Betwixt and between

Chapter 1 • PREHISTORY Dimitri did not answer. He pushed his chair back abruptly and left the table. Then he walked off angrily across the covered veranda and ran, down the hotel steps and towards the harbour, to find Maria. He had to see her again one more time, even though his father had made it crystal clear that he intended to marry Jenny in October. His father’s affair with Maria was over. But Dimitri adored Maria, not Jenny; he had even betrayed his own dying mother for her sake. Early that morning, he had met Maria by chance. She had looked very pale and had been walking towards the harbour with a small suitcase in her hand. Upon seeing her, it had flashed through his mind that maybe their separation had only been a passing phase. That they would all finally be able to live together as a family, the four of them: Father, Maria, he and Evdoxia. Maria had not told Dimitri why she was in Kyrenia. She had said that she wanted to see him, without saying why, and had given him the name of the inn where she was staying. She had kissed him briefly on the cheek before they parted and the redolence of her familiar scent had brought back a flood of memories; of the Sunday mornings they had spent so contentedly together, when he and Evdoxia would take a breakfast tray into Maria’s small room at the hospital and sit on their parents’ bed, Dimitri at his father’s feet and Evdoxia at her mother’s. At the time, Dimitri’s father had been the financial director at the General Hospital in Nicosia. His position there had meant that he and his wife and son were able to live comfortably near the hospital, together with his mother-in-law and his mother-in-law’s sister, both widowed, in a beautiful stone house in Gladstone Street. Mr Dorides was helped by the added income from the dowry of his wife, whose family owned substantial property in Patras. And so Dimitri had grown up surrounded by the warm affection of at least half-a-dozen women, including various live-in servants and occasional helpers, washer women, seamstresses, nannies and governesses, as well as his immediate family. The small boy’s greatest luxury had been the undivided attention of his mother, Eleni, for he had no siblings. Dimitri followed his mother everywhere about the house, and kept close by her side when she went out to go shopping, or to see her friends. He picked out clothes for her to wear when she dressed in front of the mirror, and chose the colours he liked: never yellow, and preferably white, pink, light blue or black. When she had visitors, he would take his little stool to come and sit beside her, clutching at her skirt. His intimacy with his mother was troubled by an incurable disease, which attacked Eleni and left her increasingly disabled, destroying the calm contentment that Dimitri and his parents had enjoyed up until then. Doctor’s visits, pills and medicine, hospital tests, even a trip to Switzerland were all in vain. The multiple sclerosis took its course relentlessly, exacting its daily punishment on Eleni’s elegant body, mercilessly altering her beautiful face. She suffered, and it affected them all. Dimitri’s father had always been a cheerful person, often singing, or softly whistling popular songs such as “In the morning you wake me with kisses” or “Two green eyes” or all the older hits by Attik which Eleni loved. He would suddenly take his wife in his arms without any warning, and dance a waltz or a tango to the music that came on the radio. But recently, he had been coming home late from work in the evening, and would often be back for dinner and then go out again, making excuses about matters needing his attention at the office. But Sunday mornings were always completely devoted to Dimitri. Father and son would go for walks together to the museum, to the Orthodox churches of the Greek quarter, and to the Gothic monuments in the Turkish district. Sometimes Mr Dorides would take the car out of the garage, and the two of them would go off together for an outing into the country. Dimitri’s father talked to his son a great deal about his own childhood and growing up, and told him stories about the living members of his family, and those long gone. He talked about the island, with its ancient, mediaeval and more especially its recent history; about the revolution of 1931 against the British, and the recent war. Dimitri listened and every so often asked a question. They occasionally stopped for a treat at Hurricane or Halepi, and his father would buy him a kok with shiny chocolate icing on top, or an ice cream, or they would both drink a KEO Vita. Then they would go home, in time for Sunday lunch with Eleni and the rest of the family. Eleni’s mother had been a sensible and mild-tempered woman. When she died, they were left at the mercy of her sister, Aunt Irene, who was of the opinion that her niece had married beneath her, and did not hesitate to intervene tactlessly in the couple’s affairs. When he came into a room, Dimitri often found his aunt and mother talking in hushed whispers, which they broke off the moment they saw him. They would pick up where they had left off in English, and then, when he had learnt to understand that language, in French. Often when he came upon them unexpectedly, he could see that his mother had been crying. Once he overheard the laundry-woman whisper to the daily about “the mastros’s kafka”. The mastros was his father, there was no doubt about that. But who or what was his kafka? Dimitri was unable to make any sense of these peculiar portents, but they distressed him nevertheless. Then, one spring morning, on a Sunday, the day of their hallowed outing, Dimitri’s father did not go straight on down the road to Kyrenia, on their usual route to St Hilarion, but instead turned the steering wheel to the left, towards the entrance to the hospital. “We’ll pass by first and pick up poor Mrs Georgiadou and her daughter, so that they can enjoy the countryside with us for a while”, explained his father. And Dimitri was far from being surprised. His emotional confusion evaporated, as if unconsciously his thirteen-year-old mind had found an explanation for the whispers and the tears. He was impatient to assess the new threat to his family’s happiness. He could already picture “Mrs Georgiadou” in his mind’s eye, and had given her the features of