Elektra(83)

‘Why now?’ I choke out at last. ‘I had given up hope, I had thought . . . why are you here?’

‘I’m ready,’ he says. He glances towards his friend. ‘Is there somewhere we can go, somewhere safe that you know? Somewhere we can talk?’

‘You can come to my home,’ I tell him. ‘But—’

He looks questioningly at me. ‘Yes?’

I straighten my shoulders, willing my body not to betray my embarrassment. ‘It’s not the kind of place you’re used to. It’s no palace.’

‘It’s where my sister lives.’ His voice is soft. ‘There’s nowhere I would rather visit.’

Still, I feel as though my body will cave in on itself when I bring them back to our miserable little dwelling. There is nothing in here to make it a home. It’s dark and shadowed, an unloved and unlovely thing. I’d thought myself past such worldly considerations, but when I look at it, I see it through their eyes. Georgios appears, and I want to shrivel even further into myself.

‘Elektra?’

‘It’s my brother,’ I announce. ‘Orestes has returned – at last.’

A shock of joy fills his face, his smile so genuine. It’s a long time since I’ve seen him look this way.

Orestes steps forward, almost shyly. I wonder if he’s trying to conceal his disgust for our home. But, just as Georgios seems truly happy to see him, Orestes looks sincerely pleased as well. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asks.

Georgios laughs, opening his arms wide. ‘Of course I do!’

And they’re clapping each other on the back, both of them beaming.

I hug my arms around myself. ‘Let’s go outside.’ I don’t want any of them to see how rattled I feel.

‘Of course,’ says Georgios. ‘Go and sit outside; it’s so dark in here. I’ll bring you food and drink, you must be tired from your journey.’ He ushers us all through the door, back into the sunshine, and he disappears. It’s my role, of course, to do this, to welcome the guests and feed them, but it’s just another thing I’ve got wrong, another courtesy I’ve forgotten.

‘I’m sorry I can’t welcome you in a better way,’ I say, as we find a shaded patch beneath the spreading branches of a great tree.

Orestes shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry that this is what’s happened to you.’

The blood rises in my cheeks and he catches himself, realising how it sounds.

‘I mean I’m sorry that you were driven out of your home,’ he says. ‘I’m sure you’re far happier here, with Georgios, than there with – with them. But it shouldn’t be this way. It shouldn’t be them, living in our father’s palace and us both exiled from it.’

I swallow. I’m not so much an exile as a runaway. She didn’t make me leave. But then, she made it impossible for me to stay – and for Orestes, too. I watch him, casting his gaze all around, taking it in. I feel almost shy of him, the man he’s become and all the experiences he’s had without me. For the first ten years of his life, I shaped his world. Now I don’t know him at all.

Georgios comes out, and I wince at the sight of the black, bitter bread he’s brought for them. Orestes, though, takes it as though he’s truly grateful. I wave it away, squirming a little. Everything is wrong. I’m sitting with them, my husband is serving us, I’m horribly aware of how unevenly I have hacked away at my hair. I wish I had been prepared. I wish I’d known the day he was coming. I wish I’d made myself hold on to my faith that he would.

Georgios, apparently far more at ease with my brother than I am, starts asking the questions I can’t manage. ‘Why have you come now? What prompted your journey?’

Orestes’ forehead creases. ‘I’ve lived comfortably in Phocis,’ he says. ‘The king was always kind to me, he treated me like his own son – like Pylades – so we have lived like brothers.’ He glances at his friend and takes a long breath. ‘But however welcoming and loving my home there was, I knew it was not my true home. It burned at me always, to think of Mycenae.’

My shoulders relax a little at this. ‘You didn’t forget us.’

His eyes widen. ‘How could I? Elektra, I thought about you every day, about what might be happening to you here. You were so brave, smuggling me away, saving me from what Aegisthus would have done. I knew I had to come back, that I had to repay you.’

I can feel tears brimming in my eyes. I lock my hands together, pressing my fingernails into the back of each hand. The sharp pain holds me fast to the moment, keeps me from crumbling.

Orestes shifts uncomfortably. ‘Still, I wrestled with the thought of coming back and what that would mean – what it would require of me.’

What they’re here to do is no easy task. Though, in this moment, I wonder if perhaps it could be. If I imagine channelling all my pain into the fall of an axe, if I think of Aegisthus beneath it, and Clytemnestra, too . . . I pause, horrified for a second to think perhaps this is what my mother felt when she saw her beacons blazing. Revolted by the thought of sharing any communion with her, however brief, I shake my head vehemently. ‘She drugged our father and imprisoned him in a net she wove.’ The words are bitter in my mouth. ‘Then she cut him down with an axe. Her own husband. The gods cannot tolerate a woman who does such a thing.’ I don’t add that she has lived a peaceful life since that day. Zeus didn’t hurl his thunderbolt at her; no god intervened. I have heard of them striding out into the fray and heat of battle in Troy to save the mortals that they loved and to take vengeance on those who offended them. I can’t understand how Clytemnestra has lived on, unmolested, so many years since her crime.