Songs of Blue and Gold (7 page)

Only one of the two small supermarkets was open. Even there the stock was being run down, but there was enough on the shelves for her to pick up coffee and milk, honey and yoghurt, bread and cheese, some fruit, water and a couple of bottles of wine. The honey held almonds and pistachio nuts in its sticky amber.

According to the guidebook which she consulted over breakfast, it was possible to walk to the Shrine of St Arsenius. Julian Adie had written about it time and again, his special bathing place: a tiny chapel at the foot of the cliffs beyond the next bay. He and his wife would take the sea route, in their little cutter, but a way existed down through the trees from the cliff path.

Melissa decided to go. She was curious. Having read the
poetry and his lyrical prose descriptions, she wanted to see the places for herself, to see if anything remained that still resonated today. If she wanted to know more about Julian Adie, it was the obvious place to start.

The air was still cool for all the brightness. Perhaps it wasn't going to be warm enough for swimming, but she put a few books, purse, towel and swimsuit in a bag anyway. She wanted to be able to take the chance if it came.

Few other people were out and about. An elderly woman dressed in two cardigans gave her a weary half-smile. A party of German walkers, most of them middle-aged in heavy leather boots, with telescopic steel sticks and rucksacks, were peeling off fleece sweatshirts. A teenage girl, ordered on the expedition by her parents, perhaps, lagged slightly behind, a fistful of wild flowers in her shirt pocket and trailing an air of resentment.

Melissa couldn't help but remember the time when she hated walking; the leg-aching boredom, while Elizabeth strode ahead, tall and narrow, hair bouncing on the resolute set of her shoulders, always seeking the wind and sun on her face.

The door of the boat hire office was open. Inside, Manolis was at his desk handing over some paperwork to a couple in shorts. She had half-expected him to appear at the taverna the previous night, and in a way she was disappointed that he had not. It would have been a good opportunity to ask him who owned the White House now, and whether there was anyone still in the village who remembered Julian Adie first hand.

Across the road the White House was shuttered. No sign of life there, not even at the taverna to the side. A few metres further on, the road disintegrated into a knobbly concrete
path, and began to climb into olive groves. The way was pitted by brown spots, the mouldering stones of previous crops. Through silver-green trees was the sea. Under the olives the grass was studded with rocks and luxuriant drifts of tiny pink cyclamen. Despite reading the accounts of the lush beauty of this coastline, and staring again and again at the photographs Elizabeth had unearthed, nothing could have prepared her for the sheer exuberance of the reality. It was so unexpected; she had to let her eyes rest for a while as the words and pictures magically transposed into the reality at her feet.

The path wound down into the next bay, across the headland. Between the olives on this side, as the land tumbled away, were great rolls of black netting, twisted and slumped round the gnarled trees like so many monstrous sea snakes exhausted by writhing from cold depths. It was yet another indication that the year was on the turn, and the winter harvest would soon begin.

The beach down here was composed of grey-white stones, like the one at Kalami. A bank of prickly pear cacti grew robustly behind it, threaded here and there with wild mint which released its perfume when her feet brushed past. On the far side, an expanse of flat rock shelving into the sea looked perfect for sunbathing and swimming. A fig tree grew out of a crack where it joined the cliff wall behind. She made a mental note to return and test out her instincts. Pressing on, she followed another steep stony path up again and across fissured golden and marble-like rocks to a further cove. According to the guidebook, this was Agni.

She struck a path across the stones as instructed by the
guidebook, past several simple wooden jetties where restaurant customers could moor their boats, and then across the forecourt of the far taverna.

Two men were arguing fiercely as she walked up. Their voices rose and they stabbed fingers at each other.

‘
Kalimera
,' one said, smiling brightly. Melissa jumped as she realised he was speaking to her.

‘
Kalimera,
' she returned the greeting.

Then, as she passed, they gave each other a friendly bang on the back, and drew apart, still shouting. It was extraordinary how a normal Greek conversation always sounded like a ferocious verbal duel.

