Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson Read Free Book Online Page A

horrified at how far their beautiful and clever daughter had thrown in her lot with the louche and prospect-less Adie. The situation was barely improved by the news that this was a respectable passage: the Adies had been pronounced man and wife on 28 February by the registrar at Bournemouth, where his family had set up home. They had not been invited to the ceremony. It was not so much a secret wedding, as a fuss-free occasion, in the same manner as the passports had been arranged and tickets purchased with the last of that month’s allowance from their respective families.
    In Italy, there was a delay. A letter to the family back in Wimborne Road, Bournemouth reads, ‘
We are stuck on the docks with nothing but pennies for cigarettes and wine, waiting for some mischief-makers in Brindisi to settletheir differences with the ship owner before we can board for the final push across the Ionian . . . we are short-tempered but managing to ration our arguments along with any unrealistic hopes. Our first marital test – G. wants either a bed for the night or an immediate divorce. I told her this is a Catholic country and she has Burned Her Bridges!!
’
    When they finally arrived in Corfu they stayed for three weeks with Paddy and Bridget Williams at the Villa Limoni near Perama – it was Paddy’s letters that had lured them – then struck out north to find somewhere wild and remote in which to write and paint.
    At Kalami, they found rooms to rent in a fisherman’s house. It was always known while they lived there as Prospero’s House, but he called it the White House in his first major literary success,
The Gates of Paradise
.
    Adie was to write ever after that he lived a peasant’s life in Corfu: he fished with the fishermen; he toiled in the olive groves; he was a picker of oranges and kumquats. If that was not strictly true (he soon made friends with the island aristocracy and caroused in convincing imitation of a leisured and wealthy expatriate in Corfu Town) this was a time of simple pleasures and sunshine.
    Photographs of the time show his blond hair bleached almost white, his beguiling grin triumphant above an octopus caught on a trident, or fish grilling on a beach fire; while Grace is almost always serene, smiling thoughtfully at the horizon from a jetty or a balcony as if she is keeping a delicious secret to herself.
    The sea was the bluest he had ever seen, shot throughwith veins of gold. ‘
We plunge into lapis lazuli, molten by the sun
,’ he wrote to his old friend Peter Commin back at the bookshop in Chelsea, ‘
and emerge dripping with bright diamonds
.’ He and Grace developed a passion for nude swimming. Adie was working hard, brimming with ideas; Grace was painting confident gaudy canvasses inspired by the lushness, the rocks, the cobalts and aquamarines of the Ionian. It was an idyll which neither ever forgot – nor from which he ever recovered, according to some who knew him in that ‘period of perfection’.
    And why should he not have presumed he had reached the gates of paradise? (It was typical Adie that he just hedged his bets: he was at the gates, but not quite inside . . .) He was young, lusty, fired with enthusiasm and ambition, heady with his first serious attempts at writing both poetry and prose, and perhaps most importantly, he was deeply in love with a beautiful young wife who shared his ideals.

Part Two: Wreck of Paradise

I
    ALONE SMALL BOAT skimmed into Kalami bay from the south. The splutter of its outboard motor grew louder. Soon it was close enough to make the two men on board visible. As they nosed towards the stone landing stage at the White House, the younger stood up with a rope and ran off the front of the craft and on to the mooring with no break in his stride. He tied the boat up, amid shouting. The other gesticulated at Melissa. She turned away. In another life she might have tossed back a choice