The Officer and the Spy, page 2
Don’t wear them anyone can see, probably.
She’d taken her time unpacking it all upstairs, unfolding her older, less controversial, sundresses, hanging them in the ancient wardrobe, then pausing – out of habit, old longing – at the bureau, staring into the photograph that stood there: the only one that existed of herself and her mama. It had been taken at a studio in Portsmouth when she’d been just a few months old, and her mama not much older than she was now; just twenty. Her mama was wearing a winter coat, and held Eleni bundled up in a blanket, clasping her hand. Eleni had her fist wrapped around her forefinger; tight, trusting. She’d known her mama, then. Once, she’d known her.
They looked alike; even Eleni could see that. Aside from the fair hair she’d inherited from her father, her mama had given her everything: olive skin, oval face; curves. Yorgos said they shared mannerisms, as well. She used to sink her face in her hands when she laughed, and fiddle at her earlobe when she was trying to ignore me telling her off. Did Eleni’s father notice their similarities? He never spoke of it if he did. And he kept no photographs up. He wasn’t one for ornaments or memories. Eleni wished he was, but not even a wedding portrait graced his well-ordered desk.
She shivered. The June air had cooled since sunset, and her bare skin prickled in anticipation of the sea’s liquid touch. She could hear the waves licking lazily over the cove’s pebbles below. The Greeks had a word, just for that fizzing sound they made. Flisvos. It was a beautiful sound. It deserved a word of its own, Eleni thought.
It grew darker as the steps gave way to the small private bay, and she disappeared from the reach of her papou’s lamp. The sea, beyond the shallow shore break, was calm; a mirror to the stars, the beam of the white moon. She continued towards it, not hesitating as she shrugged off her robe, letting it fall to the ground. It was the only way to make herself get in, at this time of year, this time of night. No pause for thought.
Except then she did stop, startled by the crack of a branch behind her. She turned, glancing up at the shadowy hillside. An animal, she thought. A goat, or stray dog. She waited to see if it would show itself…
But no, nothing.
‘Fine, be like that,’ she said, in Greek, so it understood.
And, without further ado, she ran at the sea, diving, her breath leaving her as the biting water quenched her face, her sluggish, weary limbs. She swam deeper, on and on, diving again, reaching for the sandy bottom, lungs bursting until she could bear it no more and had to resurface, gasping for air. Sinking backwards, she floated, pulse pounding in her ears, eyes fixed on the stars – so much brighter, away from Portsmouth’s city lights, so much closer – thinking of the freedom of the months ahead. The wonderful reality that she was lying in the Aegean Sea, staring at Venus, and not revising for her exams, or doing the washing up, back in Gosport.
She wasn’t sure how long she might have gone on drifting like that.
Not so very long, probably. Soon enough, the sea’s chill would have propelled her from her reverie.
But the call came first.
‘Otto,’ it rang out, high and clear from the shore, ‘Otto Linder.’
Intrigued by the unfamiliar voice, the unfamiliar name, Eleni kicked herself upright, peering through the night for the person who’d spoken, finding her easily on the dark water’s edge, marked out by her white evening gown; a ghostly kind of silhouette. The gown was full-length, elegant, making its wearer appear more adult than she’d sounded. She’d sounded like a girl. Eleni studied her, wondering who she was, and what she could be doing on the rocks beneath Nikos Kalantis’s villa. A villa which, now Eleni looked, had several lamps of its own burning. Her brow creased. She’d only ever known Nikos’s home to stand empty in the past. He’d always been absent on business when she’d visited. (‘This is no loss,’ Yorgos had once said.)
Was he here this year?
Or had he leased his villa to tourists?
Certainly, this girl wasn’t Greek. German, maybe. They were hearing it spoken more these days in England; those newsreels that played at the pictures of Hitler shouting, the ecstatic crowds cheering…
‘Otto.’ That name again. Something else followed. ‘Wo bist du?’ Definitely German. And whiney. ‘Essen ist fertig.’
