Elaine Lennon is a film historian. She is the author of ChinaTowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne and is widely published in international film journals.

She has a background in television production and film financing and was a lecturer for a decade in film studies and screenwriting at the School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.

Year-Round Tan

By Elaine Lennon

“Take me to your favourite place in Vienna,” she said.

They re-enacted scenes from the film they had found they had in common and stared at the Kunst, Schiele and Kokoschka paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

“I’d like to do that with you,” he whispered to her as they held hands in front of The Kiss.

And he did.

Afterward they saw an opera, went to Mass in St Stephen’s Cathedral and wandered around the Schönbrunn. It warmed up and they went to the Prater where she squealed in delighted terror at the top of the Ferris wheel.

“Do you know that film?” he asked her. “With Orson Welles?”

She had to confess that she didn’t. She promised to look it up when she got home, which was the following day.

Orly picked up the telephone on the fifth ring just as he had instructed.

“That’s right,” he said at the other end. “Five is just the ticket. Now listen.”

Three hours later she was at the boarding gate at Dublin Airport. She had gone to the airline desk he’d directed and got her pass.

They had met at a nightclub, the kind where love stories begin. He was wearing a spectacularly elegant grey suit, a shirt without a tie and his hair was freshly cut. Short back and sides. Simple.

The air outside Athens Airport was stifling. Heat hit her like a wall. He held open the door for her.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said as the grey Audi RS6 purred along the road to the city.

The apartment was beautifully appointed but weirdly impersonal.

There wasn’t a sign that anyone actually lived here. No newspapers, books, reading material. No documents of any kind. No letters on the hallway table which was windowless and dimly lit by some kind of electronically operated sconce.

“It reacts to movement,” he said as he saw her stop to examine it.

“What normal people call a light switch,” she said, wondering where the camera was hidden.

“I don’t want you filming me,” she said, putting her airline bag on the floor.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “This isn’t Candid Camera.”

At dinner in the Hilton area in in one of the most discreet restaurants she had ever seen, they sat facing the entrance. She observed the way he held his glass, at an angle slightly inclined to the table.

“Why’d do you do that?” she asked. She nodded at his hand, the glass tilting with wine askew.

“I’m testing gravity,” he said.

“You need more jewellery,” she said. He wore none. No signet ring, no necklace. Just a plain-looking watch with a silver band.

“You look good with a tan,” he said. “You should keep it up.” He reached across the table and using his index finger he tapped the freckles on her nose.

“I can think of something better to do with that,” she said softly. She felt more sultry and suggestive in the heat of the night.

It was scorching when she woke up.

“Lookit here,” he said, sucking on a Marlboro. “I have things to do today. I’ll be back later.”

“Why on earth did you bring me here if you didn’t want me to spend time with you?” she asked. She was aware her voice was expressing the indignation she had wished to suppress. She sounded like one of those ghastly children she was obliged to teach for nine months of the year.

He smiled. Indulgently. “I just thought you might like to go clothes shopping. We’re in a great area for boutiques and frankly they’re not my thing.”

He handed her a wad of cash. She looked at her hand and found a bundle of notes that added up to more than she earned in a month.

“I have something to do. When I get back I hope you’ll be wearing something lovely.” He patted her on the wrist and kissed her on the lips and she found herself standing in a department store on her own coveting a ridiculous bikini and embroidered shawl. And a handbag. Emboldened by the bills in her purse, she bought them all.

She didn’t have a clue what he was up to. She didn’t want to. If she could draw a map on the places she’d met him over the previous six weeks it would make a pretty picture of Europe’s loveliest locations and a few in North Africa too. Days of long lazy lunches and nights of spectacular passion punctuated with abrupt partings, monosyllabic phonecalls, mysterious messages.

When she strolled up to the apartment building with its oversized blooms in brick planters she looked up and tried to identify his flat. She squinted and thought she saw a hand removing a plant pot from the railing where it had perched precariously. She met him in the elevator and he smothered her with kisses and she forgot all about it.

At the airport news stand as she rushed for her flight the headlines read Defence Minister Assassinated by Sniper’s Bullet.

“There’s a ticket at the KLM desk,” he said one day in his usual thirty-second message.

She duly went to Dublin Airport. She was a regular customer. The staff had begun to recognize her. Out of the corner of her eye as she bought a classic airport novel she saw a newspaper headline at the shop in Departures: Woman Murdered in Own Home.

