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She hadn’t counted on going to Lara’s new home, especially with Andreas, but what "reason could she possibly give for refusing now that she had accepted his offer? Her heart beat heavily for a moment and then she shrugged her despair aside. Why not? It would be stealing a day from the future, one day out of all the years ahead. She thought about the mountains and how often they had gone there in the past, golden days spent in the sun with the great peaks of the Troodos reaching up to a cloudless sky and a soft wind blowing across the valley floor. Such days had been perfection and this one day stolen from the future could be no less. Her heart lifted in sudden, inexplicable ecstasy as she walked along the terrace in front of the open loggia where most of her guests gathered for tea. As Andreas had just pointed out, it would be a day off and she had quite an efficient staff.

Friday seemed a long way away, but she had plenty to do. She would leave all the marketing to Francis because he went in early anyway to choose the fruit, and Elli and Paris could see to the other details between them.

Nikos had not been at the Crescent Beach all week so she concluded that he was too busy on the estate to come so far for a game of tennis, and when she phoned her mother Dorothy said vaguely that they were ‘doing something with the vines’. She was almost childishly glad at the prospect of their meeting.

‘I wondered if Andreas would offer to bring you,’ she said. ‘He is so busy these days.’

‘Apparently not on a Friday.’ Anna’s heart was suddenly light. ‘It’s a good day for leaving hotel responsibilities behind, I gather.’

‘When will you arrive?’ The voice at the far end of the line was eager. ‘Will you leave early?’

Anna hesitated. ‘We’re going to Pedhoulas first,’ she explained. ‘Andreas has to go to Lara’s new villa for some sort of consultation, I gather, and to deliver some papers. I told you we passed Lara’s car on the way home last week. She was with her husband—and Martha.’

‘She may ask you to stay for lunch.’ Dorothy sounded disappointed.

‘I don’t think she will, and Andreas knows I’m coming up principally to be with you for as long as possible. Will you tell Kiria Masistas and ask if it will be all right for me to come?’

‘You don’t need to ask,’ Dorothy assured her. ‘She is very fond of you, Anna, and so is Kypros. Do you know, he keeps me amused all day. He has a great fund of stories to tell and he seems to enjoy my company when Nikos is here to supervise the work.’

‘I’m glad you’re so well settled—and obviously so happy,’ Anna said. ‘Keep it up till Friday.’

At ten o’clock precisely Andreas arrived at the front door, driving his own car.

‘All set?’ he asked when she hurried across the hall to meet him. ‘This all your luggage?’ He glanced down at the suitcase and large basket she had placed near the door. ‘It looks as if you’re going for a week.’

‘I’m taking some extra clothes for Mama,’ she explained, ‘and a few goodies for the family—fruit they don’t grow and that sort of thing. Will it go in the back seat?'

“Easily.’ He lifted suitcase and basket, casting a critical eye over the hall. ‘Everything in order?’

‘Absolutely. I’m looking forward to this, Andreas, and I’m not going to give the Villa Severus a single thought till we’re on our way back.’

He held the front passenger door open for her after stowing her luggage in the back seat where she noticed a large bouquet of flowers encased in protective cellophane which was probably a gift for Lara.

‘I ordered them from Limassol yesterday and they arrived just in time half-an-hour ago,’ he said, getting in behind the wheel. ‘I thought your mother would like them.’

‘She’ll be enchanted.’ So, they were not a love-gift for Lara, after all. ‘You know how fond she is of carnations.’

Paris saw them off, standing at the open door with an expression of great importance on his face, his white shirt tucked neatly into pale grey trousers, his bow tie of office immaculate. He had subdued his unruly curls with a side parting and much water, and his hands were folded discreetly behind his back.

‘We’ve made his day.’ Andreas laughed. ‘What did I tell you about delegating responsibility? Paris will do you proud.’

