Читать книгу The Phoenix - Тилли Бэгшоу - Страница 9

Peter Hambrecht closed his eyes and lost himself in the music, his baton moving through the air with a grace and fluidity that set him apart from all the other great conductors. Hambrecht was the maestro, the undisputed best in the world. Every musician in London’s Royal Albert Hall felt privileged to be there that night. Because to be swept up in Peter Hambrecht’s genius, even for a moment, was to play to one’s full potential. To shine like a star.

‘Thank you, Maestro!’

‘Wonderful performance, Maestro!’

After the concert, Peter shook hands and signed autographs with his usual good grace. Then he put on his thick cashmere overcoat and walked the few short blocks back to his flat on Queensgate.

The next morning, he saw the picture, the same day it was published. An old friend emailed a copy.

‘I thought you’d want to see this,’ the friend wrote.

That struck Peter as odd. Who in their right mind would ‘want’ to see a picture of a drowned child? But of course, his friend was not referring to the child, only to the emblem burned into his flesh, as if he were an animal or a piece of meat. Peter winced, imagining the pain the poor little boy must have suffered.

Later, the friend telephoned. ‘Do you think Athena …?’

‘No.’

‘But Peter …’

‘Athena is dead.’

Peter Hambrecht had known Athena Demitris, as she was then, since they were children, and had loved her all his life. She was his best friend, his confidante, the sister he’d never had. In the tiny village of Organi where they grew up, blonde, blue-eyed Athena had been adored by everyone. Dark, shy, effeminate Peter, on the other hand, with his German father and his strange accent and the little piccolo he carried with him everywhere, was an outcast, a favorite target of the local bullies.

‘Hey, Sauerkraut!’ they would taunt him. ‘Why don’t you wear a tutu, so you can dance to that gay classical music you’re always playing? You want us to make you a tutu?’

‘He can borrow my sister’s.’

‘I don’t think he wants a tutu. I think he wants us to jam that flute up his ass. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Sauerkraut?’

Peter never rose to their jibes. But Athena always did, roaring to his defense time after time like a lioness, taking on his tormentors, alive with righteous fury on his behalf.

‘How can you let them talk to you like that? You have to fight back!’

‘Why?’ Peter would ask.

‘They’re calling you gay!’

‘I am gay,’ he shrugged.

‘No,’ Athena insisted, with tears in her eyes. ‘You aren’t gay, Peter. You love me.’

‘I do love you,’ he assured her.

‘More than anything?’

‘More than anything. Just not like that.’

Athena covered her ears with her hands. ‘No, no, no. Stop saying that. You’re confused. You’ll change your mind, you’ll see. When we’re married.’

Peter laughed. ‘It’s not my mind that needs to change, Athena!’

But there was no stopping her. There was never any stopping Athena. They married the year they both turned twenty and moved to a minuscule apartment in London, where Peter had won a place at the Royal College of Music.

‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’ Athena would demand, every morning, as he pored over sheet music in their tiny kitchenette.

Peter had to admit that he was, blissfully happy. The bullies were gone, he was playing his beloved music twenty-four hours a day, and he got to come home to his best friend, the most magical, gregarious, and most alive person he knew. Giving up sex with men seemed like a small price to pay.

He was even happier when, a few months later, Athena fell pregnant with their first child, a boy.

‘We’ll call him Apollo,’ she gushed, ‘after the god of music and beauty.’

And beautiful he had been, so impossibly beautiful, for the twenty short minutes of his life.

CHD the doctors said. Congenital Heart Disease. ‘He didn’t suffer,’ they told Athena. ‘Not at all.’

But three hearts broke that day, and Athena suffered enough for all of them. Later, Peter came to realize that the girl he had known all his life had died along with their son. That the Athena who came after was not the same as the one who had been before. Weeks of mute shock gave way to months of deep depression. Desperate to help, Peter tried everything: dragging Athena out to dinner and the park, taking her to doctors and therapists and hypnotists. He still remembered how delighted he was when Athena looked up at him one night, after another silent, miserable supper, and suggested that she take a trip back home to Greece.

‘There’s a place on Mykonos, my mother told me about it. It’s in a tiny village, between Kalafatis and Elia. They do “rest cures” and programs to help people through grief. It’s not cheap …’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Peter assured her. ‘Go. You must go. I’ll find the money, don’t worry about that.’

It was the first proactive thought Athena had had since Apollo’s death, and Peter grabbed at it with both hands like a drowning man. He couldn’t have known that that would be it. The end.

It was on that trip to Mykonos that Athena met Spyros Petridis. Or rather, it was there, at her lowest ebb, that she fell under his evil spell. She wrote to Peter twice, strange, formal letters that sounded nothing like her, explaining that she had met someone and fallen in love and that she wasn’t coming back. Peter was gay and she needed more than a platonic relationship. The marriage would never have survived long-term.

Only in the very last line she wrote did Peter hear what sounded like Athena’s true, authentic voice. ‘Every time I see your face, I see his,’ she wrote. ‘It’s more pain than I can bear.’

And so he’d let her go. That was thirty years ago now, and Peter Hambrecht had had other, great loves in his life, not to mention a wildly successful career. But he’d never forgotten Athena. Over the years, as her fame, and her husband’s infamy, grew, Peter had watched Athena on television like a child watching a cartoon character. Or rather, characters, plural. The gracious socialite and hostess. The saintly goodwill ambassador. The untouchable beauty, People magazine’s ‘sexiest woman alive’. None of these was the real Athena.

Rumors swirled about Spyros Petridis’s criminal dealings, his murder squads and his drug gangs and his people-smugglers. But nothing was ever proven. Athena’s dazzling light, her aura of goodness, her magic, seemed to blind people to the dark underbelly of her husband’s world.

Peter suspected the rumors were true. But he never blamed Athena, not then, not now. However she might have changed, he knew his Athena could never, ever be responsible for the death or suffering of a child. Even if she were alive, there was no way on earth that she would be connected to what happened to that poor little Libyan boy. No way.

But she wasn’t alive.

She was dead, burned alive alongside her monstrous husband.

May God rest her soul.