‘What will Savvas say?’
They always asked this of a woman who wanted any kind of radical change. They knew from experience that husbands were rarely pleased.
‘This is how I want it,’ answered Aphroditi, ignoring the question. ‘And hair does grow.’
The two stylists looked at each other in shocked silence. It seemed extraordinary that after all these years Aphroditi should be asking for such a drastic change, and with so little discussion. But they could see that she was absolutely serious.
Emine put a dark gown over Aphroditi’s white dress and washed her waist-length dark tresses for the last time. Then, fighting her own reluctance, she picked up her cutting scissors. Skeins of thick, damp hair eighteen inches long fell to the ground. She shaped and layered with expert precision, continually glancing at the picture that lay in Aphroditi’s lap to make sure that she was getting it right. When she was done, she put in some rollers and sat Aphroditi under one of the big helmet hairdryers.
Aphroditi watched as Savina swept her pile of dark hair into a mound. It was like seeing the final trace of her childhood being disposed of.
Forty-five minutes later, the timer pinged. Emine deftly loosened each curl and the shape that Aphroditi desired fell into place. With a little backcombing on the crown and some lacquer, the style precisely matched the picture.
Aphroditi smiled at her image in the mirror.
‘Let me show you from the back!’
Savina stood behind her with a small mirror. The hair brushed her ear lobes and flicked out slightly at the ends. When she took off the gown, the full effect of the new hairstyle became apparent. It made her eyes seem larger and her neck longer. Any jewellery she had round her neck or in her ears would be more prominent now. Out of her bag she produced a gold and sapphire choker; with her scoop-necked white dress, the effect was nothing less than spectacular.
The two hairdressers stood back and looked at her with naked admiration.
‘My, my, you look beautiful,’ Emine said simply.
‘It’s just how I wanted it,’ said Aphroditi, smiling for the first time since she had entered the salon. ‘Thank you so much.’
She twirled in front of them, reapplied her lipstick, hugged them both and left. They had not seen her so happy in a long while.
The whole process had taken slightly longer than she had expected, and by the time she got back into the foyer, she could see that a few people were already gathered in the terrace bar. She quickened her step.
Markos was waiting at the entrance, from where he could see the clocks behind the reception desk. It did not surprise him that she was late. He had half suspected that she would want to make a point. Earlier that day, when Savvas had telephoned to request – though perhaps ‘order’ would have been more accurate – that he act as his stand-in for cocktails, Markos had said it would be his pleasure. For the first time, however, Savvas was asking Markos to do something he resented. And there was no choice.
When evening came, he had arrived early. He was wearing one of his new suits and had stopped to have his shoes shined in the lobby. Catching sight of himself in the mirrored wall, he realised he was overdue for a visit to the barber and ran his fingers backwards through his hair to push a few strands from his face.
Two female guests – Swedish, he assumed, from their deeply bronzed skin and the sheets of yellow hair that hung down their backs – walked across the reception area as he was waiting and he felt the warmth of their approving eyes. One of them looked over her shoulder at him as she passed.
Suddenly he was distracted by the sight of an even more beautiful woman in white striding purposefully across the foyer.
Without the familiar sapphire necklace, Markos would not have recognised Aphroditi. When he realised that it was actually the boss’s wife, he stepped forward to greet her, this time breaking into a spontaneous smile, with eyes as well as mouth. The hairstyle was new, but something else was different too.
‘Kyria Papacosta …’
Aphroditi stopped.
‘Your husband asked me to accompany you tonight …’
‘I know,’ replied Aphroditi.
Markos tried to stop himself saying anything complimentary about her appearance, knowing how it might be taken. His boss’s wife would want to keep her distance more than ever tonight. He was sure of it.
They walked side by side, with a good metre between them, into the bar. For a while they both joined one group, and then circulated separately for an hour or so, Markos gravitating towards Aphroditi each time he saw that her eyes had glazed over. Some of the guests were short of conversation, or rude enough to make it clear that they would rather be talking to a man.
In spite of herself, Aphroditi was not ungrateful for his presence.
The time passed, and when dinner was served, the pair were placed together at top table. At first they sat stiffly and talked to the person sitting on the other side of them before eventually turning to each other.
There was only one thing that Aphroditi could think of to ask Markos. It had been on her mind.
‘Has your baby arrived yet?’
‘My baby?’ he exclaimed.
There was a moment of awkwardness. Had she asked the wrong thing?
‘Oh! You mean Maria’s baby! My sister’s baby!’
‘Oh! Your sister … I thought …’ Aphroditi’s eyes had widened. She felt slightly foolish for having made a mistake.
‘She had him a fortnight ago. He’s to be named Vasilis. After his grandfather. Everything went well.’
There was a moment of awkwardness.
‘So you thought I was becoming a father!’ A wide smile spread across his face and he laughed, his hand hovering over her bare arm as he spoke. ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for that.’
Aphroditi smiled back. She had been right after all. He was not a man ready to settle down.
Markos was much too clever to ask any reciprocal questions, so the matter could be dropped, but in that moment, with his hand almost touching her skin, she felt the ice between them thaw just a little.