Then, another voice: male, deep, and so very close to Eleni, she all but lost her heart through her mouth.
‘Ich komme.’
I’m coming?
Eleni hardly considered it.
She was much more concerned with absorbing the revelation that she hadn’t been nearly so alone in the water as she’d believed.
That, and the jolt of the stranger, Otto’s, eyes meeting hers when she spun reflexively towards him, no more than twenty strokes away.
Hand to her exploding chest, she stared.
For a moment, so did he.
As shocked as she was?
He didn’t appear particularly shocked.
The night was too deep for Eleni to see him clearly – she drew an impression rather than a picture: the symmetry of his face, accentuated by the shadows; those eyes, holding hers – but it was enough for her to feel sure that he’d been a deal more aware of her presence than she had his.
Indignantly, she arched a brow.
Did he smile?
She was pretty sure his lips moved in a rueful smile.
She had no time to decide. The girl in white called for him again – ‘Otto, wo bist du?’ – and, with a flicked glance in her direction, he bade Eleni, ‘Guten Nacht,’ (she understood that) then was gone, slicing through the water for the shore.
Too stunned to move, Eleni watched him go.
He swam fast. His strokes, clean and assured, hardly made a noise. Vaguely, she made sense of why she hadn’t noticed him before.
How long had he been aware of her own presence though?
Turning the unanswerable question over, she kept her attention on him as he reached the rocks, pulling himself from the sea. His back was broad, muscular, his movement easy and athletic. The woman threw a towel for him, and he caught it. He obviously joked, too, because the woman laughed, her peals slicing through the night. At the sound, their familiarity, Eleni felt the strangest tug; that hollowness of being on the outside. In the ensuing silence, she, replaying Otto’s smile – certain now that’s what it had been – found herself wishing she knew what he’d just said.
Much more than that though, she really was becoming freezing.
With a breath of resolution, she forced her cold body back into motion. She swam as swiftly as Otto had, not looking at him again, so not knowing whether he did, or did not, glance back at her. By the time she’d realized how much she wanted to check, it was already too late; she’d reached the shore and was wading through the shallows, Nikos’s own rocky inlet hidden from view.
She stared in its direction, curiosity over Otto, and the girl, growing.
Then, teeth chattering, thinking she could quiz her papou on them, she reached for her towel and robe, and, wrapping herself in both, set off at a jog for the villa.
She heard no more noises on the way up; no cracks, nor rustles. It was only when she came across a kitten, curled right at the top of the stairs, that she recalled the snapping branch that had stopped her in her tracks before.
‘Was it you?’ she asked the tiny animal, scooping it up. It mewed plaintively, its back leg sticky with blood. ‘Now who did this?’
Another mew.
Cradling it close, she carried it on with her, back into the light of her papou’s lamp.
‘Don’t bring that animal in here,’ he called from up on the now-smoky terrace.
‘It’s hurt.’
‘That’s life.’
‘Papou, you’re a doctor… ’
‘For humans.’
‘Just take a look at it.’
‘And all the other cats on the island?’
‘Please. Whilst I get changed. I won’t be long.’
She wasn’t.
And, as she and her papou ate beneath the stars – the kitten, clean of blood, purring at their feet (‘What shall we call him?’ she asked. ‘Nothing,’ Yorgos said. ‘That’s not a very good name,’ she observed) – she mentioned the Germans she’d seen at Nikos Kalantis’s villa. She learnt that Yorgos knew disappointingly little of them, only that they must be part of the family that had flown in that morning from Berlin to stay for the summer. The Linders.
‘Friends of Mr Kalantis?’ she asked.
‘Let’s hope better of them than that,’ he said, and frowned, scolding her against throwing fishbones for the kitten to eat.
