Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave (7 page)

I
sabel said afterwards that we were really getting too old for that sort of thing; which remains perhaps the best verdict on the whole sad affair. Unless you take the line—as my wife did—that the moon was to blame.

They’ve never found out who did it: just some ugly little incident among a lot of drunken campers. Since clearly none of us was involved, they let us all go and back we all came to England. Not immediately: that would have looked odd since we’d rented an expensive villa, but a little sooner than planned. You could hardly blame us for cutting short our holiday by a few days. A death on the beach below, police crawling all over the place,
Greek
police what’s more: not that we put it like that to the charming young woman in the villa rental office, given that she
was
a Greek. In any case she was most understanding. Especially as we showed no signs of asking for a reduction in the rent.

Obviously none of us four was involved; how could we be involved, up on that great big villa on the rock? How could a smart villa party of well-off married people from London
be involved with some little scrubber camping down below? Different worlds. Utterly different worlds. Quite soon, the police took that line too.

The world of the campers below was not only a different world, but a pretty horrible one to boot. Crowds—there must have been nearly fifty of them down there—and squalor naturally, since there was no sanitation beyond the natural shade of the olive trees, those graceful trees whose leaves had flickered so exquisitely in the sunlight on the day we arrived, when the beach was still empty.

“Do you realize that apart from anything else, apart from the noise—ye gods, the noise, we hardly slept a wink last night, did we, Isabel?—do you realize that it’s
illegal
?” That was Nick. Isabel nodded vigorously; she always agreed strongly with everything that Nick said in public. (In private, since the villa walls were not entirely soundproof, we were aware that matters were somewhat different.) But my wife, Dinah, did murmur to me afterwards in that light voice of hers—the one she uses for her really snaky remarks—that it was wonderful to have Nick standing up for the law here on the tiny island of Bexi, it really must be the effect of the sun, since back on the great big island of Britain, Nick sometimes took rather a different line about the law …

But I had better begin at the beginning. No, not at the very beginning, not from our very first business enterprise; suffice it to say that the four of us, Dinah and myself, Nick and Isabel, had become close enough over the years to take villas together in sunny foreign parts over a considerable span of time. The Algarve, Italy, Greece (Corfu followed by Paxos), all these have produced comfortable villas, more or less, and happy holidays, of which the same could probably be said. And frankly a holiday which is more or less happy
is way above most holidays you take: which is, I think, why we all persevered with the arrangement.

Did I mention that something else unites us? Beyond the same line of work and living nowadays in the same part of London. We’re all childless, or effectively childless. Nick did have a son by his first marriage, I believe, but either the mother kept him to herself or Isabel dumped him—the story varies—at all events he never figures in our lives. As for ourselves, we’ve certainly never wanted children. We’re enough for each other, always have been. I look after Dinah, she looks after me, as we’re fond of saying. So that at the age when our contemporaries are spending all their time worrying over their ungrateful 20-year-olds—and a good deal of their money rescuing them from this, that and the other, also without getting much thanks—we four have the luxury of our time to ourselves. And our money, too, come to think of it.

Douceur de vivre
: that’s our motto (and yes, it does sound much better in French, but then we four are, I fancy, rather more enlightened in our enjoyment of luxury than the average couples who toast “the sweet life”).

This year we decided to experiment with a lesser island and go to Bexi. An island paradise, said the brochure. And so I suppose it was—in a way. Much less spoilt than Corfu and much nearer to a decent airport than Paxos. Villa Aglaia was pretty near paradise too. At first. Even my wife, who generally finds something to say about the washing arrangements or lack of them, approved the separate showers for each double bedroom, to say nothing of a water supply which actually did not run out. (Remembering that time outside Portofino!) Then the view was so extraordinary, right there on the cliffs; we would look towards Albania at night, and watch the moon rise. A thin crescent the night we arrived—amusing to be drinking retsina again,
once the duty-free champagne ran out—but rapidly growing.