They took the Troodos road out of Limassol, driving with the sun ahead of them as it came up over the mountains and filtered through the valleys. It was an ideal day with not a cloud in sight, a day like those she had remembered, and it seemed inevitable that Andreas should be by her side. Once or twice, glancing at his stem profile etched against the backdrop of hills on the far side of the car, it seemed as if they might regain the simple intimacy of a past long since gone, and she had to steel herself against remembering too vividly because everywhere she looked, to right or left, was heartbreakingly familiar. It was the road they had travelled so often, passing through the little villages they knew until they came close to the heart of the great peaks and the summer resorts built high on their craggy sides or sheltering in their shaded valleys. Mount Olympus shimmered in the sun, dedicated to Aphrodite long ago, and all the legendary nightingales of Platres seemed to be singing in her ears.

Monasteries and ancient churches, waterfalls and deep-hidden gorges came and went with the road climbing among pines and plane trees one minute and plunging deep into a valley the next.

‘We’ll stop for coffee at the next taverna,’ Andreas suggested. ‘I don’t think we’re expected at the villa much before twelve o’clock. Let’s make it somewhere we know,’ he added. ‘Papasolomontos’, perhaps.’

He swung into a side road, bumping to a halt before the open frontage of a small restaurant where the stout proprietor was sitting at a table under a vine pergola smoking a contented pipe with half-a-dozen cronies who had gathered to hear his view on everything from the latest political situation to the state of the local vegetable crops. Peter Papasolomontos recognised them immediately.

'Kherete!
I heard you had returned.’ he said to Andreas in his native tongue, ‘and you have not changed your girlfriend, either! That is good,’ he declared. ‘That is very good.’

Anna sat down on a red plastic chair, thinking how much nicer it would have been if Peter’s old wicker chairs had survived. The old man’s sense of hospitality had not altered, however. He brought thick, black Turkish coffee in little porcelain cups, placing a tray of sweetmeats beside them as a matter of course. Andreas asked about his family.

‘They are well. We have five grandchildren now and Mama has come to stay with us since Papa died. You see,' he laughed, ‘our family grows larger every year and we grow more and more content!'

Anna sipped the thick, harsh coffee politely, although she had never acquired a taste for it, and Andreas watched her effort with a smile.

‘None of your instant stuff,' he pointed out. ‘Thick and black and strong, as I remember it.’

‘You always took water with it!' she condemned him. ‘And mostly you preferred orange-juice.'

‘Your father used to say that orange-juice was a woman’s drink,’ he reflected, ‘and it took a man to appreciate Turkish coffee as it should be served.’

It was the first time he had mentioned her father without reserve and she wondered if he had decided to forget the past completely. It might no longer interest him now that he had a splendid new future ahead of him, a future of Lara’s making, it seemed, blotting out the rancour of the past.

When they rose to go Peter Papasolomontos pressed a small parcel into her hands. ‘For your Mama,’ he said with a broad smile. 'For Kiria Rossides, whom I remember well.’

Anna knew that it would be the brand of Turkish Delight most popular in the small tavernas, the ‘real thing', as her mother called it.

‘We're going to see her this afternoon,' she said. ‘I'm sure she will want me to thank you, Peter.'

‘Kali andamossi!’
Peter said. ‘Come again.’

They reached Troodos at mid-day, climbing through the pine forests by the mountain road to Prodhromos with its summer hotels and flats and well-watered gardens basking in the sunshine. Andreas took a secondary road out of the resort where the houses thinned to a selected few, large villas and small, each with a spectacular view and hidden in their own bower of greenery to give them the measure of privacy they evidently desired.

‘I think it might have been better if we had gone straight to the farm,’ Anna said nervously. ‘I feel like an intruder.’

‘You had a perfectly legitimate invitation.’ He turned to look at her. ‘Lara knows that we will be going on to visit your mother and this is purely business. I have these papers for her to sign and she would have had to come to Limassol if I hadn’t made the journey.’

He slowed the car as they came to a high white wall trailing hibiscus and bougainvillaea along its entire length until they reached an arched gateway leading to an extensive garden ablaze with every colour of the rainbow.

‘Hullo!’ a familiar voice greeted them from the top of the wall. ‘We’re on the look-out for you and you are ten minutes late.’

Andreas got down from behind the steering-wheel, smiling up at Martha who was perched on the top of the wall.

‘Come down,’ he ordered, ‘and greet us properly. Your mother would never approve of a welcoming speech sitting astride a wall. Besides, you’re spoiling the hibiscus.’

