Aphrodite’s Smile. Stuart Harrison
had bought a small olive-pressing plant from a family member a few years after she met my father. She must have understood early on that they would struggle to live on the money my father made as an archaeologist and curator of the small museum he had started to house his finds. At first she had pressed the crops of local smallholders, mainly for their own use, charging them a percentage for the process. Later she had begun bottling her own brand and, as European regulations loomed, she had invested in more sophisticated plant and gradually had turned the business into a full-scale commercial operation. Her oil was exported all over the world, albeit in relatively small quantities.
The whitewashed plaster façade and terracotta tiled roof of the house were typical of Ithaca. It had been built over two levels with shutters on the windows and wrought-iron balconies outside the upper-floor rooms. A large terrace overlooked the town and the sheltered harbour far below. To the north, Mount Nirito rose dramatically to a darkening sky, splashed by late golden sunlight.
When we arrived, Irene showed me to my room. It was the same one that I had used during my reluctant visits there as a child. After she had reminded me where everything was, she told me that I should feel at home and she gave me the keys to my father’s Jeep.
‘I am afraid that the last few days have been tiring,’ she said. ‘If you do not mind I will go to bed early. But perhaps you would like to go into the town.’
I was sure that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I took the keys and thanked her. ‘I might do that.’
She smiled wearily and kissed my cheek. ‘Then I will say goodnight, Robert. Kalinichta.’
‘Good-night.’
It was dark by the time I drove into Vathy. The town was built around a picturesque harbour. The entire place had been destroyed during the devastating earthquake that had hit the Ionian Islands and part of the Greek mainland during the early fifties, but Vathy had been rebuilt in traditional style. Unlike neighbouring Kephalonia, there were no strips of tacky bars and nightclubs or huge tourist hotels. The twisting, narrow streets were full of small shops selling fresh vegetables or books and magazines, groceries or clothes, and on every corner there was a kefenio or taverna where the tables spilled out onto the pavements. Closer to the waterfront there were a few souvenir shops catering to the tourist trade and all of them had racks of paperback translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad on display.
Outside the towns, the beaches were not sandy like those on Kephalonia, but rather were made of smooth stones bleached by the sun. As a consequence, the island didn’t attract the package-deal hordes that descended on its neighbour. Instead, many of those who came to Ithaca were Italians or mainland Greeks. Some stayed in small apartment complexes or rented rooms in private homes, others had their own properties that remained shut up during the winter months. The island was also popular with the many boats that cruised the area during the summer, their owners attracted by its unspoilt beauty and its history.
As I drove along the waterfront I could see that almost every available berth was taken and a few yachts lay at anchor further out in the harbour. In the main square the restaurants and bars were busy. I found somewhere to park and searched for a free table outside but they were all taken. I was about to look for somewhere quieter in the backstreets when I saw a girl sitting alone. At first I thought she was a local. She had dark blonde hair, the olive complexion of the Mediterranean races and there was something distinctly Greek about the angular slant of her features. But when I noticed the book she was reading I saw that it had an English title and I approached her and gestured to the unoccupied chairs.
‘Excuse me, do you mind if I share your table?’
She looked up in surprise and then glanced around at the busy tables as if noticing them for the first time. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses even though the sun had gone down an hour before. I wondered how she could see to read. ‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said quietly and then returned to her book.
The way she spoke immediately conjured images of private schools and a well-to-do family. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties or so and I wondered if perhaps she was from one of the visiting yachts. The book she was reading was by a well-known and fairly literary author.
The air was warm and the smells of grilled food and the sea mixed pleasingly. The slap and suck of water against the wharf was soothing. A waiter arrived and delivered the beer I’d ordered. I drank while I watched the life of the town go on around me. Whole families were out to eat dinner or simply stroll along the waterfront. Groups of people stopped to talk while their children ran around shouting and playing games.
I thought about my father lying somewhere nearby, his body cold and lifeless, and it hit me that I would never hear his voice again. There would be no more phone calls and conversations that never went anywhere but saw us endlessly skating around each other on thin ice. He was always wary of cracking through the surface of normalcy while I silently resented the pretence. I always felt agitated during those calls. Part of me wanted to air my grievances with confrontation, another part to punish him with silence the way I had been doing for years. I always ended up doing the latter. It struck me that I’d never have to worry about it again, but also that everything I’d wanted to say would have to remain unspoken.
My thoughts turned to my father’s claim that somebody had tried to kill him. I didn’t believe any of it. It sounded as though he had been doing a pretty good job of it himself anyway. The thing that had really killed him was selfishness. It was what had brought him to Ithaca in the first place and had ultimately led him to clog his arteries and pickle his liver. Years ago he’d fled Oxford after a professional scandal that had ruined his reputation and destroyed my parents’ marriage, which had been far from perfect in the first place. My father had taken refuge here on this pretty but insignificant island, and for the next quarter of a century had buried himself in the past. I’d always thought he had taken the easy option.
I could still remember the last time I saw him in England. I was eleven years old and I had been in a fight at school with a boy who’d said my dad was a cheat. I went home with a blackened eye and when I told him what had happened, instead of being proud of me for sticking up for him, my father couldn’t look at me. He went to his study and shut himself away while my mother put an ice pack to my face. When I told her what the boy I’d fought with had said she was tight-mouthed and furious. That night I heard her voice raised in shrill anger and accusation and in the morning my father had left. Within a fortnight I’d been sent away to boarding school with the flimsiest of explanations about where he had gone and when he was coming back.
Until then, our house had been divided. Though I’d always known that my parents were not particularly happy together, they never actually argued much. But they weren’t affectionate towards one another either. My mother exuded a more or less permanent air of dissatisfaction and disapproval of which I somehow understood my father was the root cause, though I never knew why. He seemed to accept his lot and tried hard to keep the peace, but his nature seemed coloured with the resignation of defeat. They were out of balance with one another and I was caught in the middle.
During the summer breaks, when my dad went off on one of his digs I would go with him. We’d camp out or stay in a small country pub, and for the time we were away he didn’t seem to have any worries bearing down on him. For my part I was happy to escape my mother’s attention to tidiness and cleanliness, qualities my dad didn’t consider important. During those summer digs everything was different. It was like shrugging off clothes that were a size too small, and I sensed that he felt the same way. Out of that shared feeling a deeper bond grew between us, though in a sense it was a secret. After the summer was over and we went home again there was an unspoken agreement that we didn’t talk about the time we’d spent away. We simply resumed our structured way of life.
Boarding school was even more regimented and excessively orderly. I didn’t fit in. Our family didn’t have money and everybody seemed to know about my father and what had happened at Oxford. At first I defended him, but later, when I realised that the things the other children said were true, I simply ignored their taunts. All the time I expected to hear from him any day and I couldn’t understand why I