Songs of Blue and Gold (16 page)

He seemed oblivious to the fact that they were not alone. ‘Besides, I have a very strong feeling that we could be soul-mates.' His astonishingly blue eyes twinkled, but there was indelible sadness under the charm. ‘And I always act on my instincts.'

Elizabeth just caught sight of Mary raising her eyes to heaven.

Early the next morning, she went out with him in a borrowed sailing boat. At the helm of the sloop, he was a different man. Gone was the cocksure repartee, and in its place a seriousness she could relate to.

Out on the wide blue strait, he followed the coast round to the north of the island, past Kassiope, skimming past scrubby
headlands and shallow deserted bays of clear green, towards the great brown-bear mountains of Albania lumbering ahead to the east. The wind in her hair, she sat in the prow, exhilarated by the movement and the spray. Her nervousness at being in his company lasted no longer than getting used to the movement of the boat.

At noon they anchored at a wide sandy beach and walked inland to a lake surrounded by white flowers.

Julian stood still for some time, hands on hips, surveying the roll of the hills and the patterns etched by the sun and breeze on the water. ‘It hasn't changed,' he said at last.

‘Is this somewhere you used to know well?' she asked.

‘Several lifetimes ago,' he said.

For once he was still. The extraordinary stinging blue of his eyes rarely fell away from hers when he talked.

‘But the trouble with coming back to somewhere like this,' he went on, ‘is that it's always the same.'

‘Isn't that good?'

‘It makes you realise how much you've changed. Where is that other person who used to exist? Drugged on lily scent – embalmed, perhaps . . .'

He unpacked wine and food. They sat and drank. It was odd, she thought, she didn't feel a moment of nervousness in his company. The indefinable warmth she had felt in his presence that night at the party was stronger than ever. He asked all kinds of questions in the direct way he had, and she found herself telling him easily about David, the son of family friends in the village where her parents lived in Suffolk. A handsome boy – she still thought of him as a boy – who was kind and in love with her. How he had waited for her to finish her studies. And how she knew, little by little, that when she
graduated from the Byam Shaw, she would not be able to marry him after all, as both families had determined.

How she liked David, but liking was not enough. There was something missing, she confided (faintly astonished to be giving the thoughts form in words that she was speaking aloud), some vital spark that had never quite ignited for her. Of course she regretted the hurt she had caused, the embarrassment to their parents in the village, the wasted expense and the non-returnable deposits, the booked church and London hotel for the reception, but surely it was better, less hurtful, to stop it all before rather than six weeks after the ceremony.

‘We should have been coming back from our honeymoon about now. . . .'

Julian laughed. ‘I've always taken the opposite view. Never shirked a wedding – but then paid the price!'

They sat in silence.

‘There was a baby. I had an abortion,' said Elizabeth.

The sand was hot under their bare legs. Warm breaths of wind played in the air between them.

‘I know how it feels, to lose a child,' he murmured.

She had to lean in closer to hear.

His powerful shoulder muscles clenched as he turned to face the sea. The handsome tanned features crinkled in the searing brightness. ‘First my Greek daughter, then my Egyptian child.'

‘Tell me,' said Elizabeth.

So he did.

He told her how he had arrived in Egypt heartsick and battered, watching the coastline emerge through a cold white
dawn from the deck of an Australian transport ship that limped into the Western Harbour at Alexandria. Harried through the darkness by the Luftwaffe, the crossing from Crete had been a violent plunge south for survival.

Other less fortunate vessels lay ripped open inside the arms of the docks. The stench of spilled oil, its viscous blackness slicking the still water, permeated every pore.

As the sun rose hot and oppressive, he was directed to an army truck bound for a transit camp. The green flats and reeds of Lake Mareotis were the last landmarks before the desert road struck out into flat nothingness.

‘I had lost a wife, a daughter, and my island.'

‘Lost?' It was an involuntary interruption of the urgent fluency of his story, but she had been puzzling since the first time he said it. Did he mean they had died?

