Songs of Blue and Gold (40 page)

Behind her footsteps crunched, then stopped. Too close to her for a stranger. Automatically, she looked round. Alexandros was staring straight at her.

They were equally awkward.

‘I was just coming to see you' he said, his expression unreadable.

‘I came to see
you
 . . .'

A spiky melody was playing faster and faster, intensifying her nerves. He seemed equally ill at ease.

‘Are you, er . . . on your own?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘I was coming to see you,' he said again.

‘Oh! Well, that's . . . How did you know I would be here?'

‘Manolis told me.'

‘Of course.'

‘The village radar . . .'

‘Yes . . .!'

‘Well . . . It's good to see you. How are you?'

‘I'm fine. You?'

‘Yes, yes . . . very well, thank you. So – you are back in Kalami!'

‘Yes . . .!'

An awkward silence. Then they both started at once.

‘Manolis said—'

‘I've got some—'

He laughed and shook his head, looking away. He looked even healthier than he had in France, as if life was good. As if she might well have missed her chance.

The music was growing more and more frantic. There was a loud group of teenage holidaymakers kicking and tangling, trying to perform their version of a Greek dance, their white t-shirts standing out like a puppet show down by the jetty.

‘Do you mind if I join you?'

‘Do.' Her voice was a croak.

He leaned on the rock beside her.

The moonstruck music ended in a tumult of clashing keys and instruments. Then the mood changed and the serenades and songs sounded like laments.

Lights were coming on up the hillside, illuminating houses peachy pink and several plum-coloured lines of windows from the largest hotel. Occasionally he translated a line of a song he thought she might like, but otherwise they were silent.

Melissa was tight and awkward, sitting in the dark with him. All the while she was rehearsing what she wanted to say. She was close enough to smell his scent, that mixture of warmth and sea tang which seemed unbearably familiar.

The band was still giving its all when fireworks were let off the boat, exploding chrysanthemums and kaleidoscopes in the black above the sea. The unexpected salvo made her jump.

‘It's quite a spectacle,' she said, determined to sound positive as the sky whined and cracked, trailing gunpowder scents which overpowered the ozone tang in the air.

The finale erupted, leaving an eerie, smoky moment of silence.

She wanted to tell him why she had let him go. How desperately sorry she was that she had not begged him to stay. What she understood now about her life with her mother, and how it had affected her own way of thinking.

It was too hard to say any of it. The words were stuck deep inside.

Alexandros shifted beside her. Her first thought was that he was going to leave. The second that she alone was now responsible for whatever happened next.

The words spilled like gibberish. ‘When I was last here, you gave me a photograph of my mother, do you remember?'

He was standing now. She could not wait for his acknowledgement.

‘I've got something for you in return. Can I give it to you some time?'

‘Of course.'

Crowds were flowing all around them in the darkness, leaving the beach after the spectacle. She paused. ‘I'm sorry for what happened in France. That's what I came to tell you.'

She squinted out to sea in the silence that followed.

‘You could give it to me now,' he said carefully, at last.

‘It's in the Prospero Apartments,' she said.

The book looked more battered than ever after its latest journey. Alexandros pulled the brown paper away. The
tooled leather of the spine was scaling, the edges of the cover rounded with use.

He held it up to the crude light of the balcony, examining it as carefully as an artefact.

‘Cavafy,' he said softly. Then, opening it, ‘A first edition.'

Melissa fetched a table lamp, stretching the lead outside so he could see it better.

‘I – I wanted you to have it.'

A shy smile with the hint of a tease lit up his face. ‘You could have sent it in the post.'

‘I could have done.'

Their eyes connected.

‘But I've always been curious,' she said keeping up the contact. ‘I wanted to do the right thing – and to see your reaction for myself.'

‘See what?'

She said nothing.

Alexandros opened it to the library plate on which was written, ‘
Ex Libris Clive Stilwell
'.

‘The Englishman who lived at Kouloura,' he said. ‘You say it was in your mother's house . . .?'

‘Clive Stilwell was her godfather.'

‘I didn't know that.'

‘Neither did I – at least, not when I was here last year. I found a card with it – all it said was, ‘
Julian
'. He must have given it to her to pass on to Adie.'

Melissa was thinking about the diary, and the days after the drowning when Adie was reluctant to see Elizabeth. In the end she must have told Clive she was going over to Agni, or Kalami, and it was possible he had asked her to drop the book off.

‘For whatever reason, she didn't give it to him,' Melissa said.

She was wondering whether Elizabeth had wanted to keep back an excuse for seeing him one more time. But it was all pointless speculation.

‘Why she didn't, we'll never know . . .' she mused.

‘Probably not,' said Alexandros. ‘Thank you, it's beautiful.'

Each was tentative, unwilling to presume.

It was too cool now on the balcony but to suggest they went inside seemed like an invitation she was too self-conscious to make. This was not how she had imagined the scene. Alexandros was friendly but too distant. The thought that he was simply being polite, that she had missed her chance months ago, began to curdle in the pit of her stomach.

‘Do you think I could see Theodora again?' she asked brightly – too brightly.

‘Theodora?' He did a fake double take. ‘I'm sure she would happily see you. But what more is there to ask?'

‘I found my mother's diaries. She did meet Theodora.'

Alexandros rubbed his cheek. ‘But what of it?'

She started to explain about the party the night Veronica Rae died, but he had tensed up. She could sense his irritation from three feet away.

‘It doesn't matter,' said Melissa.

His mood had changed suddenly. Desperate to regain their previous minutes of relative ease, she tried to change the subject. ‘Are you travelling a lot at the moment? What are you working on?'

‘I'm working here,' he said, flatly closing that down.

There could be a reason for his awkwardness. She decided to make it easy for him – for them both.

‘When I came to your house earlier, I met a woman there.'

