Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
‘Why the sudden rush to text Harriet?’ Frank asks.
‘No rush!’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Huh?’
‘Running away to your safe space.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. And can you please stop analysing me? If I needed a shrink, I’d probably pick one with better credentials than you.’ As if to prove a point, I drop my phone back down onto the table with a little more gusto than I intended.
But now is actually not the time to text her. Not while I’m feeling so unhinged by all this conversation. He is watching me like shrinks do – or at least the ones I’ve seen in movies – when they just want you to keep blowing off steam so they can make their money really, really easily.
‘If I don’t call her now, can we please talk about something else?’ I say.
‘Must we?’ He cocks his head. ‘I rather like talking about how your entire life has felt like a compromise.’
‘Thanks a heap. I feel so much better now… Let’s pay up and go and find accommodation,’ I say, pulling my bag onto my lap and diving in there almost headfirst in search of my wallet.
The hotel we decide on is an iced white confection that clings to the caldera, all several luscious layers of it unfurling to a hot tub and a small infinity pool that consorts with the sea and the sky. When I hear the price of the rooms, I almost have a heart attack. Oh well! One more Herculean charge on the credit card, but in for a penny, in for a pound, as my mother used to say. I am wiped out suddenly after all that soul-searching and stuffing my face, so tell him I’d like to take an hour’s rest and we can reconvene later and decide what we’re going to do about tracking our kids down.
The room is sparsely furnished in blond wood and marble. Everything is white. White walls. White rugs. Simple white louvre blinds dress two dramatic floor-to-ceiling windows that give onto a swathe of sapphire sea. The bed is a pouffy, pillowy white perfection. All of it conspires to be purely hypnotic which makes me nap longer than I intended. When I next check my phone it’s almost five-thirty. I text him and we agree to meet downstairs.
When I go out onto the pool deck, he is gazing out at the water. He has his jacket on, because it’s chilly, and his hands in his jeans’ pockets. I register every nuance of him standing there in the fading light, hard, almost pivotally, in the pit of my stomach. Then he turns, looks me over appreciatively, and smiles.
‘Should I text her now, you think?’ I stroke a skinny tortoiseshell cat who comes to greet me, abandoning her perch at the bottom of an enormous flight of steps that leads all the way back up to the street. ‘I was thinking I’ll just say, Harriet, look, we have a gift to deliver to your hotel if you will please send me your address. Then… Ta-da! The gift will be us.’
Frank seems to mull this over. ‘That’s a pretty big thing to spring on her – on them. I mean, what if they’re seriously pissed?’
The cat meanders around my ankles, tickling me. ‘I hadn’t really thought of that possible downside,’ I say.
‘Why don’t we take a walk around town for now? We have to eat. You never know, we might bump into them.’ He pulls his jacket tighter around his body. ‘You know, given it’s freezing, and we are probably the only four tourists on the whole goddamned island.’
‘Because that won’t be less of a shock? Bumping into them on a deserted Greek island when they think we’re four thousand miles away? No surprise at all there!’
He titters. ‘I think this clearly illustrates we haven’t got a clue what we’re doing. So let’s just walk and not care. For now.’
‘So what’s happened to your marriage?’ Frank says, when we have climbed the steps and are back onto the street. ‘You kind of have to tell me now.’ He is a little breathless. ‘Was it to do with the absent fireworks?’
‘Oh, we’re not back to this?’ The sky is now striated with red and orange. Below us, patio lights start popping on. I stop and catch my own breath for a beat and watch a ferry on its way to Crete that barely appears to be moving. ‘Nope. Not the fireworks. As you get older, those things matter less anyway.’
‘I disagree. They matter more.’
I tug my trench coat around me, glad I put on my merino wool hoodie for an extra layer. ‘They burn out in most relationships.’
‘But who wants most relationships? And what about the ones where they never do?’
‘If we can stick to the facts and do less of the philosophising, I might tell you,’ I say. We randomly head uphill towards Imerovigli because it’s closer than walking into Fira. The streets are eerily deserted, except for the odd tourist in a hoodie or windbreaker.
I tell him about the aeroplane. When I get to the part about how the text pops up, then seconds later the plane starts barrelling down the runway and then we’re stuck there for the next twelve hours, he says, ‘Jesus Christ. I mean… Wow. How did that go?’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘I’ve had less turbulent flights.’
We stop and look at one another. The wind catches my hair and I try to hold it down with one hand. ‘Somewhere over Iceland he finally admitted he’d had an “inappropriate flirtation”, but that was all it was. Harriet said, “Well then, if nothing happened, let’s just check his phone.”’
‘Oh no!’ he grimaces. ‘I think I can see where this is going.’
My eyes are watery from the wind.
‘At first he was, like, “Fine! Here it is!” But then when I was, like, “Okay. Give it here, then…” he was all, “I’m not going to let you see it on principle. Not because there actually is anything to see. I just have this massive problem with you not believing me.”’
‘So you tried to pry it out of his hands?’
‘Close. Things got a little heated. The flight attendants said that if I continued to behave in an unruly manner I’d be taken to another section of the plane and “restrained”.’
He gasps. ‘They were going to handcuff you?’
‘Stuff my mouth with British Airways socks? I wouldn’t have ruled it out.’
