Aphrodite’s Smile. Stuart Harrison
‘I don’t really like flying,’ she confided, only now releasing her white-knuckled grip on the armrest between us. Her friend in the window seat was looking outside, anxiously searching for something that resembled the pictures she’d seen of Kephalonia in holiday brochures.
‘It looks hot,’ was all she could manage by way of uncertain pronouncement, no doubt unimpressed by the concrete and glass terminal and the featureless hills beyond.
‘The beaches are nice around Lixouri,’ I assured them.
‘Is that where you’re staying too?’ the one beside me asked.
‘I’m going to Ithaca,’ I reminded her.
‘Oh, yes. You told me that earlier didn’t you? Is that near Lixouri?’
‘It’s another island. You have to catch a ferry.’
She looked disappointed. ‘That’s a shame. We could have met up. Had a drink or something.’
She held my eye, emboldened by duty-free vodka. She was quite pretty, in her late-twenties with short hair and elfin features. In fact she reminded me a little bit of Alicia and for a moment the thought of her caused me a sharp pang of loss. It had been a month since she left. I had seen her once in a restaurant with a man I didn’t recognise, but I’d hurried on before she noticed me. She had called me at home a few days afterwards, the coincidence making me think she must have seen me after all. I wasn’t at home when she called, but when I came in and turned on the answering machine and heard a hesitant silence I knew it was her. I waited to see if she would speak, my pulse racing.
‘It’s me,’ she said finally, and then there was another long pause before she hung up. I checked to see if she’d called back but there were no other messages and I hadn’t heard from her again.
The seat-belt sign over my head went out and I put thoughts of Alicia out of my mind as all around me people got up and began to haul luggage down from the overhead lockers. When we emerged from the plane it was to a sudden and unfamiliar heat. Even in June, England had been chilly and grey. As we crossed the Tarmac to the terminal beneath a cloudless sky I could already feel the prickle of perspiration through my shirt.
I said goodbye to the girls I’d sat next to and after I’d collected my bag went outside to find a taxi to take me to Efimia. Already a throng of people had emerged dazed into the sun, clutching their luggage. They mingled with the crowds heading home who had just been disgorged from a line of buses. A few sat on a low wall exposed to the sun, their brown or sometimes livid red bodies bared for a final time.
The airport is on the western side of the island, but Ithaca lies in the other direction, reached by ferries that ply back and forth across the strait from ports on the eastern coast. The road led over the mountains, climbing high above fertile valleys past olive groves and vineyards where the taxi driver kept offering to stop so that I could buy some of the local wine. When I repeatedly declined he eventually gave up and for the rest of the journey contented himself with chain-smoking.
At Efimia I found that I had to wait an hour for a ferry to take me to Ithaca so to fill the time I ordered coffee at a nearby kefenio. The town had been built on the slopes of low hills surrounding a pretty bay that formed a harbour. A few yachts were tied up against the wharf where some children were fishing and a group of Greek men smoked cigarettes and chatted. Beneath the hot sun I could feel life slowing down, changing gear. When the ferry arrived I went to pay my bill, remembering too late that I hadn’t changed any English currency into euros. The owner shrugged, waving away my pound coins.
‘Next time. Next time.’
I thanked him, making a mental note to be sure I remembered to come back here on my way home.
There were perhaps twenty or so passengers besides myself making the trip across the strait. Once out of the bay, Ithaca revealed itself as a hazy series of rocky humps resembling some sleeping sea monster. The colours of the landscape brought back memories of childhood visits. The sun flashed like silver on the impossibly blue sea. Kephalonia retreated, its coastal hills bare and brown while Ithaca’s coast in comparison seemed lush with dark green growth. I sat on the top deck wondering what I would find when I arrived.
Since my father had left the hospital he’d been making a steady recovery. According to Irene he was resting and eating properly and drinking only half a glass of wine a day with dinner. When I spoke to her she sounded strained, but I put that down to worry and the stress of coping with my father. My father had regained some of his old bluff manner on the phone. I kept saying that I would come out some time soon, but I had never been precise about dates. I had told him I thought it would be better if I waited until he was stronger and, though he was disappointed, he tried not to let on. My vague plans had changed abruptly two days earlier. Irene had called me at five in the morning. I was only half awake, but as soon as I heard her voice I knew something was wrong.
‘Irene? What is it?’ I said, glancing at the clock by my bed and sitting up.
‘It is your father, Robert.’ I gripped the phone tightly, fearing that she was about to tell me he’d had another heart attack, but instead she said, ‘He has vanished.’
‘Vanished? What do you mean?’
‘Yesterday he left the house early in the morning. Before I was awake. Since then, nobody has seen him.’
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I wondered how anybody could disappear in a place the size of Ithaca. ‘Do you mean he’s left the island?’ The first thing that occurred to me was that he might have gone to Kephalonia to catch a plane and was on his way to England. I even glanced toward the door as if at any moment I might hear the doorbell downstairs.
‘I do not think so,’ Irene said. ‘Nobody remembers him buying a ticket for the ferry, and the police found his car at the marina.’
‘The police?’
‘When he did not come home I phoned them. I thought something might have happened to him.’
I was fully awake by then and I tried to think logically. ‘Hang on, you said his car was at the marina. What about his boat?’
‘The Swallow is still there.’
‘But if his car is there surely he must be around somewhere.’
‘The police have asked everybody. Nobody has seen him.’ She paused and when she spoke again her voice caught in her throat. ‘They are searching around the harbour.’
I understood then that she was afraid he’d had another heart attack and I understood how worried she was. I tried to reassure her. I said that I was sure he would turn up but I was already thinking about how quickly I could get out there. By the time we hung up I’d promised I would get a flight as soon as I could. As it turned out, the next available seat on a scheduled flight to Kephalonia wasn’t for forty-eight hours. Even after I’d booked my ticket I expected him to show up before I left, but the last time I’d called Irene from London there still hadn’t been any news. By then my father had been missing for three days.
As the ferry approached the small port of Piso Aetos on Ithaca’s western coast I searched for Irene on the wharf. Nothing much had changed since I was last there. There was just a dock and a couple of low-roofed buildings at the bottom of a steep hill. A handful of people stood waiting and among them I spotted Irene. Despite the years that had passed since we’d last met, I had no trouble recognising her. She wore a simple sleeveless jade-green dress that clung to her figure in the afternoon breeze, reminding me that she was twenty years younger than my father. As a boy I used to spend a week or two with them every summer during the school holidays. When I was fifteen, Irene would have been in her thirties. I used to wonder what she saw in my father, who by then was steadily thickening around the waist. She had made an effort to be especially nice to me and, with youthful confusion, I misinterpreted her kindness and indulged in fevered guilt-ridden sexual fantasies. A father cuckolded by his own son. It couldn’t have been more fitting on a Greek island.
Once