The Pleasure Seekers (24 page)

The following morning D’Arcy was on her way to meet Manoussos when she saw Laurence sitting alone over coffee. This was particularly early for him, and where was Caroline? She would have liked to avoid him but that was impossible. He rose from his chair and she was yet again reminded of how good those two years had been with him. She put that out of her mind. There was still an attraction there but . . . They greeted each other and D’Arcy hurried past him just as a beautiful tiny Italian girl who had been at the Kavouria the night before went rushing into his arms. He looked round and seemed relieved that they had not been seen by anyone except D’Arcy.

She had heard that from the first day Lady Caroline had arrived in Livakia he was also sneaking round having erotic liaisons with every other attractive visitor to the village, and she was none the wiser for it.

It was only much later in the day, when they were sailing back to Livakia and D’Arcy had an overwhelming desire to make love to Manoussos, that she realised that since she had left Laurence she had been on a sexual spree with men other than him, to satisfy carnal desire, for pleasure and the sheer fun of sex, for the excitement and the adventure lust can afford, and for the bliss of orgasm . . . but more than all these things because she was trying to forget love.

Chapter 11

It was mid-October now and the skies were clear of cloud and as blue and bright as if it were mid-summer. These were days when the sun was hot and the weather warm enough for swimming, but the nights were drawing in. In the evening they still sat out at tables in the port but wore a shawl or a jumper. A breeze with the scent of the coming winter in it rustled the white paper tablecloths. Only house guests arrived, no tourists. They would stay away until spring of the new year.

In the weeks after D’Arcy’s return from London, there were other returns: Max’s to a hero’s welcome. He had been found out. Much to his consternation, he made the cover of
Paris Match
as the guiding force behind a flight of thirty cargo planes of food aid: wheat, beans, milk, into Somalia, all privately sponsored by several African countries. No fuss, no bother from warlords, no hold ups on the airfield, no ransom for trucks or petrol to run them to the most needy in the remote areas of the country, no stealing, no looting. He was either piloting or on the ground, overseeing the army of workers unloading the cargo planes before the propellers had even been cut. In twenty-four hours he had done what no aid organisation
had been able to achieve, no UN diplomats had been able to negotiate. He put a great many people and countries who had failed in their efforts to help the people of Somalia in the shade and there was little they could do about their own embarrassment. He went in unofficially, with no other intention than that of delivering his cargo, and had pulled a lot of strings to do it. The photograph that appeared showed him in a beat up fedora, dark sunglasses, an open white shirt and jeans. An Uzi machine-gun slung by a leather strap over his shoulder lay under his arm, a pistol in a holster on his hip. The only thing he would say about it was: ‘That fucking
Paris Match
! It’s an invasion of my privacy.’

Edgar Marion and Bill Withers returned after several weeks in New York. They had fled there in distress over the murder and how it was affecting Livakia. When they returned their habitual bickering was gone and they spoke happily about New York and were as amusing as ever.

And then there was a surprise return. Laurence was sitting with Max on the quay. Tonight was to be poker night at Max’s house and the game was short handed. Lunch over, they were lingering with yet another bottle of wine and talking about who should replace the absentee poker player. Max’s poker night was a serious social event among the men of Livakia.

She was still quite a distance away when she caught Laurence’s eye. He was immediately distracted from his conversation with Max. She was tall and slender and dressed in a pair of wide white linen trousers, a long-sleeved fingertip-length shirt with a dropped shoulder worn over them. The light was behind her
and you could see the faint outline of her slim figure. She wore flat sandals and her walk was a slow and elegant stride. She had very long thick wavy auburn hair with shades of gold in it worn swept back. No make-up on her face but a magnificent bone structure and a skin that had a luminescent quality, like smooth clear alabaster. She was probably the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. To see her was to fall in love with her, this vivacious and fascinating creature who enchanted Laurence even before he realised that he was, for the first time, seeing the woman he had only known before as a legendary figure: Brett Montesque, D’Arcy’s mother.

