Aphrodite’s Smile

Outside the towns, the beaches were not sandy like those on Kephalonia, but rather were made of smooth stones bleached by the sun. As a consequence, the island didn’t attract the package-deal hordes that descended on its neighbour. Instead, many of those who came to Ithaca were Italians or mainland Greeks. Some stayed in small apartment complexes or rented rooms in private homes, others had their own properties that remained shut up during the winter months. The island was also popular with the many boats that cruised the area during the summer, their owners attracted by its unspoilt beauty and its history.

As I drove along the waterfront I could see that almost every available berth was taken and a few yachts lay at anchor further out in the harbour. In the main square the restaurants and bars were busy. I found somewhere to park and searched for a free table outside but they were all taken. I was about to look for somewhere quieter in the backstreets when I saw a girl sitting alone. At first I thought she was a local. She had dark blonde hair, the olive complexion of the Mediterranean races and there was something distinctly Greek about the angular slant of her features. But when I noticed the book she was reading I saw that it had an English title and I approached her and gestured to the unoccupied chairs.

‘Excuse me, do you mind if I share your table?’

She looked up in surprise and then glanced around at the busy tables as if noticing them for the first time. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses even though the sun had gone down an hour before. I wondered how she could see to read. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said quietly and then returned to her book.

The way she spoke immediately conjured images of private schools and a well-to-do family. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties or so and I wondered if perhaps she was from one of the visiting yachts. The book she was reading was by a well-known and fairly literary author.

The air was warm and the smells of grilled food and the sea mixed pleasingly. The slap and suck of water against the wharf was soothing. A waiter arrived and delivered the beer I’d ordered. I drank while I watched the life of the town go on around me. Whole families were out to eat dinner or simply stroll along the waterfront. Groups of people stopped to talk while their children ran around shouting and playing games.

I thought about my father lying somewhere nearby, his body cold and lifeless, and it hit me that I would never hear his voice again. There would be no more phone calls and conversations that never went anywhere but saw us endlessly skating around each other on thin ice. He was always wary of cracking through the surface of normalcy while I silently resented the pretence. I always felt agitated during those calls. Part of me wanted to air my grievances with confrontation, another part to punish him with silence the way I had been doing for years. I always ended up doing the latter. It struck me that I’d never have to worry about it again, but also that everything I’d wanted to say would have to remain unspoken.

My thoughts turned to my father’s claim that somebody had tried to kill him. I didn’t believe any of it. It sounded as though he had been doing a pretty good job of it himself anyway. The thing that had really killed him was selfishness. It was what had brought him to Ithaca in the first place and had ultimately led him to clog his arteries and pickle his liver. Years ago he’d fled Oxford after a professional scandal that had ruined his reputation and destroyed my parents’ marriage, which had been far from perfect in the first place. My father had taken refuge here on this pretty but insignificant island, and for the next quarter of a century had buried himself in the past. I’d always thought he had taken the easy option.

I could still remember the last time I saw him in England. I was eleven years old and I had been in a fight at school with a boy who’d said my dad was a cheat. I went home with a blackened eye and when I told him what had happened, instead of being proud of me for sticking up for him, my father couldn’t look at me. He went to his study and shut himself away while my mother put an ice pack to my face. When I told her what the boy I’d fought with had said she was tight-mouthed and furious. That night I heard her voice raised in shrill anger and accusation and in the morning my father had left. Within a fortnight I’d been sent away to boarding school with the flimsiest of explanations about where he had gone and when he was coming back.

Until then, our house had been divided. Though I’d always known that my parents were not particularly happy together, they never actually argued much. But they weren’t affectionate towards one another either. My mother exuded a more or less permanent air of dissatisfaction and disapproval of which I somehow understood my father was the root cause, though I never knew why. He seemed to accept his lot and tried hard to keep the peace, but his nature seemed coloured with the resignation of defeat. They were out of balance with one another and I was caught in the middle.

