Moon Of Aphrodite

‘How did you get in here?’ she demanded in swift alarm. ‘My father …’

‘Dead, and his body buried under the thirteenth stair,’ he said in studiedly sepulchral tones, then burst out laughing. ‘You are wasted working in an art gallery, Miss Brandon. Such an imagination could be put to good use writing thrillers. Your father is pouring me a drink, and I have been sent to enquire if you would like one also. Is everything clear to you now?’

‘Like hell it is!’ she snapped furiously. She banged down the saucepan and marched to the door. She expected him to move to one side to give her passage, but he remained exactly where he was and she was forced to brush past him, a fleeting contact, but one that she would have given much to avoid.

Hugo, who was busying himself with bottles and glasses, gave her a slightly apologetic look. ‘Dinner will stretch to three, won’t it, darling?’ he asked.

‘It could probably feed four or five,’ she said in a stifled voice. ‘Aren’t there any other strangers we could pick off the streets?’

‘Helen!’ There was a real sharpness in her father’s voice. He said, ‘I must apologise, Mr Leandros, for my daughter’s bad behaviour. I can assure you that she isn’t usually like this.’

‘The situation isn’t very usual, either,’ Helen burst out. She was trembling violently and very close to tears.

‘Perhaps it would be better if I went,’ Damon Leandros suggested. ‘We can always defer this discussion to a more suitable occasion.’

‘It won’t make the slightest difference …’

‘Helen!’ her father interposed again. ‘You could at least listen to what Mr Leandros has to say. I thought perhaps in a relaxed atmosphere, over a meal in your own home, you might be more willing to listen to reason.’

Helen drew a shaky breath. ‘You—really think I ought to do as my grandfather wants and go to Greece, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Hugo Brandon said baldly. ‘I see no point in continuing a hostility which has done nothing but harm in the past. You have his blood in your veins, my dear, whether you want to admit it or not. I suspect you also have a certain amount of curiosity about this unknown part of your family.’

Desolation struck at her as she stood there between the two of them. That was something she could not deny, but she could have sworn that it was her secret and always had been. Of course she’d been curious. She could remember all the stories her mother had told her when she was quite tiny of life on Phoros, and in the big villa that Michael Korialis owned on the outskirts of Athens. She wouldn’t have been human, she thought, if in spite of everything she had not sometimes wondered—speculated about all the things her mother had told her. But she had never said a word or given a hint of this to her father because she was afraid that he might be hurt, or worse, think perhaps she was hankering after the material comforts that life in a Greek millionaire’s household could provide her with.

She said wearily, ‘I’ll go and see to the dinner. I—I can’t think straight.’

It wasn’t the most successful meal of all time. Helen could only pick at her own food, and Hugo did little better, his eyes fixed anxiously on her bent head. Only Damon Leandros seemed to have any appetite, and the ability to keep a normal conversation going, choosing safely impersonal topics.

She supposed the real discussion would take place over the coffee. She’d been aware all through dinner that Damon Leandros had been watching her, not with the concerned protectiveness of her father, but rather, she thought, as a cat might watch a mouse. She could feel resentment building up in her at his scrutiny, but she controlled it. Perhaps he was also curious about his employer’s long-lost granddaughter, she thought.

One thing was certain: Michael Korialis must rely on him highly to entrust him with such an errand. She found herself wondering exactly in what capacity he worked for her grandfather, how old he was, even if he was married, then checked herself hurriedly. This kind of speculation was totally valueless.

Hugo and Damon Leandros were sitting talking while the stereo unit in the corner murmured Brahms in the background when she returned with the coffee. She set down the tray on the table, wondering if anyone would believe her if she pleaded a headache and went to her room. Then Damon Leandros bent forward to pick up his cup, and she caught the derisive smile twisting his lips as he looked at her, and she knew that he was just waiting for her to make some such excuse, and angry colour rose in her cheeks. She took her own cup and retired with it stonily to the far corner of the room, on the pretext that she wished to listen more closely to the music. But her seclusion was shortlived.

