Lie With Me (12 page)

When I surfaced, Alice – rich, glorious, fuckable Alice – was at the edge of the pool, ready to pull me out.

It was all right after all. I was on a roll, unbeatable. No one here was going to get the better of me.

Chapter Nine

The plan was to eat out – as they had the night before. (Neither family was wary of spending money.)

Alice had a call to make and, as I was ready, I waited in the front yard by the car. It was close; the air stuck to your skin. A wood pigeon cooed in a dark copse of trees. A strange transparent lizard darted across the wall of the house, reached the rafters and hung there, motionless. I was watching it, to see if it would move, when I heard a noise, a small clatter and a rustle behind me. I turned and saw a man emerge from the shed with the corrugated roof. It was the blond man with the pale eyes whom I had seen earlier. He crossed the yard and walked past, not looking at me, with slow regular strides, adjusting a bag across his shoulders.

Tina came round the side of the house.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked, as he disappeared down the drive.

‘That’s Artan,’ she said. ‘The gardener-cum-handyman. Looks after the house during the year.’

‘He’s not very friendly.’

‘He doesn’t speak much English. He’s Albanian. He’s worked for Alice for years. We first met him in the port the night Jasmine went missing. He had only just arrived, but he was unbelievably kind and helpful, spent days searching the hillsides. Alice gave him a job out of gratitude, and also pity. Someone told us his wife and child had died in a fire.’

‘Oh dear. I feel guilty now.’

‘So you should.’

The car was one of those van-like vehicles, silver in this case, with seven seats and sliding doors down the side. It would have been a squeeze even without me, but Andrew said pointedly: ‘We’ll have to squash up. We’re nine,
with Paul
.’ I offered to walk, but Alice wouldn’t hear of it. ‘No, no: we’ll make it work. Come on, Louis, hop in the back. It’s not far. Make life easy.’

‘I don’t want to go in the back. Why can’t Paul go in the back?’

‘Don’t argue with your mother,’ Andrew said.

If I’d been Louis I’d have found it grating, the way Andrew kept saying, ‘your mother’, as if her children needed him to remind them of their relationship.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Alice muttered. ‘Leave it.’

At the bend in the lane, by the gate to the building site, the car scraped over a rock. Tina peered out of a rear window and called: ‘I think we’re all right. No smoke!’ Alice twisted round from the passenger seat and said: ‘For once in our lives we’ve got a genuine mechanic on board.’

‘A genuine mechanic?’ Andrew said.

‘Yes. Paul’s good with cars.’ She smiled at me. ‘Aren’t you, Paul?’ She twisted back. ‘He’s going to have a look at Hermes. If he gets the truck going pronto, we can all bomb around in that – ride shotgun.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, realising what she was talking about. ‘Of course.’

‘Go Paul,’ said Phoebe.

‘Do you think you’d be able to put your hand on the key after all this time?’ I asked.

‘It’s stuck in the ignition. Has been for years.’

‘Great stuff.’ I did a miniature drum roll on my knee with my index fingers.

Andrew parked in a small lay-by close to the centre of Agios Stefanos and we tumbled out. It was dusky and warm. Bats darted and dived from roof to roof in the darkness above our heads. Tiny insects flickered in the glow from the street-lights. Wine and good food lay ahead of me. I felt another surge of optimism, of confidence and hope: the sort of things you feel when a holiday stretches out before you like a naked woman waiting to be explored.

Alice was already marching ahead, a small, defiant figure in a clingy T-shirt dress, and a pair of high espadrilles which made her calf muscles bulge. The village had come to life: people and lights, music and cooking smells. Skinny-ribbed ginger and white cats mewled in corners. Children darted between legs. Alice kept stopping to hand out leaflets: a tourist, a shopkeeper having a cigarette, a man touting roasted nuts, a woman selling friendship bracelets. I felt a tug of tenderness, of both admiration and pity.

Tina was walking along beside me. ‘Do you think it makes a difference?’ I asked her. ‘Seriously?’

She made a face, weighing up the options. ‘It doesn’t matter. The brilliant thing about Alice – she won’t give up either way. She does this every year.’

‘Does anybody ever get in touch with information?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Is it ever useful?’

She shook her head. ‘Sightings . . . or . . . but no, nothing concrete, not yet. Alice is so determined. The ten-year anniversary, the fact that it’s the last summer at Circe’s, all the money she’s raised . . . You just have to admire the force of her energy and commitment.’

Andrew had caught up with us. ‘She’s determined to find her,’ he said.

‘If she’s here to be found. I mean, even if she were alive, wouldn’t she be long gone? I mean if I were going to snatch a teenage girl, I’d . . .’