During the summer breaks, when my dad went off on one of his digs I would go with him. We’d camp out or stay in a small country pub, and for the time we were away he didn’t seem to have any worries bearing down on him. For my part I was happy to escape my mother’s attention to tidiness and cleanliness, qualities my dad didn’t consider important. During those summer digs everything was different. It was like shrugging off clothes that were a size too small, and I sensed that he felt the same way. Out of that shared feeling a deeper bond grew between us, though in a sense it was a secret. After the summer was over and we went home again there was an unspoken agreement that we didn’t talk about the time we’d spent away. We simply resumed our structured way of life.

Boarding school was even more regimented and excessively orderly. I didn’t fit in. Our family didn’t have money and everybody seemed to know about my father and what had happened at Oxford. At first I defended him, but later, when I realised that the things the other children said were true, I simply ignored their taunts. All the time I expected to hear from him any day and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t. My mother finally told me he was living on a Greek island. I compared a mental picture of blue seas and sunshine with the cold grey stone walls of the school and the wet wind that came off the river. I was still certain that he would come back for me as soon as he could, or at least write and tell me when that would be. But every week my disappointment grew like a cancer. He never came or sent word.

My reflections were abruptly disturbed when a child bumped into the table as he chased a ball. ‘Signomi,’ he said, grinning apologetically.

As he ran off to continue his game I glanced at the girl opposite me. She didn’t appear to have noticed what had happened. Though she still held her book open, I was sure she hadn’t read a page since I’d sat down. She seemed completely absorbed in her thoughts. Perhaps lost was a better term. She exuded a kind of melancholy aura. I wondered what gave me that impression and decided that it was her stillness and the fact that she took no notice of what went on around her. The dark glasses she wore made her seem removed from the world, but imprisoned rather than unobserved.

I finished my beer but couldn’t attract the attention of a waiter so I got up to go inside to fetch another. When I returned, the girl had gone. I saw her crossing the square among the crowd, but somehow apart from them. As she retreated into the darkness she looked small and vulnerable.

When I had finished my beer I decided to go for a walk. I hoped that the exercise would tire me out so that I’d be able to sleep later. Away from the centre of town there were fewer bars and restaurants and the streams of people thinned to a trickle. Small fishing boats replaced the yachts and launches at the wharf and across the road tiny cottages looked over the water. I walked almost to the very end of the wharf beyond the last of the iron lamps that cast a string of pools of yellow light in a crescent along the waterfront. There, only the moon that had risen above the hills softened the darkness. It was very quiet, the water like oil close to the shore, turning to silver grey further out. Cicadas chirped from the trees on the hillside. I paused to take it all in.

About thirty feet away somebody else was gazing across the harbour. Whoever it was didn’t seem to be aware of me and I had the feeling I was intruding on a moment of quiet reflection. I was about to turn away when I recognised the girl whose table I had shared. Her melancholy air struck me again. Without warning she seemed to waver, then, as if in a dream, she vanished into the darkness and I heard a splash as she hit the water below.

It felt afterwards as if I had been rooted to the spot in surprise for a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a moment before I ran to where I had last seen her. The wharf was perhaps seven or eight feet above the water. I couldn’t tell how deep it was because it was black as pitch, but I saw a streak of movement below and heard a gasp. Without thinking, I leapt in. Immediately I sank. I couldn’t see a thing. The water was cool but not cold. When I didn’t touch the bottom, a flutter of panic rose in my throat and I kicked for the surface. A second later I took a breath of warm air. I spun around looking for the girl. She was half-floating face-down only a few feet away from me and with a stroke I caught hold of her and turned her pale face to the air. Her eyelids fluttered and she coughed. Grasping her underneath her shoulders I struck out for shore. My feet touched the ground within seconds and I hauled her onto the rocks.

She had been in the water for no more than half a minute. As I laid her dead weight down I pushed her over onto her side and almost immediately she began to cough up sea-water. She gasped for breath and was gripped by a bout of retching. I did what I could for her until she finally collapsed from the effort with a low moan of either despair or pain. When I was sure that she was breathing normally I asked if she was all right.