‘She left me, taking the baby. She went back to the bleak homeland.'

Still staring out at the horizon he paused, then exhaled. His voice was so soft, the rhythm so lulling, the words seemed to float on the warm air.

‘But then I met Loula and I knew there was no going back for me.'

Elizabeth held her breath, willing him to go on, to confide more. He poured more wine then settled back. A light breeze caught the opening of his white cotton shirt and he visibly relaxed.

‘I was at the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo. A press gathering. She stood a little apart from the crowd, so proud and silent. Loula Habib, they told me when I asked who she was.

‘I was hooked straight away. This was no English rose; this was another species of woman, with soft cinnamon breath,
skin of golden silk and claws that cut deep. She was wearing a dress of tight scarlet silk, with a darn under the arm.

‘The second time I saw her it was at a party where a woman fainted. Loula brought her round so calmly and capably, yet her hands trembled afterwards. I was drawn to her like a magnet.'

Loula was twenty-two years old, estranged from her middle-class parents in Alexandria, and working as a nurse. Her father, a banker, was part Syrian, part French and Spanish, with a strong dash of Jewish blood; her mother was French Alexandrian with Lebanese.

‘She had such a strong beautiful face – lotus-petal cheeks, dark burning eyes. Neither of us had any money. The scratching of beetles wore away at the nights in her bed-sitting room. But the way she held her head proudly away from the stench of the drains and squeals from the abattoir a street away . . .

‘Then I was seconded to Alexandria to work at the British Information Office and Loula went with me. We took rooms in a Jewish philanthropist's mansion in the Moharrem Bey area.

‘At the top of the house, there was a tower rising two storeys from the roof, high above the garden full of banyan trees and ginger lilies and snakes, and a view of Lake Mareotis to one side and the pockmarked shaft of Pompey's Pillar to the other. At last it was peaceful enough to start writing again.

‘I picked away at a borrowed typewriter, my mind elsewhere.'

‘Elsewhere?' asked Elizabeth.

‘That was where I wrote
The Gates of Paradise
.'

Julian lay back, propped up on his elbows. He said nothing. Elizabeth gazed around at the soft green hills and across the lake towards the sea beyond, let the heat unknot the tightness she had been carrying for months.

She felt no awkwardness as the minutes went by, just the warmth.

After a while he resumed his story.

‘At the end of the war, I got what I wanted – a return to Greek soil. I was posted to the island of Rhodes to work as an Information Officer for the occupying forces and I took Loula with me. As soon as I finally got my divorce papers from Grace and we could square it with her family, Loula and I got married there.'

‘You were happy again?' asked Elizabeth.

‘Blissfully. The happiest two years of my life.'

‘What happened?'

‘Loula fell pregnant – and we were so delighted. The time had come to leave Rhodes, the hand-over to Greece after the war was complete, so we travelled back to England for her to have the baby. All went well, or so I thought. The most ravishing little dark creature was born. We called her Hero. The baby was perfect. But sadly . . . all was not so well for Loula. She tipped down and down.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘She went mad.'

He said it so matter-of-factly. Elizabeth was searching for the right words to convey her horror, when he went on, this time more kindly, ‘There was nothing anyone could do for her – she went down into a spiral of madness.'

‘A depression after the birth?'

‘I suppose so. It was appalling, shocking. She would rave
and threaten to harm herself. Psychiatrists were called in and retired without helping. No one knew what to do.'

In the circumstances, he took what he considered the best option. He installed Loula with friends near his family home at Bournemouth, while he went to Cyprus to take up a new part-time post and set up home as they had planned. The domestic situation would be taken care of, and all prepared for her. But he was to await Loula's arrival for more than a year.

On Cyprus he found an old Turkish cottage at Bellapaix, a few miles inland from Kyrenia on the northern coast, and for a few sunny months, despite his worries, it seemed he had finally achieved what he wanted so desperately: to free himself to write while living relatively cheaply abroad. He had an idea for a serious and ambitious novel – perhaps a series of novels – set in Cairo and Alexandria.