Leaving the men behind, she went up again into more olives and holm oak, firs and cypresses, the blue of the sea always to her left. Somewhere along here would be the footpath down to the shrine.

Twenty minutes later and breathing fast, she realised she must have gone too far. The path was now high above the sea and too close to the main coast road. The book described a fork off down to the left, a precipitous drop down but negotiable with care. She should have bought a map, of course, and not relied on a few vague paragraphs in a tourist guide.

She started back in the direction she'd come, feeling hot and a little frustrated. Clearly she was close but hadn't quite found it. For the first time since her arrival she wished she wasn't on her own. If she'd had someone with her they might have put their heads together and worked it out.

What looked as though it might be the path turned out to be a false trail. The cliff had no stone edifice at its foot.
Back on the marked way, a couple in their late fifties stopped to let her past.

‘Morning,' said the man. Even had he not spoken, there was no doubt that they were British, in their faintly absurd leisure clothes and sandals. He had a boyish face that was running to beefiness, and an impressive thatch of wiry grey hair. His companion was as slight as he was broad and tall.

‘Morning,' Melissa nodded. It's always a tricky moment when you run into your compatriots abroad. She was about to trudge on through, head down, when she noticed they did have a map. Swallowing her pride, not about asking for directions but for consorting with her own kind, she said, hearing the words come out stiltedly, ‘Excuse me, you don't know whether I'm on the right track for the St Arsenius shrine, do you?'

They looked blank. Clearly it meant nothing to them.

‘A shrine?' said the woman. ‘We haven't seen a shrine, have we?'

‘Is it marked on the map?' he asked.

‘I don't have one. I don't suppose I could have a quick look at yours, could I?'

But there was nothing marked. Melissa thanked them and set off even faster than before.

That afternoon, she went back to the flat rock with the wild fig tree at the edge of the second bay. Hardly anyone was there, and it was perfection. Over the sloping stone moss unrolled like a soft carpet into the sea. The water was clear and surprisingly warm. She swam, lay in the sun,
and read, and simply looked all around. By the time she returned to the apartment, she was relaxed and more content than she had felt in a long while.

She should have known it wouldn't last.

Every hour seemed to make her eyes open wider, her senses more acute. Each time she walked the tiny main road, effectively barely more than a lane, she noticed more: the powerful scent of jasmine escaping over a wall; bright globes in orange and lemon trees; the violet trumpets of morning glory winding through wire fencing; and everywhere the ancient gnarled olive tree, each composites of several intertwining trunks, some so holed and intricately braided you could see right through them.

From the balcony of her apartment, she watched the sun set. The mountains across the water, in a reverse of the morning's display, burned red and peach, then pink to purple. Isolated wisps of cloud made brushstrokes of black on the evening canvas.

She decided to try dinner at one of the two tavernas on the beach.

The air was warmer than the previous night, and the proprietor of Thomas's Place had planted a line of his green wooden tables outside drawn-back curtains of heavy-duty plastic sheeting. Here too they were squeezing out a last few weeks of business before autumn closed in.

Inside, candles were already lit, and willow baskets served as light fittings hung by their handles from the rush ceiling. The atmosphere was cosy. It was also more crowded than Prospero's Taverna. A young slight waiter with a sparse,
possibly experimental moustache, showed her to a corner table. She was hungry, having not eaten since breakfast. The waiter recommended a local dish of prawns and feta cheese, so she ordered that and made a greedy assault on the bread basket.

Mesmerised by the waves playing on the beach, the hushing sounds of water on stone, she was trying to imagine Elizabeth here. When had she come to Corfu – when Melissa was too young to remember, or before she was born? It must have been at the same time as Julian Adie visited. So logically, if she could take a list of the dates he was here from his biography, she might be able to narrow down the possibilities. Always providing the biography was detailed enough, or indeed accurate.

A woman's voice cut through her thoughts. ‘Hello again. Did you find what you were looking for?'

Melissa looked up with a start.

It was a moment before she registered who they were. Then she realised it was the couple she'd asked for directions on her walk. She hadn't spoken to anyone else all day, apart from in the supermarket and here.

