‘Well, whatever happened, in the end he got away with it. He never had to pay for any of his crimes. I hope you’re pleased.’
‘How could I possibly be pleased?’ Daphne felt the hot injustice of the wrongly accused, while still floundering with bewilderment at Jane’s transformation from someone who had always appeared solidly reliable and kind into an acid-tongued cynic. ‘It wasn’t my fault. It was a nightmare. Just when I thought I’d broken free of the whole story… I’d made my peace with it. With him. And then I was sucked back into the middle of a shit storm that was even worse.’
Jane ignored these attempts to explain or justify and went on as though Daphne had not spoken. ‘I couldn’t believe the obituaries. Did you see them? The way they hardly mentioned his arrest. All that gushing about his brilliance. A complete whitewash! And you probably know they were even continuing with the idea of his seventieth-birthday-concert thing, only turning it into a memorial instead. Still at the Barbican! I contacted the organisers. They said it was all going ahead with bloody children’s choirs. Unbelievable. So I told them everything. Said they couldn’t do it – that it was grossly inappropriate. I sent them details.’ Daphne nodded miserably.
And then, Jane’s secret. It spewed out with sudden violence. Daphne felt such shock she feared she might faint. Jane saw her turn white and made her put her head between her knees and take deep breaths. Once she recovered enough to speak, Daphne absorbed the gravity of betrayal by both Ralph and Jane. So Ralph was a rapist. You couldn’t dress it up any other way. And although he appeared to have repented, he never told her the truth. She was not so special after all. Jane’s hideous cover-up made every aspect of it worse.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? And not just back then, but more recently? All that endless talking about Ralph. Shit, it was you telling me the rules about abuse, about confronting it. What the hell was that? What was your plan? To pull it out of the bag like a magic trick? It’s such a big lie. Too big.’
Jane didn’t try to defend herself; her face was a mask of blank acceptance. She did murmur, ‘I hoped you’d be the one to slay the dragon. I wanted to do that for you.’
‘Why couldn’t we have done that together? It would have been so different, so much better. You left me alone and you didn’t even allow me to see the real dragon.’
Before she went, Jane let drop the other accusations against Ralph from the young musicians in Tallinn. Displaying a cruelly detached calm, it was as though she was quoting facts from a story in the news that had nothing to do with her or Daphne. She mentioned their names, something about drugs.
‘I don’t want to hear any more.’ Daphne’s voice was quiet because otherwise she would shout. It was clear they could no longer be friends.
‘Go now!’ she said.
It was months before the inquest took place and she returned to Athens as a witness. Ralph’s oldest son Jason flew in from Madrid. She had not seen him since he was a child and he looked at her as if she was dangerous, responsible for his father’s death – almost a murderer. He nodded at her outside the courtroom but they did not speak. Nina was there too, but her gaze had turned inwards and away from the world. She did not appear to talk to anyone, certainly not Daphne.
Given that she should have been dragging him through the legal system in London, it was surreal to find herself ordered into an Athenian court on his behalf. It was so awful as to be almost funny when it looked as though she might be in trouble for her part in Ralph’s death. The investigators were not initially convinced that Ralph had the strength to climb over the ship’s rails and jump into the sea. By any standards, it was deemed negligent to leave a critically ill man alone on deck.
Whatever the method and reason for his tumble from the Agios Nektarios, Ralph was still alive when he entered the water. According to the autopsy, he died from drowning. It was possible that he leaned over the rail and fainted or had a heart attack, slipping forward unconscious into the sea. Nobody could be sure. ‘Death by misadventure’ was the final verdict. A good enough interpretation, thought Daphne. The end to a great series of misadventures, some of which might have resembled adventures but were not.
After the inquest, she no longer felt so furious. Ralph was gone and she had decided to leave London and begin something completely new. It was impossible to go on looking out of the window at her childhood across the stodgy blur of the winter river. The rumble of trains on the railway bridge had become the beat to a rhyme of deceit, betrayal and people she hoped to forget.
The best thing about the new plan was Libby’s eagerness. Daphne had imagined she would need persuading to approve yet another change in a life that had already required so much adjusting. She presented the idea as a year’s escapade – some time out, during which Libby would go to school in Athens, acquire perfect Greek and then, if they wanted, they’d return to London. Or not, if life there suited them. She laid out the joys of Greece as though she was tempting a client: the warm weather, swimming trips and relaxed social life, not to mention Sam and the crowd of cousins who would take her under their wings. But Libby had said, ‘Yeah, I told you I’d like to spend more time there. And that way I’d get to hang out with Dad more and help him and…’ She ran out of breath, but it was clear she was more than willing to embark on a new life. Perhaps the apple did fall closer to the apple tree than I imagined, thought Daphne.
Discovering surprising reserves of patience and perseverance, she arranged for Libby to finish her school year, gave Jelly plenty of notice so she could find a replacement, and obtained ideal tenants for the flat – a friendly, professional couple taking early retirement. Nothing flimsy this time. By renting out Aunt Connie’s place, they’d have more than enough money to pay for somewhere in Athens and Daphne was confident of finding jobs here and there; Jelly said there could be part-time work for Hell.
The day after summer term ended, she and Libby flew out to Athens, their belongings arriving a week later in a van. Cousin Evgenia had found them an apartment and had given a modest down payment. Ano Petralona was a noisy inner-city area but it was only a short walk from the cafés and art galleries of Gazi and close enough to Philopappos Hill to smell the pine trees. The landlords were an elderly couple returning to their Peloponnesian village after a working lifetime in the city. They were both there to welcome Daphne and Libby and explain the quirks of the temperamental water heater and how to read the meter. The woman admitted the rooms hadn’t been revamped since the 1970s, but the atmosphere was hardly reminiscent of Aunt Connie’s place. It was more like something from the ’30s, with its marble basins, mosaic concrete floors and sliding, wood-framed doors. There were two small bedrooms, a sitting room overlooking the street and a kitchen at the back that faced another block of flats.
Over the next days, the intimate view of their neighbours reminded her of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and she and Libby became well acquainted with their habits: the hirsute man who wandered about in his underpants, television booming; the woman with two young children, whose high-pitched threats were often audible from out in the street; and the old widow directly across from them who called and waved from her kitchen’s open window and invited Daphne to collect a jar of her home-made grape ‘spoon sweet’.
During the September elections, Daphne discovered that Constantine had been voted in as a Conservative Member of Parliament. All she could do was laugh when she saw him on television. He was still handsome but had softened around the edges – plumper and gentler, as if time had rubbed away the sharpness; less lone wolf and more Labrador. Her short marriage with him had been underpinned by danger and filled with speed and risk. What a relief to laugh, to see Constantine’s hackneyed political statement about ‘Making a difference’, and ‘Love for my homeland’, and to feel only mild irritation, even pity. She realised now that her husband had only ever been a spoilt boy. He had certainly been mixed up and troubled, and he took far too many drugs, but he was not the villain she had built him up to be. It no longer felt plausible that he had been the malign presence which caused nightmares and cold sweats. From this perspective, she could see that the villain had always been Ralph. Constantine had taken the blame over all these years for crimes committed before she even met him.