The Pleasure Seekers (28 page)

D’Arcy watched the torchlight coming closer, closer to the wall surrounding her house. There was a strong wind adding more excitement to the night. She flung open the front door and ran down the steps towards the wooden door in the wall just as he opened it. She called his name and, seeing her, he took the remaining steps separating them two at a time and they ran into each other’s arms. They kissed – the kiss she’d wanted and been waiting to have from him all the years she had known him. The clouds raced away from the moon. It reappeared and its light turned the path and them and her house silver-white. They burned for each other, as hot as if it was the sun.

Their first night together was spent in his bed where they kissed and spoke to each other about their hopes and dreams, how they felt about each other in the past and present, and discovered each other’s bodies: their scent, the feel of their skin, exploring their contours and their beauty, and falling in love with each other’s nakedness. They had no need to keep sex at bay but they did, not intentionally but because it just didn’t happen. They were too wrapped up in other aspects of their togetherness, knowing they had the rest of their lives for sex, erotic
dreams and fantasies, all things sexual that two libertines in love would have as a natural part of their lives. They each of them intended to take this love affair slowly; it was after all going to last them a lifetime.

They did not intend to spend every minute together but their good intentions did rather go by the wayside since after only a few hours away from D’Arcy, Max would rapidly be courting her again with one romantic gesture or another. It did not take many days before everyone in Livakia could see the changes in them both and that their togetherness was more than merely momentary. People were glad for them, but suspicious also. Max had been too much of a womaniser for too long for his friends to be comfortable with the idea that there would ever be a lifetime love for him.

There were other concerns besides their love affair D’Arcy was most definitely the sort of woman who when she believed it right to take on something would follow it to the end. In her newfound happiness with Max she did not forget Melina and went in search of the right person to help the girl, if Melina would allow herself to be helped. D’Arcy’s friend Aliki did find someone she thought would be the right person, a twenty-year-old girl called Sophia who lived in Iraklion. She was the adopted daughter of Aliki’s cook and worked on archaeological digs in Crete. Sophia had come through hard times, she was a girl with an understanding of what deep loneliness meant, and was willing to befriend Melina on D’Arcy’s behalf.

Everyone concerned agreed it was worth a try. It was Manoussos who suggested to Max and D’Arcy that they
keep what they were doing for Melina quiet in Livakia. Mark was drinking more and more and beginning to resemble Arnold in as much as his new lady love, Dorothy, or someone else would on occasion now have to see that he didn’t slip from his chair, that he could get home safely. When in a seriously inebriated state he was more eloquent than ever but no more generous about Arnold and how he had caused the ruination of a young girl’s life. It always brought people’s hackles up. Max and D’Arcy took their police chief’s advice and kept what D’Arcy was doing between themselves.

They went to meet Sophia twice to make certain taking on Melina was not going to be a negative in her life, and the more they saw her the more certain they were that Sophia might benefit from meeting someone who had gone all wrong where she had gone all right, since both girls started out in life in the worst possible circumstances. The next step was for Manoussos to go with D’Arcy to see Melina and talk to her, ask her if she would be willing to receive Sophia as a prison visitor, someone who would soon become her friend. Though Max was sympathetic to what D’Arcy and Manoussos were trying to do, he did not ever want to see Melina again, so his contribution was to fly them into Iraklion, and arrange a late lunch for them in an unusually good taverna where he was well known.

It was a very hot day and Iraklion was the madhouse of traffic and people it always was. Manoussos and D’Arcy gave Max their shopping lists and he was sent off while they took a taxi to the prison. Manoussos had fought hard to get Melina into this particular prison, believing she
would behave better if she was inched into the harshness of the prison system slower rather than faster. Her age had helped. She was in a small prison, an old fortress high on a ridge overlooking the sea.

A police officer greeted Manoussos and D’Arcy in his office and then proceeded to take them to Melina. From the very moment the doors to the prison clanged closed behind her, D’Arcy felt uncomfortable.

She felt no better now. The stench was appalling, a combination of damp and heat and stale air. They walked down a narrow corridor passing prison cells with doors standing open. For the most part the cells were empty. A few prisoners were sitting on three-legged stools in the passage talking to one another.