In all the time they had known each other, this was the longest conversation they had ever had. She had always shared Markos Georgiou’s attention with her husband. That evening, much to her surprise, she found his manners impeccable. He did not behave in any way other than as an employee, and did not even comment on her changed appearance. She rather wished he had.
When the meal ended, Aphroditi drove herself home and Markos went to the Clair de Lune.
Savvas was already asleep when she got into the apartment, but the following morning he was the first to wake.
‘What on earth have you done?’
Aphroditi sat up in bed, brought out of a deep sleep by his angry voice.
‘It was like waking up with a stranger!’ he shouted.
He was doing up the buttons of his shirt but continued his rant.
‘Why do such a thing! You’ve had that beautiful hair since I’ve known you.’
‘Since I was a child, actually.’
‘Well I hope you’ll be growing it again.’
‘We’ll see,’ she said sleepily.
He finished dressing in silence. She could hear the small flicking sounds of shoelaces, and even with her eyes shut, she could sense the ill temper with which they were being tied.
‘Tonight,’ said Savvas, getting to his feet, ‘Markos can stand in for me again.’
Aphroditi said nothing. It suited her better that Savvas should think this annoyed her.
Over the following month or so, with building work continuing at weekends, Savvas did not attend the drinks reception even once. The noise, heat and dust were an exhausting combination, but he knew that the pace of construction would only be maintained if he were present.
In the few minutes each day that she was with him, Aphroditi saw her husband carrying all the anxieties of the world.
‘Why don’t you take the day off?’ she asked him one morning.
‘You know exactly why,’ he snapped. ‘We have a deadline. Unless we open next year, a whole season will be lost. So why do you keep asking about days off?’
Markos, by contrast, seemed carefree. His face broke into a smile with every introduction, every order for a drink, every snatch of conversation. As August turned into September, Aphroditi took it for granted that she would host the nightly reception with him.
Throughout the day she found herself looking forward to the cocktail parties more than she had done in the past, and at five o’clock she was back in the hair salon to ensure that she was perfectly coiffed for the evening.
‘She’s glowing, isn’t she?’ Savina commented one afternoon as they were shutting up the salon.
‘That hairstyle makes all the difference,’ agreed Emine. ‘It seemed to have cheered her up. She needed a lift after her poor father …’
‘I didn’t mean that. I wondered if she was … you know …?’
‘Pregnant?’
‘Yes! Wouldn’t that be nice for them both?’
‘Yes, but with that tiny waist … she can’t be.’
‘Some women don’t put on any weight for ages.’
‘I think you’re imagining it. I am sure she would have told us.’
Something that was not in Savina’s imagination was Aphroditi’s radiance.
Although formality prevailed between Aphroditi and Markos, with him continuing to address her as Kyria Papacosta, she realised she was beginning to dislike him just a little less.
One evening during dinner he broached a subject that he had long been meaning to mention.
‘The Clair de Lune—’
‘Is a nice name,’ she interrupted, finishing his sentence.
She smiled but he was not certain if she was sincere.
Chapter Eleven
INHALING THE DUST of the building site for fourteen hours a day and poring over paperwork for several more, Savvas Papacosta considered that he worked harder than any other man in Cyprus.
The hours that his right-hand man worked were almost as many. Over the past months, with the Clair de Lune and all his other new responsibilities in the hotel, Markos had spent at least sixteen hours a day at The Sunrise, but he needed little sleep so he did not complain.
In the early hours of each morning when he returned home, he found his brother still awake too. Christos had moved into his own apartment now and was rarely alone. He and his group of friends were in the habit of meeting there, and their cell was becoming increasingly active. In November, events five hundred miles away in Athens fired them up.
For six years, since the coup in 1967, Greece had been ruled by a military dictatorship under George Papadopoulos. Now Dimitrios Ioannidis, well known for torturing political dissidents, ousted Papadopoulos and took his place as leader, bringing in an even more brutal regime.
The unification of Cyprus with Greece had been a goal of the colonels, but the new dictator began to agitate for it more openly. Under Ioannidis, the more moderate Greek officers of the Cyprus National Guard were slowly being replaced by a more fanatical anti-Makarios contingent, and he began to use them as a tool for achieving his aims. EOKA B members knew that this would be a huge boost. The organisation originally formed by Makarios himself had turned squarely against him.
For many people the activities and machinations of politicians and soldiers made little impact on day-to-day life. They carried on as normal, conscious of the undercurrents but facing inwards on their own lives. Irini Georgiou made a fuss of her first grandchild, tended the plants in her little kipos, cooked more for her family than they could ever eat and chatted with her canary. Vasilis went daily to check on his ripening oranges, harvested his olives and planted a new crop of potatoes in his dark, fertile soil. These activities took him to the limit of physical endurance, but a rough-skinned orange in his palm, the weight of a net of olives or the sudden sight of a carpet of shoots sprouting from the earth made it all worthwhile. For him such joys transcended all others and helped anaesthetise his pain.
