Songs of Blue and Gold Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Deborah Lawrenson

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Looking for Julian: A Search for the Truth about Adie

  Chapter I

  Part One: Garden of England

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Julian Adie: A Biography

  Part Two: Wreck of Paradise

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Julian Adie, Behind the Myth

  Part Three: Ashore

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Looking for Julian

  Part Four: Sea Music

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Looking for Julian

  Part Five: A Mermaid Singing

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Julian Adie, Behind the Myth

  Part Six: Landlocked

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Part Seven: Discoveries

  Julian Adie, Behind the Myth

  Looking for Julian

  Part Eight: Medusa

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Suggested Further Reading

  Selected Books by Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In the horseshoe bay of Kalami in Corfu, a tumultuous love affair begins between a renowned novelist and a woman escaping scandal. Years later, her daughter Melissa, running from her own past, returns to the island ...

  Melissa’s life in England is in disarray. There are cracks in her perfect marriage, and her elderly mother, Elizabeth, is losing her memory and slowly drifting away. In the last glimmers of lucidity, Elizabeth presents her daughter with a gift that suggests a very secret history – one that leads Melissa to Kalami, where Julian Adie, poet, traveller and novelist, once lived.

  But what is the connection between Adie – an alluring hedonist who discarded four wives – and Melissa’s mother Elizabeth? As Melissa chases Adie’s shadow across the golden places he loved, she finds her mother may not have been the person she thought. Forced to question morality, loyalty and her own unwillingness to let love in, Melissa is gradually led to a dramatic re-evaluation of her own life.

  About the Author

  After reading English at Trinity College, Cambridge, Deborah Lawrenson worked as a journalist on the Kentish Times, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. She was also the London Section editor of Woman’s Journal magazine. She has written four other novels: The Art of Falling, published by Arrow in 2005, The Moonbathers (1998) and the newspaper satires Hot Gossip (1994) and Idol Chatter (1995).

  Visit www.deborah-lawrenson.co.uk

  Also by Deborah Lawrenson

  Hot Gossip

  Idol Chatter

  The Moonbathers

  The Art of Falling

  Songs of Blue and Gold

  Deborah Lawrenson

  Acknowledgements

  This story is infused with the spirit of Lawrence Durrell. Many – although not all – biographical details are his, but Julian Adie is a separate, fictional creation. Most importantly, I would like to make it clear that Lawrence Durrell was never implicated in a suspicious drowning, although accidents at sea were a recurrent theme in his novels.

  Durrell aficionados might be disconcerted by the way I’ve played fast and loose with his chronology, compressing and altering his travels and his wives’ biographies to give an impression of the author’s life without providing in any way an accurate portrayal. In this, the book has more in common with his fictional characters, his use of dualism and reinterpretation than with real people. ‘All these writers [in my books] are variations of myself,’ he said a few years before he died. I wish to acknowledge that some of Julian Adie’s words come close to Lawrence Durrell’s own, both written and spoken.

  I have been far more faithful to the settings of the book. The White House in Kalami, Corfu, is and was, as described. It is still owned by the Athinaios family, who were Durrell’s landlords in the 1930s, and I am grateful to Tassos and Daria Athinaios for permission to make of it what I will. It is crucial to emphasise that the Kiotzas family in this book is imaginary and none of the characters or events is based on fact.

  In the South of France, the arts centre – L’Espace Lawrence Durrell – in Sommières is more or less as described, as are the town and the house across the river where he lived for more than twenty years.

  Looking for Julian: A Search for the Truth about Adie

  Melissa Norden

  [Thames Press: 2008]

  Introduction

  Julian Adie’s life and strange demise had many mythic qualities. The traveller and writer, who loved the light and made his reputation on the shores of the Mediterranean but whose world grew increasingly dark, still exerts a powerful fascination, all the more so since recent revelations.

  Adie’s critical reappraisal in the new biography by Martin Braxton has rightly focused on the controversial facts newly uncovered. When I was first approached by Dr Braxton, I had little idea of the full story, and my instincts – not unnaturally – were to be wary. I certainly had no expectation that our meeting would result in this book, and no inkling where our separate investigations would lead.

  This is not another biography. It is a personal memoir which stands beside Dr Braxton’s version of the past, casting light from a different angle on a small but intriguing episode. It is also an account of my own journey chasing the shadow of Julian Adie across his sunny places, from the Greek Islands to the South of France.

  It grew from the detailed notes I kept as I found out more about my mother Elizabeth Norden’s connection to Adie, a relationship which was unknown to me until the very end of her life. What began as a private quest became a defence of her reputation.

  While I have rewritten in parts and smoothed my notes of conversations for ease of reading, this is at heart a record of my own experience of the story; its disclosures remain in the order in which I discovered them, and my reactions to events substantially as they were at the time.

  Chapter 1

  By the time I reached Corfu, the season was in its last gasp.

