An Inch of Time (20 page)

Once I had parked the bike by the van I waited for a while, allowing my eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness and my ears to the absence of engine noise before taking the path towards the house. The display of stars in the Greek sky was spectacular tonight, the starlight strong enough to make out the shapes of the church and churchyard to my right and the rest of the ruined village squatting in the hollow darkness to my left.

Only in a setting like this one could the oil lamps and candles that were lighting Morva's sitting room appear so bright. The three students were keeping the invalid company, cheering her – and themselves – with the help of quite a few bottles of wine. I fended off the repeated invitations to join them. In the kitchen I pulled the cork on a private litre bottle of red Corfu plonk and let myself out of the back door into the ghostly starlit village. Not too far from the house I found a comfortable place between the roots of a giant olive tree where I intended to drink every drop of this stuff. Tomorrow Annis would touch down and I would talk sense to her about this whole Corfu lark, but tonight I would indulge in the solitary romantic pleasures of starlit inebriation.

After a third of a bottle, my taste buds were sufficiently numb and I no longer shuddered after each gulp. Lying back against the tree trunk, I looked up at the patch of sky above the silhouetted church and fell into schoolboy musings about whether up there on a distant planet some other idiot was drowning his brain cells and thinking the same. In which case, it was hardly worth us going there; it was bound to be painfully similar at the other end of the galaxy.

Even quiet footfall travelled far in the stillness of the night. A dark shape appeared near the house, then stopped. There was no way of telling who it was. No noise came from the house and the figure stood motionless now. I kept equally still, hoping to pass for a gnarled root shape under my tree. Then the shadow moved off towards the groves near the church and I lost sight of it. All was quiet again. Should I care? I had never felt less inclined to investigate anything than in that warm, hidden, starlit moment, slightly soured by cheap red wine and serenaded by just one insomniac cricket, still sending its simple message to the stars.

I took a long draught from the heavy bottle. When I set it down again between my knees, the shadow was back, much closer and in front of me, standing motionless.

Perhaps aliens used this last quiet corner of Corfu to beam down on to our planet. Yes, that was it. Bound to be the most likely explanation. I lifted my wine bottle in salute. ‘Hail, alien shadow. Welcome to our planet; population: five. We are a peaceful race and taste horrible.'

The figure moved straight towards me. I smelled her perfume long before the amorphous shadow sharpened into a recognizable shape.

‘How did you find me?' I asked. ‘Thought I'd be invisible under here.'

Helen let herself slide down the trunk next to me. Close. ‘You were, more or less. But I could smell the wine.'

‘You must have a sensitive nose.'

‘Let me ruin it by drinking some more of that paint stripper.'

I transferred custody of the bottle to her, remembering what Sophie had said in a similar situation: ‘There's never enough to go around. Of most things.' Sophie had a point there – a sad little point – yet there was, just possibly, enough sour wine on the isle of Corfu.

She took a swig from the bottle. ‘Why the lonely vigil?'

‘I just fancied a quiet drink under the stars.'

‘Sorry if I'm ruining it for you.'

‘Don't be. I think it already yielded all the metaphysics it was going to.' I lit a cigarette. The flame from the lighter briefly illuminated Helen's face, her eyes bright from the evening's drinking. ‘I wonder what it was like up here when people were still living in the village. Life must have been quite simple.'

‘Nonsense, Chris; village life is never simple.'

‘Basic, then,' I amended.

She ignored it. ‘City life is simple. You don't know anyone and nobody knows or cares about you. The freedom of the ant heap. But in a small community you have to think carefully about what you say and do. Everyone knows your business, too; watches every step.'

‘You make it sound less than idyllic. You're speaking from experience?'

‘Mm? Yes, I . . .' She sighed impatiently. ‘I lived in quite a small community; didn't care for it at all.'

‘And what about here? You couldn't live like Morva, then?'

‘No. And neither can Morva. But she's stubborn.'

She felt for my cigarette and took it from between my fingers, then took a puff.

‘I didn't think you smoked.'