She settled into reading on the two-hour flight and found a message telling her to check in at the Ibis Airport Hotel.

He met her there an hour later and they celebrated their reunion in their customary fashion. Three hours later they checked in and flew to Morocco on the next flight.

The clicking of cicadas woke her up.

He was speaking very quietly on the phone on the other side of the bed. Her movement made him turn to her but only after he had hung up.

“Who was that?” she asked sleepily. Her eyes were still shut.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll be back in an hour and we can have breakfast.”

He draped the sheet over her naked form and she waited until the door shut. Five minutes later she started to look around the plain furnishings. He had taken one travel bag, barely a bag, more of a briefcase.

She was looking at them when he returned.

“Put on some clothes and let’s go eat,” he said.

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“What do you see?” he responded.

“Passports. For how many different countries?”

She had laid them out in the shape of a fan on the counterpane of the bed.

“Why does it matter?”

“You tell me.”

“What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” he said. “Or me. Leave it alone.”

She showered and dressed in a skimpy pair of shorts and billowing white cheesecloth blouse, her face framed in Oliver Peoples sunglasses.

“Will you come to Spain?” he asked her.

And they flew to Malaga, where they danced in the Tocata Bar and he scooped her in his arms and told her she was the greatest he had ever had. She wasn’t sure if it was a marriage proposal.

They walked in silence along the Parque and stopped at a brasserie for lunch. When she stepped in front of him to admire an exotic flower engulfing the a huge terracotta pot, he grabbed her by the arm and said urgently, “Never do that again.”

She blinked.

“Don’t walk ahead of me. Stay with me. Right beside me. Never get in my line of vision.”

Steam rose from a bowl of mussels and he washed his meal down with an Estrella. The cacophony of passing traffic with its rolling tyres and faulty transmissions was annoying but partly camouflaged by enormous floral displays complementing the huge trees bending over the esplanade. Without warning he jumped up from where they were sitting.

He was sprinting.

She was watching a flick book as he appeared and reappeared between gigantic flowers, a staccato action figure.

Her attention was attracted by a car speeding by and a thirtysomething woman screaming and she watched as he dashed to save the woman’s pushchair from the out of control driver, whose erratic steering had led a Marbella to zigzag onto the zebra crossing,

It was the most heroic thing she had ever seen. It was the first time outside the bedroom he had done something that wasn’t deathly dull.

She ran after him.

In the melee of people rushing this way and that and a policeman blowing a whistle to try to control the crowd she blinked and looked around, left and right, across the street, up and down the pavement, amid the parked cars, the tables at the front of a nearby café, the shopfronts, nothing, no sign of him. She couldn’t see him. She pulled her shopping basket close and adjusted her sunglasses and breathed heavily. She bit her lip. She bit it so hard a small spot of blood dotted her gloss.

There was no sign of him. The woman whose small child had been saved stood looking around, alternately sobbing, cuddling the little girl and looking around calling, presumably, “Where is the man who saved my baby?” People fussed and went away, the emergency over, the crisis solved.

She stood in the dispersing crowd.

She didn’t move.

She waited.

She was alone.

Time stopped.

After what felt like a lifetime, she returned to the brasserie to discover another couple sitting at their table. She approached Reception to pay the bill only to find it had been settled.

She stood at the exit, looking across the road to the sea and the breezeless beach and the uniformly-coloured umbrellas that stood like soldiers to attention.

She returned to the hotel room where her belongings were packed neatly in her weekend case on the suitcase stand.

It wasn’t until she returned home and finally got around to opening it a week later that she found a huge diamond and emerald ring wrapped in her knickers.

She never saw him again.

She had to admit to herself that in so many ways he was the most boring individual she had ever been involved with but to be fair she didn’t know an awful lot about him and what she did couldn’t be spoken of in polite company. He had a very healthy disposable income, good if somehow indescribable looks, expensive if subtle clothes and some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder regarding paper. He never lost his temper. She knew nobody belonging to him. She had no idea where he came from. His accent was untraceable. She hadn’t the faintest idea what he did for a living. And she didn’t know his real name. Did it matter? It was over. He’d obviously got other fish to fry and was clearly not interested in marrying her or living in Ireland or doing anything normal. The ring was a payoff. She could live comfortably on the proceeds for years. But she hid it away. She never wore it. She reminded herself of his mantra, Less is more.

