Aphrodite’s Smile. Stuart Harrison

As he admired their effect he glimpsed a movement and this time he swore that he heard the sound of footsteps. He experienced a prickling of unease. It was just his imagination, he told himself, though not very convincingly.

      Moving on, he hurried along a street past terraces shadowed with grape vines supported by rusting iron trellis. The houses petered out and the road wound upwards through olive groves. As he turned a corner the lights from the harbour were lost from sight and the road was abruptly smothered in thick, heavy darkness. Breathing heavily, French paused to mop his brow with a handkerchief. He was sweating profusely. Behind him the sound of footsteps dogged his progress, any pretence at stealth now abandoned. There was something chilling in their purpose. He felt the darkness close in around him like a shroud. Unfortunate analogy he thought grimly.

       ‘Who’s there?’ he called out with false bravado. The footsteps stopped briefly, then resumed and quickly picked up pace.

      A peculiar sense of calm descended over him. He would not spend his last moments consumed by fear. If he were going to die he would face his killer and look him in the eye. He wondered if it was the alcohol that fuelled his bravery, though he no longer felt drunk. Briefly, he wished he hadn’t said so much at Skiopes. If he’d kept quiet he might finally have found a measure of success towards the end of his life. He might also have had the chance to put things right with Irene and Robert, and at this thought a wave of regret welled up inside him.

      The footsteps were almost upon him. French drew himself up and prepared to face his fate, determined to cling to the remnants of his self-respect. And then from around the bend came the unexpected sound of an approaching engine. The road wasn’t used much at night, but perhaps on this evening some greater force was at work. Or perhaps it was just luck.

      The footsteps stopped. An indistinct figure was visible no more than twenty feet away. Something glinted in the light. A blade perhaps? Seizing his chance, French turned to run, though his bulk reduced his flight to more of a shambling stumble. He gasped for breath, his heart bursting. He could feel the spot in his back where the blade would enter and pierce his liver. The sound of the approaching vehicle grew louder, drowning out the footsteps behind him and then he was bathed in the headlights of a truck and a voice called out.

       ‘Professor? Is that you? What are you doing? Slow down before you hurt yourself.’

      It was Nikos. He ran a haulage business between the towns on the island and as he climbed down from the cab French almost wept with relief. He turned to face the figure pursuing him but the road was empty.

      Suddenly a devastatingly sharp pain gripped his chest. His mouth opened and closed silently as his knees gave way and he felt himself sinking to the ground. He heard Nikos call his name, but it sounded as if his voice came from a long way off, and slowly the lights from the truck shrank to a pinprick.

      His last conscious thought before darkness overcame him was that this must be the gods’ idea of a grim joke.

PART ONE

       ONE

      The phone rang at six. I was already up so I took the call in the kitchen hoping that it hadn’t woken Alicia. She had been working long hours lately, leaving at seven in the morning and sometimes not getting home until nine or ten at night. I thought her boss could manage without her for an hour or two.

      I wondered who was calling so early. I lifted the receiver feeling the faint stirrings of disquiet, unexpected calls at odd times being harbingers of bad news. When I heard Irene’s voice I experienced an odd reaction of both relief and dread combined.

      ‘Robert, is that you?’ Her accent conjured an image of the house where she and my father lived overlooking the town of Vathy. I could almost smell the dry earth and olive trees and, involuntarily, I glanced to the window. Outside, London was waking to a leaden May sky. The leaves on the trees in the square dripped steadily onto the pavement below.

      ‘Irene, yes it’s me.’ I became aware that I was clenching the phone with a vice-like grip and I took a breath to relax myself. ‘What’s happened? Is something wrong?’

       ‘It is your father. He had a heart attack.’

      I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

      ‘He is in the hospital in Argostoli. They brought him on the ferry to Kephalonia this morning.’

      The knowledge that my father wasn’t dead gradually seeped into my brain. The attack was serious, but no longer immediately life-threatening. As she continued to explain what had happened, Irene’s normally thickly accented pronunciation of English was exacerbated by emotion. She sounded distraught.

      ‘Where are you?’ I asked her. ‘Are you all right?’

      ‘Yes. Yes, I am fine. I am phoning from the hospital. Your father is sleeping. They have given him medicine.’

      ‘You sound tired,’ I told her, though what I meant was that she sounded shattered. Emotionally spent. I recalled her saying that she had been at the hospital most of the night.

      ‘Yes, I am a little tired. But I will be all right.’

      ‘You should get some rest. Why don’t you go home? I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do there anyway.’ She didn’t reply, and in the silence that followed I thought we had been cut off or else she hadn’t heard me. ‘Irene, did you hear what I said? You should go home.’

      ‘Yes, yes. I am sorry. I heard you. But I will stay here. They have put a bed in Johnny’s room for me.’

      She seemed hesitant and I wondered if she really was OK but she assured me that she was.

      ‘It is just that I am tired, and I have been so worried about Johnny.’

      She had always called him Johnny. I’d never become entirely used to it because when I was a child and we still lived in Oxford, my mother had always called him John. Everybody had. He taught at the university then, and John seemed natural for a middle-aged academic who wore corduroy trousers and tweed jackets. But when he went to live on the island of Ithaca he seemed to shed that persona, and when I first saw him there he was born again as a tanned and bearded figure who wore shorts and short-sleeved, open-necked shirts for most of the year. He had developed a fondness for Greek food and wine and indulged heavily in both. Johnny suited him, and in some ways he was like somebody I had just met.

      I continued to offer Irene long-distance advice as if she were the one who was ill. ‘Make sure that you eat something,’ I told her. ‘Don’t worry too much.’

      There was a short silence and then she said, ‘Robert, you understand that your father is very ill?’

      I realised that I hadn’t mentioned my father. I hadn’t questioned anything that she had told me. ‘But didn’t the doctors say he’s in no danger?’

      ‘They say that he will recover if he rests. But he will need to take medicine and he will need to change the way that he lives.’

      ‘He’s a tough old bird. He’ll be fine, Irene.’

      ‘He is not so tough as you think, Robert. He is getting old.’

      I detected a vague censure in her voice. It was several years since I had last seen him. I counted back in my head and surprised myself when I realised that it was actually closer to eight. He’d seemed robust enough then but a lot could happen in that length of time. I had to admit that I had picked up on the changes in him during our infrequent phone calls. There was a time when he’d always put on a cheerfully optimistic front. He’d talk about some dig that he was working on or about the museum he ran, and pretend not to notice my lack of interest. When he asked what I was doing I gave monosyllabic answers. After every call I would feel tense and physically drained. But for a couple of years now it had begun to seem that keeping