We get to the top of the hill and look back at the view: Santorini preparing to sleep. Inky sea merging with inky sky. The cliffside structures, a stark white by day, are softened in the glow of the warm light of living rooms. I realise I am recounting this story like it’s someone else’s. ‘What got me was the flight attendant was so in sympathy with him. I remember him apologising for my behaviour – to a stranger. But he had no intention of apologising to his wife about his own.’
‘I am, like, totally hating this asshole. Just so you know.’
I smile, a mirthless stretch of a few taut muscles. ‘The worst part of all this was that Harriet was caught in the middle. She’d always looked up to her father, and then she learned he was the very cliché she despised.’ Like I once did with my own dad.
I tell him that’s why she wants nothing to do with him, and why she wouldn’t want him here.
‘That’s brutal,’ he says, ‘and understandable too.’
We decide to search for a bar or a place to grab a snack, but nothing seems to be open and clomping around in the wind is starting to wear.
‘It’s funny because he’d mentioned her a few times. Dagmara thinks. Dagmara says… I remember thinking who died and made this Dagmara person the Oracle?’
‘Didn’t you ask him about her?’
‘No. I truly just thought she was a colleague.’
‘Moira, who never thinks the worst of people.’
I tell him about my conversation with Nat.
‘So this makes you believe him? Because your friend said you should?’ He scowls. ‘I’m not sure it was her place to weigh in on whether he was being honest. Seems that was a bit above her pay grade.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I respect her opinion on most things, but I think she’s wrong on this.’
I realise I’m sharing all this with him simply because I just like telling him things.
‘So that’s why you decided to stay in Santa Monica,’ he says. ‘Not because you couldn’t bear to be apart from your daughter. But because you couldn’t face going back to him.’
I nod.
‘And now?’
‘And now I don’t know,’ I say.
We come to a small, cobbled square, not much here except for a giant tree, a bench in the centre, and two tavernas that look very ‘local’. The one with the more visible windows seems to have a lot of people in it, as though the few tourists around have all made their way to the same sign of life. ‘Do you think they could be in one of these?’ I ask him. ‘Oh God, they might be.’ I press a hand to my stomach.
‘Don’t care. I’m heading in. I’m freezing.’ He strides to the more obviously populated one.
I grab his arm. ‘You can’t barge right in. What if they’re in there?’
‘Then I’m the surprise that pops out of the pudding,’ he says.
‘Let me look in the window first.’ I scoot ahead of him.
‘Look, if you want to case the joint and bring in the sniffer dogs, be my guest, but I’m going in before I perish to death.’
I walk past the window exactly how I used to do it in central London. In those posh parts of Kensington and Chelsea where rich homeowners seem to deliberately leave their lights on with no window coverings.
Walk straight on with purpose.
Slight turn of the head.
Quick dekko out the corner of your eye.
Return focus to the path ahead.
‘Not there!’ I tell him. ‘Let’s try this one.’
Unfortunately, this one’s windows are eighty per cent covered with net curtain, leaving only a sliver up top to see in. There’s a giant tree almost concealing the door. If I am to see in there, I need to be seven feet tall.
Unless…
I quickly take off my trench coat, stuff it into his hands.
‘Can you give me a little nudge?’ I ask, when I’ve managed to climb one tree-limb up – and one human limb – and am running out of nerve. I knew I wore jeans and running shoes for a reason.
He is standing at the bottom. My bottom.
‘If you’re not strong enough to get into the tree, you’re not strong enough to stay in the tree,’ he says. He goes on standing there staring at my ass. I know this because I am looking back, and his head is almost up my…
‘Thanks again for everything!’ I try not to look down again because if I did fall I’d be right on top of him – not like that would be a first. ‘I always climbed trees as a child.’ I try another leg up, try to avoid my merino wool hoodie snagging on a branch. ‘No kid is allowed to do this any more. I tell you, it’s a dying art.’ I am panting.
‘There is indeed a lot of artistry to this,’ he says.
I glance back again and he’s still gazing up between my legs and smiling.
I can finally see past the damned curtain. Cosy couples. A few families. Tables of saganaki cheese going up in flames. A long one full of raucous Germans who sound like they’re at a football match. I hang on for grim life.
‘No Harriet and Aiden,’ I say.
Now I just have to get back down.
‘Might be easier to just call them,’ I tell him, when I land back on the ground with an ungainly thwack that I feel in my kneecaps. ‘Less damaging to good cardigans.’ I show him the enormous hole in my hoodie and pout.
‘Maybe after we eat, and warm up?’
I cock my head and pretend to give this thought. ‘Er… no. We can’t keep putting this off.’ I huddle beside him under the canopy of my mate the tree, conscious of him watching me tinker with my phone. ‘It’s why we came here,’ I tease. ‘Remember?’
I dial her number.
‘Hmm… That’s odd. Her phone’s off.’ I frown. ‘Harriet’s phone is never off. Why don’t you try Aiden?’
‘I thought you were the one who wanted to break the big news?’
‘Ah yes. Forgot that part.’
He smiles. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘they’ve probably got better things on their mind than food. My guess is they’re probably entirely unfindable right now. Unless you’re a bed bug.’
‘Please. Not that again.’
‘It’s what I’d be doing if I was young, here and in love. Wouldn’t you?’
I cock my head and study him. ‘Frank. I hate to break the bad news, but we will never again be young, in Santorini and in love. How’s that for a sobering thought?’
He casts a languid gaze across my face, a tender quality suddenly lighting his eyes. ‘Two out of three wouldn’t be bad, Moira Fitzgerald.’