‘I don't. I just wanted an excuse to touch you.' She felt for my hand again, found it and held it in that suddenly awkward six-inch canyon between our bodies. My body remembered hers, naked, among the sun-baked ruins. For a while we just sat quietly. She handed the cigarette back, which I finished all too soon, but she kept my hand, caressing it with her thumb; a tiny, delicate gesture, yet electrifying, magnified by the wine, by the night. She stretched out her other arm towards me.

I cut across the gesture, reaching for the bottle, and rearranged my body, freed my hand. ‘I do have a girlfriend . . .'

‘I know.'

‘She's arriving here tomorrow.'

‘I know. Morva mentioned it.' There was a pause in which I took a swig, then lit another cigarette. Helen took the lighter from me and held a flickering flame between our faces. ‘That's tomorrow. How about tonight? Why waste the night? Go to bed with me. Make love to me under the stars.'

‘Look, it's . . .'

‘If you say “Look, it's not that I don't fancy you, but”, then I may just do something . . . unexpected.'

‘Like what?'

‘How should I know? That's the thing with unexpected things, I find; you never know what to expect.'

‘I don't want a one-night stand, but I don't want to complicate my love life, either.'

‘This lighter is getting bloody hot.'

‘Then let it go; I can't see the stars.'

The flame went out and I heard the lighter drop in the sudden darkness. ‘I'll not try to compete with your stars.' She stood up with a little groan, brushed her skirts with her hands and walked off, sure-footed. ‘I can see like a cat in the dark,' she called over her shoulder. ‘It's just during the day that I don't see so clearly.'

Matilda wouldn't start. Annis's plane was touching down in two hours and the damn van sulked in the heat. Since the Fiesta still sat crumpled against a tree, the van was my only hope of bringing Annis up here without paying a fortune in taxi fare, always presuming I could persuade a taxi driver to make the journey up here. With the amount of luggage Annis normally lugged about, I knew the little bike certainly wouldn't do.

Being under-endowed with mechanical genius, I kept on worrying the starter and senselessly drained the battery. I shrugged at Dr Kalogeropoulos who just then arrived in his own battered car to check on Morva.

‘Engine trouble?' he enquired.

‘It may just be a flat battery.' The starter motor stopped turning over altogether. ‘Quite flat now, I expect. You wouldn't have jump leads by any chance?'

‘No, I'm afraid not. Someone in the village, perhaps. Or a battery charger?'

I checked my watch. ‘No time for that, I'm afraid. I'm supposed to pick someone up from the airport soon.'

‘I'll drive you,' he offered instantly. ‘It's no problem.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘I said, it's no problem.'

‘No patients to see?'

‘Not until tonight. But now I must go and see how Miss Morva is getting on.'

Today Morva was getting about again for the first time, albeit only on the ground floor of the house, on the crutches the doctor had provided, taking as much weight off her ankles as possible and moving extremely slowly.

‘The less you move about, the sooner you'll recover,' the doctor warned.

‘The less I move about, the sooner I'll go mad,' Morva countered. ‘And you'll never get a shrink to hike all the way up here.'

The doc shrugged. ‘I have a psychiatrist colleague who would be interested in your case, I am sure.'

‘Ha. Now get out, both of you; Margarita is about to run me a bath.' She nodded at the zinc tub waiting by the stove.

‘Run?'

‘Well, pour, anyway. Out, both of you.'

A photograph of Dr K behind the wheel of his car would have shown a cautious-looking man grasping the steering wheel at the recommended ten and two o'clock positions while squinting through his gold-rimmed glasses through the windscreen. Yet the sun-drenched landscape beyond the car windows would have been a blur; Dr K drove as though the pothole had never been invented and he cornered at ambitious speeds.

I braced myself against the door and worked an imaginary break pedal, usually seconds before the good doctor felt any need to. He noticed it. ‘Relax. Trust me, I'm a doctor.'

‘They teach rally driving at medical school?'

‘They do in Finland, I think. Good rally drivers, the Finns. Lousy doctors, I heard. Everything quiet at the old village now? No more strange things happening?'