Three months later she got engaged to a secondary school teacher who was into all kinds of kink.

She led a life of unremitting boredom for years on end but she remembered what he had said to her – that he liked how she looked with a tan – and kept it up with weekly sunbeds until there were too many tedious health warnings and now she made do with fake creams and potions, liberally applied, all over, all year round.

When data access was more advanced, she fancied she found out something about him, quite accidentally, when an old murder case was being investigated. Some journo figured out a link between two men whose wives had been killed in odd circumstances. One had been shot from a distance, another closer up, in homes sixty miles apart on the east coast. Five years had separated the deaths. It transpired that their husbands had been in the Army together as cadets and both were friends with a third man, an unnamed colleague, a shadowy figure who was rumoured to live abroad and who was now a person of interest, decades after the fact.

They were the three musketeers – crack shots all – but he was on another level entirely, apparently, a legendary sharpshooter whose talents would have attracted a high payday in the black ops world. Ivan. Francie. The men’s names cropped up in cold cases and court cases and a pattern emerged somewhere in the crevices of her brain where her youthful dalliance had been suppressed, like all her pre-marital relationships. The third man.

She wondered what he would look like these days. A character from a movie. Not John Wick, he would never get married and freak out over a dog. Perhaps Alain Delon in Le Samouraï. A sexy mournful killer in a trench coat. Or, more likely, Tom Cruise in Collateral: a dapper greying gent in a sharp suit with a tragic ending on the horizon.

The journalist in question died in a car crash on the M1 a week later. It was all very unfortunate, apparently. A blowout. She shuddered.

“God, I’m lucky,” she told herself. Her memories could feed her need for mystery and history, a backstory that fascinated even her at this point in her life, about to retire, widowed for a few months and happily child-free. She picked her way through a box of old photographs and was amused and a little surprised when she saw how attractive she had been back in the day when she sported a Purdey haircut, gold hoops and short jackets over tight jeans and cowboy boots. She was cool. Not quite a fashion victim but an arbiter of a certain kind of sullenly expressive individuality that transcended the times she lived in. Like Betty Catroux or Maria Schneider. Or so she imagined. She suddenly saw what he had seen in her that night in Bojangles. She hadn’t realized it at the time. She resembled one of the women in the Baader- Meinhof Gang but with shorter hair.

On a solo trip to Trieste after 9/11 she’d been wearing heavy black Roberto Cavalli sunglasses she’d picked up at a local optician’s and was hauled over the coals by security when one Sunday morning waiting for the Ryanair return flight to Stansted they seized on her in the tiny airport. The fuss had been instigated by a woman who looked like a bitesize Rosa Kleb. They believed they had caught a terrorist. She thought it was pretty funny at the time. They were bored, she was teed off but now it made her think.

She leafed through a magazine and stopped on an advertisement that offered a two-week long guided tour around Greek historical locations. Delphi. Poseidon. Cape Sounion. It promised three days and nights in Athens where she could visit the Acropolis and the Parthenon. Her mind drifted to that long ago summer and she found herself wondering if the apartment building was still intact. She found the address in the tattered notebook she’d kept since the mid-Eighties and looked it up online. There it was. A more recent photograph of the building, which looked like it had a different façade but it was definitely the correct address. There were trees reaching up to the second and third floors that were just beginning to grow when she had stayed there. Then it was blank and characterless. Now it had a sheen of anonymous wealth.

She used the cursor to move up the levels, to approximately where his home would have been. She looked at the image on the balcony, barely detectable. There it was. The thing she had noticed that she had forgotten. A flowerpot with a flag. What was that? All the President’s Men. Thirty years later she was putting it together. When was this photograph taken? She tried to uncover the date using whatever tech skills she had learned at a recent computer class. It was less than a year old. Was it possible? Was he still there?

There are no photos of them together. She possessed just one image of him, snatched on a disposable camera, one he knew nothing about. They were in that market in Marrakesh. He is in the distance, talking quietly to a man wearing a crumpled linen suit and Panama hat, a comedy Englishman abroad. He is just a blur. It was as if he had never existed, a shadow, a ghost.

An unmarked envelope arrived in the letterbox with a ticket to Athens.

What could anyone do now? Cry ‘havoc!’?