It was Hugo who rose with the excuse. He had run out of the small cigars he smoked, and would have to go to the nearby off-licence to buy some more, he explained. He wouldn’t be long, he added, with a deprecatory look at his daughter.

When the door had closed behind him, she sat rigidly in her chair, staring unseeingly ahead of her, feeling the tension build up in the room. There was not a word or a movement from her companion, yet she was convinced her father had simply invented the tale of needing more cigars in order to leave them alone together.

At last she stole a glance at him under her lashes, and was disconcerted to see that he was leaning back in his chair, watching her, very much at his ease.

‘Relax, Miss Brandon,’ he said drily. ‘You look as if you would splinter into a thousand pieces at the slightest touch.’ He saw her swallow and smiled rather grimly. ‘Don’t be alarmed, I do not propose to test the truth of my observations.’

‘I should hope not.’ Helen found her voice. ‘I wouldn’t think Mr Korialis would be too pleased to know that one of his henchmen had been—mauling a member of his family.’

His face was sardonic. ‘But as you do not propose to accompany me to Greece, there would be little chance of your grandfather ever finding out. Perhaps I should make love to you, if it means you will contact him, even if it is only to protest at my behaviour.’

He got up from the chesterfield and walked towards her. Helen felt herself shrinking back against the cushions.

She said huskily, ‘Don’t you dare to touch me. Don’t you come near me!’

He halted about a foot from her chair. Staring up at him dazedly, she thought that he seemed to tower over her.

He said softly, ‘You’re a stubborn little fool, Eleni. What am I asking for, after all? A few weeks of your life, no more. A few weeks to give some happiness to a sick old man, holding on to his life in the hope of seeing you.’

‘A sick autocrat,’ she said bitterly, ‘who has never had his slightest wish disregarded before. That was clear from the tone of his letter.’

‘If it were so,’ he said, ‘then you would never have been born. As for the letter, it is true that Michaelis finds it difficult to ask. Is there no pity for him—no warmth under that English ice?’

‘You have absolutely no right to talk to me like that.’ She wished desperately that he would move away. ‘And my name is Helen, not Eleni.’

‘To your grandfather, you have always been Eleni,’ he said quite gently, and to her horror she felt sudden tears pricking at the back of her eyelids.

‘Damn you!’ she whispered, then his dark face blurred, and she buried her face in her hands. When she had regained sufficient control over herself to become aware of her surroundings again, she found that he had moved away to the fireplace and was standing with one arm resting on the mantelshelf, staring down at the floor. An immaculate linen handkerchief was lying on the arm of her chair, and after a brief hesitation she used it with a muffled word of thanks.

He said, ‘I won’t wait for your father’s return.’ He reached into an inside pocket and produced a small leather-covered notebook and a gold pencil and wrote something, before tearing off the page and putting it on the mantelpiece. ‘My hotel and room number, Eleni,’ he said. ‘I shall be returning to Greece at the end of the week. If you wish to come with me, you have only to contact me.’ He paused. ‘Or leave a message, if you would prefer.’

‘I would prefer,’ she said tightly. ‘Very much I’d prefer it.’

He gave her an unsmiling look. ‘I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.’

‘I’m sorry we had to meet at all,’ she said wearily. ‘But I suppose my grandfather will be grateful to you. How will you describe your victory to him, I wonder? As a knock-out in the first round? Perhaps he’ll give you a bonus.’

He looked faintly amused. ‘I would hardly describe this as a victory, more in the nature of a preliminary skirmish,’ he said coolly. ‘As for my bonus—–’ he smiled—‘I think I’ll collect that now.’

Two long strides brought him back to her, his hand reaching down to close like a vice on her wrist, jerking her upwards. Taken off her guard, she found herself on her feet somehow, overbalancing against him, and for the second time she experienced the strength of his arms as they held her, drawing her closer still.

She protested on a little gasp, ‘No!’ and then his mouth closed on hers with merciless thoroughness.

