Songs of Blue and Gold (25 page)

He hit the water angrily with a flat palm, looking wildly all about.

‘She's not there? Veronica!' shouted Elizabeth.

‘What can you see from up there?'

‘Nothing . . . nothing!'

They shouted, louder and louder, across the sea. Nothing came back but the faint echo of their own voices.

‘What should we do now?' asked Elizabeth, starting to tremble.

‘I don't know . . .'

Elizabeth tried to be rational. ‘Are you sure she's still in there – she didn't climb out and you didn't see her go? You might have been underwater, not heard anything—'

‘It's possible . . . but if that was the case you would have seen something, heard something—'

‘I suppose . . .'

‘I'm going to get the boat,' said Julian, hauling himself out of the water. ‘You run to Agni and – no, wait . . .'

‘What? What should I do?'

‘Nothing. There's nothing you can do—'

‘But—!'

‘No. I want you to do what I tell you,' Julian told her. ‘Go back to Kouloura. Go up to the tavernas at Agni and call yourself a taxi – better, take the water bus if it's still running. Go home!'

‘But I can't!'

‘Yes. You can. You must. Look, there's no time to waste.'

‘And what are you—?' she cried.

But he had already set off back up the path the way they had come. ‘I'm going to get the boat . . .!' he shouted back.

‘Should I call someone for help?'

His words floated down to her.

‘I'll do it!'

AT KOULOURA SHE
waited the next morning, watching the sulky water, the sunless currents. A wind beyond the headland ruffled the cypresses. The same rocks, the same trees and scrub moved silently above a grey sea. All had changed.

Julian stayed away. No news came. In a state of suspension, pleading a hangover, Elizabeth sat for hours in the garden. The hills across the strait turned a sullen face to the emptiness, brown turning to a menacing iris-mauve as the day wore on. That evening the colours were too vibrant for her tired eyes, the contrast too reckless.

And all the time, jarring her nerves, making her head ache, was the appalling doubt that everything was as normal as it seemed. Where was Julian, what had happened next? She should never have left. She was furious with herself for following his orders so meekly. If only she had insisted on going back with him. But he had been so decisive when she had had no idea what to do next. In the heat of the moment she had let him override her better judgement. Just like so many other times, whispered a sly voice in her head.

Elizabeth closed her eyes. What did she actually remember of the previous night? Did the two of them, Adie and she, really see Veronica on the rocks? Yes. The mermaid dress was so distinctive. Was Veronica sitting or standing? Sitting. Did she seem agitated or calm? Earlier she had been drunk and truculent. Did she argue with Julian when he went down to her? There were raised voices. Did she threaten to hurl herself off the rocks and he ignored her? Julian was not ignoring her. Did she go into the water? There was a splash, followed soon after by another. Was there a tussle and she slipped into the sea? It was impossible for Elizabeth to know. Did Veronica try to swim? Again, impossible to know.

Had Julian been in time to take the boat out and find her in the water?

Or was Veronica still missing?

The letter. If she was still missing, it would be her fault.

Elizabeth shivered. She should never have done such a stupid thing. Of all of them, Veronica might not have been the most unhappy, but she was quite possibly the one most out of control. Here was a woman, twice divorced and a heavy drinker, become child-like in her need, and unable to imagine the consequences of her actions.

She forced herself to breathe calmly.

Surely the most likely answer was that Veronica had crawled back to the party, dripping wet and crazed. A bed would have been found for her, and she would have spent the day suffering.

Elizabeth fervently hoped that was the case.

There was of course another possibility: that Adie, having found Veronica, had allowed her to persuade him to spend the night with her. Both salt and wound. But in
the circumstances, Elizabeth began to think that might not be the worst outcome.

Still he did not appear, or even telephone. By early evening, Elizabeth was in such a state of agitation that she got ready as if she was due to meet him, allowing Clive and Mary to assume this was the case, and took the water bus to Agni. From there she walked up to the olive press. No one was there. Neither was he in any of the local tavernas. She walked over the headland and down into Kalami, even stopping to ask one man outside a boathouse if he had seen Adie that day. Darkness fell, but she did not find him.

