She handed over a glass and scooped up a chunk of cheese, which she popped into her mouth. She licked her fingers slowly, then she winked at Daidre, mocking herself. “Delicious,” she said. “Mama sent it from London.”
“How is she?”
“Still looking for someone to kill Stamos, of course. Sixty-seven years old and no one holds a grudge like Mama. She says to me, ‘Figs. I shall send that devil figs. Will he eat them, Aldara? I’ll stuff them with arsenic. What d’you think?’ I tell her to dismiss him from her thoughts. I have, I tell her. ‘Do not waste energy on that man,’ I tell her. ‘It’s been nine years, Mama, and that is sufficient time to wish someone ill.’ She says, as if I had not spoken, ‘I’ll send your brothers to kill him.’ And then she curses him in Greek at some length, all of which I’m paying for, naturally, as I’m the one who makes the phone calls, four times a week, like the dutiful daughter I have always been. When she’s finished, I tell her at least to send Nikko if she truly intends to kill Stamos because Nikko’s the only one of my brothers who’s actually good with a knife and a decent shot with a gun. And then she laughs. She launches into a story about one of Nikko’s children and that is that.”
Daidre smiled. Aldara dropped onto the sofa, kicking off her shoes and tucking her legs beneath her. She was wearing a dress the colour of mahogany, its hem like a handkerchief, its neckline V-ing towards her breasts. It had no sleeves and was fashioned from material more suitable to summer on Crete than spring in Cornwall. Little wonder that the room was so warm.
Daidre took some cheese and wine as instructed. Aldara was right. The wine was rough.
“I think they aged it fifteen minutes,” Aldara told her. “You know the Greeks.”
“You’re the only Greek I do know,” Daidre said.
“This is sad. But Greek women are much more interesting than Greek men, so you have the best of the lot with me. You’ve not come about Stamos, have you? I mean Stamos the lowercase pig, of course. Not Stamos the uppercase Pig.”
“I stopped to look at him. His ears are clear.”
“They would be. I did follow your instructions. He’s right as rain. He’s asking for a girlfriend as well, although the last thing I want is a dozen orchard piglets round my ankles. You didn’t answer me, by the way.”
“Did I not?”
“You did not. I’m delighted to see you, as always, but there’s something in your face that tells me you’ve come for a reason.” She took another piece of cheese.
“Who’re you expecting?” Daidre asked her.
Aldara’s hand, lifting the cheese to her mouth, paused. She cocked her head and regarded Daidre. “That sort of question is completely unlike you,” she pointed out.
“Sorry. But…”
“What?”
Daidre felt flustered, and she hated that feeling. Her life experience-not to mention her sexual and emotional experience-placed in opposition to Aldara’s experience left her seriously wanting and even more seriously out of her depth. She shifted gears. She did it baldly, as baldness was the only weapon she possessed. “Aldara, Santo Kerne’s been killed.”
Aldara said, “What did you say?”
“Are you asking that because you didn’t hear me or because you want to think you didn’t hear me?”
“What happened to him?” Aldara said, and Daidre was gratified to watch her replace her bit of cheese on the plate, uneaten.
“He was apparently climbing.”
“Where?”
“The cliff in Polcare Cove. He fell and was killed. A man out walking the coastal path was the one to find him. He came to the cottage.”
“You were there when this happened?”
“No. I drove down from Bristol this afternoon. When I got to the cottage, the man was inside. He was looking for a phone. I came in on him.”
“You came in on a man inside your cottage? My God. How frightening. How did he…? Did he find the extra key?”
“He broke a window to get in. He told me there was a body on the rocks and I went down to it with him. I said I was a doctor-”
“Well, you are a doctor. You might have been able to-”
“No. It’s not that. Well, it is in a way because I could have done something, I suppose.”
“You must more than suppose, Daidre. You’ve been educated well. You’ve qualified. You’ve managed to acquire a job of enormous responsibility and you cannot say-”
“Aldara. Yes. All right. I know. But it was more than wanting to help. I wanted to see. I had a feeling.”
Aldara said nothing. Sap crackled in one of the logs and the sound of it drew her attention to the fire. She looked at it long, as if checking to see that the logs remained where she had originally placed them. She finally said, “You thought it might be Santo Kerne? Why?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Why is it obvious?”
“Aldara. You know.”
“I don’t. You must tell me.”
“Must I?”
“Please.”
“You’re being-”
“I’m being nothing. Tell me what you want to tell me about why things are so obvious to you, Daidre.”
“Because even when one thinks everything has been seen to, even when one thinks every i has been dotted, every t has been crossed, even when one thinks every sentence has a full stop at the end-”
“You’re becoming tedious,” Aldara pointed out.
Daidre took a sharp breath. “Someone is dead. How can you talk like that?”
“All right. Tedious was a poor choice of words. Hysterical would have been better.”
“This is a human being we’re talking about. This is a teenage boy. Not nineteen years old. Dead on the rocks.”
“Now you are hysterical.”
“How can you be like this? Santo Kerne is dead.”
“And I’m sorry about that. I don’t want to think of a boy that young falling from a cliff and-”
“If he fell, Aldara.”
Aldara reached for her wineglass. Daidre noted-as she sometimes did-that the Greek woman’s hands were the only part of her that was not lovely. Aldara herself called them a peasant’s hands, made for pounding clothes against rocks in a stream, for kneading bread, for working the soil. With strong, thick fingers and wide palms, they were not hands made for delicate employment. “Why ‘if he fell’?” she asked.
“You know the answer to that.”
“But you said he was climbing. You can’t think someone…”
“Not someone, Aldara. Santo Kerne? Polcare Cove? It’s not difficult to work out who might have harmed him.”
“You’re talking nonsense. You go to the cinema far too often. Films make one start believing that people act like they’re playing parts devised in Hollywood. The fact that Santo fell while he was climbing-”
“And isn’t that a bit odd? Whyever would he climb in this weather?”
“You ask the question as if you expect me to know the answer.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Aldara-”
“Enough.” Aldara firmly set her wineglass down. “I am not you, Daidre. I’ve never had this…this…oh, what shall I call it…this awe of men that you have, this feeling that they are somehow more significant than they actually are, that they are necessary in life, essential to a woman’s completion. I’m terribly sorry that the boy is dead, but it’s nothing to do with me.”
“No? And this…?” Daidre indicated the two wineglasses, the two plates, the two forks, the endless repetition of what should have been but never quite was the number two. And there was the additional matter of Aldara’s clothing: the filmy dress that embraced and released her hips when she moved, the choice of shoes with toes too open and heels too high to be practical on a farm, the earrings that illustrated the length of her neck. There was little doubt in Daidre’s mind that the sheets on Aldara’s bed were fresh and scented with lavender and that there were candles ready to be lit in her bedroom.