When it was over, she stood staring at him, her eyes enormous in her tear-stained face, one hand pressed convulsively against the bruised softness of her lips, too shocked to utter a word of protest.

Damon Leandros gave her a last cool look and turned to go, and as he reached the door, Helen found her voice at last.

‘You swine!’ She was trembling violently. ‘I’ll make you sorry you did that!’

He turned and looked back at her. ‘You are too late, Eleni. I am already sorry,’ he said, and went out.

CHAPTER TWO

HELEN unfastened the shutters of her hotel room and stepped out on to the balcony, in the full force of the Athenian sun. The muted roar of the city came up from the square below as she stared around her in fascination. She had been told to rest for a few hours to prepare for the continuation of the journey to Phoros, but she could not simply lie down on her bed and forget that all Athens was spread out at her feet.

Besides, she wasn’t in the least tired. It had probably been the least troublesome journey she had ever undertaken, she thought. She had expected to travel on the normal scheduled flight, so the private jet had been a shock, but a pleasant one.

‘This surely doesn’t belong to my grandfather?’ she had asked Damon Leandros, having to forgo her fierce private intention to speak only when spoken to by him, and then only in monosyllables.

‘No. It belongs to a friend of his,’ he said laconically, but he didn’t volunteer any further information on the subject, and she was determined not to ask.

The formalities at the airport were soon concluded, and a chauffeur-driven car was waiting to take them into the city. Helen had assumed she would be staying at her grandfather’s villa, the one her mother had described, and she was a little surprised to be taken straight to a hotel instead, albeit a luxury one. But it soon became clear that this was one of the hotels owned by her grandfather, a fact emphasised by the flattering welcome afforded her by the smiling manager, and the flowers and fruit which awaited her in her suite. A discreet fuss was being made, and Helen would not have been human if she had not enjoyed it.

It made up, she told herself, for having to spend the journey in Damon Leandros’ company. She had not seen him from the evening he had dined at the flat until the time the car had come to collect her to take her to the airport.

Even when she had finally nerved herself to phone his hotel and announce that she was prepared to return to Greece with him after all, he had not been there, and she had had to leave a message with some unknown female with a husky seductive voice. Typical, Helen had thought scornfully, as she replaced her receiver. The degrading way in which he had treated her had shown that Damon Leandros was the sort of man who would constantly need to be proving his virility by having some unfortunate woman in tow. She had nothing but contempt for him. It had annoyed her too to see the amount of deference with which he had been treated at the airport in Athens and back in England, while the hotel manager’s greeting when they arrived had been almost servile. He was not just an ordinary employee, she decided, he must be quite big in her grandfather’s organisation. Well, the bigger they were, the harder they fell, she thought with satisfaction, and she could not believe that Michael Korialis would be too pleased to learn that even a trusted employee had been pawing his granddaughter.

Even though the last thing she wanted to do was spend any more time with him, nevertheless it had annoyed her when he had casually remarked that she would need a rest before the resumption of their journey, and that her lunch would be brought up to her suite.

On their way to the lifts, she had passed the open doors of the dining room where a mouthwatering cold buffet was being set out, and she would have much preferred to have come down to the dining room and chosen a meal for herself with the rest of the guests.

Not that anyone could have complained about the selection which had been brought to her, she admitted. There had been a variety of delicious salads, cold meats, stuffed tomatoes and peppers, and a half bottle of white wine, just dry enough to suit her palate.

She had sampled everything eagerly, but if she was honest, she was too excited and too nervous to eat, and sitting on her own in a hotel room, however luxurious, was not improving the condition. She needed something to take her mind off the journey ahead of her, and the stern old man waiting for her at the end of it.

She still did not really understand why she was here. She hadn’t wanted to come, and now she was here she was beginning to realise just how alien her new environment was. People said that these days foreign capitals were growing so much alike that anyone dropped into one blindfold would be hard put to it to decide where he was. They would never be able to say that with Athens, she thought. Even on the journey in from the airport, she had realised it had an atmosphere all of its own, and the glimpse she had caught of the mighty Acropolis had been breathtaking.

