Songs of Blue and Gold (34 page)

She shook her head.

‘I'm sorry, I got it wrong.' He was bitter again, with the old clipped edge to his speech.

Wretched, she began to explain, but was not up to the argument. It was too soon after Richard. It was painful to think of him, of the way he had manipulated her emotions and screwed up her trust and trampled over her judgement. Thinking about the past months made her tense up. Richard had spoiled everything for her. But the ugly truth was that she had let him do so. Her judgement really was terrible. She was angry with herself for being such a sap.

‘I will go,' said Alexandros.

She wanted to stop him but could not think how to do so.

He was walking back towards the house, and she was saying nothing. She could not call him back. It was too soon. She was too wounded.

When he came down with his travel bag, he proudly refused her offer of a lift to Nîmes. She clasped his hand, willing him to understand what she couldn't say. It was a stilted goodbye – another stilted goodbye – and then he was gone.

The place felt desolate without him.

MELISSA THREW EVERY
shutter open in a symbolic gesture to spring cleaning, poked into forgotten cupboards and hung rugs outside for beating.

Afterwards, feigning optimism, she went into town to the
agence immobiliere
to find out what rental she might expect, should she decide to put the
bergerie
into their hands for the coming year.

That was the impetus, born out of a renewed sense that she was at last moving on and concentrating on the practicalities, no matter how turbulent her inner life, that sent her into the locked room at the side of the house.

At the far end of the
bergerie
was a flight of six ragged steps to a pale green door from which paint unfurled in flakes. It was a simple cell-like room used for storage. But perhaps, she thought, it would be possible to convert it into another bedroom, which would add to the rental price. It would be a good practical project, satisfying and profitable, to complete her journey back into the present.

The key was in the drawer of the kitchen table, a blunt rusty weight in her hand which left brown-red dust in the
palm. Perhaps it would not even turn in the lock. She took a cloth and some oil, hoping that might work. She need not have worried. Once jiggled into position, the key turned easily.

It was dark inside, with a slight scent of damp. In the light from the door, Melissa stared in. Heavy curtains were drawn over the single small window. She remembered the walls as knobbly grey plaster, but now they were whitewashed. A few cobwebs hung down, and there were patches of crumbly dust, and what might have been mouse-droppings perhaps, on the plain wooden floor. But this was no storeroom as she recalled it.

A single bed, with a mean frame of black iron, was pushed lengthways against the far wall. On it were cushions and folded cotton spreads. Against the walls to either side were low bookcases, of assorted sizes, old and cheap, the kind that might have been brought back from a flea market. On the floor was a wide tray, holding several ballpoint pens.

Finally, a small pine table. On top was a radio, three candlesticks and a half-f box of candles.

It looked as if Elizabeth had been using it as a kind of study.

Wondering when she had done this, and why she had never mentioned it, Melissa went over to the bookshelves and looked closer. Her heart skipped a beat.

Travel books, on India and Greece, the Greek islands, Egypt, old ones featuring Yugoslavia, were crammed against books by Julian Adie. His poetry was there, and his novels too. The Mason biography, much read.

There was a collection of interviews Adie had given, transcripts from radio and television programmes catalogued by
an academic; critical assessments of his work; volumes dedicated to the study of his Spirit of Place. Then there were the biographies of other men and women who had known Julian Adie. She picked out one at random, and turned to the index, heart beating faster, feeling sweaty, knowing what she would see. Adie's name, underlined, and a string of page numbers.

Most of the books were twenty, thirty, forty years old. Had Elizabeth haunted antiquarian and second-hand bookshops to get them? Melissa worked her way along. Picture books of Greek Islands. A book of photographs by Grace Heald.

And then, when she had barely assimilated the first, another discovery.

An old sketchbook, dropping its pages. A foolscap notebook, lined pages, a white sticky note on the front in her handwriting: ‘Precious. My life in parts. Very roughly written.'

