The Kings of Eternity (5 page)

But I had made the same resolution more than once in the past, to no avail. Always the fear of being alone had stilled my tongue, and for a time afterwards the intimacy I shared with Carla would make it seem worthwhile... until the occasion of our next tiff, or the inevitable bout of blind jealousy on my part.

The phone shrilled. I snatched it, up, fully expecting Carla to start haranguing me for my behaviour.

It was a man’s voice, and it was a little while before I could gather my senses and identify it.

“Hello, is that Langham? Jonathon Langham?”

“Langham here. Who?-”

“Thank God,” said the voice, deep and rumbling. It came to me that it was a friend of my father’s, ringing with bad news.

“It’s Carnegie. Been trying to reach you all night.”

“Jasper? How can I help...?”

Jasper Carnegie was the editor and publisher of a small literary magazine called
The Monthly Scribe
. He’d often called me with the commission for an article or short story, but never at midnight.

“Jasper?”

“Can you get away for a few days, Langham? Come down to the Grange?”

“Ah...” I began. I had been at university with Carnegie, and I had seen more of him since he’d founded his magazine a couple of years ago. He had never before invited me to the Grange - but why now, I wondered, and why at this ungodly hour?

“Did you hear me, Langham? Can you see yourself free for a few days?”

My father would not be in town for a while, and the novel was going nowhere. Also, it would be the perfect opportunity to get away from Carla. I would go without informing her of my destination; perhaps it might be the precursor of the ultimate break that I knew, in my heart, I needed to make.

“Yes, yes of course.”

“Excellent, Langham. Y’see, there’s been some strange goings on down here. I’d like you to help me investigate.”

I almost laughed aloud. It was like something from a penny dreadful.

“Edward Vaughan’s coming too. In fact, he can pick you up. Ten in the morning, Langham, outside Waterloo station.”

“Carnegie,” I interrupted. “Investigate what, exactly?”

“Plenty of time for all that tomorrow, Langham.”

The line went dead.

I had met the novelist Edward Vaughan a couple of times. He too wrote for Carnegie’s magazine, but unlike me he was wealthy and respected. I had always been in awe of the man - I considered his novels of the highest standard - and I looked forward to meeting him again with anticipation and not a little nervousness.

I retired to bed, my head swirling with the events of the day. As I lay staring up at the darkened ceiling, I went over and over my conversation with Jasper Carnegie.

Strange goings on at the Grange...

Chapter Three

Kallithéa, July, 1999

One week after he first met Caroline Platt, Langham received an invitation to the private showing of her exhibition. He had seen nothing of her that week, which reassured him that she was not an undercover investigative journalist stalking him for an interview.

He found himself looking back to the evening they had spent chatting on his patio, and he realised that he’d enjoyed her company. Oddly, he was disappointed that she had not been in touch since then. Caroline Platt was friendly and intelligent and strong - she had her own opinions, and could articulate them. It was the first time for years he had engaged in extended conversation with anyone other than his editor, and it had not been as painful as he’d feared.

At eight he made his way out to the patio with his customary breakfast of black tea, plain yoghurt and honey. He found the envelope containing the invitation propped against an empty bottle of wine on the table.

He considered attending the private showing that evening. It was a long time since he had been to anything vaguely formal on the island, and only the thought that he would have the opportunity to meet and talk to Caroline again persuaded him to go.

He reached into his trouser pocket and held the mereth, reassuring himself.

At nine he began writing. He was working on a novel set in Cairo in the late sixties. It was a follow up to his most critically acclaimed novel
Tangier
, and while he usually shied away from committing follow-ups or sequels, the female protagonist of
Tangier
had demanded that he write about her further exploits in Egypt in the summer of ‘72. While he found it painful to write about Sam, who had existed as a real person, once upon a time, it was also an act of catharsis to extend in fiction a life that had been cut tragically short in reality.

He arrived at the end of the scene just before midday, put away his manuscript book and pen, and walked into Sarakina for lunch.

