Songs of Blue and Gold (33 page)

She was thinking of Dr Braxton, but maybe they were all implicated in the web of supposition.

‘Braxton thinks my mother was there.'

Alexandros sat forward in his seat as she told him how she had gone to Sommières, thinking she was finding her own way into her mother's story, only to find it was another trail Braxton had already covered.

‘He's spoken to the same people I did in Sommières . . . but there's not much that's relevant there. Unless Annick wasn't telling the truth when she told me how she knew who my mother was.'

‘Or only part of the truth.'

‘Do you think it's worth trying her again – see if she'll tell me any more this time?'

‘It's getting a long way from the story Braxton is researching.'

‘Not if he's set on finding out about my mum, it isn't!' She was amazed he didn't get that. ‘He thinks she was involved in this . . . death. He even called it a killing! He's going to write a book saying that my mother was Adie's partner in murder!'

Her heart was pounding. Finally articulating the threat made it horrifying, as well as incomprehensible.

‘Why would he think that?'

‘I don't know!' wailed Melissa. ‘I simply don't know. If you'd ever met her you'd know it was just ridiculous!'

‘It could simply be because of the time she was there . . .' It was lame and he knew it. ‘Or someone remembered her name for another reason . . .' That was worse.

He had no answers either.

‘Braxton wants to see her papers – but there are no papers. He doesn't believe me. He lives in a world where everything can be found in a book or a library. And if it's not written it can be teased out from between the lines.'

‘Do you have a number for Braxton?' asked Alexandros.

‘He gave me his card.'

‘Perhaps we should meet him.'

‘Face him head on, you mean? But we know what he intends to write. The only thing we can do is prove him wrong,' said Melissa. ‘And how do we do that?'

The situation seemed bizarre. But the idea of having someone like Alexandros on her side made all the difference to her spirits. The way he used the word ‘we' was profoundly comforting.

She showed him upstairs, to the bedroom she had hurriedly prepared for him. Gauging his reaction to her lack of presumption was impossible. His face was granite as he thanked her.

Quickly she prepared a simple supper and opened a bottle of wine. Bread and olives went in Provençal dishes on the kitchen table. It would be making too much of a statement to have set it out in the more formal dining room, but she lit a couple of candles. They cast intimate shadows across the long wooden table. The mood was cosy.

Neither wanted to reopen the discussion about Braxton for the moment. Melissa asked him about looking for the ancient sites for the guidebook, and he chatted more easily.

‘There's nothing left of the great Pharos of Alexandria. It's almost all cleared out. Within folk memory, the two obelisks known as Cleopatra's Needles were shipped to Britain and America. They built a tram station on the spot where they once stood, or rather one stood and the other – the one that went to London – lay on its side. The only ancient monument left is Pompey's Pillar.'

She served the salad. ‘Go on.'

‘I also tried to find the house where my grandfather was born. I had always wanted to do that. Did I tell you I once had relatives in Alexandria? But whatever traces had once been were under blocks of modern apartments.'

He met her eyes. He mumbled a few words she didn't catch, then resumed. It was possible he was also feeling awkward.

‘One early morning I took my maps and Cavafy's anthology, and stood outside the building where he lived, and spoke some lines aloud. Then I walked through the back
streets, an archaeologist, but of the imagination, looking for what was there no longer, and perhaps never had been.

‘As I say, the . . . ah, place names are all changed. In the end I took some very thin paper and traced an old map to a standard scale. Then I laid it over the new map of the city, and moved it until I found a m-match. I wasn't going to give up.'

‘I found the old Rue Lepsius that way – where Cavafy lived. The building is renumbered, and the road is now called the Sharia Sharm el Sheikh. The Greek consulate has taken over Cavafy's old apartment, made it into a small museum, but it was . . . sterile. The walls are white. You . . . er . . . had to look at the photographs to have any idea of what it was like when it was his home, with deep colours on the walls and idiosyncratic possessions jumbled on every space.'

‘Were you disappointed?'

‘A little. It could have been done with more thought.'

‘Did your pieces for the book turn out well?'

He pulled a face. ‘Quite well, I suppose. It's hard to say.'

‘It's been a difficult time.'

Melissa pushed back the molten lip of the nearest candle from where a wax stalactite was forming. She wanted to reach out to him so much, to assure him he was not alone, but held back, afraid of spoiling it all, of misreading the tension which had been building since his phone call.

‘Yes, but in a strange way that has helped.'

She saw him walking the dusty streets, picking his way through the foetid Egyptian air, his wife in Athens, with no intention of returning; looking around intently, in the process of mastering that knowledge, just as she had been coming to terms with being on her own again.

‘I do know what you mean,' she said. ‘Standing outside your own situation for a while, learning how to be alone again.'

Alexandros looked away. His expression was profoundly sad.

‘Did she come back?' Melissa asked awkwardly. ‘Your wife?'

For a few seconds it seemed as if he was not going to reply. He shifted nervously in his seat. Then he looked up. ‘No.'

‘Are you – how do you feel about that now?'

Another long pause. ‘I'm all right. Mainly. My friends are kind. I have my interests, my work . . .'

‘My husband came back,' she said boldly. ‘But so did the problem.'

After eating, they moved back to the sitting room. More relaxed there, they talked for a long time about their separate situations. How you felt you knew someone, and then discovered you had missed the fundamentals, the driving impulses of their personality. It was good to talk. It seemed a long time since she had imagined having this conversation with him in Corfu. But better late. There was so much she understood better now.

‘You aren't still hoping it might work out somehow, are you? With Richard?' he had been visibly jolted when she told him that Richard had been with her up until only a few weeks ago. That she had gone back to him.

The moon was silver bright through the window.

‘No. I told you. I feel relieved. I might have gone on trying for years, even when I was unhappy. But he gave me no choice. So for that, I'm grateful.'

