The Officer and the Spy, page 17
‘I like this story.’
‘It’s a good one, isn’t it?’
‘Very good.’
‘Do you believe it, Eleni?’
‘Yes,’ she said, touching her hand to his face, ‘I believe everything you tell me.’
He swam home that night, like he’d been swimming home all week, because dinner was almost upon them, Yorgos would be too, very soon, and it felt safer than him going by the road.
Eleni saw him off at the cove. Wrapped in her robe, she ignored the disappearing sun, ignored Venus, already shining in the pale sky, and focused only on him.
They kissed again, then again. I love you, in fact. She knew that one of them needed to pull away, but she couldn’t make it be her, so in the end it was him – she felt the tension enter his muscles as he moved – and then he was gone.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said, from the water’s edge.
It felt kinder than goodbye.
In many, many ways, she was glad that they still had their evening together ahead of them. She wasn’t sure how she could have borne not being with him, whilst she still could. Nothing was over, she told herself, it wasn’t…
Yet, as she returned to the terrace and watched him swim from her, disappearing around the bay, she felt such an awful pressure in her throat. She closed her eyes, breathing deep, trying to push the feeling away. Dimly, she registered the thrum of her papou’s motor coming into the drive, a trickle of relief that they really had got away with it, but mainly she thought about the hours that had passed, then the night ahead, and how it would, actually, have been better after all not to have had to spend it with his family.
They’d parted now.
Looked one another in the eye and turned away.
It was done. She knew just how painful it was.
It hurt, horribly, thinking of having to go through it again.
The dinner Henri and Brigit laid on for them all was, nonetheless, lovely. They’d gone to a great deal of effort, illuminating Nikos’s terrace with lanterns, dressing the table with bowls of bougainvillea and flickering candelabras. The meal itself, of melting, slow-baked lamb, was delicious; Christina was clearly worth every last drachma Krista had obliged Henri to pay her, week after week.
‘How much?’ said Maria to Krista, when she related the story.
‘That much, I’m afraid,’ said Henri, walking around the table, topping up everyone’s wine.
‘But Nikos will have paid her,’ said Maria, smiling bemusedly. ‘You do know Christina was meant to have been his mother-in-law.’
‘Really?’ said Henri.
‘Nikos was engaged?’ said Brigit. ‘To whom?’
‘A girl not much older than my Petra,’ said Yorgos, shortly.
‘What happened?’ asked Brigit.
‘She disappeared to Athens,’ said Maria. ‘A long time ago now.’
‘And Nikos still looks after her mother?’
‘I think it’s really Christina that looks after him.’
‘She feels guilty?’
‘I’ve always thought so.’ Maria eased her knife through her lamb. ‘She’s a very private woman, though. I don’t know anyone who knows her well enough to ask.’
‘How interesting,’ said Brigit.
It was interesting.
On any other night, Eleni might have joined in the conversation, asked Maria to tell her more.
But Otto was across the table from her, in an evening suit.
Every time Eleni looked at him, bathed in the candles’ glow, she felt that choking pressure in her throat grow. He’d hold her gaze in his, like he knew what she was feeling, and would fix it for her if he could, but that didn’t make it better, because he couldn’t fix it; no one could.
After dessert was cleared, at Brigit’s request, Marianne fetched her cello to play. She sat on the stool Henri brought out for her, her back to the villa’s open doors, facing the night; the black, inky sea.
‘Elgar,’ she told them, before she raised her bow and began.
She played as exquisitely as before. Eleni, sitting on the terrace wall, watched her, spellbound by the music, her face; how she seemed to have disappeared.
Otto sat beside her, his arm touching hers.
At some point, they must have started holding hands, because Eleni realized they were doing it.
No one noticed.
No one was looking at them.
Everyone’s eyes were on Marianne.
Brigit had tears flowing down her cheeks by the time she finished.
Eleni felt closer than ever to weeping herself.
‘Are you all right?’ Otto asked her, quietly, so that only she could hear.
‘No.’ She looked at him sideways. ‘Are you?’
‘No,’ he said, with a crooked smile.
She smiled as well.
They were surrounded by people.
What else could they do?
She wanted to leave. She’d become desperate by now to get it over with, since there was no other way but through it. Her desperation grew through the coffees Henri offered everyone, then the brandies.
It still broke her heart though, going.
Determinedly, she held herself together, thanking Brigit and Henri for having her, and wishing them a safe journey home. She kissed Marianne, told her that she really couldn’t wait to see her perform in the Carnegie, and kissed Krista as well.
‘Chin up,’ Krista whispered, squeezing her, ‘he’s not that special.’
‘He is though,’ said Eleni.
He was.
She turned to him, and, with everyone else saying their own farewells, offered him her hand, and – feeling the steady warmth of his grasp, knowing that it really was now for the last time – reached up, brushing his cheek with a kiss too.
He held onto her, placing his other hand in the small of her back, not letting her go.
The moment lasted no more than a second.
It was the sweetest, and saddest, second of her summer.
He still didn’t say goodbye.
Neither of them said a word.
