Free The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop Page B

of them big names in Athens and Thessaloniki, and flew others in especially from Paris or London. Savvas continually studied the accounts, and even with the plane fares, he could see that Markos managed to make a large profit. Membership of the club became highly coveted, and after a few months its cost soared. The drinks were astronomically expensive, but for vintage whiskies, nobody cared what they paid.
    For the first time in Cyprus, the high prices became desirable in themselves, making the Clair de Lune a place to be seen. People began to queue for entry to a club where cost and status were synonymous and where spending an evening on one of its purple sofas made them part of an elite, the crème de la crème. To people who could afford luxury, the proximity of modest one-storey homes where families still ground their own wheat, grew vegetables and milked their goats was irrelevant. Inhabitants of these parallel worlds had their own reasons to be content.
    ‘This is what the jet set wants,’ said Markos, when even Savvas balked at the new price list that the club manager was proposing. ‘They don’t want things to be cheap.’
    ‘But spirits only cost two shillings at the bar in town,’ fretted Savvas.
    ‘Trust me,’ said Markos.
    When film stars began to frequent the place, and soon afterwards a famous Hollywood couple spent two consecutive nights there, Markos knew he had proved his worth on every level. From now on, in his boss’s eyes, he could do no wrong.
    Business in the rest of the hotel had continued to grow. In late September, when the hotel was booked to capacity for the first time, with all five hundred bedrooms fully occupied, Savvas Papacosta announced that dinner would now be held in the ballroom.
    With a mosaic floor and slender, elegant pillars at the entrance, the ballroom, like the reception area, had been modelled on the recent discoveries at Salamis. Excavations had revealed tombs filled with treasures from thousands of years before. The architectural and decorative motifs of the once thriving town of Constantia, as Salamis had been known in Roman times, had inspired Aphroditi, and she had taken many of the details and applied them to the grandest space in the hotel.
    The ballroom was circular, to reflect the shape of the ancient amphitheatre. Around the edge of the room were a dozen female figures. The limestone originals were no more than thirty centimetres high, but Aphroditi had commissioned hers to be larger than life-size, so that they appeared to be holding up the ceiling, like the caryatids at the Erechtheion in Athens. Each of them held a flower in their right hand. She had resisted the temptation to paint them in the bright colours that would have been used on the originals. She wanted the colour to emanate from the walls, where she had designed a repeated pattern of a woman’s face with garlands of foliage, in gold and green. The face had been faithfully produced to mirror the original in the Salamis gymnasium, and yet it looked eerily like Aphroditi herself. Huge eyes gazed from all around the room.
    She had even commissioned copies of a chair that had been found in one of the tombs in the ancient city. The excavated fragments were made of ivory, and the cool, smooth texture of the original material had been reproduced in wood. With meticulous attention to detail, an artisan had spent two years on the pair of chairs, reproducing the ornate plaques that embellished them. Everyone marvelled at the carvings of the sphinx and of the lotus flowers. An upholsterer had been given free rein with the padded seats and had chosen gold silk to match the gilding that had been applied to the sphinx’s crown. The chairs were sat on by Aphroditi and Savvas at the top table. They seemed like royalty on their thrones.
    The two pieces of ornamental furniture were not the only
objets
that had kept the best artisans of Nicosia busy. The gossamer curtains that hung from the very high ceiling had been