He passed Caroline’s villa on the way into the village, but saw no sign of her; no doubt she was over in Xanthos, making last minute preparations for the exhibition.

The writing had gone well that morning, and he was in good spirits as he strolled towards the taverna. But the sight of the fat Englishman, wrestling with a newspaper in the slight sea breeze, put a damper on the prospect of a quiet lunch.

He took his usual table beneath the awning. At least from here, close to the entrance of the taverna, he had a view of the Englishman, and not vice versa. To have eaten his lunch under threat of scrutiny would have been unbearable.

He ordered squid, with salad, and his usual glass of local retsina.

The Englishman had chosen a table in the shade when he had arrived, but he had reckoned without the movement of the sun. Now he was in its direct light, and it was basting him like a wild boar on a spit. The simile, Langham thought as he ate, was not inappropriate. The man was porcine in more than just his surplus of blubber; he had a turned up nose and rheumy eyes, and ginger bristles instead of real hair. Langham decided to use his physical aspect in the next scene of his novel. His heroine was due a run in with a particularly vile military policeman. The Englishman would suffice as a template.

He wondered if, his suspicion constantly primed, he had taken against an innocent tourist. He had first seen the man a week ago, when he’d convinced himself, on flimsy evidence, that he was a grubby journalist.

Langham chastised himself for being so uncharitable - and then he saw the man produce a book from an overstuffed hold-all beside his chair, and he knew that his initial assumption, and subsequent irritation, was fully justified.

The book was a hardback first edition of Langham’s third novel,
In Khartoum
.

There was something almost arrogant in the way the man pulled it from his hold-all, thumbed through it negligently, and began reading the book at arm’s length. A minute later he decided it was too hot in the sun. He moved into the shade, and consequently closer to Langham’s table. Langham knew it to be a ploy. Soon the man would find some pretext with which to start a conversation.

But not if I can help it, he thought, and quickly finished his squid and gulped down the wine. He hurried into the taverna and paid Georgiou, then slipped out again behind the broad, sweating back of the journalist and escaped up the road leading from the harbour.

In the shade of the pine trees, put out at having his usually leisurely lunch curtailed, he wondered if he was being paranoid. Perhaps the Englishman was not a journalist at all, but some innocent tourist who enjoyed the novels of Daniel Langham.

But he had Fleet Street stamped all over him, and Langham knew he had not seen the last of the man. Battle lines had been drawn. He was content in the knowledge that he would vanquish his foe, as he had in the past. They might come after him, but he would retreat into silence and wait out the journalistic onslaught. Their papers had limited staff - the hack would be needed on other stories when this one drew a blank.

He showered when he arrived home, and at three rewrote that morning’s work, cutting and tidying up. At six he made himself a simple Spanish omelette, ate it with a beer while gazing out over the calm blue sea, and at seven walked back into the village and hailed one of Sarakina’s three taxis.

There was no sign of the Englishman at the taverna. Langham wondered when the approach might be made, and from what quarter. A letter, requesting an interview, a brazen demand one morning at the taverna, a visit at his villa one afternoon? Whichever, Langham would be ready.

As he rode in the back of the taxi from Sarakina, on the old road high over the hills, he put the journalist from his mind and thought about Caroline and the evening ahead.

The private showing was taking place in the town hall at Xanthos, a quietly impressive building overlooking the main square. As the taxi drew up outside the sweeping steps of the building, Langham made out a parade of the island’s dignitaries making their way across the square.

He climbed the steps and entered the main exhibition hall, his hand instinctively reaching for the mereth. Activated by the presence of sentient beings, it thrummed reassuringly.

As Langham stood and stared about him, he realised that the work he had seen in the studio had done nothing to prepare him for the exhibition.

It was more than just the colour of the paintings, he realised as he joined the widdershins procession around the room, but the effect of the vibrancy she somehow achieved, that tricked the eye into thinking that the shapes portrayed had a pulsing, rhythmic life of their own.

