paintings, statues. You’ll probably recognise the statues of Eros and Aphrodite as well.’
‘The gods of love,’ she whispered.
‘His wife directed matters, and had this room turned into a kind of temple.’
‘It’s charming,’ Petra said. ‘Had they made a great love match?’
‘No, he married the poor woman for her money, and this was her way of trying to deny it.’
‘How sad.’
‘Love often is sad when you get past the pretty lies and down to the ugly truth,’ he said in a flat voice.
But now she scarcely heard him. Disturbing impressions were reaching her. Something was badly wrong, but she wasn’t sure what. Then she drew closer to a statue of Eros, the little god of love, and a chill went through her.
‘His face,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t see, but surely-’
With a crash Lysandros threw open the shutters, filling the room with pale light. Petra drew a sharp, horrified breath.
Eros had no face. It looked as if it had been smashed off by a hammer. His wings, too, lay on the floor.
Now she could look around at the others and see that they were all damaged in a similar way. Every statue had been attacked, every painting defaced.
But the worst of all was what had happened to the bed. It had been designed as a four-poster but the posts too had been smashed, so that the great canopy had collapsed onto the bed, where it lay.
Someone had attacked this temple to love in a frenzy, and then left the devastation as it was, making no attempt to clear up. Now she could see the thick dust. It had been like this, untouched, for a long, long time. That was as terrible as the damage with its message of soul-destroying bitterness.
‘You asked if she were in here,’ Lysandros said. ‘She’s been here since the night I brought her to this house, to this room, and we made love. She’ll always be here.’
‘Was she here when-?’
‘When I did this? When I took an axe and defaced the statues and the pictures, smashed the bed where we’d slept, wanting to wipe out every trace of what I’d once thought was love? No, she wasn’t here. She’d gone. I didn’t know where she was and after that-I didn’t find her until she died, far away.’
He turned to the wrecked bed, gazing at it bleakly as though it held him transfixed. Shivers went through Petra as she realised that he’d spoken no more than the truth. His dead love was still present, and she always would be. She followed him through every step of his life, but she was always here, in this house, in this room, in his heart, in his nightmares.
‘Come away,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing here any more.’
It wasn’t true. In this room was everything that was terrible, but she wouldn’t admit that to him, lest her admission crush him further. She drew him to the door and locked it after them. She knew it would take more than a locked door to banish this ghost from his dark dreams, but she was determined to do it.
She didn’t speak to Lysandros again, just led him back to their bed and held him in her arms.
At last some life seemed to return to Lysandros and he roused himself to speak.
‘Since we’ve been here together, I’ve found myself going more and more to that room, hoping that I could make myself enter and drive the ghost away.’
‘Perhaps I can help you do that,’ she suggested.
‘Perhaps. I’ve resisted it too long.’
‘Am I something you need to resist?’ she whispered.
He took so long to reply that she thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but at last he spoke as though the words were dragged out of him by pincers.
‘From the first evening you have filled me with dread,’ he said slowly. ‘With dread-with fear. There! That’s the truth. Despise me if you will.’
‘I could never despise you,’ she hastened to say. ‘I just can’t think of any reason why you should be afraid of me.’
‘Not of you, but of the way you made me feel. In your presence my defences seemed to melt away. I felt it when we met at the wedding. When I discovered that you were the girl on the roof in Las Vegas I was glad, because it seemed to explain why I was drawn to you. We’d been practically childhood friends so naturally there was a bond. That’s what I told myself.
‘But then we danced, and I knew that the bond was something far more. I left the wedding early to escape you, but I called you later that day because I had to. Even then I couldn’t stay away from you because you had an alarming power, one I shied away from because I’d never met it before and I knew I couldn’t struggle against it.
‘Do you remember the statue we saw in the Achilleion Palace? Not the first one where Achilles was in all his glory, but the second one, where he was on the ground, trying to remove the arrow, knowing that he couldn’t? Did you see his face, upturned to the sky, begging help from the gods because he knew that this was stronger than him and only divine intervention could save him from its power?’
‘But he was fighting death,’ Petra reminded him. ‘Do I represent death?’
He smiled faintly and shook his head.
‘No, but you represent the defeat of everything I believed was necessary to keep me strong. The armour that kept me at a cautious distance from other people, the watchfulness that never let me relax, so that I was always ahead of the game and all the other players. In your presence, all of that vanished. I implored the gods to return my strength so that I could be as safe against you as I was against everyone else, but they didn’t listen-possibly because they knew I didn’t really mean it.
‘Your power over me came from something I’d never considered before. It wasn’t sex, although there was that too. Lord, how I wanted to sleep with you, possess you! It drove me half demented, but I could cope with that. It was something else, much more alarming.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I could make you laugh. I’ve always loved doing that, not because it gave me power but because I hoped it might make you happy.’
‘It did, but it also alarmed me because it meant I was vulnerable to you as to nobody else in the world, man or woman. So I departed again. This time I went away for days, but then I began to worry that you might have returned to England, and I discovered I didn’t want that after all. I was acting like a man with no sense, wanting this, wanting the opposite, not knowing what I wanted-like a man in love, in fact. So I called you.’
‘I was with Nikator,’ she remembered. ‘He guessed it was you and warned me against you.’
‘He was right.’
‘I know he was. I never doubted that for a moment. Do you think I care what that silly infant thinks, as long as you come back to me?’
‘When I saw you again I knew I couldn’t have stayed away any longer,’ he said, ‘but I also knew I’d come back to danger. I was no longer master of myself, and that control-that mastery-has been the object of my life. I understood even then that I couldn’t have both it and you, but it’s not until now-’
It was only now that he’d brought himself to face the final decision, and for a moment she still wasn’t sure which way it would go. There was some terrifying secret that haunted him, and everything would depend on what happened in the next few minutes.
Suddenly she was afraid.
CHAPTER NINE
AT LAST he began to speak.
‘It started in my childhood with my mother’s fantasies about Achilles and his hidden vulnerability. I understood the point about keeping your secrets to yourself, but in those days it was only theory, little more than a game. I was young, I had more money than was good for me, I felt I could rule the world. I fancied myself strong and armoured, but in truth I was wide open to a shrewd manipulator.’