She turned her head weakly and peered at me with a mixture of surprise and mild shock. She could only nod feebly. I got up and, helping her as much as I could, encouraged her to stand. ‘You’re cold,’ I said, feeling her skin. Her hair was plastered to her scalp and she looked even paler now that I had her out of the water. She did not resist as I led her back to the wharf and then she began to shiver. Her features were oddly expressionless and, though I tried to get her to rub her arms, she seemed incapable of doing anything.

‘Wait here,’ I said, guiding her to the kerb by the road so she could sit down. When I let go of her she reached out for me.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To get help.’

She stared at me slackly and then something in her brain seemed to kick-start into life again. ‘I’ll be all right. Just give me a few minutes. Please.’

I hesitated, persuaded by the appeal in her voice. She seemed to have snapped out of her trance-like state, but I was still worried that she was shivering so much even though the night air wasn’t cold. I looked back toward the nearest cottages. ‘All right. Just wait for a moment.’

I remembered seeing some washing hung out to dry on a small terrace, and when I found it I took down what looked like a bedspread and left some sodden euros under a stone. When I got back, the girl hadn’t moved. She sat hunched over and shivering and when I put the bedspread around her shoulders she looked at me gratefully and clasped it tightly around her.

‘Thank you.’

For a couple of minutes we sat in silence. I studied her as best I could in the darkness. Wrapped up in the huge, threadbare bedspread and without the glasses she’d worn earlier, her hair plastered to her skull, she looked even more vulnerable than she had before. Gradually she stopped shivering.

‘What happened?’ I asked. She didn’t look at me.

‘I don’t know. I was thinking. I sort of forgot where I was. The next thing I knew I was in the water and then you were dragging me out.’

When I thought about what I’d actually seen I couldn’t say that she had jumped. It seemed rather that she had deliberately fallen, though for the time being I didn’t say so. Instead I decided to try to get her somewhere warm and dry. ‘Is there somewhere I can take you?’ I asked. ‘Do you have family here, or friends?’

She shook her head.

‘You mean you’re here alone?’

‘Yes. I’m renting a room. It isn’t far.’

‘You need to get out of those wet things. Can you walk there?’

After a moment she nodded and got to her feet. I put my arm around her shoulders and she stiffened slightly but then leaned against me and allowed me to lead her away. The top of her head barely reached my shoulder. We didn’t speak at all except when she gave me directions. I was trying to think about what to do when we arrived wherever we were going. I knew if she really was alone I couldn’t leave her. For all I knew she’d turn around and go straight back to where I had found her.

It took nearly thirty minutes to reach the house where she was staying, though as she’d told me it wasn’t actually far. It was on a narrow street on the hillside, a largish place surrounded by a low wall with a sign outside advertising rooms for rent. There were lights on inside, but when I headed for the front door the girl gestured towards a low building that had probably once been a garage.

‘That’s my room.’

At the door she dug in her wet clothes and produced a key. Inside I found a light. The room was simply furnished but clean and tidy and there was a small bathroom attached. From the few things I saw hanging in a cupboard and the single bed, I gathered that she really was alone.

‘I’ll just get changed,’ she said, and then noticed for the first time that I was wet through as well. She also recognised me. ‘I saw you earlier tonight didn’t I? You sat at my table.’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes were a startlingly pale shade of green. She caught me staring and looked momentarily self-conscious, though I imagined she must have been used to it.

‘Did you follow me?’ she asked.

‘No.’

She appeared to consider whether or not to believe me, then she went into the bathroom and came back with a towel. ‘I haven’t anything to give you to wear I’m afraid.’

‘This is fine,’ I said and took the towel.

‘I won’t be long.’

She went back into the bathroom and closed the door, then I heard her turn the shower on. While she was gone I looked around her room, and spotted a bottle of pills that were on the bedside table. I picked it up to read the label, which was in Greek. It appeared to be some kind of over-the-counter pharmacy medicine, and the bottle was about three-quarters full. I was about to put it back again when the bathroom door opened. I hadn’t noticed that the shower had been turned off.

‘They’re to help me sleep,’ the girl said when she saw me with the pills.

‘Did you take any tonight?’

‘A few. They didn’t help. I didn’t want to take any more so I went out.’