They proceeded up a flight of old stone stairs that twisted and turned to the floor above. Here the passage widened and the rooms off it were much larger. All their doors were open and revealed administrative offices, sparsely furnished, with hardly an officer in sight.

At the end of that hall they went through another door that led to an open courtyard. The bright light blinded them for a few seconds. Hot sun poured over the stone yard. Three prisoners were sitting at a worn wooden table doing bead work – long, thin, beautifully made coloured glass bead snakes that were sold to the tourist shops in the town. It was close to midday and very hot, with not a breath of wind. There were a few birds singing somewhere in the shade of one of the trees outside the prison grounds. The sound of the waves crashing against the rocks five hundred feet below the cliff where the old prison perched. D’Arcy looked out to sea and then
towards the city of Iraklion which had spread almost to the walls of the fortress prison. From a door on the opposite side of the courtyard entered a police officer followed by Melina. On seeing her D’Arcy felt suddenly very unwell. This was the first time she had seen the girl since she had been taken away from Livakia. She still had the same misgivings about Melina she had always had.

The officer somewhat harshly told Melina to sit down which she did at the far end of the table. Manoussos and D’Arcy joined her. She had that same cocky attitude she had always had, and D’Arcy felt herself foolish to have imagined her sentence might have softened her.

‘Hello, Melina,’ she said.

The girl ignored her. The officer now standing behind her chided her for having no manners and insisted she greet her visitors properly, but even a shove on her shoulder had no effect. Manoussos thanked him but said he would be grateful if the officer went off and had a smoke on the other side of yard. He offered him a packet of cigarettes after removing one for himself and lighting it.

They sat in momentary silence and then Manoussos asked, ‘Are you well, Melina?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve come to talk to you because I want to know how you’re getting on in prison.’

‘I have nothing to say.’

‘Nothing? Not about being here and how you’re feeling and what you’re going to do in the years you have to spend here?’

‘No. What can I say? I wish I was free, I think
all the time of nothing but being free, that’s all I can say.’

‘And what do you think of then?’

‘I think of the sea, of swimming in the sea, of being alone, of being free to walk where I want to, when I want to, of eating something good. You put me here, and you, a police chief, ask me what will I do in prison for years? You know what I’ll do. Eat, sleep, make beaded things for cigarette money, learn to embroider for rich ladies.’ At that she shot a dark look at D’Arcy then continued, ‘Clean my cell, the prison, do my turn in the vegetable garden. I’ll be like all the other prisoners watching the hours, days, months, years go by. That was a dumb question, Chief. What will you ask me next? I can guess. Do I ever feel remorse for killing Kirios Arnold?’

‘Well, do you?’

She laughed at Manoussos and said, ‘You see, I guessed right. No.’

‘Nothing.’

‘No. My feelings are mine, I don’t have to tell them to you. Why have you come to see me? Why have you brought her? Why are you asking me all these questions?’

‘Does it upset you that we’ve come to see you?’

‘No, I’m not upset. I only ask why?’

‘Because you’ve not been very clever in your life, but you’re a survivor. I know that by the way you’ve lived in the past. You have fifteen years to become more clever in how you live when you leave here. You’ll still be a young woman and can begin again but to do that you’ll need a lot of help and you have no one to give it to you. You need a friend.’

‘I don’t want
her
for a friend.’ Then she turned to gaze at D’Arcy for only the second time since they had been there. She spoke directly to her. ‘You were never my friend. Only Kirios Mark was my friend. Only he understood me, you never can.’

It was then that D’Arcy found her tongue. She told Melina, ‘You’re right, I was not your friend and I cannot be your friend now, we don’t much like each other. And Arnold was my very good friend. You killed him and don’t even care that you did. But that does not stop me from feeling that you were born into miserable circumstances and were driven by them all your life. I know a girl, a Cretan girl, who has had as bad a time as you have had and a friend of mine extended the hand of friendship to her. Now she lives a full and happy life but has no friends that have suffered as she has, as you have. No one she can talk to who has in common with her the bad old times or knows what it’s like to be an orphan. I told her about you and she thinks she would like to become a prison visitor in the hope that you might become friends and help each other.