But, realizing that it was her turn to be the one to pull away, she tightened her fingers on his, then stepped back, towards the others, and didn’t look at him again.
She simply couldn’t.
She didn’t cry either. Not that night.
Not even when she was up in her room, smelling his soap on her sheets.
He’s still near. She repeated it over and over. Just down the road.
She pictured him there, in a room like her own, picturing her here, in hers.
So this is where you’ve been all these nights.
Soothed by the thought, she closed her heavy eyes and, utterly spent from the emotion of the day, the week, slept.
She slept so deeply.
When she woke the next morning, to a familiar cramp in her stomach (her curse; it was something), it was already after nine. She rolled onto her side, saw how bright the sunlight coming under her closed door was, and knew he wasn’t near anymore.
His plane, which had departed at eight, had long since left.
She’d slept through the moment, and now he was on his way back to Berlin.
Back to his world.
Back to Lotte.
Without her.
She cried about that.
She cried about that for quite a long time.
Chapter Thirteen
She didn’t return home herself until the third week in September, a few days before her nineteenth birthday. She’d been excited, back in May, when she’d sat with Timothy, confirming her boat and rail reservations; euphoric that, free of school at last, she was to gain nearly an entire month at the end of her summer.
She regretted that now.
Who had she even been, back then?
She couldn’t think.
But those final weeks without him on the island – quiet, hollow, full of lonely bus rides, even lonelier swims, and pretence to everyone but Dimitri that she was fine, fine – weren’t ones she’d want to repeat.
But nor were they infinite, either.
They did end, in so many last meals – at the villa, in Halepa, up in the mountains – and hugs, and cheek pinches, and a trip to Little Vassili’s training ground, where Eleni summoned her very best of best efforts at a smile, told him to not have any accidents with his shiny new gun, and hugged him too.
Then, it was the morning of her departure to Athens, and there were just her final bits of packing to finish; her shorts and swimming costume, which she’d bought with such heady anticipation, to fold away. Tips stood on her bedroom floor, watching her, eyes like saucers in his stripy face, seeming to sense something not entirely ideal was afoot. Picking him up, Eleni kissed his furry head, then took him downstairs to the kitchen, where she made Yorgos promise again that he’d look after him, which he did. He then presented her with the inevitable box of fruits and vegetables she was to take home with her to Portsmouth.
‘You are to eat them all,’ he said, wagging his finger, white brow knitted, cross, as ever, that she was going. ‘If they bruise, you make soup. If they get too ripe… ’
‘I make jam,’ she finished. ‘I know, Papou.’ She hefted the box into her arms. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
His frown deepened, worrying regardless, and not only about her diet, she knew. For all she’d tried to keep up her charade these past weeks, she’d caught him looking at her, often, with the same perplexed concern he was wearing now. No swim today? he’d kept asking. Or, Why so quiet?
She hated that she’d made him anxious.
She wanted to say that to him, but simply didn’t know where to start.
They’d run out of time, anyway.
Within the hour, they were in the motor, haring back along the coast towards her ship. She’d changed into the travelling clothes she hadn’t worn since June. They felt scratchy and thick; her shoes were already giving her blisters. She thought bleakly of the long, rainy winter waiting for her in England, her prevailing uncertainty about what she was even going to do with herself through it, and, too late, realized what an idiot she’d been, wishing away these last weeks on the island.
‘I’ll miss you, Papou,’ she said, on the quayside, her trunk at her feet, the box of food propped atop of it. The ferry was ready to go, chugging in the dark, crystal sea, swallowing the islanders and visiting Athenians streaming onto it, choking the morning sunshine with its smoke. ‘Very, very much.’
He huffed a sigh, tipped his head gruffly in assent, and opened his arms.
She wrapped her own around him: the longest and tightest hug of all.
‘I’m sorry,’ she found herself saying.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you have nothing to be sorry for.’
And maybe he’d guessed some of it after all, or maybe he hadn’t, but the ship’s bell rang, so she couldn’t ask, but had to go, struggling up the cargo bay’s gangplank with her luggage until Yorgos barked furiously at one of the porters, who came down to help her.
It was a very long journey to Athens.
The ship steamed past other islands, their arid bulks speckled with tiny white towns, and, in the stultifying silence, Eleni almost wished Helen Finch was with her after all. It would have been nice to have had some company to take her mind off everything.
As it was, she sat out on deck, the searing sun moving higher, then lower, and thought of Yorgos returning to the silent villa without her; feeding Tips; preparing his own dinner. Then, of the summer, everything that had happened, and, always, always, of Otto.
You make me feel not alone.
It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to weep.
She wasn’t sure how she was going to last the entire way back to England. All those trains on her own. Facing up to the blackshirts at the Italian border…
But then, at Piraeus: a surprise.
The ship’s gangplank dropped, scraping onto the busy dockside, and, cutting through the shouts of the quay hands, the ship’s churning engines, she heard a familiar, clipped voice.
‘Eleni. Eleni. Down here.’
Her eyes moved, then widened, settling on her father, pristine in his naval uniform, waiting, ramrod straight, at the front of the jostling melee on the quay.
It was such a shock to see him, she almost thought she might be hallucinating.