She glanced at her watch, which she had remembered to alter to local time. She had several hours to kick her heels in before they set off again. Surely she had time to do a little sightseeing.

She slipped on a pair of low-heeled sandals and reached for her bag. She had brought some travellers’ cheques in London and changed a few pounds into drachmas. It wasn’t a great deal, but it would be enough to pay her bus fare up to the Acropolis, and maybe buy her a coffee and a pastry at one of the pavement cafes she had noticed on her way to the hotel.

She slipped on a pair of sunglasses as she went down in the lift. Not that she really believed that anyone would try to stop her if they saw her leaving, she told herself, but Damon Leandros had been very positive about her resting in the heat of the day, and perhaps the hotel staff might feel that his orders should be reinforced.

The foyer was full of people as she stepped out of the lift and she walked past the reception area without being observed by anyone, and through the enormous swing doors into the sunlight.

After the air-conditioning of the hotel, the heat outside struck her like a blow. She stopped at one of the news-stands and bought a guide book in English, and walked along slowly reading it. She didn’t feel conspicuous in the slightest. Every second person she saw seemed to be a tourist, and no one seemed to be in a hurry. Using the map in her book, she managed to find her way to Omonia Square, and there she hesitated, finally plucking up courage to ask a passer-by where she could catch a bus for the Acropolis. He gave her a wide smile, then launched into a flood of Greek, interspersed with a few words of very broken English, before seizing her guide book from her hand and writing down the numbers of several buses across the top of the page. She was about to thank him and turn away when another man standing nearby decided to take a hand. Waving a peremptory finger, he seized the stub of pencil the other had been using and began to write a list of alternative numbers, beaming at Helen occasionally while his conversation with the first man became more and more heated.

Helen, aware of the curious glances of some of the passers-by, was becoming embarrassed by the raised voices and violent gestures. She tried to interrupt, but the two Greeks were by now far more interested in their argument than anything else, and after standing there rather helplessly for a moment, she decided to try and find the way to the nearest bus stand by herself.

Next time she wanted to know anything, she vowed silently, she would ask a policeman!

The heat was becoming oppressive now, and she was beginning to wish she had taken Damon Leandros’ advice and stayed in her suite with the shutters closed. Perhaps if it had been offered as advice, and less as an order, she might have felt more inclined to accept it, she told herself in self-justification. It was galling to be issued with instructions as if she was a child who could not be trusted to think for herself.

There seemed to be a great many buses about, but none of them seemed to bear any of the numbers she had been given, she realised ruefully as she stared around her. Nor were there any policemen in the vicinity.

At last, in desperation, she entered the nearest shop, a chemist’s, and this time she was luckier. The chemist, a dark young man with a beard, spoke almost perfect English, but he looked at her dubiously when she explained where she wished to go.

‘In the heat of the day, thespinis? Is it wise?’

‘I only have a few hours in Athens,’ she explained.

He shrugged, looking at her slender arms revealed by the sleeveless navy dress she was wearing. ‘You have a very fair skin. It needs protection in our sun.’ He reached to one of the shelves behind him and produced a tube of sun cream. ‘This will help a little, but you must take care or you will burn, and that is not pleasant.’

She thanked him rather doubtfully. After all, she had only come in to find out where the bus stop was, not to spend any of her small hoard of drachmas on expensive sun cream, but when she produced her money, he waved it away.

‘I do not wish payment, thespinis. It is my pleasure to do this for you.’ He smiled into her eyes with a frank sensual appreciation that sent the colour racing into her face. ‘Perhaps one day you will come back to Athens.’

He escorted her to the pavement, and pointed out to her exactly where she could catch her bus. It occurred to Helen as she moved away that with very little encouragement he would probably have come with her. And she recalled too that Greek women were supposed to lead quite sheltered lives until their marriage. Judging by the way the men behaved on the slightest acquaintance, they had good reason to be sheltered! she thought with faint amusement.