Temporal conventions are irrelevant in Adie's oeuvre. Time is pulled continuously out of shape; the present distorts the past, and what was once fact is relegated to unreliable recall, even in his autobiographical work.

Adie shows us how memory subtly reorders the past, playing up certain incidents and compressing others by the importance to which they are assigned by the mind. But in his obsession with the tricks of memory, he is highly susceptible to nostalgia in its cruellest form, and this trait is crucial to an examination of his state of mind in the summer of 1968.

This is the turning point of the myth: his descent into the underworld.

In May, still shell-shocked by Simone's sudden death, Julian Adie returned once again to Corfu. He set off
east through France in a stink of petrol from the jerry cans strapped to the inside of the camper van. The student unrest in Paris had spread to the rest of the country in a great wave of belligerence, blockades and disruptions. Many filling stations were closed, but nothing would deter him from making this journey to a spiritual home. And for a free spirit, his views on the political situation were surprisingly conservative. ‘I would kick them all back into the Sorbonne,' he told Peter Commin. ‘They don't know how lucky they are.'

But when he arrived on his beloved island this time, nothing was as it should have been. The rented villa in Paleokastritsa developed a sewage problem. He hated the atmosphere of the tourist town which had sprouted weed-like between the scallop bays. ‘
The New Costa Brava
,' he called it, writing grouchily to Don Webber of the invasion of unattractive hordes wearing shorts and caring nothing for the history and classical resonances. His beloved landscape was despoiled by litter, and worse, building sites in the coastal olive groves from which grew monstrous cheap hotels, ugly and attractive only to an equally unappealing clientele. His old haunts, especially in the south of the island, had to be filtered through an ever-thicker imaginary gauze. The wounds he had come back to lick were deeper and more bloody than he had realised.

He returned to Kalami, refusing the offer of his old rooms at the White House then regretting his decision. He found a couple of rooms above an olive press
off the path to Agni, close to his old cradle, the rock pool by the shrine. There, he could look out to a purple-sprinkled sea shielded by trees from all earthly disappointments.

Was he simply glutting himself on his particular pleasures: alcohol, sea and sun, and the cut and thrust of words which reassured him more than anything else that he was indeed alive? Surely he must have thought now and then of Grace, his long-ago wife.

He was an older, paunchier man. His hair was still thick and light although it must have been greying by then, but on a good day the engaging smile was undimmed in the sun-lined face. He was still extremely attractive to women.

To the world at large, Julian Adie was a success. He was still the great catalyst, the man who ‘pumped champagne bubbles into the air', according to fellow poet Bernard Bressens. Stir in the hard-won fame and praise for his work, and it must have been a potent brew.

On the other hand . . . strip away the romance of his travels, his seductive powers, his fame – and what was left? A middle-aged man, a nomad in a camper van grieving for his dead wife. Anyone meeting him now, having read
The Gates of Paradise
, would see it clearly for what it was: an elegiac howl of pain for the author's lost youth and idealism.

Drink helped: it enabled him to function relatively normally until he overshot the mark; it was his constant companion now. Words had dried, along with the
effervescence and belly laughter. He went through his paces with women, but in a manner which suggested a tired old animal tied to biological habits. For the first time he felt old, and this time no amount of mythology could disguise the torture of his loss.

He could not bear to be alone. He would go to expatriate parties, occasionally behaving badly. His state of mind that spring and summer was impulsive, reckless even. He was alternately morose, roaming the island alone in his van in search of the past, sleeping out close to deserted beaches, or so gloriously drunk that he could steal a donkey and ride it one afternoon right up to the counter of his favourite bar on the Liston in town.

He raged at the state of the island, but he was also battling his own unsightly flaws. With the years, the successive losses, he had become more angry, embittered, and inclined to lash out. The pugnacious undertow of his work was showing up in real life. Julian Adie could be a violent man, and this was becoming more and more difficult to contain.

