Body and Soul by Roberta Latow Read Free Book Online Page B

artist and the world was charmed by him and his work. Smooth and ingratiating he used himself rather than his talent to climb the art ladder and win the friendship of some of the great painters of their time.
    Eden believed him to be a good artist who loved her. In all the years she was passionately devoted to him she could never bring herself to accept that he was the gigolo other people claimed him to be. He had never taken money off her, used or abused the love they had had when they had been together – or so she maintainedto herself and everyone who tried to make her see the affair in its true light.
    Hydra had been their haven where the world and Garfield’s flaws were left behind. It was difficult to say when Eden faced the truth about their love affair: one glance too many by Garfield at another older woman with a great deal of money, the realisation that she would always be less than the most important person in his life, the moment he walked away from her when she was in crisis and told her he would be back when she’d straightened herself and her career out.
    Standing in her house now, all these years later, looking out on his closed shutters was the first time she could admit to herself that she had fooled herself about their love. To her it had been significant whereas to him she had been just like every other woman he had ever had an affair with. That realisation left her feeling free, as if she had dropped a huge stone she had been carrying for decades: the desperate self-delusion of love.
    As Eden walked through to the kitchen where she opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses, one for Maria and one for herself, she took a few minutes to ask herself some questions about her affair with Garfield. How much of it had she created to satisfy her own need to be loved as strongly as she had loved him? Had that love really been the great love of her life as she had once believed it to be? Why had she had to come this far in her life to face the truth when it no longer mattered? And it didn’t. She had left him behind more than a decade ago. Never thought of him as a person now, only ever as the abstract embodiment of a great love affair during one of the best times of her life.
    After several glasses of wine, Eden settled down to play the cello. Hours passed before she realised she was playing in the dark. Turning on several lamps, she walked through to the upper terrace where her bedroom had been made ready for her. She found a plate of sandwiches and a carafe of water left there by Maria and, lighting the fire, sat in front of it for an hour before she went to bed and slipped into a dream of the stranger who had sent her on this Odyssey of self-discovery.
    The next morning she was up bright and early to the sound ofthe church bell, a cock crowing from some distance above her house, the screech of a donkey and the clip-clop of his hooves on the stones as he passed down the path to the port. She could smell Maria’s coffee and frying eggs and bacon.
    After breakfast in the garden Eden walked the streets of Hydra. Memories of her sexual excesses with Garfield, and how she had been enriched by them when she had been so young and innocent and happy, flooded back to her. What she had hoped for in revisiting the romantic places of her past, that it might validate her old erotic life, was happening. She had not been fooling herself as she had started to fear she might have done.
    The Hydriots did of course remember her but few of the expatriates who lived in Hydra happened to be there at present. These were the months when most of them travelled or returned to their native lands for sentimental reunions with their relations. It was almost as if she had her island to herself and that suited Eden just fine. It allowed memories of her past life to invade the present as she climbed the narrow paths up over the spine of the island.
    It was early-evening when she returned to her house. She bathed and changed her clothes