‘I was worried about you here on your own,’ he yelled, by way of greeting. ‘All this business with Metaxas.’
‘I thought you were meant to be touring the Libyan Sea,’ she yelled back.
‘It’s quite close by, Eleni.’
‘Yes, I know that…’
‘I called in a favour, took leave.’ Ignoring the port clerk attempting to block his way, he mounted the gangplank and – ignoring the flood of disembarking passengers pouring past him too – strode towards her. ‘What’s this? More vegetables?’ He took her box. ‘Christ, it’s heavy.’ He frowned down at her, brow denting beneath the white brim of his cap. ‘You look well.’
‘You do too. Nice and tanned.’
‘I haven’t been on holiday, Eleni.’
‘No, of course not.’ She really couldn’t believe he was there. ‘Are you coming home with me now?’
‘What else would I be doing?’
It was too much.
He was coming with her.
She wasn’t going to have to get through the journey alone after all.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and still struggling to absorb that he’d done this for her, she threw her arms around him.
‘Now what’s all this?’ His voice softened. ‘Come now.’ A quick pat. ‘Oh my God, Eleni, are you crying?’
It didn’t all come pouring out of her, on their journey home. She didn’t sob and take the kerchief Timothy handed her and say how she almost wished she’d never met Otto, because then she wouldn’t be so sad now.
They really didn’t have that kind of relationship.
Quickly, she pulled herself together, and before their train had even made it out of Greece, began to wish she was on her own again, because it was honestly a lot more comfortable sitting in silence by herself, than with her father beside her, staring stiffly through the window at the parched Greek countryside.
Was he thinking about her mama, she wondered.
Remembering the journey the two of them had made?
Again, she didn’t ask.
But her gratitude to him returned at the Italian border, where he was really quite excellent with the blackshirt who took their papers, fixing him with a stare that was pure British Naval authority, and dared him to do anything but quickly stamp them through.
‘I wish I had your uniform,’ said Eleni.
‘You’d look ridiculous in it,’ Timothy replied.
And, against the odds, she laughed.
It was raining when, grubby and tired, they reached Portsmouth two days later, and caught a taxicab home to Gosport. Their house, left empty all summer, was cold, echoey from lack of habitation, and scented with damp.
None of this Eleni minded though, because on the doormat was a huge mound of post.
She crouched, gathering it to her whilst Timothy went upstairs to wash and change, and, nodding absently at his request that she put the kettle on, carried on into the chilly kitchen, where she flicked the light, forgot the kettle, and stood at the Formica bench, eagerly sorting through the scores of envelopes that had come.
Most of them were for Timothy, but there were five for her. The first contained her high-school certificate scores; she did, obviously, look at them, and was happy, but not nearly as elated as she was when she uncovered the four (four) letters that had arrived from Germany.
Three were from him.
Smiling, breathless, fingers trembling with impatience, she sat at the table, ripping them open in turn, racing through his words, Dear Eleni, then going over them again, more slowly, savouring his every sentence, hearing his low voice in her mind. He told her how much he’d hated leaving her in Crete, how sorely he wished he was still there. It’s a kind of torture, knowing you are, thinking of what you’re doing, What we could be doing. I want to be back in your room with you. Or swimming with urchins. Or even carrying your oranges out to that bin. ‘Yes,’ she said, under her breath, ‘I want that too.’ His second letter, he’d written on the train to Munich (she was pleased to read that; it was a relief, it really was, knowing he’d now left the city Lotte was in), and, in his third, said that his tutor had liked her reading nook, but his friends were annoyed; none of them had met any sirens in Switzerland, nor mermaids in Italy, nor Greek girls in Austria, who spoke English like they were on the BBC, and could finish a peach in three bites.
Are you home yet? he asked. Write soon, please, talk to me like you’re with me, then I can fool myself that you are.
She did it there and then, not even stopping to remove her coat, just grabbing a pad from the dresser, sitting back at the table, filling him in on everything that had passed since they’d parted, down to her delight, just now, finding his letters.
It was like you knew exactly what I needed, she wrote, before signing off.
‘Eleni,’ said Timothy, startling her by reappearing, waving at the frigid kettle. ‘Are you not thirsty?’
She actually was.
Once the tea was made, and Timothy was distracted, rifling through his own post, she opened her fourth letter from Germany, which turned out to be from Marianne, who’d got her address from Otto – I hope you don’t mind, I wanted to say how nice it was to have met you – and was full of her news from Berlin, where she’d moved into her aunt’s flat, which she said wasn’t too bad, although they definitely needed to get rid of some of their furniture. I’m sleeping in the living room, which is strange, but I’m getting used to it. And, much better, my aunt had her baby whilst we were all away. A little girl called Esther, who is quite perfect. She’d sent a picture of the two of them, perched in an armchair in front of a packed bookshelf. Marianne was smiling into the lens, holding Esther, wrapped in a swaddle.
She certainly is scrumptious, Eleni wrote back. Look at all her little creases.
She loves it when Papa and I play her music, said Marianne. I miss Dimitri’s. I wish I could find a copy of ‘Cheek to Cheek’.