  Evening hung early over the bay when I walked the stony beach at Kalami and found the White House. It was just as he described: defiant on a rock, the sea clawing at its feet. On the headland behind, cypress trees pointed into a curdling sky. Pebbles crunched under my feet as I went closer, and waves sighed on grey stones. A brackish smell of nets and seaweed prickled in the air.

  This was how my search began. Looking for someone I didn’t know, many years too late. And looking, at the same time, for someone I had always known, but trying to place her in a strange setting, reconfigured in some new history.

  It was late October. My summer had disappeared, hour by hour, into the oppressive sun and rain of an English heat wave that drained suddenly into autumn while it was still August. Here, though, warmth lingered. I’d fallen asleep for an hour, late afternoon, to the weary hum of ageing insects and woke with the drumming thought: time present is only a breath, a heartbeat, and then it’s gone. So I went out
quickly, clutching the book. My knuckles were white around it, I noticed, as if my hands belonged to someone else.

  I don’t mind admitting it: I was nervous, frightened of what I might find and how much it might alter my old certainties when so many of the recent ones had already gone. In retrospect, it was the perfect frame of mind in which to begin what I was trying to do; alive to changes and misinterpretations, I trusted nothing.

  This was a new way of thinking for me. It still felt odd, to have no trust in the world. But thanks to Richard, there was deceit and duplicity everywhere. It was like a cold knife in the flesh, this newly minted cynicism, sharpened by my own small deceptions to cover the wound.

  The lies had started as soon as I arrived alone at the boat hire office where I picked up the key to the Prospero Apartments.

  ‘Unfortunately my husband couldn’t come with me,’ I told Manolis Kiotzas. He was frowning at the print out of my booking, clearly made for a married couple: Richard and Melissa Quiller.

  Manolis, a jovial, wide-faced man in his forties, was sympathetic and eager to offer help. He was also waiting for more. The Greeks are tactful as well as hospitable; for all that, they are unembarrassed in their curiosity about other people’s lives, especially on this island. I had learned that much already from Julian Adie.

  ‘Work . . . his business, he couldn’t get away,’ I said.

  Manolis pulled down the corners of his mouth, with a wry twist this time. He nodded sagely, acknowledging a wise decision not to have cancelled in the circumstances. ‘Is good you have come. You will have a nice time. Still sunny for a few days, nice rest, nice food . . .’

  ‘I’m sure I will.’

  ‘You come to the Prospero Taverna this evening, you have some wine . . .’

  I smiled, without committing myself.

  He handed over two large keys and gave me directions to the apartment, about a hundred metres further up the road. It was on the first floor of a modern house overlooking the sea, a few steps up a path on the hill side of the road. I found the outside stairs at one side, and carried my bags up feeling suddenly exhausted. There was no evidence that any of the other apartments in the property were occupied. The door opened easily. Inside, it was clean and white: a bedroom, a shower room and a sitting room with a basic kitchen along one wall.

  I sluiced off the grime of travel, the early morning start on the motorway, the sweat of penned-in airport queues, then lay down wrapped in a dry towel on the double bed.

  I could cry now if I wanted. It didn’t matter. I knew no one here in Corfu. No need for any pretence. The stupid lie to Manolis apart, I was feeling all right. Or as well as could be expected. There was relief in simply being away, a guilty relief, that the worst had happened and I could stop fearing it. I didn’t intend to sleep, but my eyes closed and oblivion took over.

  That first evening, thoughts of my mother came easily as I sat on the rocks below the White House. How she had always loved the sun and sea, the spiciness of southern air. Her sense of fun, but also the self-containment that sometimes made her distant. Her delight in colour and history. The Greek myths she would retell. My own sense, successfully sublimated for years, that she had made light of her struggles and did not want her subsequent decisions to be scrutinised too closely.

  When my mother was young, she made a minor name for herself as a seascape painter and exhibited several times at a well-known London gallery. My father Edward helped in that; an art historian and writer, he always claimed to have promoted her. But equally, later on, he made it more difficult for her to work. Gradually, she stopped painting, though there was a brief resurgence after he left. Afterwards she became an interior decorator. She made a good living by using her eye for colour and form in other people’s houses. And given that she was a woman on her own with a child to support, it may have been as simple as making the best use of a talent. She had always had a practical streak.

  ‘Try to live in the moment,’ she would say.

  It was certainly possible to imagine her in this place.

  A lilac veil was poised to drop over the water between the island and the mountainous Albanian coast so close by. Julian Adie’s description of its hulking nearness was more accurate than I had expected.

  The Gates of Paradise was his account of an idyllic sojourn by the Ionian Sea, first published at a time when Britain was ‘a place of thin greasy soup and shrivelled lips’ and most people could only dream of sensuous escape, of unbroken sunshine and the freedom to swim each day in cobalt-blue seas, to eat fresh figs and drink wine, make love and write poetry under the sun. Sixty years ago, it was the book that made Julian Adie famous.