‘What?’ Andrew was looking at me strangely.

‘Come on. We’re in a port.’

‘Yes. So what would you do?’

‘I’d find a boat. If I didn’t already have one. I’d escape by sea,’ I said. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

We ate not at Nico’s (where they had eaten the previous evening), but at Giorgio’s, the taverna next door. A large table was waiting for us on the platform by the water’s edge, and a big fuss made: Tina and Alice received hugs from the elderly owner, the boys had their heads ruffled, the girls their palms kissed, and Andrew’s hand was energetically pumped. I tried to stand back, but Andrew pushed me forwards. ‘This year we are joined by our dear friend Paul Morris. A very famous writer. Remember his name, if you don’t know it already. He’s just sold his latest novel at auction. Six figures! You’re going to be hearing a lot more about him.’

‘A pre-empt,’ I said under my breath. ‘Not an auction.’

The owner, a stooped man with thick black hair and a grey moustache, clamped his arm around my shoulder. ‘Is it your first visit to Agios Stefanos?’

‘Yes,’ I said, without thinking.

‘Don’t forget you’ve been here before,’ Andrew said. ‘Ten years ago.’ He turned to Giorgio. ‘In fact, he came to this very taverna, though I’m not sure he had a chance to sample your delicious fare.’

Fare: it’s one of my least favourite words.

The others had sat down by now, but Andrew made everyone stand up and sit where he wanted them. This time, he placed me at the head of the table. ‘Better view,’ he said – though I had my back to the water. I felt on show, and for a horrible moment wondered if that was what Andrew intended.

A young waiter with a faint moustache swept up. Wine was ordered and beer and Coke and Fanta, numerous starters – taramasalata, calamari, fried cheese, fried courgettes – as well as lamb, and chicken and fish. The casual profligacy astounded me. Both Louis and Frank ordered the steak, double the price of anything else, without seeking their mother’s approval. ‘What about you, Paul?’ asked Tina, noticing I’d been quiet. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, worrying about my share of the bill (would it be split according to what we ate, or according to the number of heads? If the latter, I was in trouble).

‘Oh, go on,’ Tina insisted.

I’d only pretended to study the menu. Now I racked my brain for the cheapest thing I could think of. ‘Some hummus, I think.’

‘Hummus. Oh no, they don’t have that here.’ Andrew let out one of his laughs, three regular short snorts, which didn’t convey much amusement. ‘Oh, Paul. No, you don’t get hummus in Greece.’

‘Yes you do.’ I could visualise the Cyrillic script on the plastic pot in the continental delicatessen on Lamb’s Conduit Street. I added, more pompously than I intended, ‘It’s a Greek speciality.’

Andrew studied me. He’d noticed the pomposity and didn’t like it. Catching the attention of an elderly lady by the till, he called: ‘Sofia – hummus?’ He flapped the menu in the air. ‘I can’t see it anywhere, but for a special customer, our famous author here, do you have hummus?’

Sofia shrugged and shouted something in Greek into the kitchen. Giorgio re-emerged, wiping his fingers delicately on a napkin. ‘Giorgio,’ Andrew continued loudly, ‘settle this matter for us, will you? My dear friend Paul says hummus is Greek. A Greek speciality, he insists.’

Several people on other tables were looking at us, at me. Giorgio bowed his head obsequiously. ‘My dear friend,’ he repeated, ‘is mistaken. Hummus is from the Middle East. But if he would like, I can bring something very similar, very delicious. Fava bean.’

Alice said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Andrew.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’ll have tzatziki.’

‘We’ve ordered so much anyway,’ Alice said. ‘We can share.’

I smiled, but internally I continued to fume. I wish I hadn’t said ‘speciality’ but of course hummus was Greek. Andrew was bullying me, deploying Giorgio in his little game. It’s how I used to feel sometimes at school. I remember arguing about the spelling of the word ‘desiccate’ with a boy called Jeremy de Beauvoir who rallied a group of fellow trust-funders to support him, even when a dictionary proved me right. People with privilege always think they control the truth.

Alice clearly felt bad on my behalf, which was good. She tried her hardest to make things better, laughing loudly, throwing back her head, her white throat flashing in the light. Under the table, her hand rolled tantalising circles on my thigh. She said to Andrew, ‘Did you know Paul did crosswords?’ (‘I’m more of a sudoku man,’ he answered.) ‘Paul – tell the others about Kate Boxer. He’s got this wonderful picture by her in his flat. What’s it called it again?’ ‘Twiggy Bird,’ I said. (‘
Twiggy
Bird?’ repeated Andrew, his intonation expressing contempt.) She wanted everything to be all right. She wanted us to be friends. She had no idea how much I had begun to dislike him.