Alexandros was sombre. ‘It could have been Lia. I sent her to the house to fetch something for me.'

‘Right . . .'

‘She's my intern at the museum.'

Relief made her fingers tingle. She wanted to fling her arms around him.

Alexandros stood up. She smiled. But he made no move towards her. Instead he said, with unbearable formality, ‘I must be going. Thank you very much for the book.'

Her heart uncomfortably skipped a beat. He couldn't go – not like this! He had reached the sitting room before she made him turn round.

‘Alexandros . . . I need to . . . tell you something.'

Now was her chance. But everything was wrong.

He started for the door again. ‘I still don't quite understand why you need to do this!' His tone was pure exasperation.

‘What – what do you mean?' she asked, feeling desperate.

‘It's all . . . the past. You don't let it go.'

The room, already dim, seemed to darken further.

She watched him, unable to believe how badly she had handled it.

‘Goodnight,' he said flatly.

It was a complete foul-up. Wretched, she wanted to tell him that she understood why he had left. She couldn't blame
him – she had left it too late. Going over it all later, miserably lying alone and awake in the dark, she realised she was being presumptuous again, still trying to decipher symbols and complicated languages, not all of them spoken.

What she liked most about Alexandros was his reticence, his very lack of glibness. If he said something, he meant it.

‘I'm sorry I didn't trust you.' That's all that needed to be said.

NO ONE ASKED
what had brought her back. They accepted her presence tactfully. Eleni, placid and buttery-cheeked, greeted her like a sister, inviting her to dinner. Manolis, following orders perhaps, let caution override curiosity and asked nothing.

Melissa drank a late morning coffee at the Prospero Taverna feeling crushed and tired, thinking about a simpler time when people did not read so much, and before televisions and computers brought the world crashing into their whitewashed rooms, and long before that when memory, individual and collective, was the only tool there was, to order their society, their understanding and their myths.

Manolis waved and called down from the road. ‘It's here!'

She climbed the steps wearily to where the taxi was waiting.

One more conversation, and she could leave.

Theodora's house was on a hillside at Sotiriotissa, just north of Corfu Town. The address was in Melissa's
notebook all along, jotted down when she'd thought she would never need to use it.

A twisting drive led up from a shabby gate set back from the main highway, through orange and lemon trees, olives and myrtles. A turning circle in front of what had once been a grand Venetian villa was shaggy with overblown grass. The house itself, once a pale yellow, was porous and in need of repair.

‘I like to keep it in a state of nature,' she said with dignity.

Or in a lack of funds, Melissa surmised.

She followed her down a gracious hallway.

‘You look well,' Melissa told her. Theodora seemed less made up than she had been at the Liston, and her hair was in better condition. More grey had been allowed to show through.

‘Rattling with vitamins, m'dear. Life's not too bad.'

On a terrace of potted geraniums and banana trees, they took coffee and nut liqueur and ate tiny cakes in the shade of a pomegranate tree, its fruit hard, shiny and red as Christmas baubles. Theodora took a fraying rattan chair, armed with a fly swat like an African dictator. Every so often she flapped it viciously at the wall but these bursts of movement caused no break in her conversation.

She had been contributing to a local magazine, was spending more time at the Corfu Arts Club, had taken in a stray cat. An expatriate production of
The Tempest
had come to grief in a welter of recriminations.

Behind her, the house groaned with overstuffed furniture, heavy armoires and sideboards. A collection of framed photographs stood on a baby grand piano, and in the corner a bulky old television buttressed by piles of videos. The
door to the terrace stood open but the windows were shuttered.

‘How did you get on with your researches?'

Theodora rubbed her fingers together rapidly, as if there was some stickiness on them. Her fingernails were thickly varnished deep red. ‘I must say I didn't expect to see you quite so soon!'

‘You were expecting me?'

‘Well, yes . . . Alex said there was something else you wanted to ask me.'

Melissa's mouth was dry. So Alexandros had already called her. Either he was still willing to help, or he wanted to absolve himself of any further responsibilities for her. She swallowed hard.

‘I asked you last year about Elizabeth Norden. I wasn't entirely honest with you. What I should have said then was that I'm her daughter.'

Theodora put her head on one side, assessing.

‘Yes . . . perhaps you are.'

Melissa let that go.

This time she told Theodora her reasons for asking, setting out what she knew of the night Veronica Rae drowned, as Elizabeth had written in her account. She even told her about Dr Braxton's biographical investigations, although not – yet – the conclusions she feared he might reach, nor the precise details of what Elizabeth claimed happened after Veronica followed them down to the sea.

‘It's a long time ago, I know. Do you remember that party
where you spoke to Elizabeth – and do you remember Veronica Rae being there too?'

Theodora nodded. ‘I remember – for
many
reasons.'

‘Tell me.'

‘I was there on my own. I'd had a
dreadful
row with my husband. Oh, we used to have a time of it in the early days – adjusting to each other, I mean. There was a time when I felt he was a lot nicer when I couldn't understand what he was saying . . .' Theodora looked off into the distance.

‘So . . . I suppose what I really want to know is . . .' said Melissa, waiting until she had her attention, ‘. . . was my mother's account accurate – was Veronica Rae drunk, and did she slap Julian Adie?'

Theodora became lively again. ‘Oh, yes.
That
happened all right. A lot of people saw it – and gossiped about it for weeks afterwards, as you can imagine. I'd forgotten about the shoe breaking, but that was true. The way she walked out of the room and we all made way for her, like the parting of the waves. I can see it all up here,' she tapped the side of her head. ‘The silver dress, too . . .'

‘Did you see Adie leave with Elizabeth?'

‘I can't remember that. Just the set pieces, you know.'

That struck a chord. It seemed more likely that whatever Theodora was about to tell her would be the truth.