Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

not, in fact, seem to be quite a stranger, not to the Greek man.

The man anyway leads him across the wide hall and into another wide space, this one tiled blue. Furniture is minimal. On a whitewood sideboard, a dish of various ceramic fruits, two cigarette boxes, three cut glass ashtrays, bottles that shine white, dark blue, green or yellow.

“I take it then,” says Nick, sounding to himself over-precise but cool enough, well chilled even, “She’s here. I mean Kitty. Or,” he adds, “is that still her name?”

“Kirri,” says the man. “We call her Kirri.” He smiles his faultless teeth. “You may know, Mr Lewis, it comes from the goddess of bees in the old Greek times. Q, then the mark, the apostrophe, then RE. Her mother, you see, was fanciful.”

Nick stares at him.

Nick has just felt all the blood drain, or seem to, out of his brain and head. He thinks he is going to pass out, but cannot make himself move towards any of the sparse furniture in order to hold on, or drop into it. He has a dizzying horror of falling flat on the hard floor, and hurting his half-repaired lung. Maybe this precognition steadies him enough that he stays conscious. And gradually the lights come up again in his vision. His ears cease to drone. Drone, bee-hive - bees - queen-bee. A fanciful mother.

The man seems not to have noticed anything.

“Let me offer you a kítron,” he says. “Will you like the stronger or the softer type? Or we have a medium. I can have them fetch some ice, if you like.”

Kítron is quite difficult, Nick had heard, to obtain now. But here, of course.

“Thank you. Dry,” he says. “No ice.” Now he can walk he crosses to a glass door that looks out on to a perfect post-card grove of olive trees, spilling in steps away downhill. At the bottom is a clip of sea, blue-tiled like the floor.

The man comes over and hands him the yellow drink.

He is about five inches taller than Nick, and built far larger. How old is he? His twenties, probably, or just a little more. Blue-black hair and that coaxing smile; as if amused, glad to humour the visitor who matters not at all.

“Now I must be elsewhere,” says the man who had walked with Kit-Kitty-Kirri-Q’re along the terrace and between the mulberry trees.

“How long will she be?” Nick asks.

“Oh,” says the man. He smiles on, and shrugs. “You know how they are. Women.”

And then he goes out and leaves Nick standing on the tiles, with the drink in his hand and the view of trees and sea at his back.

Shadows shorten in the room and on the grass outside. There is no sound in the house that he can hear. Outside the scratch of crickets, but even this he is unsure of. The noon sun passes over and begins obliquely to dazzle to one side. Well over an hour has passed, Nick thinks, but his watch is acting up. (He remembers again Laurence’s watch, the Angie-watch he had changed into at Nick’s, with that curious gutturally sexual laugh. After he had hidden the Roman pin in Nick’s bathroom.)

It drifts to Nick in a harmless, foolish way, that perhaps after all he did die when the knife went into him. And all this insanity - past and here and now - is some scrambled invented afterplay in the final instants before utter nothing swamps him forever. Only then does he sit down.

He puts the barely tasted drink on the tiles.

What is he going to say to her, when - if - she comes into the room? Assuming, of course, his last moments are still providing a script.

But evidently, there is only one thing to say to her. Really he need not even say it. Even if his life has not, the book has reached its last page and should now close, is already closing. The book had ended anyway, all those years ago when he was eighteen. The rest had and has been an ultimate chapter. And then - a sort of afterword.

The shadows are starting to stretch again, in the opposite direction.

The house is surely empty.

Everyone has gone away.

“Mr Nick, you will come. We serve lunch.”

The fat woman in tight black has returned. She stands in the doorway, exacting participation.

“What time is it?” he says.

She ignores him.

He can hear noises in the house again; he glances at his watch, which shows four. This seems unlikely, the watch has gone crazy, that is all. The light is wrong for 4 p.m., even for 4 a.m. And they would never, here, would they?, introduce lunch at such a late, or unformed, hour.

He stands up and the woman turns briskly and paddles off down the red-tiled hall in her flat shoes.

Nick goes after her. He realises he has left his drink three-quarters full on the floor of the other room. An offering then for the god - who is it here? Bacchus… no. The Greek name. Dionysos.

The large dining room has two glass doors standing open on another sunny courtyard with flowers in pots. Two of the room’s remaining walls are bare and white, but the third seems composed of grass, a dense green, cut in the sort of patterns that appear on antique Greek vases.

At a big polished table, ready laid with glasses and cutlery, seven people are already seated.

It is a scene from a play.

Nick enters stage left of the French doors.

And they all look up or round at him, and some of them smile, but no one speaks or rises.

Five of these people Nick does not know. There are a pair of young women, between twenty and twenty-five, he thinks. They have short black hair and faces he guesses to be French, as indeed they are for they will speak in Parisian accents. They wear designer jeans, ankle-length tough rough leather boots, like a boy’s, Roland Mouret tops, one pink, one black, and are almost