There were already several people waiting at the stop when she arrived, and she hoped that was a good sign and that the bus would be along very shortly. Time was passing more rapidly than she could have believed possible, and she had no idea how long the journey to the Acropolis would take.

But twenty minutes later they were still waiting, and Helen was ready to scream with frustration. Most of the other would-be passengers had moved back from the bus stand to find themselves patches of shade, but Helen remained at the edge of the pavement, straining her eyes as she peered down the hill at the oncoming traffic.

She noticed the car at once, because of its opulence and sleek lines. And then she saw who was driving it, and a little gasp escaped her. It was Damon Leandros, and he was not alone. There was a girl with him, dark and in her way as opulently beautiful as the car. She was smiling and talking to him animatedly, and at any moment the car would be past and gone, then Damon Leandros turned slightly to flick his cigarette out of the window, and his eyes met Helen’s across two lanes of traffic. She was thankful those two lanes existed, because as well as recognition and disbelief, she had seen the beginnings of anger in his face.

She glanced down the hill again, biting her lip anxiously. He was caught in the traffic, and couldn’t stop, and anyway this was a one-way street, yet something told her that he would be back.

A battered grey taxi swerved into the side of the road to discharge its passenger, and Helen leapt for the opening door, almost knocking over the indignant Athenian who emerged in her haste.

The driver was very dark and unshaven, and looked like a member of the Greek Mafia, but he seemed to understand that she wanted to be driven to the Acropolis, even if he displayed no real inclination to take her there. He put the car into gear with a gut-wrenching screech and hurled it into the stream of traffic, muttering all the time under his breath as he did so.

Helen, being bounced around in the back seat from one side of the car to the other, was almost numb with rage. Quite a few of the taxis she had noticed in the streets had had the same battered look, with bumps and dents, and sometimes even their headlights taped up, and if this was a sample of the way they were usually driven, she could quite understand why. She wished very much that she spoke Greek, because she doubted very much whether the conventional phrase books on sale would provide a translation for ‘Please stop driving like a maniac!’

Her only consolation was that when Damon Leandros returned to look for her, and she had not the slightest doubt that he would, she would have vanished, she hoped without trace.

The taxi stopped at last with a jerk which almost hurled her on to the floor, and she stared doubtfully at the mass of figures on the meter, wondering which one depicted the fare. The driver didn’t seem prepared to help. As she hesitated, he directed a sullen stare at her, and eventually she produced her purse, peeled off a number of notes and handed them to him. Judging by the slightly contemptuous smile he gave her as he pocketed them, she had given him far too much, she thought angrily as she got out of the car.

It was hotter than ever as she walked up the hill which led to the entrance, but near the car park was a large stall selling cold drinks and other refreshments. There were people everywhere, sitting under the shade of the trees as they ate and drank, most of them tourists, a lot of them students, propping themselves up on their bulging rucksacks. There were all sorts of accents, and Helen found she was eagerly listening for an English voice, as she made her way up the slope to the summit. She would have her cold drink later, she thought, because something told her that if she ever settled under the trees, her sightseeing would be over for the day.

The stone slabs she was walking up were warm through the thin soles of her sandals, and above her the rock towered away, crowned by a cluster of buildings. She stood there for a moment, staring up, conscious of an isolation that went deeper than mere physical loneliness, overcome by the thought of time, and the generations of feet which had trodden this way before hers—tyrants, philosophers, soldiers, slaves and conquerors—suddenly aware as she had never been of her mother’s Greek blood in her veins, and of a faint stirring deep inside her which went further than the ordinary excitement of the holidaymaker.

Following the small knots of people ahead of her, she made her way without haste through the Propylaea and out on to the vast expanse of bleached white rock which had served the city of Athens as a fortress and a religious sanctuary. The Parthenon dominated, as she supposed it had always been intended it should. Its great honey-coloured mass seemed to rear into the flawless blue of the sky, like some proud ancient lion scenting the air, Helen thought, and smiled at her own fancy.