Betwixt and between

Chapter 1 • PREHISTORY-2

He had not yet come to his senses when Evdoxia came running towards him, awkwardly, as if encumbered by the unfamiliar maturity of her body, and sat down on the parapet opposite. She was suddenly very serious, without a trace of her usual playful manner.

“Dimitri,” she said to him, “don’t harm us. And don’t harm your father. Don’t say anything to your mother. If there is going to be a scandal, my mother will lose her job. And you could lose your father. Please pretend you didn’t see anything.”

Dimitri was unable to reply, because at that moment his father and Maria were entering the Great Hall. Their bodies had drawn apart, but they stood beside one another with the backs of their hands still touching, as if they couldn’t quite let go of their recent embrace.

Dimitri and Evdoxia had no time alone for the rest of the expedition, when the car finally came to a halt back in the yard of the hospital, and Evdoxia and her mother got out. So he had no opportunity to reply to her. He said nothing to his father for the rest of their short journey, and Mr Dorides chatted on pleasantly, without a care in the world, recalling insignificant details from the morning’s outing. When they got home, Dimitri pretended to be ill and avoided the family dinner, so as not to be required to give an account of the outing to his mother. He never told anyone what he had seen that Sunday, not even his beloved aunt Melpomene, his mother’s sister, who had no children and loved Dimitri as if he were her own son - encouraging his passion for the history and archaeology of Cyprus.

Life carried on as if there were nothing untoward, and the following Sunday, Dimitri agreed without any argument to accompany his father on another expedition. He didn’t even ask if they would be alone. As if to voice his acceptance that “Mrs and Miss Georgiadou” would be with them, he asked to learn more about them. His father, like all lovers, was happy to talk about the object of his passion, and he responded eagerly.

Dimitri learned that Maria was the bursar at the hospital. When she was just twenty, at the beginning of 1940, she had met and fallen in love with a successful lawyer from Yeroskipou, George Georgiades. When the Greek-Italian war broke out, George, who had studied law in Athens, wanted to enlist as a volunteer in the Greek army to fight for the freedom of Greece alongside his old fellow students and friends. And so he cleared his outstanding affairs at work, and at the beginning of 1941 he said goodbye to Maria on the quay at Limassol.

Two months later, the Greek Consulate in Nicosia informed Maria that George had “fallen heroically in battle” at the Albanian front. He handed her the gold cross which George had worn around his neck, his watch, the letters she had sent him, and his wallet with a few Greek drachmas and a few more photographs of Maria.

George had died without ever knowing that his wife was pregnant. Evdoxia was born seven months after her father’s death, and Maria was forced to give her baby into the care of her widowed mother, and to turn her hand to any kind of employment, just to make a living. With the financial support of her uncles, she then went on to study at night school. She got her diploma, and in consequence was able to find work at the hospital in the financial department. The post of bursar, to which she had recently been promoted, gave her a higher salary, and it also brought the added benefit of a roof over their heads, and free food for herself and Evdoxia.

Why did Dimitri keep quiet about Maria’s existence? Why did he become an accomplice to his father’s infidelity? He himself found it hard to answer these questions. Certainly, Dimitri was not, either by temperament or upbringing, a rebel. He had a natural respect for his father and it would never have occurred to him to challenge, still less to betray him. It was also true that he would have found it hard to think up a gracious way of avoiding his father’s girlfriend. How often could he claim to be ill or overloaded with homework, without provoking a hail of questions and entangling himself in endless lies? Despite all this, it would have been dishonest of Dimitri to pretend that those were the only reasons why he had so passively accepted his father’s - at best - unethical behaviour.

The truth was that Maria had surprised him with her modest appearance and shy manner. She had never intended her embrace with his father to be seen, and bore no resemblance to the mistresses in Maupassant’s Bel Ami, which he had seen on his aunt’s bookshelf and secretly read.

Maria was a good-natured woman, hardly any different - apart from social class and education - from his mother or her friends. She wore no make-up, dressed simply, and her only jewellery was a small cross about her neck. She avoided oppressive perfume and exuded the freshness of Palmolive soap. When she looked at him, her eyes glowed with maternal tenderness. And as for the story of her life, as his father had related it, it naturally aroused in him a chivalric longing to rush to the aid of the widow and her orphaned daughter.

The mystery for Dimitri was why such a woman should demean herself so far as to steal the love of another woman’s husband, and furthermore the husband of a woman who was ill. He had begun to suspect that certain things in life were not as simple as they appeared, and that moral judgements required circumspection. As far as Evdoxia was concerned, he found her entertaining and had missed having friends, partly due to his solitary nature, and partly because of his mother’s illness.

