“What kind of shoes?”
“Expensive shoes.”
Well, I’ll be damned, he thought.
“He wouldn’t buy cheap ones,” he said.
He went back to the table, and instead of dissimulating he told Naomi exactly what he had just heard.
“Italy?” she blurted out.
“So it seems. He bought a pair of shoes in a place called Fasano.”
She thought for a moment. Would Faoud buy a pair of shoes with Jimmie’s credit card? He must have. He didn’t have any shoes, but he could have used cash: it was a mistake.
“I’m rather surprised,” she lied. “They left without saying anything to me. It’s quite rude.”
“Maybe something came up?”
“Came up? I doubt it.”
She was put out, and he took note. But there was no way of saying what it meant. He treated her with care from then on, steering the conversation away from her father and stepmother so that she would be put at ease. He let it be known that he was satisfied that they were on the road in Italy and that he would, perhaps, leave the island soon and go to Italy to find them himself. There was now no reason to persist with his inquiries on Hydra.
“I’ve called them at the house in Sorano,” Naomi said, “but they never pick up. Do you think something could have happened to them?”
“Not if Jimmie is buying fancy shoes.”
“What will you do in Italy, then?”
Rockhold wasn’t sure himself.
“Find them, I suppose. I can’t imagine why they’re hiding from us. It’s extraordinarily childish.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“By the way, are you staying here all summer? Or going back to London?”
She looked at him steadily, and she held her whole body erect and poised. He was a man, she now realized, who had to be fended off with a light touch. She didn’t feel that he was entirely suspicious of her, but his half-suspicion, his invisibly alert animal antennae, were attuned to the slightest muscular reaction on her part. He was a bloodhound, and his nose was refined. It didn’t matter that he called her “dear” and paid the bill.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Rockhold. In fact, I’m thinking about moving here. It’s my summer home, after all.”
“What a delightful idea.”
“Of course, I have to ask Jimmie and Phaine first.”
He looked at her and his eyes seemed to separate; she reconsidered what she had thought before, that one of them was glass. But there was no way of asking.
He walked back to the Bratseras alone. In the little area by the port there was a jazz concert without a stage, the musicians playing with their backs to the water and the lit-up yachts. He sat at one of the cafes and got himself a Pernod. He called Susan back and asked her to book a ticket to Bari on a flight out of Athens, and then lost himself in reverie. His eye was itching and he couldn’t wait to get it out for the night, but the evening was too enjoyable to abandon. He thought about Naomi instead. Her father had always said she was a tremendously gifted liar, and he wondered if he had just been treated to a perfect demonstration of this talent? He had noticed her heels, the earrings and the lipstick. It was too much for an hour or two at the Sunset with an old man. She had gone a little too far. There was a fracture just below her surface which made her seem decentered, and yet she herself was not aware of it. She was lying, but he could only detect this falsity with the part of his consciousness that was unconscious.
—
Left at the table, Naomi called Sam and made a suggestion. Why didn’t they go to Athens the following day and escape the claustrophobia of the island? She had to go into the city to take out the money for Carissa, but it was a boring trip if she did it alone. Sam not only agreed, but jumped at the idea. She said she had spent a painfully dull day swimming by herself and she asked if they could do something different in Athens.
“Different in what way?”
“Can we go to a fancy restaurant? Can we get drunk? Blow off some steam?”
“It’s about time,” Naomi said. “And it’s my treat.”
She returned to the villa and found Carissa awake and enjoying Jimmie’s brandy. It was shameless now, and her expression was openly insolent, but Naomi let it slide in the interest of peace. Instead, she went to her room and waited for the maid to do the same.
It took a long time. Carissa sang to herself in the salon and played the radio; it was close to midnight before she went down to the basement and closed her door. When quiet had returned Naomi went back down to the salon and saw that the maid had left everything on the table where she had eaten. Her soiled wineglass, plates with cheese rinds, serviettes. She had left everything on purpose. Naomi went around the room making sure she hadn’t stolen anything, then scooped out Phaine’s heritage silver spoons from the service drawers and took the two silver candlesticks that stood on the mantelpiece, bracketing pictures of Jimmie and Phaine caught as if unawares in various corners of the world. She rolled them all into a tablecloth and took them upstairs to pack into a sports bag. Then she returned to the salon, turned off the lights, and locked the doors. Perhaps it was the final night of being with another human being in the Villa Belle Air. She wrote a note for Carissa explaining that she was going to Athens in the morning and would be back in the evening the following day with the money. She wanted to spend a night in Athens just to be sure. She hadn’t wanted to tell her to her face; Carissa would have grown suspicious and she would probably have objected. She left it on the dining table and went out into the garden, where the tree’s upper branches were bathed in silver light and long-domiciled cicadas sang in the walls around it. It was not a cemetery, but a hushed sanctuary filled with bones, and this simplicity made it more beautiful than it had been before.
—