I’ll have to ask her how she does it, he thought, before realising that it was perhaps a crass question: it was no doubt not so much a conscious technical effect, but something that emanated from the soul of the woman, something inherent in the essence of her personality. Viewing the paintings, he liked Caroline Platt even more.

One picture in particular took his breath away with its beauty and vitality. He remained standing before it, a rock in the stream of people passing around him.

The canvas showed three figures in a sunlit landscape; they were in the foreground, but small, reduced by the immensity of the plain or desert before them. The sun was setting, and high above in the sky the first stars were beginning to glimmer. Langham found himself choked by it, near to tears. There was something elemental and yet original in its portrayal of humanity in a landscape. It spoke of optimism and eternity.

He squinted at the tiny note beside the painting. It said simply:
Contemplating the Future
, acrylic on canvas, May 1999. Very recent, then.

“Do you like it?”

He turned. It was Caroline. She passed him a glass of wine. “I’m delighted you could come, Daniel. I’ve been talking to a few people, and they said they didn’t think you’d make it. Did you know you have a reputation as a recluse?”

He laughed. “Is that all? Recluse, misanthrope, all round miserable churl.”

She clapped her hands, delighted at his ironic self-appraisal.

Despite her animation, she looked drained. Her face was pale, her eyes tired. No doubt all the arrangement, the stress of the exhibition, had taken its toll.

She took his arm and escorted him around the show. “So, Mr Recluse, having you here is something of a coup.”

He laughed, again, and he couldn’t recall laughing twice in as many minutes for a long time. “I’m that much of a draw, am I?”

“Sequestering yourself away has increased public interest.”

“Something like the last dodo on Mauritius, hmm?”

“Now, I never said you were a dodo.”

“Feel like one sometimes,” he said, pausing to admire another vivid landscape.

“I do hope you like them.”

He turned to her. “Isn’t it wonderful when you come across work by a colleague, a fellow writer, artist, whatever, which you can be wholly enthusiastic about?” He gestured around the exhibition. “They’re not only beautiful and technically accomplished, they contain a life and an optimism that touches something in here,” he touched his chest. “They’re truly staggering.”

“I’m blushing.”

He smiled. “Sometimes, you come across accomplished work by someone in another field. You wish that you had their skill. It’s as if... you know your own discipline so well, its tricks and short-cuts, that you just want to start again in a field you know nothing about, so that you can perhaps achieve an innocence of vision... I’m babbling.”

“No, no,” she said, dragging on his arm. “I know what you mean. I felt like that when I discovered your books.”

He stopped walking and looked at her. “You never said you’d read them.”

“Well, you never asked.”

They had come full circle, and in a bid to change the subject, he gestured at the painting entitled,
Contemplating the Future
.

“My favourite.”

She was silent, regarding it, and when he looked at her he saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.

Someone called her name from across the hall, and she turned and replied in fluent Greek. “Damn, Daniel. I’m wanted. What are you doing later? Say, in an hour?”

“In an hour? Nothing planned.”

“Then I’ll meet you outside on the steps, okay? There’s a lovely, quiet bar by the harbour. We’ll have a sedate night-cap.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

She squeezed his arm and hurried away.

He watched her go, aware of the beating of his damnable, maddening heart, and then returned his attention to the paintings.

He picked up a pamphlet about the artist and her work, in both Greek and English. It told him little more than she had told him during their first meeting, but he did learn that she was born in 1960, had attended art college in Leeds, and had had an exhibition in New York. He would have to ask her about that.

So he could relax and take Caroline Platt at face value; she was not, it seemed, an investigative journalist - or anything else, for that matter. He wondered how he could have suspected her of being anything other than an attractive, warm-hearted human being?

He took another turn around the exhibition, finding new things to see in each painting. He would have to come here with Caroline when it was quieter, and she could talk him through the paintings at her leisure.