Daniel pivoted around and stretched out next to Kate on the patio. They lapsed into a comfortable, easy silence for a while. It was blisteringly hot, and Daniel invited the sun’s rays to penetrate through his tender flesh to his tired bones, dissolving his aches and pains away. The contrast between the atmosphere in Atheenaton and that in the cold, wet, grey London of his other life was so extreme as to render any comparison pointless.
As he lay there peacefully amid the sounds of cicadas and the faint tumbling of the waves on the beach less than a hundred metres away, Daniel imagined that, while he was in Atheenaton, he was awake and conscious, and that London and all its problems were just a dream. If he could stay awake indefinitely, perhaps he might never have to return there; perhaps he could stay in this Greek Wonderland for ever
It was Kate who eventually broke the silence and brought Daniel back from his reverie. ‘Daniel?’ she said softly, so as not to surprise him or jolt him unnecessarily.
‘Uh-huh,’ murmured Daniel, tuming on to his side to look at her. Kate drew a long, deep breath, and then paused for a moment before speaking.
‘What was she like?’ Daniel searched Kate’s face for clues. He knew instinctively that she was referring to Alex, and as she already knew various things about him her question was not altogether surprising. None the less, Daniel didn’t answer immediately; he wanted to be sure they were thinking about the same person.
‘Lisanne?’ he said at last.
‘No, silly. Alex. You don’t mind me asking, do you?’
Daniel paused. Did he? Did he mind someone - even someone in a dream - breaking the taboo and asking him about Alex? He wasn’t sure, but he decided to show willing; after all, if one couldn’t experiment in one’s dreams...
‘No, no. Of course not,’ he said, as lightly as possible, but even as the words left his lips his conscience was darkened by a rush of memories that he was powerless to forestall.
Alex. No one had spoken her name aloud for months; no one had dared to mention her. Even now, six months after her death, none of his friends had any idea of what had really happened between them. No one understood the depths of his despair, the anguish that he suffered. They thought he was mourning the loss of a colleague, a friend perhaps. But that barely touched upon the truth. Alex was dead, and no one had had the slightest notion of what she had meant to him.
After all this time, Daniel still found it difficult to concede that he had committed a sin. In his attempts at rationalisation, he told himself that it had been just a fling - a short affair with an attractive, delightful and engagingly sexy young woman who had made it evident, almost on first contact, that she was more than a little interested in him. And what man, stranded thousands of miles from home in a city in a foreign country, would have found it easy to resist such a come-on, especially when he was daily entering war zones and battle grounds, dodging flying fists and occasionally speeding bullets, just to get a picture for the front cover of some newspaper or magazine?
It was true what they said: danger was an aphrodisiac, and when one introduced that chemistry into the sort of high-tension environments that Daniel inhabited, then it was only a matter of time before the inevitable occurred. For all his blustering self-justification - his unvoiced pleas of mitigating circumstances and situations beyond his control - it was true that, up until the time he and Alex had been thrown into the Ayodhya crisis in northern India, Daniel had managed to resist such impulses. Not that such abstention in itself absolved one of the sin, but it was still the case that this one commission was something of a lapse, a black mark in an otherwise unspotted copybook.
There had been opportunities previously, and there had been a number of propositions over the years - after all, he was not an unattractive man. But he had resisted, albeit with some exercising of willpower, not least because he truly loved Lisanne, was happily married, and had never wanted to do anything that might jeopardise his relationship with her.
But Alex had turned his head. She was different: not just physically attractive, but possessed of a special quality, not easily defined, that placed her apart from all the pretty young female journalists on the circuit. She had a certain zest for life, an enthusiasm that was both appealing and infectious. One could not help but have a good time around Alex, and in a short time she had established quite a reputation for herself, not just as an outstanding writer, but also as the life and soul of the party, any party, whenever and wherever there was one to be found.
Alex was good company, something Daniel appreciated from the moment they met. India was not the easiest of places in which to work, and having someone around to share the burdens made life a good deal more tolerable. This became particularly evident during the Ayodhya crisis.
The Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya had become the focus of some of the worst sectarian violence since Partition. Hindus claimed that the mosque had been erected on the site of a sacred temple, razed to the ground by the Mughals, who conquered the area in the fifteenth century. The temple was supposedly the site where the god Rama had been born. Hindu fundamentalists had been agitating for the mosque to be demolished and for a new temple of Rama to be built in its place, and indeed a number of Hindu fanatics had attacked the mosque and caused considerable damage. Inevitably, this had resulted in high-octane confrontations and serious, bloody riots.
Alex and Daniel were both sent by one of the Sunday broadsheets to cover the incident. On their first day in the area, having had to duck various airborne missiles, including several rocks, sticks and bottles, they retired to their hotel, shaken and stirred and ready for a little liquid anaesthetic. Although neither of them was what Daniel referred to as a ‘career drinker’, the events of the day had really unsettled them, and, rather than stomach the cheap, locally produced whisky served in the dismal bar attached to the hotel, they repaired to Daniel’s room and duly polished off the whole of his duty-free allowance, i,n the shape of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label.
Looking back, Daniel was to recall that although he had never been seduced before, it did not feel strange or unusual and that, in fact, with a bit of practice he could quite get used to it. At the time, however, he had reservations, not the least of which concerned what would happen if Lisanne ever found out. But, under the influence of strong drink and the attractions of Alex’s long, lithe legs, pert bottom and firm, round breasts - all of which she flaunted with the vigour and ease of a professional stripper - even these fears dissipated.
