Chapter Twelve
They did not stay in the flat, though they couldn’t bear to part with it. They moved instead into Thanasis’s beautiful house on Hampstead Heath, which reminded Saskia of a museum.
“Maybe a mausoleum,” she murmured, when he walked her through the marble halls and echoing rooms.
“Something like that,” he agreed, and then he showed her into a particular room that was all books and art, all arranged around one enormous canvas on the far wall.
Saskia recognized it at once. “It’s that painting,” she breathed, her hands over her mouth again, this time because she was laughing. “You went out and got that dreadful painting.”
He came and stood beside her, pulling her into his side because they liked everything better when they fit together like puzzle pieces.
“It is dreadful,” he agreed, gazing up at it. “I bought it shortly after we met, when that exhibition ended. It has not improved in all this time.” He smiled down at her. “But I find I cannot bear to part with it.”
She tipped her head back. “You’ve had it all this time.”
“You might not have been here,” he told her, his smile fading while the intensity in his gaze grew. “But there is no place I have ever been that you are not, fos mou.”
They married quietly and without fanfare, and spent that first night back in the flat, as if to finally christen the place with their legal union. As if that was the only way they could leave those rooms in Chelsea that had seen the whole span of their relationship.
Neither one of them wanted to get rid of the place even then, but they couldn’t go back after that. They cleared it out of everything that was theirs and leased it out.
Then they set about making his mausoleum into their home.
And every time the sun was out over London, Saskia would find a reason to sit with him in the mornings in their well-tested bed, gaze out at the sunrise, and think about this life she’d almost lost twice.
She only wished that Ffion was here to see it.
But I think that you see just fine from where you are, she would think. And I hope you know that I’m right where I belong.
Thanasis turned a little-used greenhouse and shed into an art studio, and insisted that she use it. Saskia felt like a fraud, and expected that she would waste her time the way she had when she was on the island.
But instead, she found that when she picked up a brush or a pencil, the lines seemed to form of their own accord.
Maybe, all along, her interest in art had been an attempt to use beauty to find safety. And now she was safe, and her life was more beautiful by the day, and at last she could let the art in her free.
It was a magical, creative, fertile time. In more ways than one.
They had their first baby nine months from that first night back together in the flat. She was a chubby, smiley girl, filled with life and love, and they named her Selwen Ffion, because it only seemed right.
“And because,” Saskia whispered to her daughter in the middle of the night, as the baby latched on and her husband lay beside her with his hand on her back so she wouldn’t be alone, “I think Selwen deserves a better life. And you’ll give her one, my darling girl. I know you will.”
If there was nonsense in the tabloids about them, neither one of them cared. Every now and again, one of Thanasis’s half siblings would turn up to cause trouble, but Saskia insisted that they treat them as if they didn’t expect that trouble at all.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be alone in the world,” she would remind her husband. “Not really alone. You might not have understood your mother, but at least you had her.”
As she made his half siblings food. As she let them tell her their wild stories. As they proved themselves incapable of living up to the myths they tried to tell about who they were, time and again.
She would smile at Thanasis and tell him it was all for the best. It was all okay.
“The very least we can do is give them a soft place to land, for a while. Because you know they won’t get that from Pavlos.”
He was barely worth thinking about. They rarely did. Yet when he died, he clearly thought he’d got in the last laugh, because he had not disinherited Thanasis at all. He’d left it all to him—but had made certain to call Saskia the tart in his last will and testament.
“Charming as ever,” Saskia said, and laughed so much that she thought she might actually pull something.
Thanasis did not bother to go back to the villa and sort things out, as Pavlos must have assumed he would do. He left it all to the others and let them sort it out themselves.
“It’s your birthright,” Saskia said. “Surely you must want something.”
“I have everything I want,” Thanasis told her.
“You have a right tart, apparently,” she said, still laughing.
But he crawled into bed beside her, after she put the new baby down, and showed her precisely how he felt about the things he wanted—and how he preferred to receive them.
They got to four perfect children, two girls and two boys. And they had a very serious discussion about whether or not they should stop.
“I wanted a family and a home,” she told him. “You have given me all of that and more. They have expanded my heart more than I ever imagined possible.”
“And you have taught me, every day, that the only way to love is bigger,” Thanasis replied. “Bigger. Wider. So that these children never have any idea that there’s any other way.”
“I love you so much,” she whispered. “I can’t believe that it’s possible, but I love you more each day.”
The passion between them only grew. Everyone said it would go the other way. Everyone promised them that it would fade, but it didn’t. It grew and grew, becoming only more intimate, and more beautiful as they went.
Thanasis only expanded his business. Saskia showed her art in London galleries, and when she sold her first piece, they framed a print of it and put it next to that modern scribble, for posterity.
That was how they ended up with the fifth baby, then the sixth.
It was all that beautiful living. It was all that love.
And so it was after their seventh, with the house run over with all of that noise and light, laughter and feelings—a mausoleum no more—that they finally decided that they’d reached capacity.
“I love you pregnant,” Thanasis told her. “But maybe, going forward, we can find other ways to enjoy that perfect body of yours.”
And he was true to his word.
The children were not always happy, which was a good thing.
Happiness alone meant little. Happiness tested led to joy.
And so they had their joys, and their deep pains, but they also had their parents.
Their champions in all things, their fiercest advocates, and the first to call them out when they were wrong.
But not the way Thanasis’s father had done in his time.
They started with love. They led from love.
Love, in the end, was who they were.
And late in their life, when they were both old and gray and their children talked around them as if they’d become the children themselves, they still held hands.
Like they were new.