“Yes, a bit of a fanatic. Not that that’s a bad quality in a man like that. What did he grill you about when he was over there?”
“My childhood, mainly. But strangely, it didn’t feel nosy. I rather liked him. He was just worried when Jimmie didn’t return his phone calls. His curiosity seemed completely normal to me at the time, and it still does. That was his job, after all. I couldn’t resent him doing his job.”
“True enough.”
“Besides, he paid for dinner.”
Rupert smiled, and she did too.
In some way, he reflected, he had cleared the matter up and he had done it without a ruckus. He congratulated himself. They drove in his Jaguar along the looping roads contained within wire fences on the way back to Brighton, and as they came to the first traffic circle, a silver light broke over the sea as it came into view. The sea of the Normans, she thought, not my sea. There’s no blue to it.
That night she stayed in her room at the hotel. From her window she watched, gin in hand, the rollers exploding against a dark shingle beach and a hurricane wind tearing at the fairy lights strung across pale turquoise lampposts with dolphin motifs. Even summers here were wintry on certain days. Her thoughts were already back in Hydra. Her isolation returned after a long, nervous day filled with meaningless pretense and chatter, and with it came her doubts and her guilt—however ephemeral—and her hatred of her family. It wasn’t that they were insufferable; it was that she hated them for what they were. The emotion was straightforward and natural. In the center of this sudden turmoil and returning hatred was the thought of Faoud’s cremation. The ashes must be somewhere even now, stored in a place where a person could pick them up eventually. What if she did so, just because she expressed curiosity to the Italians? I want to have the ashes of my father’s killer. Wasn’t there a certain logic to it? But she would never do it. The box of ashes would remain unclaimed and eventually someone would dispose of it on the quiet, unless a family member heard of the events from afar and came for them. It wouldn’t happen. There was something orphaned about Faoud, an unmistakable abandonment. Certain people don’t come back from the dead in other people’s minds—but nevertheless he existed in hers.
The following day she took the train to Victoria and a taxi to St. John’s Wood. Her father’s mews house there never looked as if anyone ever lived in it, despite the confusion of his study. They had gone through his papers already and someone, without her knowledge, had obviously gone through his hard drive as well. Perhaps it had been Rupert. She wondered if he had talked to the Rockhold widow in that knowing and wheedling way of his. Rockhold must have talked to his wife about his comings and goings, his suspicions. It was impossible that she knew nothing. Perhaps she had let slip a thing or two. Things that he thought about the girl he was investigating. Things about the visitor at Episkopi and the Four Seasons that he could have easily found out about. Troubled by the possibilities that she would never be able to verify, she lay in her old room from schooldays—still filled with her cherished and stored school textbooks—and traced in her mind the paths of Hydra, the steps and squares and landings and the little churches high above the port, and especially the one near her house, the chapel of Agia Paraskevi. Since she was little she knew when it was open (it was usually closed) and she knew the story of the obscure saint whose face was painted above the door: a Greek woman of second-century Rome whose name means “Friday” and who was tortured by being forced to wear a steel helmet filled with nails. She was later decapitated after causing the idols in a temple of Apollo to disintegrate. It was her favorite building on Hydra, though it was not much frequented by Greeks.
A long shade was almost always drawn down from the top of the door to the ground, in the Greek way, and the waste lot opposite it was a mass of flowering weeds. Nearby stood ruined stone arches covered with teeming vegetation, paths that went nowhere. They were houses that the old had left years before and that no one had yet reclaimed. The prickly pears leaned out precariously from the walls as if colonizing yet more space and pools of odorous shade had formed under the trees: she roamed through every street in her mind as if looking for a mistake she might have made, a false turn somewhere in the past. One can only calculate a certain number of things. Mistakes are inevitable.
She opened the church door and went in. There was only an old woman alone in the dark, waiting for her reply from heaven. She knew the old woman somehow, she almost remembered her name. She had been young when Naomi was a little girl. So time passes and destroys them. Then she woke and heard the English rain on the mews. Above her, directly above in his study, she heard Jimmie padding about as he always did. He went to the door and opened it, and a light came on in the hallway outside her room. She sat up and gripped the sheet on either side of her, and for a moment she doubted that events had unfolded as she had imagined. But his foot never creaked on the first step downward. He hesitated, as if mocking her, and the result was that her terror did not abate. It went on until she recovered her normal breathing and she remembered that, unlike Faoud, he had not been cremated.
TWENTY-THREE
At the end of August the clear blue evenings in the port began to grow more unstable and sudden winds blew out of nowhere, bearing a veil of haze-like cloud. The elaborate awnings of the cafes flapped and shuddered while the waiters grappled with ropes as complex as nautical rigging, and with expressions of sedate anxiety. The late-summer crowds looked up and wondered if the fine weather would continue uninterrupted into September as it usually did, or whether it would now decline and force them to carry a light sweater in the evenings. Often Sam would sit there with Toby, sipping the tsipouro that Naomi had taught her how to drink, and she too would look up at the haze enveloping the sun and wonder if it was sand falling onto them after crossing the Mediterranean from Africa. She could feel it in her hair, on her lips. It was not the first time that summer, but it was now more pronounced, the grit more salty. Her anxiety simmered constantly. But perhaps it was also just her imagination. Since Naomi had left the island, her days had become more languorous and more self-absorbed. And she had her new boy.
“We’re leaving in a week,” she said one evening, when the little storm was blowing and the waiters were rushing back and forth in front of the Porto Fino bar, trying to catch napkins as they flew through the air. “It’s all right, though—it feels like time. It’s overdue actually. Are you all booked for the return trip?”
“We’re going to London for a few days—Dad has some work there. Then back.”
“Naomi says this place is like a tomb in winter.”
“I can imagine.”
“Are you going to come back next year?”