Snow White’s wicked stepmother. But his imagination failed him when he tried to conjure up an image of her daughter. Stepmothers on the whole do not have daughters. He cast about in his own literary archive, and could come up with nothing better than Cinderella’s stepsisters, whose mean features he struggled to delineate from pictures in the fairy story book he had when he was little. His mental effort to pick out a satisfactory likeness stopped as soon as they arrived at the hospital. Two female figures stood waiting for them at the far end of the courtyard. One was a woman of medium height, no more than 35 years old, and the other a plump girl in her early teens. Dimitri got out of the car and his father introduced them to one another somewhat formally. It was obvious that the two strange women did not feel at ease. “Not Mrs and Miss, just Maria and Evdoxia”, said Mrs Georgiadou awkwardly. Before his father had time to ask it of him, Dimitri got back into the rear seat of the little Morris and left the front seat, to the left of the driver, free for the young woman. She hesitated, but eventually got into the car; Evdoxia had already, and with less reluctance, got into the back next to Dimitri. For a long while only Dimitri’s father spoke at all. He directed his conversation first to Mrs Georgiadou, then to his son, and finally to Evdoxia, in an obvious attempt to cover the looming silence. Meanwhile Dimitri, relatively unobserved in the seat behind his father, cast critical sidelong glances and assessed the features of his new companions. Maria had a lovely round face with even features, framed by soft chestnut hair. Her skin was pale, in harmony with her grey eyes. She wore a snuggly fitting thin light raincoat, which unintentionally flattered her figure and enhanced the curve of her bosom. Evdoxia, despite being only twelve, was quite as tall and maybe even taller than her mother. She already had breasts like hers, but her body and limbs seemed less elegant, and thicker than her mother’s. She had light blue eyes and almost blond hair, but her face was marred by adolescent spots. They had not yet reached the village of Kioneli, when Dimitri caught Evdoxia glancing at him. The second time their eyes met, she stuck out her tongue and covered her mouth with her handkerchief to stifle her giggles. It seemed that Evdoxia was blessed with irrepressible good humour. In the meantime, Dimitri’s father was preparing for their visit with a long drawn-out history of the Castle of Saint Hilarion, thereby providing a welcome antidote to the oppressive silence that still threatened in the car. Dimitri was struck by the castle’s other name, Dieu d’Amour, to whom its 6th-century Syrian hermit had almost, but not quite, given way. He wondered whether their expedition to this particular hill had been chosen deliberately for its symbolism. It was here that the god Eros was supposed to have been born, fruit of an illicit embrace between Aphrodite and the god Ares. His father went on to tell them about Isaac Comnenos and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Richard Coeur de Lion, John d’Ibelin, regent and Prince of Antioch, and about Queen Leonora. The Morris had begun to labour up the slopes of Mount Pentadaktylos. Fairly soon, a little beyond Agrida, they came to a narrow road which led up to a small parking place beneath the fortified hill. St Hilarion rose up dramatically before them against the spring sky: Durrell’s “fairy castle for an elvish lord”. Rocks, scrub, trees beaten about by the wind and ruined walls mingled indistinctly on the steep slopes of the hill or plunged down suddenly over the cliff’s edge. They left the car and climbed up towards the entrance to the first of three walled enclosures. They passed through a gate with sculpted decorations on the projecting stone beams of the “barbican”, as Father called it, and he pointed out the bizarre figure of a lascivious Saracen dancer with her veil lifted up behind her head. On the open area at the bottom, the children wandered a little from the pathway and away from their parents. Evdoxia was singing and picking wild flowers. Dimitri looked for a good corner from where he might photograph the castle with the Kodak Sterling camera he had been given as a present for his last birthday. Their parents carried on towards the higher enclosure, and then turned a little way off the route themselves, to visit the ruins of a small Byzantine chapel. Dimitri’s father was eager to show Maria the traces of a mural depicting the Annunciation, somewhere at the back of the church, and he called the two children to come with him, but they answered from afar that they preferred to keep climbing, and so they hung back, following the steep staircase which leads to the third and highest platform. They did not go on to the royal apartments, but followed a narrower and steeper stone stairway, and then made their way along a dangerous precipice to the castle of Prince John, which towered over the lower yard and the terraces below them. Breathless from the climb, they were looking back at the path they had negotiated and photographing the astonishing view, when they saw Dimitri’s father and Maria far down below them, standing motionless on a step, as if hewn in marble. Their stance left no room for doubt that their calling one another “Mr Dorides” and “Mrs Georgiadou” was designed to conceal a relationship that was anything but formal. Dimitri had sensed this instinctively, but now that he saw it with his own eyes, the undeniable truth of it struck him like a physical blow to the chest. For a few minutes, he remained utterly still and silent. And then he started to run, sliding down, at the risk of slipping and killing himself, towards the opposite, northern side of the third enclosure, where the Great Hall of the castle opens out towards the cliffs and towards the sea. He went and sat on the parapet of the Queen’s Window, vaguely thinking that he ought to punish his father’s flagrant betrayal by throwing himself down through the yawning gap beyond the twin arches of the window. His father had told him that from that very window the Prince of Antioch, tricked by Queen Leonora into believing that his Bulgar mercenaries were plotting against him, had hurled them down into the void. The Castle of Eros, maybe, but of death as well.