She ignored him on the fishbones, but let the matter of the Linders, and Nikos Kalantis, go, knowing he was only being short-tempered because she’d raised the subject of his neighbour in the first place. They’d been at odds her entire life: a dispute over land that went back generations. The island was littered with such family feuds. The story went that Eleni’s grandmama had, for herself, been good friends with Nikos, before she, like Eleni’s mama, had died too young, leaving Eleni’s mama just a baby (a troubling family trait), but not even she’d been able to heal the rift between the pair. If anything, Eleni suspected her friendship with Nikos had made it worse. There’d been some incident involving her mama too, back during the Great War, when Nikos had lost his temper at her – Eleni didn’t know why (‘You think a man like him needs a reason,’ Yorgos had said, when she’d pressed him on it), only that it was another thing Yorgos could never forgive, and hated remembering.
Hating that for him, Eleni had long ceased asking him to.
Dropping more fish for the kitten, she moved the conversation on, coaxing him back into a better mood by mentioning the whispered rumours of King Edward’s affair with the American divorcée, Wallis Simpson, giving him – no royalist, but every inch a moralist – all the opening he needed to vent about values and duty and the importance of modesty. (He’s really going to hate my shorts, she thought.) As he talked on – jumping from Edward, to the newly reinstated Greek monarchy, his fury at their support for yet another would-be European dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas in Athens, and from there to the welcome news that Dimitri, the owner of the harbourside café Eleni had waitressed at the summer before, had called by, offering her employment again – she did her best to keep up, fighting a smile at his gesticulations, forgetting all about her watery encounter.
But later, as she fell onto her mattress, an oil lamp flickering on the bedside table, the kitten snug on a cushion by the door, her mind moved once more to the memory of Otto’s face in the darkness. The warmth in his voice. Guten Nacht. She stared sightlessly at her chipped ceiling, listening to the shutters creak, and thought not of her mother, but of him in his villa down the way, and about what relation the girl in white could be to him.
A sister?
Girlfriend?
Or a fiancée?
Somehow, sister felt better.
She expelled a short laugh at herself, for caring.
Then she rolled on to her side, extinguished her lamp, and wondered how long it would be before she saw him again.
Chapter Two
She woke early the next morning, a Saturday, wrenched from sleep by Yorgos rapping at her door, telling her to hurry, grigora, stop wasting the day, it was almost seven.
‘Almost seven?’ she croaked, slipping into English in her groggy disorientation. ‘That’s not even five in England.’
‘This is Greece—’ he wedged the door open ‘—and we have things to do.’
‘You didn’t say last night.’
‘Because I knew you’d moan about getting up. What—’ he pointed ‘—is that cat doing on your pillow?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’d better hope it doesn’t have fleas.’
She did hope it.
In that moment though, with him clapping his hands at her impatiently, it was the least of her concerns.
She shouldn’t have arrived on a Friday, she realized belatedly. Normally, the boat and train schedules delivered her earlier in the week, when Yorgos – refusing to retire, for all he was in his sixties – was occupied at his nearby general practitioners, leaving her all the time she needed to adjust to the Greek clock’s head-start on England, and take her fill of swimming and reading down at the cove before Saturday rolled around, and the reunions commenced.
It wasn’t that she didn’t look forward to seeing the rest of the family. She did. She loved them, missed them, would choose time with them over her father’s parents any day of the week. (Every couple of months or so, her father would, in response to a wounded letter from his mother, make his own excuses, and despatch Eleni like a sacrificial lamb for Sunday lunch at his childhood home in Sutton: anaemic greens, floury mash, Bisto gravy, all washed down with suet pudding, a silent game of chess with Eleni’s grandfather, and a gentle but firm lecture from her grandmother on how, if she’d only agree to secretarial college, she might find herself a nice, steady husband. ‘Like Grandpa here,’ Grandma would say, with a pained smile at him in his braces, agonising over what to do with his knight.) There’d be no Bisto in Crete, no career advice, nor suet either; nothing to dread whatsoever, other than that Eleni had been travelling for three days straight, and truly would have loved a couple more off before spending hours in the motor with Yorgos getting to everyone.