‘There’s masses and masses of it all over the place,’ Martha told him before she disappeared from her precarious perch. ‘Anyway, Susan is here with me, standing on the path to make sure I don’t fall.’

The disembodied voice of her governess came from the other side of the wall. ‘We’ve opened the gate for you, Andreas, so you can drive right in. Is Anna with you?’

‘She is, indeed, and we are late because we stopped half-way to drink coffee with an old friend.’

There was no immediate reply and he got back into the car and drove through the arch into a wonderland of flowers.

The Villa Napa stood on a rocky ledge above its terraced garden with a plunging view over a forest of pines, cypress and cedar to the lush valley below. A mountain stream rushed down among the limestone, making a spectacular waterfall to one side of the house and on the other a large, open-air swimming-pool reflected the cloudless blue of the sky as in a mirror surrounded by flowers. Red and orange, blue and pink, they tumbled from troughs everywhere, while at the very end of the pool a yellow parasol and several reclining chairs were set out on the warm cream sandstone of the patio, waiting for Lara’s guests.

Lara herself came towards them from the direction of the house looking incredibly lovely in a soft, flowing kaftan dappled with orange flowers, and as she held out her hand to them in greeting Anna imagined that all the sadness had vanished from her eyes. She looked a woman fulfilled as she kissed them on both cheeks in welcome, allowing her eyes to linger a fraction longer on Andreas as she led the way into the house.

‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she told Anna with the utmost sincerity. ‘It would have been such a waste for Andreas to drive all this way alone when your mother is staying so near.’ She hesitated only for a moment as they reached the open door. ‘I haven’t been able to get to see her yet, but we will try to go next week. Philip has not been well. I think the journey must have been too much for him, Andreas,’ she added. ‘We should have taken your advice and broken it at the Crescent Beach for a day or two, but he was so anxious to get home.’

There had been the merest hesitation before that final word, but already they were in the cool, spacious hall where the high, arched windows were shuttered against the heat of mid-day and a quiet reigned which could almost be felt.

‘He’s waiting in the study,’ Lara said.

‘I'll take these in to him—they’re magazines.’ Andreas moved towards a white archway leading to another room. ‘And he’d better see the papers before we sign them.’

‘We’ve been talking business all morning,’ Lara confessed, ‘and I’m afraid I may have tired him. I thought the papers could wait a little, Andreas, till we have something to drink. Are you quite sure you can’t stay for a meal with us? Well, perhaps not,’ she added. ‘Anna must be anxious to see her mother.’

Standing at the top of the two marble steps which went down into the lower hall, Anna was aware of a movement in the archway, and it had also alerted Andreas who turned with a stricken look to greet their host.

The tall, white-haired man who came slowly towards them was the man who had been sitting beside Lara in the front seat of the Mercedes when they had passed on the narrow track outside Prodhromos. The leonine head, the classic features, as if carved from ivory, suggested authority, but where he had looked upright and strong in the car he now came towards them leaning heavily on a stick, his broad shoulders hunched, his grey eyes darkened with pain.

Martha rushed towards him. ‘Let me help you, Daddy.’ she cried. ‘Mummy says you must be careful of the steps.’

The concern in the young voice made him smile. ‘The steps are not too much for me, Marty, but I will do better with your help.’ He took his daughter’s hand. ‘And now you can introduce me to your new friend,’ he suggested, meeting Anna’s eyes as he crossed the floor.

‘This is Miss Rossides,’ Martha informed him primly. ‘Her mother saved me when we fell in the swimming- pool before there was any water in it.’

Everybody laughed. Anna thought it was the first time she had ever heard Lara laugh spontaneously, and she looked up to see her silhouetted against a lovely old Tabriz carpet which hung against the stark white wall between the arches, thinking her more beautiful in that moment than she had ever been.

Philip Warrender and Anna shook hands.

'I've been waiting to meet you,’ he said. ‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’

‘It renewed so many old memories,’ she answered unguardedly. ‘We spent much of the summer here in the past.’

‘You couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful spot,’ he said, ‘but now you must be ready for something cool to drink. What can I offer you?’

‘She likes orange-juice,’ Martha advised him. ‘We drink it all the time at the hotel.’