The moon: yes. Perhaps after all Dinah was right and the moon was to blame. In so far as anyone else was to blame. Certainly the moon appears to have been to blame for what started to happen on the beach. When the first campers appeared—one large grey tent under the olives and one girl who slept under an old boat—we even thought them quite picturesque; the girl anyway. “The local Samantha Fox” my wife dubbed her on one occasion, since she certainly had the most fantastic figure, the sort you could photograph for Page Three, as we could not help noticing since she seldom wore anything but a bikini bottom.

But “Samantha Fox” wasn’t quite right since Brigitte—that was actually her name—happened to be brown all over, having an amazing tan apart from having an amazing figure. As a matter of fact, I chatted to her quite a bit, in early mornings when no one else was around, and she was really very polite and friendly. Just a kid working her way around Europe as a waitress, taking a holiday on this beach in between. German probably—or was she Swedish? She had this special feeling about St. Peter’s, Rome, I remember, the square at St. Peter’s; she was absolutely determined to see the square. We had quite long talks about it.

Not when the others were around, however. Then, I have to say, the conversation was on a very different level. Well, we were on holiday. There was one famous occasion when Brigitte, topless, wobbled so perilously near Nick, sunbathing on the stones, on her way to the sea, that my wife and I both involuntarily looked towards Isabel.

The fact is that Isabel, who does sometimes bathe topless (but always discreetly up at the villa), does have the most lovely slim figure, everyone agrees about that. But if Isabel has a fault, it’s the fact that, good-looking woman as she is,
Isabel is absolutely totally flat-chested. Perhaps that explains why I’ve never really fancied her, and perhaps that explains again why we’ve all holidayed so happily together. Be that as it may, on this occasion Isabel merely smiled in her most tranquil manner and murmured something like, “That she should be so lucky.” Later, in their bedroom, however, I can tell you that it was rather a less tranquil story. What a tigress! That serene, smiling woman. Still the end of it sounded rather satisfactory; at least from Nick’s point of view, and I assume Isabel’s as well.

All the time, the moon was getting stronger at night; I should say bigger, but was it the increasing strength of the moonlight rather than the size of the moon itself which was so unsettling? Could you believe moonlight could be so white? Even when the moon was only half-full. That strange cold ancient light illuminating the sea which washed the rocks beneath us, the sea stretching out to the Albanian coast in a vast series of black and silver eddies with that broad flare-path in their centre. We took to sitting later and later on the terrace with our wine—a light Greek wine, for after dinner.

“So light, it’s like drinking water,” said Nick jovially on our second night. But of course it wasn’t quite like drinking water, particularly not in the quantities in which we consumed it. Perhaps it was all that wine late at night which made us so unsettled. They were odd, quirky, even slightly sinister, those sessions we had on the terrace. (Yet hadn’t we drunk wine in the Algarve? And Italy? And Paxos only the year before? The result being mere pleasure, relaxation …) Most unsettling of all, after we finally left the terrace, my wife and I had to lie, silent and sleepless, in our bedroom, hot behind the shutters, and listen to Isabel, the tigress of the night, who was growing more and more ferocious in the room alongside ours. Was
that
the wine?
The wine coupled with the moonlight (I noticed they did not close their shutters)? Or was it the noises coming from the beach?

For the waxing moon brought campers, more and more campers. And given its provocative light, bathing the beach in its brightness like a too well-lit stage where there had been nothing but discreet blackness before, we could hardly ignore their presence. There was—I can see it now, and my wife can see it too—a feeling of working towards some kind of climax, long before we heard the news about the party.

Besides, one or two fires began to flicker down below: those fires so dangerous to a wooden island depending on its olive groves, which was in fact the official reason for the banning of campers on Bexi. When we went down to swim in the early morning, we would find the black shells of night fires among the stones. There would also be cans of coke and beer and wine bottles abandoned. And other even more distasteful signs of what had taken place on the beach the night before. Signs of “safe sex” perhaps, but as my wife observed, wrinkling her nose (I hastily removed one of these signs from her favourite path into the water, burying it under a big cairn of pebbles), “Safe sex is all very well, but what about a beautiful beach?”