‘Look, let me be very honest with you, I believe that you are solely responsible for taking Arnold’s life, that you acted alone but were influenced and manipulated by other people’s actions and behaviour. Those things combined with your own darkness of soul, your ignorance, your vulnerability and obsessive attachment to Mark, made you kill my friend. I can never forgive you for that, but what I can do is hope that in these years when you are lost to the outside world, with a friend and help from the prison you might leave here with, at the very
least, a vocation, hopefully an education of sorts, that will equip you to make a place for yourself in the world so you will never again want to take another man’s life. I hope you’ll allow Sophia to visit you because she’s a special girl whom you might like. She’ll have funds available for educational or vocational help by way of courses, books, a computer, tutors, even for the odd luxury you might earn through diligence. Have no doubts the prison system will allow such favours if you show willing and behave yourself. Don’t be stupid, Melina, this is the time to get smart.’

‘What do you get out of this?’

‘Hopefully you’ll never kill another friend of mine.’

With that D’Arcy rose and told the girl, ‘We won’t ever be seeing each other again. I think that would serve us both best. Be brave. Goodbye, Melina.’

She turned from the girl to face Manoussos and told him, ‘If you don’t mind, I think it’s all been said. I’ll meet you outside.’

Manoussos asked the officer who had brought Melina in to meet them to find someone to escort D’Arcy from the building. Then, after telling her he would only be a few minutes, he returned to Melina.

Under a tree, on a weatherworn wooden bench, just opposite the prison entrance D’Arcy sat and waited for Manoussos. Her hands were trembling and hot as the day was, she felt shivery – not the sort of tremor that comes with cold but the kind that comes with fear and anger. Her mouth was dry.

She’d had no idea that she was so angry over Arnold’s death, not until she came face to face with Melina and her
lack of remorse for what she had done. D’Arcy thought she had done with mourning Arnold months ago. Clearly she hadn’t. She needed no psychiatrist to tell her that going to see Melina, doing what she was doing about her, saying what she had said to her, was her way of grieving for Arnold.

How had she not realised that she had never really done that for him or for herself? Tears began to trickle down her cheeks and then the sobbing came. After a short period of time, the pain of the loss of a close friend that she had kept so well buried within her began to slip away along with her hatred of Melina. She realised that she might never have resolved Arnold’s death or how she felt about Melina unless she had made this trip. She had spoken up for Arnold, and now that someone had she hoped he could rest in peace. She knew that she could now live with the tragedy that had in so many ways woken her up.

She took a small mirror from her handbag and looked at herself, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Her colour was high and she was extremely hot, having dressed for colder late-October weather. Her hands still trembled. But she took stock of the face in the mirror, of the D’Arcy Montesque whose life was so changed by falling in love with an old friend. Had she and Max only been together four days? It seemed to D’Arcy as if they had been in love all their lives.

CRETE and NEW ENGLAND

Chapter 13

‘It’s over, Max, I don’t ever have to see her again. Going there was like a last lament for Arnold. It’s done, it’s over. Please, let’s live.’

Those were D’Arcy’s first words to him as he rose from his chair to greet her and Manoussos. The look in her eyes was for him and him alone when she had said,‘Let’s live.’ He had been waiting a very long time for her to want him as much as he had always wanted her. It was there for them now, the carnal side of D’Arcy Montesque. All resistance to him was gone, they were ready to discover the sexual side of each other’s nature. The years of pent up lust they had had for each other, the fear of losing each other as friends had they consummated it, his insatiable promiscuity, were at last over.

Max swept her into his arms and held her there. He whispered in her ear, his heart racing, every fibre of his being hungering for her, ‘I wish we were alone in a wood where I could take you in the most wild passionate sex, in all kinds of ways. But always remember that it’s because of you, the way you excite me, who and what you are, and because I love you and am committed to you in love. We’ll be all things sexual to each other – the brightest, the
finest, the deepest, the darkest erotic pleasures will be part of our rich and full life together. Oh, yes, we’ll live!’