‘Not for a few hours.'

‘Good, good. And what about your own . . . mission? The missing woman. You have not found her.' This was not a question; he was stating a fact. ‘But you must find her before you can leave, yes?'

‘I can't stay for ever. If I can't find her soon, then I'll have to pack it in and go home.'

‘But you believe this woman, Kyla, she is still here. Not . . . gone somewhere else.'

‘No. She could be dead, of course.'

‘Oh no, she is not dead. I mean, let us
hope
not,' he quickly corrected himself. ‘So . . . how much longer do you think you will look for her?'

‘Oh, I don't know. Another week or so.'

‘Well, that is good. But you have somebody coming to help you?' He frowned, first at me, then at a pickup truck backing from a side track on to the narrow road we were barrelling along. Our car hurtled towards an inevitable collision until, at the last moment, Kalogeropoulos swerved madly and we flew past the truck in less time than it took to scream his name.

It wasn't just his driving that got to me; this interrogation was beginning to make me uneasy, too. ‘Just a friend who needs a break from the British weather,' I told him. I decided to forestall further questions by posing a few of my own. ‘Neo Makriá seems a strange little village.'

‘Does it?'

‘It looks fairly prosperous, though.'

‘People are surviving.'

‘A lot of people seem to own cars,' I mused. ‘And a lot of satellite dishes. And all that stone paving everywhere must have cost a bit.'

‘Probably. I wasn't here when that was done.'

‘Very well done, though. Not like some villages.' Most I had seen appeared to make do with tarmac or ancient paving, much repaired with concrete. ‘It doesn't seem to get many tourists, though. None at all, in fact, as far as I can make out.' Apart from one stray birdwatcher, of course.

Dr K sighed. ‘No, not many tourists make it to Neo Makriá. Or if they do, they'll soon leave. Nothing to do there, you see.'

‘Most people on the island seem to make money from the tourist business, yet in Neo Makriá there are big groups of working-age men just hanging about at street corners or in the
ouzeria
. And they're all quite well dressed. Doing nothing except play with their worry beads. Shouldn't they be working in bars and hotels at this time of year?'

Kalogeropoulos shuffled closer to the steering wheel and squinted into the thickening traffic; we were getting close to the airport. ‘Sorry, I have to concentrate now. Lots of
cars
,' he said as though
cars
were the last thing he'd expected to find on the roads. I couldn't tell whether he was simply avoiding my question or really did need to concentrate, though perhaps he had a point; the way he was driving when he
was
concentrating made distracting him seem like a bad idea. He got us to the airport with minutes to spare, which he decided to spend in the car with the seat reclined and his eyes closed.

I stood in arrivals watching the gate. I hadn't really forgotten how beautiful Annis was, but the sight of her in shorts and tee shirt pushing her luggage trolley still electrified me. We did the airport scene of reunion properly, with greedy kisses and tangled limbs, oblivious to our surroundings. ‘We'll have to catch up on things real soon . . .' I started, but Annis disentangled herself.

‘You've met Charlie, haven't you?'

I'd forgotten about Charlie the builder. So she'd managed to persuade him to come.

‘You came – how brilliant.'

‘Didn't have nothing else on, so I scraped together enough for a one-way ticket. Bloody hot here, though, isn't it?'

‘Wait till we get outside,' I promised. What I had forgotten was how curiously good-looking
he
was. Six foot tall, without any sign of a builder's beer gut, and darkly bloody handsome. I suppose the only time I'd seen him he was covered in dust and muck and standing halfway up a ladder at Jake's. He scrubbed up extremely well.

Charlie travelled light, which was just as well or we'd never have got all the bags into the back of the doctor's car. Since she's fearless, I let Annis sit in the passenger seat, while I folded myself into the back next to Charlie. Then I regretted it. The doctor was obviously instantly and utterly smitten by his passenger and seemed barely able to keep his eyes on the road. Annis turned round in her seat so as to be better able to talk to me, unconcerned about the good doctor's jerky driving. ‘You haven't found her, then?'

‘Not a sign.'

‘Not a single lead?'