Oddly enough, Brigitte very much kept to herself apart from it all. She was friendly enough with the campers—she was a friendly girl, as I’ve said—but she never joined in with them at their various unpleasant goings-on. I know that, because I used to watch her sometimes from the look-out up above, watch her gazing out to sea, smoking the odd cigarette. What was she thinking about? St. Peter’s square, Rome, perhaps. Something like that. But I kept all that to myself, just as I never mentioned our morning conversations before the campers came.

At least the Villa Aglaia remained airy and remote from the squalor: in the daytime, when the campers were asleep or away in the little town of Bexi, so long as you did not go down to the beach or visit the look-out, you could cut yourself off from the squalor altogether. My wife cut branches of myrtle from the bushes which lined the steep (but short) path from the villa to the beach and put them everywhere in vases in the big rooms. But as the noise grew in proportion to the number of campers, I asked my wife not to cut back any more of the myrtle: for the bushes did at least conceal the path to the villa. What if the campers, drunk—or drugged, I put nothing past them—all decided to surge up the path in the small hours?

“Then you, darling, will have to be a big he-man and protect me,” said my wife in her snaky voice. “I somehow don’t think Nick and Isabel would notice.”

It was Nick who brought back the news of the party which was going to be held on the beach on the night of the full moon. He had been into the little port in the Landrover just before dinner—Isabel was washing her hair—to cash some travellers’ cheques. He came back looking white, or as near white as anyone as perfectly cared for and turned out (which means tanned) as Nick can ever look.

“A bloody great notice!” he exploded. “In English, what’s more. Full Moon Party. On Aglaia Beach—our beach. Everyone invited. Bonfires. Dancing. Naked bathing. Come by boat! Come by moped! On the night of the full moon. All this on a notice fixed to a tree just outside the town.” He repeated, “And in English too.”

“If it hadn’t been in English, Nick,” my wife pointed out reasonably enough, “you wouldn’t have understood it.” But Isabel, short, carefully streaked hair in a shining halo, was busy giving Nick a rewarding pat.

“Well done, Nick. At least you’ve warned us.”

“Warned us! I damn well have. Look, I’m going to have a whisky. Have we got any left? It’s a disgrace. Tomorrow I’m going to tell that little Greek girl in the office that I want it stopped, stopped without question.”

“But tomorrow will be too late, Nick,” my wife continued in that same reasonable voice. “Tonight is the night of the full moon. Didn’t you notice last night? Very, very nearly full. Only one tiny sliver missing.”

I must say that I was surprised at the time that my wife had that kind of information at her finger-tips; but then I read in one of the magazines you only read in aeroplanes that retaining the capacity to surprise your spouse is the secret of a happy marriage. I dare say that it’s Dinah’s remarkable sense of order which made her interested in something equally regulated like the phases of the moon.

So we come to the party. I have to admit a certain reluctance in thinking about it all, even now, back in London W11, in our beautiful house, the house which some people laughingly suggest is too big for us—“too luxurious even for you two”—but is actually a wonderful monument to my wife’s exquisite, cool and above all fastidious taste. A showcase for a sense of order, somebody else said.

If that’s true about our house, and it probably is, then you can just about imagine how my poor wife suffered during that nightmare build-up to the Full Moon Party on Aglaia Beach. The utter chaos, the noise of course, and the noise was indescribable, and let me not leave out the fear. The four of us, four sophisticated people, crouching there—I’m afraid after a while we were definitely crouching—as the car lights came towards the beach along the edge of the cliff, an army advancing on us, and the full moonlight lit up what went on below. In a way it reminded me of some medieval picture of Hell—all the couples writhing as though in
torment, their white limbs gyrating. In fact they were of course dancing. Dancing and copulating. You would feel like using that word if you had seen what we saw.

“Supposing they decide to come up here?” Nick said that, I know he did. “Just supposing?” Nick is a big man, very heavily built in spite of all the exercise he takes. We’re both of us big men, come to that, two big men with two fragile wives, that was another thing we had in common. Dinah, like Isabel, is wonderfully slender, well-preserved or whatever you call it; naturally she takes marvellous care of herself. But even Nick sounded frightened. And I was frightened too.