He had been seeing a wealthy divorcee, Veronica Rae from Santa Barbara, California, who had been introduced to Adie by Don Webber. They had first met when Adie went to Berkeley on a lecture tour the previous year. It is possible their affair started there. When she heard the news of Simone Adie's death, Veronica had seized her chance. They exchanged letters, and he must have offered her enough encouragement to take a
transatlantic plane to Greece as soon as she knew he would be there.

But then one evening at a party, Adie meets a young Englishwoman called Elizabeth Milne. She is in her early twenties, compliant and star struck. Pretty, blonde and naïve, she provides consolation and asks nothing of him. She also bears a striking resemblance to his first wife Grace Heald.

And Julian Adie is an uxorious man, always happiest with a wife whether or not he is faithful to her. Some days, crazed by grief, drink and fury at the loss of Simone, he is barely able to control himself. He has alarmed some of the locals who have known him since the Kalami days with his unreasonable demands and embarrassing outbursts. He cries not only for Simone, but for Grace and Loula too.

It seems doubtful that Elizabeth Milne could have had much idea of the nature of the man. Flattered by his attentions, she would have been a stranger to his experiences and preoccupations: the grinning at death in Cairo, the rank, sweet odours of decay and degeneration, the macabre and cruel fascinations. She would have been oblivious to the objective reality which can be seen so clearly by anyone comparing a photograph of Elizabeth Milne with Grace Adie: that, subconsciously or not, he had cast her in Grace's role before the fall from paradise.

His moods swing. One moment he is full of bonhomie, the next the bright blue eyes cloud and narrow. One night he is found sobbing inconsolably at
the tourist spot of Kassiope, while fires are burning for a saint's feast. His old Corfiot friends fear he might be close to the edge, that he might be suicidal.

Worse, he cannot write. He is trying, and failing. The fear is constant, he confides in a letter to Don Webber, dated the end of June: the fear that he has dried up, the fear of losing everything yet again. How many more times can he start again, can he ‘shuck off his skins like an old snake'?

But there is no doubt the man has courage. In his personal life, he has rebuilt himself time and again. He is certain he will do so again, even though this time his courage is more a kind of recklessness, or madness. After all, he has come back to his beginning as a writer, to those mythic Ionian waves that hold the sunlight in their blue swell. He had forgotten the way the sea changes temperature with the currents, the cruel caress of the undertow as it pulls towards the turtleback rocks, but that is good. He will revisit the start of his story again, and remake it with hard-edged experience.

He has the title already:
Songs of Blue and Gold
.

His two rooms at the olive press are austere. He wants it that way. He wants to live as he did back in the nineteen thirties. But he is no longer that young man in more ways than one. At the woodworm-infested table he uses
as a desk, moths butt the stinking paraffin lamp he has placed by his faithful old typewriter, but the words come only as stutters.

According to local lore, Adie was the bringer of riches and was welcomed back like a lord. His landlady, Marina Dandola, supplies him with paper for the typewriter, wine, her own olive oil and the hard black bread he has requested. From her cottage across the path she hears the tapping as he works, his footsteps and the engine of his camper van starting up. Her recollection is of him working from sunrise to mid-morning when he would set off to spend the day elsewhere. She went into his rooms to tidy up and make the bed until he told her that he preferred her not to. He seemed superficially cheerful if a little distracted.

But Yannis Retalas, son of the erstwhile shopkeeper at Kalami, has a different perspective. ‘His soul was troubled that year.' According to Retalas, Adie was uncharacteristically silent. But then one night he got into a fight in the bar. A local builder was talking with friends about a construction site he was working on, and Adie staggered up, gave him a torrent of oaths.

He had turned to go, having said his piece, but then whipped round and landed a right hook on the builder's jaw. A scuffle ensued, from which Adie emerged with a cut lip and a ripped shirt. He had to be banned from the bar, which put the owner into a bind because Adie's money had been keeping the till full.

Elizabeth is often with him as he revisits the places he remembers. On a boat supplied by a Corfiot friend they sail the coast. They walk the mountain paths. Her presence might calm him a little, but despair is never far from the surface.