger than when Elizabeth first met him. This was, give or take, as he would have looked the summer that changed her life. Melissa leaned forward, arms tightly crossed.

‘I always wanted to
live
,' he said to camera. The voice was reedier, tinnier, than she expected, the accent pure Empire. ‘To make mistakes, to be greedy, rebellious, scurrilous, insightful, loving, hating, mad, bad, dangerous, kind, selfish, generous, inconsistent, angry, arrogant, assertive, uncertain, immoral, loyal, reckless, considerate, brave, passionate . . . because, do you see, that's all there
is
!'

Perhaps it was unfair to judge from a mechanical approximation, from a recording made more than forty years earlier, which like the film, like the man, was no longer in prime condition.

The brilliant peacock blues, emeralds, jades and purples of the sea pulling around the sun-baked caves and jagged cliffs. Over the shifting scenes, he talked fondly, hypnotically, of his sailing boat and the trips with friends, of the blue-and-gold-veined sea. The final part of the film showed him going to a party, on a terrace overlooking the sea. For a moment Melissa strained for a glimpse of her mother among the guests. She even rewound the tape and ran it again when she spotted a slight, blonde woman. But she knew the dates were wrong, and it could not have been her.

Afterwards she walked back down Charing Cross Road, past the surviving second-hand bookshops, through the bumping, scurrying crowds, feeling curiously empty.

That night, she was certain.

THE LAST SATURDAY
in August, after hours of rain and delays, the plane climbed through cloud. Somewhere over the Swiss or Italian mountains it broke through into heart-expanding blue. Hours later at Kalami, she stood in the apartment she had occupied the previous year. Beyond the balcony, the sea was a lustrous mirror under a deepening sky.

‘I'm sorry I can't offer you the White House,' Manolis informed her when she telephoned to book. ‘It's completely full until October.'

Melissa looked nervously at her watch. Eleni, asked discreetly, had told her what she needed to know. Now it was vital to pick the right time. This was the moment when she would truly come back into herself. She had done it in her imagination a hundred times. Now it was real.

If she went to Alexandros to apologise, put herself on the line, it would be proof of how far she'd come. She repeated that to herself. No longer stuck in the past but looking to the future; she was seeing possibilities for happiness she never let herself believe in before. It was easier to repeat than to believe.

What if he didn't want to know? She couldn't think about that.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I didn't trust you. I didn't trust myself.

At five-thirty she walked up the road. The boat hire office was closed. The track up to the farmhouse was quiet. As Melissa approached the house there was barely a sound apart from her own footsteps on the dust and pebbles. It was hard to tell whether anyone was at home.

The terrace was in sight now. On the point of turning round, cursing her own idiocy, the ease with which she lived in her imagination somewhere beyond rational hope and expectation, she saw the door open. She steeled herself to see him again.

A woman came out. Pretty and young, with long chestnut hair. Something interrogative in Greek was said. She seemed to be waiting for an answer.

‘I'm sorry, I don't understand. Is Alexandros here?'

‘He is not here,' she replied in slow, heavily accented English.

‘Do you know where he is?'

She shook her head, looking Melissa up and down.

Behind her the kitchen was just as it had been the previous year, with no sign that an enthusiastic feminine hand had cleared his things – the files and books, slides and microscopes, propagation tanks and jars – from unsuitable surfaces.

Melissa felt a lump form in her throat. She wanted to ask the girl who she was but knew that she must not. Surely – she suddenly realised what a dreadful thought this was –
surely this could not be Alexandros's wife? Don't say his wife was back in the frame, after all, as Richard had so nearly been when Alexandros surprised her by arriving in France.

Surely not.

‘Are you Mrs Catzeflis?'

‘Catzeflis, yes. Alexandros.'

It was hard to know what that meant.

Melissa took a step back.

‘Thank you –
Efharisto
–' She raised her hand in a feeble goodbye and left.

At the large taverna on the beach Melissa ordered some food she did not want and some wine that she did. It was early for dinner, but surprisingly crowded. Already the scents of cooking and herbs were pungent and familiar. It was soon obvious she had arrived just in time, for ten minutes later all the tables were full. Hard-pressed waiters were apologetically turning tourists away, although offering to serve them drinks out on the beach.

She had to remind herself that the last time she had been here it had been at the very end of the season. This was Kalami in high summer. The buzz of the crowds made it quite different from the place she had experienced the previous year.

But after a while she realised it was more than that. The atmosphere was expectant, as if something was about to happen. The mystery was solved when one of the girls at the next table, where two British couples in their twenties were trying ouzo, picked up a flyer printed in English and used it as a fan.

It read,
Varkarola. The Sea Festival
.

There was also a picture of a boat and a guitar.

Melissa sighed inwardly. She finished her drink, pushed her plate away, and freed the table.

Outside the taverna's canopy, sunset trembled over the headland. Under a glowing sky, the opalescent sea presented a surface serenity.

She went and sat on the beach, down by the water's edge. Now that she knew for certain that Elizabeth had once been here, and what had happened to her, pieces of the puzzle were fitting at last. And overlaying that was her own experience, the previous October, when she had been so sad and guarded. How far she had come, in many ways. How held back she had been by Elizabeth's experiences.

The sea was rubbing over the stones, eroding them, pulling them into new patterns, crushing the minute carapaces of sea creatures in their salty graves, as waves collapsed at her feet. Perhaps there were particles thousands of years old.

Soon the same hubbub of conversations as in the tavernas was rising on the beach. More people were gathering noisily: mostly tourists but here and there were the authentic craggy brown faces of old women in black, skinny children who had spent the summer outside running and swimming, groups of elderly men leaning crookedly together on sticks.

The sky and water were ablaze as the headlands darkened. The painful rock contortions were being lost to violet shadows.

Faintly at first, she heard a high note. The crowd noise seemed to ease slightly before a ripple of interest confirmed
that the music was starting. A group of musicians and singers smartly turned out in black trousers and waistcoats, each with a jaunty straw hat, had begun a jingling song. Led by an accordionist and a guitarist they were strolling along the broadwalk. By the time they had reached where she was the song had changed to a romantic serenade. A handsome tenor was playing up to it, reaching out his arms to the nearest pretty girls.

Melissa shivered. She had the terrible feeling she might cry. She had come to see Alexandros, and he was not here, despite Eleni's assurances. She should have contacted him first. She pinched the bridge of her nose and cursed her own rash optimism. Nothing had changed; despite everything she was still the same deluded idiot, still alone. She could see her attempt at a surprise for what it was now: an escape clause. Because she still could not commit herself to acting on her brave new instincts.

The band reached the jetty at the mid-point of the bay where a wooden fishing boat was tied up. To gasps and applause, a string of lights was suddenly switched on, making an arc over the musicians as they stepped on board and stood swaying but still gamely playing. They rattled off what sounded as if it might have been a traditional fisherman's song. Then the boat cast off, one man at the tiller, and puttered regally across the bay to begin a slow circle from taverna to taverna and the audience on the beach.

Melissa stayed where she was for a while, then feeling tiredness catching her, wandered over the pearly pebbles to the rocks below the White House. The new buildings on the hillside behind had caught the sunset so that their pale render now had a sugared-almond quality, rising in tiers like a
celebration cake. She sat on the edge of a boulder and watched, detached, as the boat carried the band slowly along the row of beachfront tavernas. The sounds were pure and strong in the cooling air, travelling across the bay which was transformed into a natural amphitheatre backed by the curving mountains.