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

looks straight across at Kit Price and says to her, “I want to talk to you. Once this meal is over.”

“Oh.” She glances at him again. There is something after all quite odd in her eyes. Not apprehension, nor malice. Not carelessness. “Yes, all right. It’s why you came, presumably. All this way.”

The glitter of her pendant catches his eye. For the first time he sees what it is. On a gold chain a broad gold ring, a wedding ring maybe, that is what it seems to be. Has Joss proposed to her - is she going to marry Joss? Or has she already married him but somehow will not put the ring on her finger?

A stray fact slips iridescently across his thoughts. Her skirt is not grey but white, like her blouse. She wore white when he saw her before, in the village. And white is the colour for mourning in Greece - or has been - some legend or custom, he cannot sort out what it was or is or how he knows. Kitty-Kirri then is in mourning. Is it for Laurence, killed by her unkindness? And despite her general gloss of well-being and almost mindless apparent enjoyment, was that what Nick glimpsed in her eyes just now - grief, guilt, loss?

Expressos are coming, Greek brandy, a grape liqueur, and one tall slim glass of Retsina for Shelley.

Kirri whisper-twitters to Joss. He answers her passionlessly. “Take him to look at the view.”

And she gets to her feet and twirls her hands at the five others, “See you later, folks. Be good, girls,” she says to the French women, “watch out for serpents,” to the brooding genius, who grunts into his brandy; she pats Clyde on the shoulder: “Better keep your handsome lad on leash this afternoon,” she adds to Shelley. Everyone but the genius, and Joss, (and Nick) is laughing good-humouredly, Kitty-Kirri with them.

She has, here, no trace of a London accent. She speaks like an actor, though not in fact like Claudia.

“Come on then, Nicolas,” she says. “Let me show you the amazing view we have. You may want to paint it,” she says. And then he believes he sees what is truly in and behind her eyes. It is a bitter hardness. It is a hollow unripened petrification of some feeling that has died. What it may have been is now, for him, doubtless unknowable.

He too rises to his feet. He follows her from the table and the room and across the courtyard and under an archway. Beyond, a path runs on up the hill, up behind the house.

“Where are we going precisely?” he says.

“Precisely? Where I said. Don’t worry, you’re quite safe with me.” Her tone is bantering, and unconcerned.

He finds he says, “I wouldn’t think I’d be anything else, after your letter to me.” And is appalled to have mentioned it, such trivia, as if he had smarted at her censure.

“That,” she says. “Don’t take it to heart. You were very good. You just didn’t fit the bill. You weren’t meant to.”

He wants to have it out, the real matter, with her, now, now, on the hillside, but she goes on walking, climbing just ahead of him on the easy path, which is littered with tiny pebbles. Trees, pines of a rounded sort, grow by the sides, and cast down waves and splatters of shade. The sea manifests again to his left, as they go up and up.

“Stop here,” he says. He sounds impatient, a put-out pickup who is being fobbed off.

“It’s not far,” she says.

“I don’t care how far it is. I want your answers to my questions.”

“Are there many, Nicolas?” she asks in a silly tweeting way. Then she lifts her shoulders. She says, over one of them, her back still to him, “It’s more private at the top. No chance of wandering art students.”

Nick gives up, and they climb on, he noting vaguely as he does so that his watch now tells him it is eleven at night, or in the morning. He sees, between the pines, a pasture with sheep in it, un-English savage sheep, pulling at grass already sun-parched. If only they knew about the fresh, watered grass in his father’s house.

Then there is a sun-shot hilltop. Some broken stones indicate the ruin of an ancient building, but it may only be a folly, a construct. A spring spangles out and flings itself off downhill like a silver ribbon. That too could be a put-up job.

No wind is blowing. One cloud unfurls along the sky. The mountains are very visible from here, floating above and on a haze, the cigarette smoke of the gods. A single cedar towers out of the ground. She goes over to it and stands there in the bluish shadow, and points the other way, out to sea. “You can spot ten islands from here.”

Nick stays in the baldness of the light. It is surprisingly hot for spring.

“You’re her daughter,” he says. “Claudia’s daughter. That’s it, isn’t it? Reenie’s sister, Laurence’s sister. Mine. My sister. Claudia’s last-born.”

Some more time passes, during which neither of them say or do anything further. Nick eventually stares away at the sea. He finds he attempts to count the visible islands. He makes out only four or five, and is anyway unsure if one of these is not some kind of illusion.

When he looks back the woman has disappeared.

He moves forward, almost involuntarily, and there she is after all, just beyond the cedar, and seated on another block of fallen ruinous stone, which is too clean and well-placed, he guesses, to be genuine. Anemones grow in a cleft of it, no doubt planted.

Kirri-Kitty glances up and laughs at him silently.

“Why did you do it?” he asks. “I mean, come after us one by one…”

“Oh,” she breaks in, “not necessarily one by one. Sometimes all of you concurrently.” She stresses concurrently, an ‘educated’ word perhaps.

“My question is the same. The first question as well. Are you Claudia’s - the last