And so Dimitri kept a tactful silence over the next few months. One day, on the way back from a winter’s outing to Famagusta, the car skidded on the slippery tarmac and the illicit affair between Mr Dorides, Financial Director of the General Hospital, and Mrs Georgiadou, its Bursar, came within a whisker of making the front pages of the local newspaper. Luckily, no one else was involved in the accident and no one was seriously injured, so the police did not put in a formal report. Dimitri held his tongue and gave no explanation to the women of the house about the injury to his head, and his father discreetly bore the pain from two ribs that the steering wheel had broken.

Fortunately for everyone, neither Maria nor Evdoxia had been harmed at all. The unlikely foursome continued their visits to Kyrenia, to the monastery of Bellapais, the spring of Kythraia and the Frankish castles of Buffavento and Kantara. One Sunday in spring, they went as far as the monastery of the Apostle Andrew in the Karpass region, on the far north-eastern point of the island, where Maria wanted to fulfil a vow.

Maria had been more careful with his father - the scene at Saint Hilarion was never repeated - and the more careful she was, the more relaxed she became with Dimitri. She held his hand, stroked his hair, and kissed him on the cheek, when she greeted him on Sunday mornings or said goodnight in the evening. And he welcomed her tenderness, as if finding a replacement for the young and healthy mother he had loved so much, and whose illness had stolen her away from him.

His relationship with Evdoxia, to begin with at least, was more guarded, because he was afraid that being close to her might somehow detract from his exclusive relationship with his father, which was something he wanted, in every possible way, to preserve. But his fear was unfounded, since by no stretch of the imagination did his father show the interest in Evdoxia that Maria demonstrated to Dimitri.

Little by little, Dimitri changed, from merely not avoiding her, to actively seeking out her company. On the pretext of a visit to his father at the hospital, he would slink out of the house and meet Evdoxia in the room - a bedroom, sitting room and study all in one - which she shared with her mother. They chatted, or he helped her with her homework, since he was already in the third form at the Pancyprian High School, whereas Evdoxia was only in the second form at Phaneromeni High School for girls. Dimitri had often pleaded with his mother for a little sister, even after her illness.

Nine months after the first spring outing to Saint Hilarion, Dimitri’s mother died of a heart attack after complications connected with her illness, and Dimitri was suddenly faced with the terrible gap left by her death. Eleni’s aunt had always fundamentally disliked Dimitri’s father, and so she left them now, to go and live alone in the big house she owned in the neighbourhood of St Luke, within the walls of the Old Town. Even Eleni’s sister, his beloved Aunt Melpomene, had had to leave Nicosia with very great sadness, to follow her husband Uncle Phrixos to Paris, where his business called him.

Now that it was too late, father and son were becoming aware that even from her invalid’s chair, Eleni had always been the reference point and soul of the house. At night, alone in their separate rooms, they struggled with their grief at losing her and their guilt at having betrayed her. After about two months, his father began to go out in the evening, first making sure that Dimitri had washed, eaten and gone to bed with a book. For a while, no mention was made of an outing together. Dimitri supposed that his father would inevitably continue to see Maria, at least for work reasons, but he himself, without giving any explanation, had stopped visiting Evdoxia. He had not set foot in the hospital since his mother’s death.

Then, one day, a telegram arrived for his father at home, and he had to deliver it. As he went into the courtyard of the hospital complex, he found himself face to face with Maria, who had run out of the door to the kitchens, and came rushing over as if she had been expecting him. He hardly recognised her at first. He had never seen her in the blue and white nurse’s uniform with the straps of its cape crossways over her chest, emphasising the curves of her body.

It was too late to avoid her. She opened her arms to embrace him and he didn’t turn away, but rested his head on her shoulder, until the tears which he normally shed when he was alone at night and which soaked his pillow through, began to dampen her immaculate uniform. Perhaps she felt that she was in danger of collapsing into sobs herself, and thought it wasn’t right to make a scene in public, so she took him by the hand and led him into her tiny office. When they got there, she took out her handkerchief and dried his eyes and her own, and spoke to him.

“Dearest Dimitri, I want you to believe me now. I may be a thief, I may have stolen your father’s love, to which I did not have any right, but I never meant it, I never asked for it to happen. And I never wanted to take your mother’s place. I was alright, I was happy with what I had, with the few hours I spent with your father, with the formal work meetings and the Sunday mornings we all spent together. But I want you to believe me. Even if there were moments when I dreamt that we could live together, the four of us, it was because I love you. It wasn’t that I envied your mother’s position, or that I wanted to become Mrs Dorides. Believe me, and don’t hate me, don’t despise me. I miss you unimaginably, and your absence and your silence all this time have been like a sentence to me.”