Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
Six missed calls from Rupert, dating back a day or two. I spot them when Frank goes to the bar to order a bottle of wine and some mezze for us. Another flurry of texts, and messages on WhatsApp.
I’m inclined to have a peek, but Frank is coming back from the bar, so I put my phone away.
‘If you tell me about what happened last time you were in Athens before you have a drink, I can assure you the story will come out better than if you’re shitfaced,’ he says.
The place is dimly lit. An Athens version of a dive bar. A place where secrets are spilled, and everything’s wiped clean in the morning. I don’t want to talk about it yet find myself saying, ‘It was years ago.’
‘Once upon a time…’
‘We’d come away with our friends, Sarah and Dan, for a holiday.’ I stare off at the memory. It’s fresher than I thought. ‘We were sitting in a taverna. Across the room there was another party of four – two couples. One of them, a man, kept looking over. Like we were more interesting than anyone at his table.’ Then I add, coyly, ‘Or I was.’ I can still picture his face. The darkest of brown eyes. The roman nose. The thick, brushed- back, brown hair. ‘It was very strange. I felt an almost unsettling draw to him. It went on for a full two or more hours, this business of us quietly tracking one another…’ I smile. ‘At one point I got up to go to the toilet. And he followed me.’
Frank’s face is rapt and I try not to let it distract me.
‘We met at the communal hand basins. We both washed our hands without a word between us. Just standing there with that intimacy of performing something personal alongside one another. And then, before he walked out, he looked at me and asked me my name. And he told me his was David.’
‘And?’ Frank’s voice cracks a little.
‘And that was it. We exchanged nothing more than names, yet it felt like we’d exchanged our whole life stories. Our entire respective disillusionments and disappointments.’ This is turning me absurdly emotional. ‘I remember how when I told him my name was Moira , he performed a very slow nod, like he was processing what might have been if we’d led some other life, if we weren’t trapped in our existing ones.’
‘Wow,’ he says.
I tell him how that same trip – it was a very strange trip indeed – I saw a look pass between Sarah and Rupert, just a split-second’s eye contact across a restaurant table that I just as easily might not have seen, that made me see our friendship and my marriage in a new light. And it was almost like those two events coming in the same short span of time were trying to tell me something. ‘Does it sound like a pitch for a new novel?’
‘Not fully formed yet. Needs more detail. What did you do about it?’
I stare into my wine glass like it’s a crystal ball that, instead of seeing the future, helps you rewrite the past. ‘Nothing. I couldn’t prove anything. They’d have probably said it was all in my mind.’
‘Was it?’
‘No.’
‘So you never challenged him? Or your friend?’
‘I wanted to, believe me. My whole life I’ve had a pathological dread of being made a fool of.’
I tell him it started with my cheating father, then was compounded by my first ‘boyfriend’ who kept standing me up. How he’d arrange these dates, then never show. And still I kept going back. Basically, he took my self-esteem and wiped the floor with it, but still I let him even though I knew it was wrong. I was so attracted to him that I was determined to have my fantasy of him no matter what shame I had to endure.
‘There was a point in my life where I vowed I would never tolerate any man who didn’t deserve my loyalty. I mean, my self-inflicted humiliation over a guy who wasn’t worth it could be put down to youth. But my mother’s? I mean why did she stay all those years?’ I have often tried to make sense of it. ‘Did she do it for me? And then I grew up and time passed and maybe she decided it didn’t matter any more?’ I shake my head, a mental picture of them assailing me. ‘They sit there in their retirement, looking all benign and cosy, yet you know there’s all this murky history between them. I mean… Why?’
This is what will happen if you choose to believe Rupert, I think. You will grow old together, and it will sit there between you until it is nothing more than your shared experience, rather than any sort of stain on his conscience.
I realise I’ve gone off on a tangent, but Frank seems quite fine with it. ‘So yes, to answer your question, I thought about confronting them. But once you make an accusation you can’t walk it back. There were two marriages, three kids, involved. I didn’t want to turn Harriet’s world upside down. And maybe, you know, maybe it helped me understand my mother a bit more too.’
A canary-yellow building catches my eye through the window, a black and white magpie perching on its corner. I watch it for a while. ‘Maybe it really was just an unacted-on attraction. She was my close friend, and he was my husband… People can’t help who they’re drawn to, only what they do about it.’
‘Do you always believe the best of people?’
‘No. But does any good ever come of automatically assuming the worst?’
He doesn’t say anything. I am overly perturbed by his silence. ‘I was attracted to the man in the restaurant enough to think about him for quite a while after. And in the end, it didn’t mean anything.’
‘I disagree. I think it meant something or you wouldn’t have remembered it all these years.’
I stare at my hands clasped too tightly on the table in front of me. ‘Poor guy will never know the hornet’s nest he disturbed!’
Frank doesn’t smile. I can’t even bring myself to, either.