For Christos, the events in faraway Athens meant an acceleration in EOKA B activities. The new leadership was impatient, volatile and extreme in its anti-Makarios position. His unit had been involved with several of the attacks on police stations in the previous year, and had seized arms and ammunition crucial for their movement.
Markos was certain that Christos must be involved, but initially he refused to be drawn in. He found his brother naive and idealistic, like a child trying to achieve something that had been attempted before but had failed.
‘Christos, how many times do I have to tell you what people went through in the fifties?’
As a teenager, Markos Georgiou had hung around on the edge of EOKA activities. One of his first assignments had been to paint graffiti. At the time it had felt daring to daub ‘Better one hour of freedom than forty years of slavery and imprisonment’ on the wall of a police station, but he had never really progressed beyond such activities.
He had plenty of friends who were more involved, however, so he was always a suspect, and at seventeen he had felt a British gun pushed into his back during a search. This was the closest he had ever got to danger.
Many of his classmates believed that the union of Cyprus with Greece was a divine mission and for that reason alone God would protect anyone who fought for it. This had been their understanding of President Makarios’ teaching.
Even before one of his school friends was killed by a British bullet, and a second was hanged in 1959, Markos suspected there was no sweetness in martyrdom. Up close, death had a pungent odour. It was ugly and wasteful and the smell of blood was acrid. He knew then that there was no connection between this stench and the sweet smell of incense that was the aroma of religion, no matter if Makarios appeared to condone violence.
By the time the Republic of Cyprus was declared, his residual faith in the teachings of the Church had been wiped out, something he kept from his mother. His belief that enosis was a holy cause had vanished.
‘The point is, Markos, you all gave up. You didn’t reach the finishing line.’
‘Without us, Christos, Cyprus would still be under the British,’ he said quietly. He was aware of his mother’s presence in the apartment below and knew how upsetting she found the sound of raised voices. ‘Without us, there would never have been independence!’
‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it!’
Christos was too young to know how things had changed since then and stubbornly refused to understand why Markos wanted to exploit all the new opportunities that he saw opening up around him. The growth of tourism and the expansion of every kind of trade in Famagusta were part of a bigger economic miracle. Markos remembered the lean years and preferred the present day.
He could see that Christos was inflamed by the cause. Personally he no longer cared about enosis, but as the sense of unrest in the country grew, he could imagine the danger his brother might be in.
Although Markos challenged Christos and rather enjoyed provoking him, he did have a little sympathy with him purely because they were brothers. There was no question of him joining the cause himself, but perhaps he could facilitate something that might keep Christos a little safer and hence keep danger away from the family home. He was not prepared to make bombs, construct booby-traps or meet at the dead of night to plan sabotage, but there might be a way he could contribute without personal danger.
‘I won’t fight for Grivas,’ he said to Christos. ‘But I’ll see what else I can do.’
His plan dovetailed with another idea that had been incubating in his mind.
After years of making himself indispensable to Savvas Papacosta, he had begun to enjoy the status as his right-hand man. But now, when he delivered his weekly accounts, with everything minutely accounted for, there was little gratitude from his boss. The success of the Clair de Lune was taken for granted, along with the huge income it brought in, a sum that was immediately assigned to the ne
w development.
There was no mention of a bonus, or even a yearly pay rise for all the extra hours and effort he put in, and Markos’ resentment had begun to fester. If Savvas was not going to recognise his efforts properly, perhaps he would balance things out himself. He felt as if something was owed.
Markos, in fact, had a specific plan. Since he had begun his new project, Savvas’ focus had moved entirely away from The Sunrise. He had put aside all that had previously mattered to him and no longer had his eye on the minutiae of his business. This gave Markos freedom.
Most of the clientele at The Sunrise paid in cash, either in dollars, pounds or Deutschmarks, and a day or two might easily elapse before it could be safely banked. In anticipation, a row of safes had been installed in a vault next to the nightclub. They could accommodate not just the hotel’s day-to-day money supply, but also valuable papers such as deeds and contracts.
The vault in which the safes were housed had two iron doors and triple locking. The basement contained an extensive network of rooms in addition to the nightclub. It was the invisible part of the hotel, where anything unsightly was hidden, including the laundry rooms and boilers.
Earnings from the Clair de Lune were the single largest element of cash income. Markos had naturally become the keeper of the keys and had the daily task of ensuring that cash was taken to the bank or to Savvas’ on-site office on payday. In having total control over the vault, he had discovered the pleasure of power.
‘If you want somewhere to keep something secure, just let me know,’ he said to Christos. ‘I have just the place.’
‘Thanks, Markos,’ the younger brother responded. ‘I’ll remember that.’
Shortly after their conversation, Christos took up his brother’s offer.
Markos was drinking a coffee in his mother’s courtyard before going to work. Even though the end of the year was approaching, the sun still gave enough warmth for them to sit outside. The light was sharp and the sky blue. It was a sweet and pleasant day and Vasilis Georgiou had gone off in the truck to the smallholding to plant carrots.
Markos was admiring some gerania that his mother had asked him to move into the sunshine to catch the warmth.