Chapter 19 Dominic
The thing about Priya was that she had a very good professional ear.
She could listen to someone talk for forty minutes about something they thought was about one thing and understand, before they did, that it was about something else entirely.
She'd explained this to me once — it was the skill that made her good at the job, the ability to hear the gap between the story someone was telling and the story they were in.
She was, I suspected, doing this the entire time I talked.
* * *
We went to the other kafeneion for this — the one in the back alley that was slightly shadier and where I was slightly less likely to be walking past anyone who knew me.
This felt like the appropriate venue for a conversation I had been not having for three months, and I don't mean not having with Priya — she knew the outline, we'd been over the shape of it in a Dalston wine bar before I left, and she'd said I'm glad you told me with the steady certainty of someone filing information they'd suspected for longer.
I mean not having at all, with anyone, including myself, except in the very smallest portions, after dark, when the windows were open and the island was quiet enough that the things you'd been not thinking about started making noise.
The difference between the Dalston version and this one was that the Dalston version I'd told to Priya.
This version I was going to have to tell to myself.
Priya ordered coffee and a small something sweet and sat with her notebook closed, which was the signal that this was not for an article.
"The whole thing," she said. "From the start."
So I told her. Greenpath Advisory, which had been Dominic's company — Dominic Harker, whom I'd been with for three years and engaged to for one of them — and which had started as a legitimate sustainability consultancy and then had become, gradually and in ways I hadn't seen because I had trusted the numbers I was given, a machine for producing impact reports that looked like evidence and were not.
The clients were real. The projects were real.
The reports were — adjusted. Not fabricated wholesale; that would have been too obvious.
Just adjusted, in the particular way that adjustments can go when someone has access to the data and a reason to want particular conclusions.
I had written many of those reports.
I had signed off on them. My name, my credentials, my professional judgement. And then everything came apart, very quickly, the way things that have been quietly wrong for a long time will when the first piece moves.
"He called it a restructuring," I said. "On the voicemail. He said it was a restructuring." (Three years together and the last thing he ever said to my voicemail was a noun from a management consultancy. I have thought about this more than is healthy.)
Priya wrote nothing. She didn't move. "And then?"
"And then I found out what it actually was.
Over approximately forty-eight hours of phone calls and emails and one conversation in our kitchen that I don't — " I looked at my coffee.
"I don't think about that one if I can help it.
" I looked up. "He said he'd assumed I knew.
That it was so embedded in the workflow that he couldn't imagine I hadn't noticed.
Which was — I've thought about this a lot — either he genuinely believed it, or it was the most efficient way to involve me in the blame without having to say it directly. "
"Which do you think?"
I considered this, as I had considered it approximately eleven hundred times since April.
"I think he'd told himself both things simultaneously and had stopped noticing they were different," I said.
"I think he'd made the adjustments so gradually, over so long, that by the end he'd revised the story of the company to include me as a knowing participant, and by the time everything came apart he'd been telling that revised story long enough that it felt like memory. "
Priya was quiet for a moment. "That's an extraordinarily generous analysis," she said.
"I know," I said. "It's probably more accurate than the alternative, which is that he's straightforwardly awful."
"He might be straightforwardly awful," said Priya.
"He might," I said. "But I lived with him for two years and that's not — it doesn't map onto the person I knew.
Which is its own problem. Which is the thing I haven't worked out how to trust about myself yet.
" I turned my coffee cup around. "How do you know, afterward, that you actually knew the person?
How do you know any of it wasn't just — the story you were telling, the same way he was telling his? "
Priya looked at me. "Margot," she said, in the direct, clear way she said the most important things. "You know you didn't do anything wrong."
"I know that," I said.
"And you're behaving like you did."
I was quiet. On the other side of the alley there was a cat — not the Overlord; a different cat, smaller, more orange — conducting what appeared to be a territorial dispute with a geranium pot, and losing. I watched it for a moment.
"I know that," I said again, more quietly.
"The investigation — "
"Found nothing. Because there wasn't anything to find, on my side.
There was insufficient evidence that I'd known, which is not — that's not the same as exoneration.
That's absence of evidence. Which is a different thing.
" I looked at the cat and the geranium. "Nobody publicly said Margot Bellamy is fine, she's completely fine.
What they said was we found no evidence of intentional participation on the part of some team members, which is the sort of sentence that doesn't get put on a sign anywhere. "
Priya absorbed this. "And after, you left."
"After, I left. April to May in our flat — Dominic's flat, technically, which I'd been living in for two years and which suddenly felt like a place I'd borrowed — and then Dominic's colleague called me and left a voicemail and I called back and he explained very carefully that the restructuring was complete and my position had been made redundant.
Which was — I mean. Yes. I understand how employment law works.
" I paused. "I accepted that explanation. "
"You shouldn't have had to deal with that at all."
"No," I said. "I know. But I did, and I accepted it, and then I started thinking about where I wanted to be that wasn't London and wasn't the flat and wasn't anywhere that had become associated with something that had gone wrong.
" I felt, in my jacket pocket, the small rectangle of the postcard. "And then I remembered the postcard."
Priya nodded slowly.
"My grandmother," I said. "She died when I was young — I was eight.
She'd been to Kaliroi once, in the early nineties, with my grandfather.