She had appeared as if from nowhere, strolling along the corniche towards the port. When Max realised that he had lost Laurence’s attention, he followed his gaze, turned and rose from his own chair to watch her. He smiled, feeling real pleasure to see Brett again. He saw Katzakis with a broom in hand about to do his afternoon sweep of the cobblestones in front of his shop. Without taking his gaze from Brett, Max called out to him, ‘Katzakis, raise your eyes and see who’s come home!’

Katzakis walked across the stones to stand next to him. ‘Old friends, they stay with you all your life,’ he said, handed Max the broom and started walking across the port to greet Brett. By the time he reached her several people were already by her side, shaking hands, kissing her first on one cheek then the other. There were hugs from Maria and her husband Manolis, the owners of the Kavouria. Max handed the broom to Laurence and went to join Brett’s welcome committee. The poker game was immediately forgotten.

People were receiving Brett with love and admiration on a scale such as Laurence had never seen them show anyone before, with the possible exception of D’Arcy. Their hearts were genuinely in it, there was a bond between them and Brett. Later on, when he had left the broom behind and joined the group around Brett and was introduced to her, he listened to them all catching up with each other’s news. That was how he realised they had that same bond with all of Brett’s children and her two men. These were people who had shared hard times together, years of living from hand to mouth, and Brett, just as they had, had struggled to bring up her children and give them the best she could. This cool and elegant beauty with a quiet simplicity, a certain stillness, who had an enticingly mysterious quality about her, had shared her life with them, been part of their community. She had lived in Livakia when the village was very poor and only sparsely populated, the villagers struggling for survival and helping each other in the hard times, when a foreigner living among them was an oddity. Several of them remarked how sad they had all been when she had sailed away with her last-born infant in her arms, and the other children they had loved and cared for.

Brett took a white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped away the tears at the corners of Maria’s eyes. ‘I never thought I would ever see a tear in Maria’s eye. What is it about Brett? Why do they love her so much?’ Laurence asked Max in a near whisper.

‘They share similar traits: Cretan courage and pride, toughness and resilience, a joy in life and love, and a passion for their island. And in all their years here, Brett
and her children never abused their trust and friendship. To men and women alike she was the romantic they could never be, living a life they could never have. She lived openly but discreetly with two men, was a fabulous mother to four children, had many lovers and still managed to win the Cretan women over to her as friends. She seduced them by just being true to herself and they learned from her what a real liberated lady can be. And of course there was something else – she was then, as she is now, an incredibly beautiful, self-contained woman. To them she looked like a combination of one of those exquisite, seductive and charismatic goddesses of Classical Greek mythology who had come to live among them. Look at their faces, that’s how they think of her even now’

‘Max.’ Brett extended her hand and he took it and kissed it.

‘Welcome home.’

Laurence watched them talking. Max seemed different with her, full of admiration. He made her laugh and it was soft and with a lilt to it, just like D’Arcy’s. There was that same softness in her honeyed voice, and she spoke in short sentences and was sparing of words, also like D’Arcy. He suddenly realised that all these qualities he was so enamoured of in Brett were those same qualities that D’Arcy had had and he had thrown away. The fact that D’Arcy engendered from everyone who knew her the same sort of adoration as Brett was receiving now was something he had never taken notice of before. Laurence was appalled to discover he had been reticent to give D’Arcy those same things unconditionally
from sheer inability to express the depth of his feeling for her.

He heard Brett tell Katzakis, ‘They are fine. Look, here they come now, the fathers of my children.’ And she stood up and waved. Several people including Katzakis left the group seated and now drinking ouzo to go and greet the two men walking into the port on either side of D’Arcy.

Seeing Brett and the two fathers was to throw into Laurence’s face his own snobbishness, one of the sides of his character which had held him back from a real commitment to D’Arcy. Her illegitimacy, her unconventional upbringing and the life she was now living had in the end defeated him, and now he was realising his own small-mindedness, his meanness of spirit. He had been seduced by D’Arcy, loved her, been fascinated by her. How could he have let her go?