‘I’m thinking of selling the flat,’ I said.

‘Are you?’ Alice looked surprised.

‘I feel like a change.’ I put my hand across her back, slipping it under the fabric of her dress to fondle her shoulder, and as I did so, I brought my mouth to her ear. ‘I want to live closer to you,’ I murmured softly.

A secret smile played on her lips. She looked at me sideways, eyes narrowed, like a cat. ‘Let’s talk about that after the holiday,’ she said, her voice full of promise.

I looked at Andrew to check he was watching.

It became noisy, hard to hear. The music, an electro dance track, was turned up loud and a rowdy group took over the next table – four English couples, the men in short-sleeved shirts, the women with plunging necklines. (‘Delfinos,’ Alice mouthed at Andrew, rolling her eyes.) Most of the kids had wandered off, Alice and Tina were sharing a slice of baklava and I was surreptitiously feeding some cats who had gathered under the table. They were worryingly thin, with jagged haunches; two of them had gammy eyes.

Tina was complaining about Archie, his tendency to get his own way. ‘Not that I can talk,’ she added, ‘being the youngest of three.’

‘Boys or girls?’ I asked, dropping a piece of lamb kebab on the ground, and then another quickly as the cats began to scrap for it.

‘Three girls.’ She laughed merrily. ‘I’m the baby, typical youngest child: spoilt, spoilt, spoilt; used to getting away with murder. What about you?’

‘An only child,’ I said. ‘Like Alice.’

It was one of our late-night topics: the pressure of parental hope, the difficulty with relationships, the sensitivity to criticism – one of the subjects I used to accelerate intimacy. I wiped my hand on a napkin and put my arm around Alice’s shoulder.

‘You and me both,’ she said. Her hand still lay on my thigh and I shifted slightly so that it would move higher. ‘As fucked up as each other.’

‘Get a room,’ Louis said loudly.

Andrew picked up the glass salt cellar and shook it into in the v-shaped crook between his thumb and finger, his lower lip jutting. The cellar rattled, full of rice. Nothing came out.

He put the salt back down on the table and breathed in deeply. He turned to gaze out over the harbour, so intently that I twisted my head to see what he was looking at. There was nothing there – just the gleam of reflected lights, and the water stilled and darkened.

I looked back at him, as Tina carefully lay her arms around his neck. She kissed his cheek, then, arms still in place, drew back to study him. He continued to stare ahead, his mouth a grim line. He was trying to get attention. Personally, I’d have ignored him.

Alice took her hand away from my thigh. She leant across the table. ‘Poor Andrew,’ she said. ‘I miss her so much too.’

‘I’m sorry, Al,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing like losing a husband, I know. It just occasionally comes back and hits me. It’s the guilt, really. Maybe she’d have been with us here now, married, with kids. She’d have loved it here.’

‘Poor Andrew,’ Alice said again. The hand that had fondled my thigh took his hand. At the same time, Tina removed her arm from his shoulders. ‘It’s not about comparisons. In many ways it’s worse – she’d been at your side nearly your whole life. As an older brother, you felt responsible for her, that’s probably why you feel guilty, but you shouldn’t. It wasn’t your fault. It’s just a bugger. An absolute bugger. And it is so unfair. Why your sister? Why my husband? They both died too young.’

‘It’s stupid, isn’t it?’ He thudded his fist against his chest where his heart was. ‘But she’s in here. Always will be.’

An image of Florrie, his sister, came into my head, or I think it was Florrie. It might have been Daisy: boyishly short hair, feathered around her face, a full mouth, a sweet smile. Was it another sister or was it Florrie who was dead? Florrie: could she be dead? If it
was
her, why had nobody told me? Was it a recent death or an old one? Had I known and forgotten? Was this the sort of thing that could feasibly slip your mind?

‘Dear Florrie,’ Alice said. She tapped her hand on her heart. ‘Me too.’

So it
was
Florrie. How could I not have known? When had she died, and how? An aggressive cancer – leukaemia, breast – whatever type it is that takes the young? I wanted to know, but I couldn’t think how to ask without sounding insensitive. It looked bad not to have known, or worse to have forgotten. I was peculiarly disturbed. We hadn’t been that close. A Sunday afternoon on the Backs with a bottle of wine; jazz at the Blue Boar; a party – someone’s birthday (was it hers?). Sex, probably – yes, I think we had slept together. A blue tinge to her skin in her student room light, goose-bumps, the rough thinness of her duvet. So yes, just a few dates here and there. So my reaction wasn’t about her; it was more selfish. Death throws you, even if you didn’t know the person well. You sense your own mortality, feel the devil’s breath on your own cheek.