‘Oh . . . no. No, I didn't in the end.'

‘Ah, well. Tomorrow's another day.' This was the man.

They had been shown to the empty table next to hers. The taverna was filling up.

Melissa smiled to be polite.

‘All on your own?' asked the woman, taking a rather beady inventory of her table settings. It may have been her long thin nose that gave the impression of a busy little bird.

And perfectly happy, Melissa tried to convey with a nod.

‘Do join us! We can't have you sitting here, eating on your own, can we?'

‘Oh, no . . . really –'

They insisted. There was no way out. If she did not accept, there would be the awkwardness of continuing to sit there next to them, having rudely turned them down. Groaning inwardly, she took the chair he had pulled out at their table.

‘David and Sheila Robbins,' he said, the aptness of which made Melissa smile inwardly. They stopped short of shaking hands to seal the formal introductions.

Sheila was a bank manager. ‘My business is people, not money!' she trilled.

‘I'm a retired police officer,' said David. That made sense; the broadness of the shoulders and the easy, slightly authoritative manner with a stranger.

‘What about you – what do you do, Melissa?'

She took a deep gulp of wine. Typical of the British abroad, wanting to place you, get the measure of you, even though they might never set eyes on you again. Exactly why Julian Adie had chosen to live here all those years ago, when it was remote and the only road was impassable in winter: to escape the expatriates and their social investigations.

‘I'm an archivist,' she said.

‘That sounds interesting,' prompted Sheila, eager for more.

‘What kind of archivist?' asked David.

‘Well . . .' Melissa hesitated, wishing this had never started. ‘Most recently, government work.' From the rapt expressions on their faces this was the wrong thing to say. ‘Nothing exciting, I'm afraid,' she assured them. ‘I've been working for the National Archives – reams of boring minutes
being transferred out of government offices to make room for more reams of boring minutes, mostly.'

‘I'm sure it's fascinating,' said Sheila, giving Melissa the full benefit of her professional people skills. ‘Don't you think so, David?'

‘Oh, it must be.'

‘We're from Bucks,' she volunteered. ‘Just outside Chesham.'

They waited expectantly for her to pat the conversational ball back.

‘London,' she said eventually.

Was there a flicker of suspicion in her husband's eye, as if he'd caught her hesitation and was wondering what to read into it?

‘Are you staying in Kalami?' Melissa rallied with an attempt at brightness.

She stood on the beach, letting the tension go. The bay was black. The curious iron street lamps along the broadwalk cast shifting columns of light, gold and silver, on to the dark water.

She was relieved to be alone again. Sheila and David, friendly and well-meaning though they were, brought it home that for the past few days she had been living in a kind of limbo reality. It was hard to explain, but since she had arrived here she had pushed real life away, perhaps because it was so painful. She didn't want to talk to anyone. There was a haunted quality to the island because every time she looked around, she was searching for signs of the past not the present and she wanted to immerse herself in that past, hoping always that would lead her to some kind
of understanding. Or perhaps it was all just a channel to be able to think about her mother as she had once been, not as she was at the end.

Melissa let herself into the apartment, and quickly put on another sweater. It was only nine-thirty, but the night air already had a chilly edge and there did not seem to be any means of heating the rooms. She moved a table lamp to the small dining table, and raised it on a pile of books and information leaflets from various holiday letting companies. Then she fetched her own books from where they were scattered around the sofa. The thick biography of Julian Adie by Stephen Mason was open with a coffee mug resting on the pages, making her slightly shocked at her own slovenliness. It was now frilled with strips of paper marking relevant passages, some with scribbled notes on.

‘To Elizabeth, always remembering Corfu, what could have been and what we must both forget.'

The words were constantly in her head like the nagging refrain of a song. And still the same questions. What must be forgotten? The sense of regret in the words was overwhelming.
Why
had she never said anything about Julian Adie before? She had obviously known him, and, the inscription implied, shared an intimate understanding. But Melissa could not find one mention of Elizabeth in the biography, nor in Adie's own autobiographical accounts of his life and travels.