Back at Kouloura much later, feeling shrunken and with uncomfortable intimations of guilt, she considered asking Clive for some telephone numbers of Adie's friends on the island but stopped short of doing so. It seemed wrong to alert anyone else to whatever it was that had happened. This was between the two of them; she needed to talk to him without provoking questions.

Mary knew something was wrong. ‘You're such a lovely girl,' she said. ‘Don't let yourself be hurt by him.'

Elizabeth spent a second sleepless night.

Early morning the next day, the news spread fast through the villages.

Mary, holding loaves of fresh bread from a shop in Kassiope, told her, ‘There's been a drowning. The fishermen at the Forty Winds found a body.'

Elizabeth trembled, hardly able to breathe as she asked, ‘Who?'

‘They don't know yet.'

‘Man . . . or woman?'

‘Woman.'

She had been washed up on a narrow beach of white stones. The body was encased in a gleaming skin of silvery scales. The fishermen thought they had found a sleeping mermaid, with her blue-white skin and matted tendrils of dark hair. On the Nereid's face and upper arms were plum smudges of deep bruising.

He was there, this time, at the olive press. Her first instinct was to open her arms to him, grateful he was safe.

When I heard about the body – I thought it might have been you! You went off into the dark and then . . . nothing! she wanted to cry. But she did not. She knew not to even before he said anything.

In the doorway, Adie was unshaven and shuffling. For the first time, he seemed his age.

‘You'd better come in,' he mumbled.

The room was in disarray. A piece of paper stuck up half-ripped from the roller of his old typewriter. The poems he had been working on were litter on the floor, torn, defaced and crumpled.

No mention was made of his avoidance of her. Elizabeth wanted to say that any guilt was irrational. They had not made Veronica follow them, had wanted no part of her silly games. But again she kept her thoughts to herself.

‘What happened?'

Adie lit a cigarette. The ashtray on the table was overflowing,
the smell from old butts acrid. She pulled up a chair opposite him.

‘I sat down on the rock with her,' he said. ‘I told her I would take her back to the party, take her home, whatever she wanted. But what she wanted was to sit on the damn rock and give me hell.'

‘What was she saying?'

‘She just wanted an argument.'

‘So you argued?'

He shrugged.

‘Why did she jump into the water?'

‘She wanted me to swim with her.'

It was only then that Elizabeth realised. ‘You'd brought her there before, hadn't you?'

A reluctant nod.

So much for being special, thought Elizabeth. ‘So then what happened?'

‘I bloody well jumped in after her. She was so off her rocker she had no idea how dangerous it was!'

‘Were you still arguing?'

‘I'm sure I was arguing with her.'

‘They say she had bruise marks all up her arms,' said Elizabeth. The picture was in her head all the time. The silvery body washed up on the beach.

‘I was trying to fish her out – she was struggling against me, the stupid, stupid woman. She was far too drunk to know what she was doing.' A vein was bulging on his neck.

Elizabeth hesitated. It was only for a split second.

‘You don't believe me!' he shouted, turning on her.

His hand closed on her wrist, pulling her roughly in to him.

‘You're hurting me! Of course I believe you. I was there, wasn't I?'

He let her go. ‘Sorry.'

In an instant, he was so subdued she wondered if he had slipped back into the raw grief he had only recently overcome. His blue shirt was stiff and stank of stale salt water.

‘It was an accident,' she said soothingly. ‘A terrible accident that you did your best to prevent. I heard you splash into the water after her.'

He was tossing down glass after glass of foul retsina. It was on his breath as he spoke. She noticed his hands were trembling as he described how he ran back to Nissaki to get the boat. All night he had gone up and down the coast searching for her, torch in hand, outboard motor gunning. The night fishermen had joined him. No one had seen or heard anything.

‘So – the police? They know all this?'

‘They know.'

There was nothing more to be said. She reached out and put a hand on his broad shoulder.

Eyes deep blue, in the face that now seemed creased, he fixed her with an unreadable gaze. Seconds passed.

Her gaze dropped to the binoculars on the messy table. The strap had snapped and the rough ends were tied.

‘We had better not be seen together any more,' he said.