They didn’t have many stops to make, at least. Their family wasn’t large, not by Crete’s standards. Eleni’s mama (Petra; she’d been called Petra) had, like Eleni’s father, been an only child. Yorgos had no brothers or sisters either, and his parents, along with Eleni’s grandmother’s parents, had sadly gone before she was born. But her grandmother’s sister, great-aunt Sofia, was still very much alive, way up in the white mountains, where she’d moved with her husband, Vassili, at the turn of the century, to make wine. They’d made a son too, (another Vassili), who himself was married with a Vassili of his own. Little Vassili.
Other than them, there was just Spiros and Maria, who weren’t really family at all, but felt like family, because Eleni had known them forever. Spiros had been at school with Yorgos, studying medicine in Athens with him, and was his partner at the general practitioners. He and his wife Maria lived much closer to home, alongside the island’s politicians and diplomats in the Chania suburb of Halepa. Eleni was as familiar with their shoreside townhouse as she was the villa. When she was little, she’d spent every day there with Maria, just as her mama had used to: playing, baking, learning to swim, whilst her papou worked.
It wasn’t them, though, that Yorgos had arranged to see that Saturday, as Eleni discovered over breakfast. No, they were expecting them the following morning. Saturday was to be all about the long journey into the mountains; lunch with Sofia and the Vassilis.
‘And I don’t want to be late,’ said Yorgos. ‘So upstairs, quickly. Get ready.’
‘All right,’ said Eleni, going, before he could start clapping again.
She didn’t forget about the kitten in the rush. Once she was dressed, and had checked him for fleas (‘None,’ she declared triumphantly), she made him up saucers of milk and fish scraps and settled him to snooze on an old blanket beneath the terrace awning.
‘What shall we call him?’ she pondered, running her finger over his bony head.
‘I told you,’ said Yorgos, ‘nothing.’ Tipota.
Eleni sighed. ‘I don’t know why you’re so set on that name… ’
She didn’t forget about Otto either.
The thought of their brief meeting returned to her, vividly, when, at length, she and Yorgos were in the motor, roaring past the gateway to Nikos’s villa, on their way to the road inland. The gate was nothing to look at. Simple, lined by shrubs; Eleni had passed it thousands of times before without notice.
Yet this time, she looked.
There was no one there. Just a pair of butterflies that flitted weightlessly above the splintered wooden posts. It was so early, the sun barely risen past the sea’s misty horizon. Eleni expected everyone was in bed.
Still, she couldn’t help but glance back as they accelerated away, holding the gate in her sights…
But no, nothing.
Yorgos sped on, wheels throwing up dust, and even the butterflies disappeared.
‘Who was that?’
Henri’s question cut through the silence in Otto’s room, startling him, although he didn’t give away how much. Still in just the trousers he’d slept in, he remained exactly as he was, hands resting on the windowsill, gaze fixed on the now-empty road above.
‘Could you knock?’ he said.
‘You haven’t answered me,’ said Henri.
Otto still didn’t. He set his jaw on the things he might say to his father, and leant harder on the windowsill, the heels of his hands numbing. A baby lizard darted up the side of the pane, then stopped, stringy legs splayed, seeming to realize it was being observed. Otto imagined its miniscule heart pounding. That instinct for survival…
‘Otto, who was it?’
The lizard didn’t blink. It was as though it believed it could make itself invisible through stillness.
If only.
‘Otto?’
‘I don’t know,’ Otto lied.
He’d seen her blonde head, caught a glimpse of her face as she’d turned in his direction.
Smiled, because she’d looked for him.
Eleni Adams, Nikos Kalantis had said she was called, when Otto had asked him about her, after the welcome dinner they’d both been late to the night before. An English father, Nikos had gone on, in perfect, dismissive, German. I have nothing to do with her.
‘You were distracted last night,’ said Henri now. ‘I noticed… ’
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘So did your mother. I’m worried—’ Henri paused, looking to the wall, reminding Otto – not that he could forget – who was on the other side of it ‘—that Lotte might have been upset.’
Otto continued to study the road. The motor’s dust had settled.
Where had she gone to?
‘You need to be careful,’ said Henri. ‘You and your sister need to be careful.’
