Page 103 of One More Christmas at the Castle
We took the path that led behind the little temple and joined the wider track up to the house.
It was sheltered by the trees and very peaceful. A wood pigeon was making its soft, repetitive cooing, but it was not the call of the wild that was drawing me on, now, but the call of the kitchen.
After everyone had had time to recover from their hearty Sunday dinner, Xan set up the projector and screen in the drawing room and arranged the sofa and chairs in front of it.
When all was ready, he came to tell us, and Henry and I slipped in and took discreet chairs at the back of the room. Sabine and Nancy sat together on a small buttoned velvet sofa and Lucy in a large armchair, which gave the impression of having swallowed her up whole, since all that could be seen of her was her dangling feet.
When everyone was comfortably settled, Henry turned the lights off at a nod from Xan and the film began to unroll, in the slightly flickering manner of its kind.
‘Oh, it’s a picnic at our favourite cove!’ Sabine cried. ‘Do you remember it, Nancy? We took you and Stephen there more than once, when you were holidaying with us. You could only reach it from the sea, so we sailed there in a flotilla of small boats.’
‘I do remember. It had a perfect little half-moon beach andthe cliffs surrounding it made it seem very private,’ Nancy agreed. ‘See, some of the men are lighting a fire to make tea for the picnic, just as we did.’
There was quite a large group of people, but it was easy to spot the tall, broad and golden-haired Asa Powys and a young, bronzed and glowing Sabine having fun among their friends.
Mrs Powys murmured a few of their names – some of them those of artist and writers I’d heard of.
‘And there’s Tommy and Rose,’ Xan said, pointing his grandparents out. He’d clearly inherited his dark good looks from his grandfather.
The film paused and then began again on a different scene, though some of the people in it were the same. This time, they were wearing more clothes and wandering around in some ruins. A few of them were seated on fallen masonry, near open picnic baskets.
‘You’d think our lives had been one long picnic!’ Sabine said, amused, then leaned forward for a better look. ‘That’s the ruins of a small temple in the hills, just above the spot offshore where we discovered the remains of a drowned town. Asa was convinced that the temple must be part of a larger complex, linked to the vanished port.’
‘And as soon as he began to excavate there later, he was proved quite right, wasn’t he?’ said Nancy.
‘Yes, of course, it was a great discovery,’ Sabine agreed, though the brightness had gone out of her voice a little. ‘Naturally, it never quite compensated for having to give up underwater archaeology – his first passion – but he devoted himself to his work there.’
‘I’m looking forward to hearing more about those years and the fantastic discoveries he made at the site,’ said Xan. ‘I’ve already read his book and articles about it.’
More of the figures on the screen were gathering round the picnic baskets now and seemed to be unpacking wine bottles and food on to rugs laid down nearby. A young boy drove a herd of goats past them, glancing curiously at the group as he went.
Then the picture flickered once more and the scene vanished into whiteness.
‘That’s as far as I got when I checked it and seems to be the end,’ Xan began, then broke off as a new scene unfolded. ‘No, wait, I think there might be a little more I missed.’
‘Not another picnic, I hope,’ said Sabine.
‘It doesn’t look like it. In fact, isn’t that the garden of your villa, Sabine?’ asked Nancy. ‘There seems to be a party going on!’
‘You’re right,’ said Mrs Powys, ‘and since everyone is in fancy dress, it must be one of Asa’s birthday celebrations.’
By now, I recognized many of the guests, though there were several new faces among the groups of people standing in the shade of what I thought might be olive trees. Most wore some kind of fancy dress, mainly the sort of toga that anyone can produce from a white bedsheet.
When the camera panned right around, though, it showed the unmistakably tall and elegant figure of Sabine, attired in an Ancient Egyptian-style robe of gauzy fabric, with a tall headdress. She was laughing and talking to the friends around her, but her gaze seemed to be fixed on something – or someone – beyond them. Then the camera moved on and there was Asa, bronzed, bare-chested and splendid, wearing a short white kilted garment and a striped and folded headdress, so that he looked as if he’d stepped straight out of an Egyptian tomb painting.
He was – as I suspected he always had been – the centre of a large group … and standing very close to him, with her back to the camera, her hand on his arm and her head tilted back soshe could look up into his face, was the small, slender figure of a woman.
Asa Powys bent his head down to speak to her and Sabine suddenly cried, with shocking harshness: ‘Turn it off! Turn it offnow!’
Xan did so instantly and Henry got up and put on the lights.
Nancy said calmly, ‘That was your half-sister, Faye, wasn’t it, Sabine? The only time she came out to stay with you on Corfu.’
‘And look howthatended,’ Sabine said with extreme bitterness. ‘She destroyed everything we’d worked to achieve.’
‘Noteverything, darling, don’t exaggerate,’ Nancy said. ‘You rebuilt your lives a little differently afterwards, that’s all.’
I’d forgotten Lucy was there until her small face, with its inquisitive, pink-tipped nose, appeared around the side of the chair. She seemed oblivious to any underlying tensions.
