The Island (40 page)

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Authors: Victoria Hislop

BOOK: The Island
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‘Perhaps it’s to discuss estate business with Andreas,’ Maria said matter-of-factly.
 
‘But he doesn’t go when Andreas is there,’ said Fotini. ‘He goes during the day, when Andreas is out.’
 
Maria found herself being defensive.
 
‘Well it sounds to me as though Antonis is spying.’
 
‘He isn’t spying, Maria. I think your sister and Manoli have grown rather close.’
 
‘Well if they have, why doesn’t Andreas do something about it?’
 
‘Because he has absolutely no idea that it’s going on,’ said Fotini. ‘It wouldn’t even occur to him. And what he doesn’t see or think about, he need never know about.’
 
The two women sat in silence for a moment, until Maria got up. She pretended to busy herself with washing their glasses but nothing took her mind away from what Fotini had just told her. She was thoroughly agitated, suddenly remembering her sister’s rather edgy behaviour all those months ago when she and Manoli had visited. It was perfectly feasible that there might be something going on between them. She knew her sister was more than capable of such infidelity.
 
With sheer vexation she twisted the cloth round and round inside the glasses until they squeaked. As ever her thoughts were with her father. She felt keenly, even in anticipation, his ever-deepening shame. As for Anna, was she not the only one of the three Petrakis women who still had the possibility of a normal, happy life? Now it sounded as though she was doing everything she could to throw it all away. Maria’s eyes pricked with tears of anger and frustration. She would hate Fotini to think that she was jealous. She knew Manoli would never be hers but it was hard nevertheless to bear the idea of him being with her sister.
 
‘You know, I don’t want you to think I care about Manoli any more, because I don’t, but I do care about my sister’s behaviour. What’s to become of her? Does she really think that Andreas will never find out?’
 
‘She obviously thinks he won’t. Or if she does, it doesn’t bother her. I’m sure the whole thing will just fade out.’
 
‘That’s probably optimistic, Fotini,’ Maria said. ‘But there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?’
 
The two sat in silence for a moment before Maria changed the subject.
 
‘I’ve started using my herbs again,’ she said, ‘with some success. People are beginning to come to me now and the
dictamus
worked almost immediately for an elderly gentleman with a stomach disorder.’
 
They continued to chat, though Fotini’s revelation about Anna weighed heavily on their minds.
 
The relationship between Anna and Manoli did not, as Fotini predicted, fade out. On the contrary, the spark between them was rekindled and a fire soon smouldered. Manoli had been entirely faithful to Maria while they were engaged to be married. She was perfect, a virgin, his Agia Maria, and undoubtedly she would have made him a happy man. Now she was a fond memory. The first few weeks after Maria had gone to Spinalonga he had been listless and unhappy, but the period of mourning the loss of his fiancée soon passed. Life had to go on, he had thought to himself.
 
Like a moth to a flame he was drawn back to Anna. She was still there in that house, so close, so needy and somehow so gift-wrapped in her tightly fitted ribbon-trimmed dresses.
 
It was around lunch time one day, his old habitual visiting time, when Manoli let himself into the kitchen at the big house on the estate.
 
‘Hello, Manoli.’ Anna greeted him without surprise and with enough warmth to melt the snows on Mount Dhikti.
 
His confidence that she would be pleased to see him was matched by her arrogance. She had known that he would come, sooner or later.
 
Alexandros Vandoulakis had recently handed the entire estate over to his son. This gave Andreas huge responsibilities and less and less time at home, and soon Manoli was seen leaving his cousin’s house more often than just on alternate days. He was now there every day. Antonis was not the only person aware of this. Many of the estate workers knew about it too. There was a double safety net that Anna and Manoli relied on: Andreas was too busy to notice anything himself, and it was worth more than any man’s job to approach their boss with tales about his wife. For these reasons they could enjoy each other with impunity.
 
There was nothing that Maria could do and the only influence Fotini had was to urge her brother to keep it to himself. If Antonis mentioned it to their father, Pavlos, then it was bound to reach Giorgis, since the two men were great companions.
 
Between Fotini’s visits, Maria tried to put her sister to the back of her mind. Her inability to influence the situation was not determined only by the distance between them. She knew that even if she was still on the mainland, Anna would have been doing just what she liked.
 
Maria began to look forward to the days when Kyritsis came across, and always made sure she was at the quayside to meet her father and the silver-haired doctor. One fine summer day Kyritsis stopped to talk. He had heard from Dr Lapakis of Maria’s skills with herbal cures and tinctures. A firm believer in modern medicine, he had long been sceptical about the power of the sweet, gentle flowers that grew on the mountainsides. What strength could they possibly have when compared with twentieth-century drugs? Many of the patients he saw on Spinalonga, however, talked of the relief they had experienced through some of Maria’s concoctions. He was prepared to relax his cynicism, and told her so.
 
‘I know conviction when I see it,’ he said. ‘I’ve also seen some real evidence on this island that these things can work. I can hardly continue to be a sceptic, can I?’
 
‘No, you can’t. I’m glad you admit it,’ said Maria, with a note of triumph. It gave her huge satisfaction to realise that she had successfully persuaded this man to change his views. Even greater was her satisfaction when she looked at him and saw his face break into a smile. It transformed him.
 