She was aghast. ‘Why? We've done nothing wrong. Surely we just have to tell someone – the police – exactly what happened! That she followed us from the party and we know when and where she went into the water.'

He did not answer.

‘Julian?'

‘No.'

‘No? Why not?'

‘We can't, that's all.'

She stood astonished. ‘But . . . why?'

Elizabeth started to shake.

He stood up. ‘I'm leaving tonight. I'm going back to France.'

‘I don't understand . . .'

He pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans. ‘I can't stick it here now.'

‘No . . .' She looked away from him and saw for the first time the tatty suitcase open on the floor, filled with bundled swirls of cotton clothes.

‘It hasn't been the best way to—' He rubbed his sticky hair, embarrassed perhaps.

‘Will I see you again?' she interrupted. But she would not, could not, say,
Don't go.

He shook his head. ‘Who knows?'

The temperature dropped. He was closed off to her. She had no way of bringing back the man she had known for the past two months. That was not the person standing in front of her, a shrunken man who would not meet her eyes. Her heart was pounding as she stepped back instinctively.

‘You want me to go then?'

Silence.

‘Let me help you,' said Elizabeth. ‘It will be all right!'

‘You can't.'

He was dismissing her.

The realisation stunned her. She wanted to turn the clock back. To dive into sunlit water with him. To hold him like before.

‘Whatever happens, I will never forget this summer—' she whispered.

But Julian turned his back.

Swallowing her pride, her voice breaking, she reminded him of the name of the gallery in London through which he could contact her. She gave him a brush of her lips on the side of his mouth, and left.

She was empty, numb. Elizabeth did not confide her discomfort to the Stilwells. Not even to Clive, who would have brought his gentle certainties to bear on her distress. To do so would have meant revealing the extent of her feelings for Julian Adie, and by implication, the truth about her affair with him. She was caught: on the one hand feeling too young and inexperienced to have entangled herself in such adult games; and on the other too mature to be seeking a second opinion of the manoeuvrings like an adolescent.

The loss of the baby, of David and the married life that never was, the future that would not be; all returned now, intensified in a swift blow. But far worse was the certainty that the golden summer with Julian was over.

It began that evening, the odd pressing in of fear, like a low-level hum. The bruise around her wrist throbbed. Was it guilt as much as misery that was driving Adie away from Corfu? In any case, shouldn't he stay while there was some kind of official investigation? Had he told her the whole truth about what had happened that night? Elizabeth pushed the suspicion away immediately. But it gnawed at her assumptions.

How angry he had been when he accused her of not believing him. His hand tight as a vice on her wrist.

‘You're hurting me! Of course I believe you. I was there,
wasn't I?' she had cried. It was only afterwards, long afterwards, that she realised that only one of those statements was completely true. The pain around her wrist left the imprint of a livid dark bruise which took a long time to fade.

Elizabeth left Corfu at the end of August.

By then she was haunted by images of the pinched face and the silver dress being swallowed by the blackness. The strange cruel gods of the sea that always frolicked close to any haven Julian Adie made from mortality. She missed him and their dazzling dream world with a wrenching ache.

The weather turned suddenly on 20 August 1968. Adie stood alone on the stone jetty, his back to the White House as the storm struck. The sea was a sheet of crow-black sullenness, rippled like mourning crêpe. Darts of cold rain pierced the cotton of his shirt.

For a second time he was leaving this place harried by the knowledge that his paradise had imploded.

He knew what happened when a human drowned. His meticulous and macabre description of a death at sea is the centrepiece of
The Cairo Triptych
. He was intimately acquainted with the physiological process by which water began to enter the lungs, followed by a brief period of laryngospasm – the desperate tightening of the vocal cords – which kept the inrush at bay for a few vital minutes, but then, when the force of the sea engulfed the lungs, the lack of oxygen to the brain and body tissues. In long heady sentences his prose builds
and swells as he recreates the waves of panic, the minute composition of the bacteria, algae, sand and microscopic sea life in the mouthfuls of water, the frantic fatal gulps. The terrible suffocation as the body remains submerged, the trauma and collapse of the central nervous system, the stopping of the heart.