‘I will say this… What I saw between Sarah and Rupert made me question a few things, I suppose. All those dinners at each other’s houses. All those intimate conversations Sarah and I had shared about our marriages…’ Then I finally say it. ‘How happy Rupert and I truly were. That bloody holiday was the very first time I’d consciously asked myself that. And once it came into my mind, it’s sort of been lodged there ever since.’
I am feeling, absurdly, like I could cry.
‘It shook me up on some level. I’d never really thought that you can love the person you are married to but grow to realise that love can mean something different to what you first thought. That you can be with someone who never feels out-and-out wrong for you, yet you can wonder, in your heart, if you were meant for someone else. I’d never really intellectualised compatibility or desire before.’
He lets that sit there, his silence, his contemplation, bestowing too much weight on it. I don’t tell him how I have walked through my married life feeling a bit flat. Sometimes wondering if other women occasionally felt this way about their choices. Telling myself it’s probably normal but a part of me saying, is it ? Is it really?
‘The holiday ended up being a disaster. Dan got shellfish poisoning and ended up in hospital the very same day as their daughter Greta was rushed into A and E in England with appendicitis. We stayed with Dan. Sarah went back home.’
‘And what became of your friendship?’
‘Not a lot. The following summer, Dan got offered a job in Singapore and they moved.’
‘Did you stay in touch?’
‘Oddly, no.’
The years have closed back in, making me realise that suspicion has the longest half-life of any emotion. It is nigh on impossible to eradicate it from your system. ‘Not sure why I’m telling you all this,’ I say. ‘Can we change the subject?’
‘Of course,’ he says.
‘That second bottle of wine wasn’t as good as the first.’ I hiccup and link him as we teeter down the street. ‘But it was better than the third.’
He sends me the side-eye. ‘I thought the fourth bottle went down the best.’
I frown. ‘We didn’t have a fourth.’
‘A lost opportunity.’ His eyes drop to my hand looped through his arm.
‘To be clear,’ I say. ‘I am only linking you because I am severely intoxicated and I’m terrified of falling, blacking my eye, and having to show up at our kids’ wedding looking like I tried to beat someone up, only they won.’
He laughs.
‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Are we really about to go and crash our kids’ elopement?’
‘I don’t know if that’s exactly what we’re doing. For starters, we don’t know where the venue is. And if we text them, and they’re still mad at us, they’re unlikely to tell us.’
I think of the white church with the blue dome. ‘Santorini isn’t that big. It’s not going to be that hard to find them. Besides, you write romances, so you of all people are bound to be able to find them for us.’
‘ You are the one who wanted to come here, remember… Way I see it, we can rent a moped and go scoot around the island, find that church – or some other church. They must have made some sort of reservation. We can take the priest aside.’
‘Are we back to poisoning people again?’
‘Nah. With this one, we pay him off. There’s your money. Now you don’t marry them .’ He catches my incredulous expression. ‘Hey, everybody has their price. Even clergy.’
The insane thing is, I truly don’t know if he’s playing with me here. ‘I hate to scupper the plan,’ I say, ‘but I’m not even sure Harriet would want to marry in a church. She’s more spiritual than formally religious.’
‘Aiden, too. He hates religion.’
‘She’s never more at peace than when she’s with nature. The beach, the marvel of the natural world… that is Harriet’s church.’
‘Same with Aiden. I worry about that a bit with him. That one day he’s going to wake up and realise that you don’t solve the problems of the world, or even your own, by inviting the universe to do the guiding.’
‘But maybe they’re right and we’re wrong. Maybe we should all try going with the flow of life rather than trying to control it at every step.’ Then I am clearly drunk, because I say, ‘Maybe they really are meant for each other.’
He smirks. ‘There is one more consideration.’
‘There is?’
‘It’s entirely possible that a wedding in Greece is not considered valid in America. That they have to make it legal back there. And it’s possible that neither of them has thought of this – because the universe would never send them such a bureaucratic complication.’ He raises an aren’t-I-clever? eyebrow. ‘So what we do is, we keep this quiet until their first big fight. You know, not one of the petty little disagreements that end in make-up sex. But the great big mother of a fuck-you, we’re done, you are dead to me fight. Then we present them with it. Our little well-timed gift to them. The news that they were never legally married at all.’
‘Wow.’ I try to process all this. ‘You don’t mean that,’ I say, though a part of me thinks that if such a situation were to occur, and their vows were not legal in America, then maybe this really would be the universe looking out for them – not me and Frank.
‘Hey,’ he says, ‘maybe I do…’ He nudges me. ‘I mean I’m the dude who stole his out-of-date passport. I had to disable then reactivate an entire high-tech security system in my home, to the tune of several hundred dollars, so he’d never be able to prove I went into his room. Would you put anything past a guy like me?’
‘I would not,’ I say.