Chapter Nineteen
 
THE DOCTOR’S SMILE changed the climate around him. Kyritsis had not been given to smiling in the past. Other people’s misery and anxiety were the cornerstones of his life and rarely gave him cause for levity or pleasure. He lived alone in Iraklion, working long days in the hospital, and the few waking hours he had outside it were spent reading and sleeping. Now, at last, there was something else in his life: the beauty of a woman’s face. To the hospital staff in Iraklion and to Lapakis and the lepers who were now regular patients he was just the same as he always had been: a dedicated, single-minded and unnervingly serious - some would say humourless - scientist. For Maria he had become a different person. Whether he would be her salvation in the long term she did not know, but he saved her in a small way every time he crossed the water by making her pulse quicken. She was a woman again, not just a patient waiting on this rock to die.
 
Though the temperatures began to drop during those first days of autumn, Maria felt an increasing warmth in Nikolaos Kyritsis. When he arrived on the island each Wednesday he would stop to talk to her. First of all it would be just for five minutes, but as time went on it was for longer on each occasion. Eventually, meticulous about punctuality and the need to be on time for his hospital appointments, he began to arrive earlier on the island to allow himself enough time to see Maria. Giorgis, who always rose at six o’clock in the morning, was perfectly happy to bring Kyritsis over at eight-thirty rather than nine and observed that the days when Maria had come to talk to him on Wednesdays were over. She still met the boat, but not to see her father.
 
Usually a man of few words, Kyritsis talked to Maria about his work back in Iraklion and explained the research with which he was involved. He described how the war had interrupted everything and told her what he had been doing during those years, painting a detailed description for her of a war-blasted city where every last trained medical person was required to be on duty almost round the clock to care for the sick and wounded. He told her about his travels to international conferences in Egypt and Spain where the world’s experts on leprosy treatment gathered to share their ideas and to give papers on their latest theories. He told her about the various cures that were currently being tried out and what he really thought of them. Occasionally he had to remind himself that this woman was a patient and might eventually be a recipient of the drug therapy that was being trialled on Spinalonga. How strange, he sometimes found himself thinking, to have found such friendship on this small island. Not only his old friend, Christos Lapakis, but this young woman too.
 
For her part Maria looked at him and listened, but offered very little of her own life in return. She felt she had little to share. Her existence had become so small, so limited, so narrowly focused.
 
As Kyritsis saw it, people on Spinalonga were living a life that he might almost have envied. They came and went about their business, sat in the
kafenion
, saw the latest films, went to church and nurtured friendships. They lived in a community where everyone knew each other and had a common bond. In Iraklion he could walk the length of the bustling street every day for a week and not see a familiar face.
 
As vital to Maria as the conversations with Dr Kyritsis were her weekly meetings with Fotini, but these she anticipated half with dread these days.
 
‘So has he been seen leaving the house this week?’ she asked as soon as Giorgis was out of earshot.
 
‘Once or twice,’ answered Fotini. ‘But only when Andreas was there too. The olive harvest has started so he is around more. Manoli and Andreas are supervising the presses and apparently they both go back to the big house for dinner.’
 
‘Perhaps it was all in your brother’s imagination, then. Surely if Manoli and Anna were lovers he wouldn’t go for dinner there with Andreas?’
 
‘Why not? It would be
more
likely to arouse suspicion if he stopped going there.’
 
Fotini was right. Anna was spending many an evening perfectly coiffed, manicured and poured into immaculately well-fitted dresses, playing the twin roles of good wife to her husband and welcoming hostess to his cousin. It was no more than Andreas expected of her. She carried the situation off effortlessly and the chances of her fluffing a line or casting a giveaway glance were almost non-existent. For Anna the undercurrents only added to the frisson of being on an imaginary stage, and on the days when her parents-in-law were there it created additional tension, increasing her excitement and the sublime thrill of concealment.
 
‘Did you enjoy our evening?’ she would ask Andreas later in the blank darkness of their ample bed.
 
‘Yes, why?’
 
‘I was just asking,’ she would say, and as they began to make love she felt the weight of Manoli’s body and heard his deep groans. Why should Andreas question such pleasure? Afterwards, he lay silent and breathless in the dark shuttered room, the unsuspecting victim of her passion for another man, a man with whom she had only made love in broad daylight.
 
For Anna there was no conflict in this situation. Since she had no choice in the matter of her passion for Manoli, her infidelity was almost justified. He had appeared unannounced in her life and her reaction had been spontaneous. Free will played no part in her response to him and it had never occurred to her that it could. Manoli’s presence electrified her, aroused every hair on her body and made every square centimetre of her soft, pale skin yearn to be touched. It could never be any other way. I can’t help it, she said to herself as she brushed her hair in the morning on the days when Andreas had left for the furthest area of the estate and she expected Manoli to appear in her kitchen at lunchtime. There is nothing I can do. Manoli was her husband’s blood relative. With all the will in the world she could not have driven him away. She was a trapped but uncomplaining victim, and even though it was happening under his own roof Andreas had not the slightest inkling that Anna was betraying him in his own bed, with the framed
stephana
, the marriage crowns, witnessing her act of perfidy.
 
Andreas did not spend much time thinking about Manoli. He was glad that he had returned from his travels but he left any worrying about him to his dear mother, who fretted that her nephew was in his thirties and not yet married. Andreas was sorry that the marriage to his wife’s sister had encountered such an insurmountable obstacle, but he supposed that sooner or later his cousin would find another suitable woman to bring into the family. As for Eleftheria, she was sorry that her nephew’s sweet bride had been snatched away but was even sorrier to have a nagging suspicion that some affinity existed between Manoli and her daughter-in-law. She could not quite define it and indeed sometimes told herself it was in her imagination. It was as fleeting as a shape in a cloud.

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