But again he was thwarted. In order to keep himself and send back enough money for Loula and the child – as well as contributions to his elder daughter Artemis's upbringing, even though Grace had married again back in Britain – he supplemented his part-time government post with a teaching job in a Greek-Cypriot school which ate up his writing hours.

When Loula was at her worst, he looked after Hero alone on Cyprus, with the help of a local nanny. But it was a strain, and he was barely able to fulfil his work commitments, far less do any productive writing.

Loula emerged eventually from her private hell, but she was not the same person.

‘She claimed she no longer loved me. We tried, but we never succeeded in living together again. In time, as she recovered, she asked that Hero be allowed to return to her, and I had to agree it was the best way.'

It was a wrench he had to bear with a mixture of sadness and relief. He had not coped well by himself with a young child. The routine of working, writing and looking after his daughter had been punishing.

Elizabeth wanted to reach out to him, past the merry extrovert persona, past the impulsive exhibitionism, to the part of him that was strung tight.

Was it loss, in various forms, that drew Julian and Elizabeth together?

Photographs of her that summer show a pretty blonde woman, hair long and straight in the fashion of the time, wearing short skirts, but with a shy, wary look. Slim and smiling she may have been, but in repose the face was vulnerable and the smile a little forced.

Why did Julian Adie attach himself to her? It was a question Elizabeth asked herself many times. It might have been that he sensed in her hurt a mirror of his own. She recorded his character at that time as tender and vulnerable. The age difference between them was not mentioned, except for once, obliquely. ‘
We seem to be in a timeless zone. It could be any year; we are simply the essence of ourselves
,' she wrote. It was clear from her overblown tone she had been spending time – perhaps too much time – with Julian Adie.

He may have come close to the truth when he told her, one day up in the hills, ‘You remind me a little of Grace.' She took that to be a reference to her painting, and did not pursue the comparison.

She was drawn to him, in a way she had never experienced before.

The purity of the attraction was exciting, but also unnerving. It was there. The indefinable charge that she knew she had been missing with David. Something was going to happen between them.

Elizabeth knew she was out of her depth with him. But wary though she was, she would not have struck back for safety. She wanted this experience,
his
experience, a chance to swim in uncharted territory.

For several days after their confessional, he collected her at eleven each morning in the boat from the little harbour at Kouloura. The days drifted into the same pattern. She would walk down through the olive grove from the Stilwells' house, brown lizards skittering from the dusty path, crickets jumping at her footfall through the brittle grass. One particular turn brought her out of the trees, still high, and presented a panorama of the sea, and the white sails waiting for her below. Great cypresses made long dark curtains between the lane and the sparkling blue as she dropped down, picking up pace. Closer still, the knotted, crumpled stones which tumbled into the sea were amethyst curds under the clear water, as if the land was anchored by fields of submarine crystal. His hand, raised in greeting from the deck.

On the third morning he sailed the boat past Kalami to a place in the sea cliffs where the brutal cracked mesomorphic rocks arched and shattered above a pool of green in the blue water. On the jaw of the rocks sat a tiny stone hut.

‘The shrine of St Arsenius,' he announced.

He edged the boat in as far as he could, dropped anchor, and took his shirt off. Then he dived in wearing his sailing
shorts. He waited for her in the water as he urged her to do the same. Elizabeth plunged in and swam for the shore, unable to keep up with him. He pulled her up onto the flattest rock.

Elizabeth's heart was beating hard after the swim, yet Adie was unaffected by his exertions.

‘This is the thing,' he said, standing gleaming against the sun. ‘Here is a piece of rock fallen from a cliff into a sea of extraordinary blue. But to me, it's magical. Look carefully and it's a whole world.'

She sat still, her feet reaching cool water, doing as he asked, feeling the sea's briny kisses on her toes.

He flopped down beside her. Lying back, hands behind his neck, nose pointed up at the sun and eyes closed, he began to talk, voice slowed so it was almost hypnotic.