‘But why did you have to keep on trying?'

That was the question she couldn't answer.

‘I don't know. I've gone round and round trying to work it out.' She sighed. ‘Lack of confidence, perhaps. Things that happened in the past. Family. A need for security. How long have you got?'

‘As long as you want,' he said seriously.

She smiled. ‘We don't always feel what we are meant to feel,' she began. It felt as if she were pulling the words out against a great counterweight. ‘When you've had a way of coping for so long, it's incredibly hard to change the pattern. It's like being one of those bloody dogs salivating at the bell.'

He spoke slowly. ‘When we're in the middle of an awful situation, it's never as clear to the one inside as it is to those looking in from the outside.'

‘No . . . that's what my friends told me.'

‘It's true. It's only after you come through, and there's some distance, that you can see what everyone else could see all along.'

Melissa tucked her feet up under her on the sofa.

‘How many years was it just you and your mother?' he asked gently.

‘Most of my life. Even when my father was supposed to be with us, he wasn't – not really.'

‘So she is the one you learned from.'

‘Of course.'

It was so obvious.

At about midnight, she went upstairs to fetch a sweater. She felt confused, scared of making a mistake. Were they just friends? What about the conversation they had just had – was that a clearing of the way, or a trading of intimacies as friends? It was not the same as that night in Corfu. It was more serious
now that they were both free to make a move. It was extraordinary that he was here.

She brushed her hair, checked her make-up and sat longer than she intended in her room. Uncertain what she wanted to happen, she stayed where she was.

When she went down, she found him soundly asleep on his chair. He seemed comfortable, so she fetched a bedspread and laid it over him as gently as she could, resisting the urge to touch his handsome creased face.

And part of her was relieved she did not have to take the decision.

The next day was Saturday. The market in St Martin de Londres was swarming, the crowds swollen with the first spring tourists from the north. They bumped through the melee breathing the concentrated scents of the south in the soaps, dried herbs, the oozing cheeses and the barrels of oil and herb-soaked olives, walnuts, olive oil, spicy sausage and wine. They squeezed past baskets loaded with aubergines, courgettes, great misshapen red peppers, cut melons.

At the café Melissa sat down; a sudden pang of loss and sadness locking her chest. Without thinking she had led the way to the spot where she had sat with Elizabeth so often over the years, just as she had followed the familiar trajectories of the old route through the stalls.

The air felt solid in her lungs. A trickle of sweat made its way down her back.

‘Are you OK?' asked Alexandros.

She nodded. ‘It just hits me, sometimes. Most of the time I don't let myself feel upset. Mum . . . sorry.'

He reached out across the table and put a hand on her forearm. ‘It's natural. You need time, you know.'

Tears were clotting, compressed and painful, behind her eyes. She would not let them go, could not. She would rather they ossified, same as the hard bony hurt.

He was so kind.

They drank coffee in silence, letting their own thoughts be carried on the flow of scents and colours, the lines of life etched deep on other faces passing, the stories of survival they would never hear, the shuffle of the elderly men and women in their rough black and dark blue country work clothes, the shouts of the vendors, the parents with young children, the relaxed well-dressed couples in late middle age.

A plane cut across the blue, high and soundless.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I think the, ah, travelling had made me more tired than I thought last night.'

They were lying out on steamer chairs in the garden. A susurrus in the olives, hot sun on skin, clear skies above; it could almost have been summer.

Elizabeth felt close by. Melissa could see her willowy shape by the fig tree, breathing in its sweet sensual August scent, and by the wall of the courtyard pulling the destructive ivy from the dry cracks of the stone wall. We can only make assumptions based on the parts we know of the full picture, or believe we can remember, she wanted to say.

Distant hills slumped on the horizon, giving a sense of space all around. They were facing down the slope where wild flowers had colonised clumps of the meadow, splashing blue and yellow on the ringing spring green of the grasses.

He reached out and took her hand. The warmth of his hand was soothing. Richard's had so often been cold. Her heart seemed to expand with hope. That night in Corfu. Then the optimism was rapidly replaced by dread.

Melissa felt panicky. A churning of the emotions that was made sharper by not knowing why she should feel this way.

Alexandros leaned over to her. His eyes were the same melting brown as she recalled. Just like she had rerun in her head all those months since that night. Suddenly it seemed too good to be true that he was here.

She was even more attracted to him than she had been in Corfu. He had lost the pained brittleness she had seen when they first met. He was decisive and confident now. He had come back into himself. Physically as well as mentally, he was stronger. He was more than she remembered, perhaps more than she could handle.

She did not respond when he cupped her face. Or rather she must have done, because he dropped his hand as soon as she looked at him.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I thought—'

She could only look at his shoes, at the grass, and the smooth red-stained wood of the chairs.

‘Is it too soon?'

‘I don't know . . .'

‘I did not know that you had, er, gone back to your husband.'

‘No . . . you couldn't have known that . . .' Melissa picked at wood, unable to explain why she was so confused. She was drawn to him, more than ever, and flattered that he had come to find her, but what was his motive in doing so?

‘I don't really know why you're here. We hardly know
each other.' There. It was said. She regretted it as soon as the words were out. She closed her eyes tightly, wishing this was not happening.

The chair creaked as he stood up. Wind rustled lightly in the walnut tree above.

‘I came because – because—' He cleared his throat but did not continue.

A mad notion surfaced that he had not been honest with her. That there was another reason he had turned up. Perhaps that was to do with Braxton and his theories too. She should have been suspicious earlier.

‘What did you want from me?' she whispered.

He looked broken. His face was all angles and incomprehension.

‘I did not want anything. I was hoping that we could give to each other. I thought about you so much after . . . that night. Thought that if I gave it time, it might be special between us.'