Brett and her longtime lovers, whom the Cretans always referred to as her ‘husbands’, were feted night after night by their old friends. And they in turn entertained with picnics and excursions to places in Crete they wanted to visit, and people they wanted to see. One of her ‘husbands’ was beloved, a hero to the Cretans because he had fought in the resistance against the Germans who had invaded Crete during the Second World War. Even now, fifty years later, he was beloved by them, an adored figure. Elefherakis spent a great deal of time with Brett, and Manoussos was most always given a seat close to her at dinner parties; he had been in and out of her house as much as his own as a child. Edgar and Bill gave a grand dinner party for her and sat with her at every chance they could get. She had always been a heroine to them.

All this Laurence watched in wonder. It was one thing to hear about a legend; one could always have doubts about the validity of what one heard. Laurence had always assumed that exaggeration about Brett and her seductive charms was the real order of things. How he would have loved to have been proven right! He had his chance to speak at length with Brett several times while she was in Livakia: a day out in her company, being seated next to her at a lunch party, a walk with her through the gorge along with several others. He was only proven wrong.

He had used Brett and her lifestyle, how she had brought up her children, against D’Arcy. Had he expected D’Arcy to revert into someone who would one day be an embarrassment to him, thanks to her unconventional background? He had no idea what he’d expected but it certainly had not been that he would be overwhelmed by the stock she came from, that he found she was every inch her mother’s daughter and more remarkable than he had dared to give her credit for. He knew days before Brett and her husbands left Livakia that he had to have D’Arcy back, that she must return to him. He would go to D’Arcy as soon as Brett left, tell her how much he loved her, what a fool he had been, how he had come to his senses and would break off with Caroline.

Brett and D’Arcy’s fathers had arrived on a three-masted schooner. They had dropped anchor just off the bay where Brett’s house stood and that was how she had managed to surprise everyone by merely appearing in the port. It was no grand entrance, and when she left a week later it was with no grand exit. Only D’Arcy waved
goodbye to her parents in the dawn light as they set their sails for the coast of North Africa.

For days people did nothing but talk about how very good it had been to have Brett back, how she had hardly changed with the years, and how clever she was to have kept her two lovers by her side. It was revealed only after she had sailed away that she had given a rare Byzantine icon to the church in Livakia, a gift from her family for the years of kindness the village had shown her. People flocked to see it.

For several days after Brett sailed away D’Arcy was incredibly busy. She had finished the bit part she had been commissioned to design for the German automobile company, and it had been accepted. She seemed to be constantly tying up details with lawyers for the contract and the patent rights. Laurence bided his time. He knew very well how she worked, as did everyone else in Livakia: a stint of isolation, concentration till the work was done, and then when she had achieved her objective it was over, forgotten, and she was back to the life of pleasure seeking.

The day D’Arcy emerged triumphant was the same day that Melina’s trial for murder began in Iraklion. Manoussos was there, Dimitrios and Max. They were all witnesses for the prosecution. Much to everyone’s relief the story was very much played down by the press. The Livakians were taking it in their stride; they did, after all, know what the outcome was going to be. Melina would be convicted of murder and given a lenient sentence because it had been a crime of passion by a young girl with an unfortunate history.

That was discovered by her defence lawyers with the help of some very discreet sleuthing by Manoussos who secretly came to Melina’s aid when not one character witness, Mark having withdrawn from his promise, could be found. Her history, combined with its being a crime of passion, was her only hope for leniency.

Now all the talk round the village was of who and what Melina really was. She had been born in a small village on the side of Mount Ida. Her mother, the poorest widow in the village, strange in many ways, some said retarded, died when she was born. In life she had been looked down upon by all the village for her poverty, her volatile nature, widowhood, and giving birth to an illegitimate child. Not one man went forth to claim the infant and give it a name. Someone left the baby, only hours old, at the priest’s house in the next village. That was how Melina’s life began. At six months she was in an orphanage in Iraklion and at five years old in a foster home where she was physically and sexually abused, barely fed and on rare occasions schooled until she ran away from the alcoholic fisherman who had kept her. That was four years before she arrived in Livakia. And for those four years the child had wandered round Crete, living from hand to mouth and dependent on the generosity of strangers, each of whom she had abused or stolen from in turn. Her whoring was played down in the courtroom as was her sexual relationship with Arnold, much to the relief of all concerned. The prosecution didn’t need it, the defence didn’t want it.