Alex made the first move. It was not in Daniel’s nature to chase after women, but he was not immune from the sort of seductive techniques that Alex had practised to perfection. Like most men, Daniel was a sucker for flattery, and Alex used her skills in the one arena where all men were vulnerable: their sexuality. Her manner, while subtle, indicated in no uncertain terms that the object of her interest was, in her eyes, one hundred per cent, gold-plated, high-octane sexy.
Take a slim, beautiful, exciting woman and have her show a man - any man - that the only thing she wants to do is sleep with him, and he becomes putty. In bed, she was, if not a revelation, then certainly a very pleasant surprise. Alex was not just keen on sex, she revelled in it. The whole arena of physical contact was a source of endless pleasure for her, and she played an active role in exploring new areas of potential gratification. She was young - younger than Daniel, certainly - and had discovered early that, if you approached it properly, the world could be a great big playground. And in general, while women were her friends, men had become her toys.
And Daniel fell for it. He fell for the compliments paid to his form and physique, to his animal magnetism, his sexual prowess, his way with women. He listened and looked and lapped it all up. Alex understood men, understood their strengths and weaknesses (especially their weaknesses), and used that knowledge to manipulate them wholly and entirely.
Even if Daniel had suspected this at the time - that he was no more than the most recent participant in a long-running game - he probably wouldn’t have cared. In bed Alex brought his many and varied fantasies to life. She was young, willing and skilled, capable of performing feats and actions that Daniel had previously only imagined.
In the morning they both woke with hellish hangovers and fuzzy but unmistakable auras of guilt, which hovered around them for most of the morning until, in an effort to exorcise these spectres, they decided to go to bed again, this time sober, and face any consequences that might arise. The idea uppermost in Daniel’s mind when he made the suggestion was not that this was a cunning way of getting laid again, but that without the booze and blinding excitement caused by the dangers of the previous day, the couple would in all likelihood find each other less than passionately arousing, thus putting paid to any notions of guilt that might otherwise hang around them like a bad smell.
Unfortunately - at least for Daniel’s conscience if not his libido - the second coupling was even more intense than the first, and, much as he would have liked to deny it, with this confirmation of their mutual attraction he soon found himself deeply - and destructively - attracted to his companion. It was not surprising that the rest of their time in India was spent - when not ducking broken bottles and the abuse of religious extremists - attempting to discover which of two as yet untried sexual positions caused the most laughter, pleasure, discomfort and/or pain.
And then, on what was scheduled to be their final day in Ayodhya, tragedy struck.
They were driving out of town, back towards the hotel, when an aggrieved agitator (whose religious and political persuasions were never discovered) hurled a home-made fire-bomb - a sort of oversized Molotov cocktail - at the windscreen of their speeding jeep. Before Daniel had even registered what had happened, the jeep had careered off the road, out of control, hit a bank of earth at high speed, flipped over several times, then crashed with full force into a banyan tree that for five hundred years had been minding its own business, doing no one any harm. The driver was killed on impact, and had Daniel not been thrown free of the wrecked vehicle he, like Alex, would certainly have died in the inferno that followed.
The flames raged on for hours, fed by hot winds and by the tinder-dry wood of the banyan tree, and when they finally died down there was not enough left of Alex even to identify her.
Alex died, and he lived. It was a result without justice, without reason, without decency. He too should have perished, Or else, they should both have survived. It was an outcome that diminished him, degraded the quality of his life, subtracted from his right to live. If such things could happen in the world, it was not a world in which he wanted any part.
Daniel looked up at Kate wistfully. Here was someone whom he could trust, someone, perhaps, to whom he could pour out his heart. The feelings, thoughts, ideas; the guilt. He had never had a chance to finish things with Alex, to break it off, as would have happened inevitably had she lived. He had cheated on Lisanne, and in some bizarre way the affair was caught in limbo, suspended like a fly in amber, there to haunt him all his days. It was unfinished business, and would always remain so.
But at last, after keeping the guilt bottled up inside for so long, he could talk about it, tell another soul how he really felt. The rush of emotion that accompanied these feelings was so intense that, for a moment, as the words formed upon his lips and he gazed into Kate’s eyes, he could feel the world around him starting to thicken, darken and dissolve, found his usually acute senses attenuating, as if he had suddenly been plunged into a giant tank of murky water, and before he had a chance to issue so much as a word, everything went black.
Daniel awoke in distress. Something had gone wrong with his dream. He had woken without a single thought in his head: no music, no visions, nothing, He felt bereft, hollow; as if someone had sucked the breath of life out of him.
He started to panic; what if he had lost it? What if Atheenaton had disappeared? What had Kate said about questioning it too closely, about not fitting? Had he overstepped the mark somehow?
He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, hoping it might calm him down. As he dried his face he tried to recall what had last happened in Atheenaton, but he was confused and distraught. He tried to relax with some deep-breathing exercises, but this didn’t work. He could not get a grip on it; he could not conjure up a single, solid image of Atheenaton. Suddenly the whole place felt like a mirage, insubstantial and illusory.
He ran down to the living room, turned on the stereo and put on his precious record of Greek music, but although the music was pleasing and familiar it failed to bring anything back to him. He searched around for the dreadful
Greek Idyll
in the hope that it might trigger his memory; much as he hated it, he had to admit that there were undeniable, though tenuous, links between the novel and his experiences in Atheenaton. Perhaps it would help to jog his memory.