  Near the end he writes of this very place, this fabled white house, after he and his first wife Grace had reluctantly sailed away in the teeth of imminent war: ‘It is never mentioned. The house is destroyed, and the lovely boat lies holed and upturned, a ribcage rotting in the sun. Only the shrine and the sacred pool are unchanged.’

  Disingenuous, of course. All the biographical sources note, usually in a spirit of indulgence, that Adie was not to be trusted with the truth when it came to spinning his literary web. Better to mesmerise with prose studded with poetic jewels, to conjure a yearning nostalgia by smashing up the beautiful landscape, setting it out of reach like a myth, than to tell it how it was.

  Maybe the house was damaged, but it was never destroyed, for all that the Germans cruelly bombed the island. It still stands, solid as it ever was, at the southern end of the horseshoe bay. The boat had been sold before they left, according to other accounts, and if Grace and Julian never spoke of their idyll it was because by the time he came to write the words, she had left him, taking their baby daughter with her. By 1945 she was back in England, while he was rampaging through parties in Cairo.

  Time and truth are elastic. I could feel that strongly here, sitting on the rocks where they once sat and which he described so alluringly, peeling away the layers of the present and the past. The slippage of years is like a strong undertow of the sea over steeply shelving beach. Could Julian Adie have been right all along, in his romantic claims? Was it possible to escape from the English way of death, and emerge in the blue light of a Greek island to collect and restructure the past, current and recurrent?

  Between the bay’s twin headlands where tall cypresses blackened into dark fringes, the sea was glassy. The looming foreign coastline was a bulge of rocky muscle, indigo-ridged on the horizon, as I strained the sinews of my own memory for the clues I must have missed.

  There was no doubt in my mind that she had sent me here deliberately when she gave me the book of poetry and with it all the unanswered questions.

  Collected Poems by Julian Adie, published 1980. On the title page is an inscription by the author: ‘To Elizabeth, always remembering Corfu, what could have been and what we must both forget.’

  To Elizabeth, my mother.

  Part One: Garden of England

  I

  IT WAS A photograph of a white house: dice-square, built low on a rocky shore. Behind it was a promontory speared by cypresses and in front, a dark blue sea glinting with sun diamonds.

  Elizabeth traced the outline of the house with a finger. The picture was trembling in her hand. She had picked it out from a pile on the floor, tipped from a battered brown envelope – yet another diversion from the awful business in hand but one Melissa had allowed because it was too draining to argue over everything.

  ‘What have you got there?’ asked Melissa.

  ‘His home.’

  ‘Whose home, Mum?’

  She opened her mouth to reply but no words came. Her eyes filled as the silent seconds stretched. The expressive green-grey eyes sharpened with tears and the pupils shrank like a wince. The answer remained frozen.

  Melissa stroked her mother’s shoulder.

  Home. It was a word they had been using tentatively. For months it had been offered and retracted, reinterpreted and recast, until it was hard to know what it meant any m
ore.

  A hard, old-fashioned suitcase lay open, half-filled, on the bed. Melissa smoothed the top layer of clothes inside. It had taken hours to get this far.

  Elizabeth eyed the suitcase suspiciously. She was putting the oddest things in it, and Melissa was taking them out. A cracked green vase, a Chinese doll, a camping saucepan and garden secateurs lay in limbo on the counterpane. Feeling sad and traitorous, as if by admitting she could not care for her she was failing both of them, Melissa removed a paintbrush and replaced it with three pressed nightdresses.

  ‘We’re not packing everything,’ Melissa said. ‘Only enough for a week or so. You know you can come back here if . . . if you don’t like it.’

  The nursing home was only an experiment. To see if she liked it enough to stay. It had to be her decision, even in this condition. Elizabeth Norden was still a strongminded, independent woman, no matter what was happening to her, the holes in her consciousness, the child-like panics and the words that remained frustratingly out of reach.

  She wandered off down the corridor again. Melissa followed and waited more patiently than she felt. When Elizabeth emerged from a cupboard on the landing she was waving a screwdriver that Melissa was sure should have been in the kitchen tool drawer.

  Elizabeth was smiling. The screwdriver was in her left hand, but she was hunched over to the right, holding something else with her elbow under the side of her cardigan.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  No answer.

  ‘Do you want to put that in?’

  Elizabeth shook her head. Her hair was still bright and thick, with streaks of the old blonde. Her lovely face was hardly lined. The devastation was all inside.

  ‘Let’s get on then, Mum.’

  Back in the bedroom there were several minutes of lucidity, during which Elizabeth sensibly decided that she would take her hairdryer and embroidered dressing gown and found them immediately, despite still having one shoulder hitched up to hold whatever it was she had hidden under her arm.