She sent my mother this postcard — on the back she'd written A place to be found when you're ready — and my mother had kept it with some of Nana's things, and I'd found it six years ago in a box of those things, and moved it to my wallet.
Not thinking about it, particularly; just — there.
And then in April I found myself taking it out and looking at it, and then I found myself on the Chios ferry. "
I looked at my coffee.
"I didn't tell anyone that part," I said. "It sounds — when I say it out loud it sounds like I came here because of a postcard."
"You did come here because of a postcard," said Priya.
"Yes," I said. "I know." (When you put it like that it sounds like the inciting incident of a film I would be too cynical to watch.)
"That's not embarrassing," said Priya. "That's the opposite of embarrassing."
I was not entirely convinced of this but I appreciated the delivery.
* * *
Theria came by our table about twenty minutes later, which was mildly surprising because we were in the other kafeneion and not at the taverna, and Theria did not usually cover this end of the village.
She was getting olive oil, she said. She'd walk back with Priya if Priya was heading that way.
She sat down for five minutes because the olive oil wasn't quite ready, and in those five minutes she mentioned, with the complete casualness of someone who was mentioning a thing because it had come to mind and for no other reason, that she'd told Lex what Margot had said yesterday. When she'd apologised.
"I told him the correct word," said Theria, stirring a coffee she wasn't drinking. "What you'd actually said versus what you'd meant."
I felt something cold settle in my chest. "And?"
"He looked like he was going to say something," said Theria. "And then didn't."
"Why?" said Priya. Which was exactly what I'd been about to ask.
Theria looked at me. "You would have to ask him that," she said. Then she picked up her olive oil from the counter and told Priya she'd see her outside.
Priya stood to go. "I'll be five minutes," she said, which meant I'll give you a moment with this.
I sat in the kafeneion in the back alley on Kaliroi in August with my cold coffee and thought about Lex hearing that I'd been saying I am grateful for your umbrella for eight weeks and looking like he was going to say something and then not saying it.
I thought about the phone call. My name. Próvlima. Den méni.
I thought about the pity theory — he hadn't corrected my Greek because he felt sorry for me, a woman who'd clearly had a bad time and was learning words from laminated cards and trying very hard and getting it consistently wrong. This was a possible theory. It fit the data.
I thought about the other theory. The one that fit the data differently.
I thought about Theria and the Athens job.
I thought about restructuring.
I thought about how a person might say someone's name on a phone call — not with the neutral quality of problem-solving, but with some other quality, the quality of something that was being navigated carefully, a situation that required care because the situation mattered — and how I wouldn't know, from a fragment, what that quality was.
* * *
My phone buzzed on the table.
The name on the screen was Dominic.
I looked at it for a long time. Outside, I could hear Priya's voice — light, professional, asking Theria something about the olive harvest — and the sound of August on Kaliroi, which was cicadas and ferry horn in the middle distance and the very faint sound of someone's music from two streets over.
The message said: I'm going to be in the islands next week. I think it would be good to talk. I owe you a proper explanation. If you're somewhere I could reach you, let me know.
I sat with my cold coffee and my phone and the particular sensation of something you'd been outrunning since April suddenly acquiring coordinates.
Somewhere you could reach me, Dominic. I am on a remote Greek island learning to say I am grateful for your umbrella and running the front of house at a family taverna and thinking about a phone call I don't have enough context to understand.
I am extremely, specifically reachable, which is the problem.
I put the phone face-down on the table.
Priya came back in. She looked at my face. She looked at the phone.
"What happened," she said.
I turned the phone over and showed her the message.
She read it. Her expression did several things in quick succession and then settled.
"All right," she said. She sat down. "Tell me what you want to do."
"I don't want to do anything," I said.
"That's useful information," said Priya. "What are you going to do?"
I thought about April in Dominic's flat.
I thought about the voicemail. I thought about Dominic's colleague and the efficient phone call and the explanation I'd accepted, because what else did you do with an explanation when it was the only one on offer and you were still stunned and there was nowhere else to put it.
I thought about the particular quality of his message — I owe you a proper explanation — and how the grammar of it put him at the centre, which was, I was beginning to understand, simply how Dominic organised the world.
"I'll think about it," I said.
It arrived on Kaliroi, I thought, the thing I'd been outrunning. It was on the ferry somewhere south of here, heading toward the islands, with its proper explanation, and I was going to have to work out what I wanted to do about that before it arrived.
I sat in the kafeneion in the backstreet and thought: here, then. This is where we find out what you've actually learned since April.
What I had learned, as best I could account for it: how to run a service.
How to read a room. How to translate between tourists and island.
How to move through a kitchen without getting in the way, and then how to move through one as part of it.
How to hold eight weeks of small corrections and not turn any of them into a verdict on my character.
How to notice things I wasn't ready to act on and leave them in a column marked insufficient data without the column becoming an excuse.
What I hadn't yet learned: what happened when the data was no longer insufficient. What to do when the thing you'd been avoiding walked off a ferry with its proper explanation and demanded to be acknowledged.
I was about to find out.
The geranium pot cat, through the window, was still losing its territorial dispute with a significantly smaller cat, but with the energy of an animal that was not yet willing to concede the conceptual point.
I thought: well, at least one of us is having a consistent afternoon.