Authors: Carol Mason
‘Jonathan had bought some stocks without my knowing. It was… do you know what I mean by an insider tip?’
‘Of course,’ he says, sitting casually beside me, his eyes on the foot that I’ve got dangling across my other leg.
‘He put a lot of money into a copper mining venture. Nearly all our savings. He even re-mortgaged our house.’
I hold my glass up to the sun and stare through it, watching the amber liquid glint in the sun. The air is hot and heavy, and is alive with the sound of crickets. ‘He never told me a thing about it. I had no idea until after he died that he lost nearly a quarter of a million dollars of our money.’ I raise my glass—in a toast
—
to the sky.
‘And you’ve been thinking about this today and that’s why you have depression.’
‘Depression?’
‘Vivien said you feel not good today. She suggest I bring you here to… make you smile again.’
‘She suggested you bring me here!’ My cheeks must turn blood-red. ‘Said you had a date!’
‘With you.’ His eyes look playful.
My damned mother! He had no intentions of taking me out. He’s doing it only to please her! ‘Do you own a shotgun? And can I borrow it?’
We laugh.
~ * * * ~
We finish off the brandies then go inside the house for the dinner he’s going to make us. It’s cool in here, with the stone walls, bare floors and minimal furnishings. I like the rustic kitchen, it makes me feel like I could suddenly be transformed from a crap cook into someone who could concoct delicious culinary wonders made with simple ingredients and olive oil. I like the eyebrow-arch that leads from here to an area with a couch right in front of a wood-burning stove. It makes me think of romantic, television-free winters by candlelight.
I pull a chair out and sit at the table, no longer feeling uncomfortable that Georgios didn’t intend any of this.
‘Have you forgiven him?’ he asks me.
I run my fingers over the rough grain of the wood. ‘I was furious at first… I mean, first I lose him, then I realise I’m penniless… Well, not quite, but close. But obviously I can’t keep being annoyed at him, because ultimately he lost a lot more than I did, didn’t he?’
I think now of what old Ms Elmtree said about Jonathan sitting in his car. I wonder if it was the day he realised he’d lost the money. Maybe he dreaded facing me, even if he knew I had no idea. Or had he had one of his seizures, right as he’d pulled up at our house? I will never know, but it taunts me.
Georgios opens the Metaxa bottle to give me a splash more but I put my hand over the glass. ‘You’re supposed to be a team when you’re married. No secrets. You don’t just do things without telling the other…’ It was that reckless devil-may-care, law-unto-himself thing that drove me mad about him, because it was a part of him that I had no influence over. It was the one part of him I couldn’t own. ‘I’m sure though, he’d be pleased that I had something to hold against him.’
He sits at my side. ‘A house is just a thing, Angelina. Before I was born we had the great earthquake of 1953. Almost everybody lose everything they ever own, including the roof over their heads. And look now. Almost everything you see on this island is rebuilt. Those who lived took the only path. The path of survival.’
I look around the four walls of this room, ancientness and family history seeping from its every pore. ‘What happened to this place?’
‘As I say, most everything was destroyed on this island. But not the olive grove. Not my family home. This placed miraculously survived when very little did.’
I hold out my empty glass. ‘I think I would like another brandy.’
~ * * * ~
The candle on the kitchen table is the only light in the room. We’ve moved on to red wine, only it’s mostly me doing the drinking, not him. I slump across the knotty wood surface after we’ve eaten a simple meal of marinated vegetables and grilled chicken in oil and herbs. I don’t know what we’ve been talking about. I’ve been far too preoccupied with thinking about kissing him.
I’ve missed kissing. More than sex, or even a good-old cuddle. I’ve missed having the back of my head cupped when a man is devouring my mouth. Fingers kneading my skill. Fingers knotting in my hair. Laying a hand on a man’s warm cheek. Negotiating that sexy place at the back of a man’s neck. The breath of a man filling my lungs, nicer than air.
‘Why is there never anyone here Georgios? In this cold stone house.’
Why, after all these talks, do I still not really feel I know you? Why are you’re still not quite real to me?
‘Don’t you miss family?’ I hope he doesn’t think I’m selling myself for the role.
‘There are always people here. Those who work with me. My brother and his wife and sons when it’s time for the harvest.’ He looks at me as though he knows what I mean. ‘When you do not have family of your own—children, a wife—it can feel silent. Life can feel silent sometimes.’
I feel a shiver. ‘I think that’s what worries me the most, Georgios—my life feeling silent. Sometimes I’ll think that if I never marry again there’s going to be nobody around to love me. I’ll be old, and I’ll never lie there napping and have my granddaughter stand over me and scour the familiar features of my face and be filled with love for me, because I am her blood, her family, the mother of her mother.’ I look at him listening closely to me. I love how he does this and can’t quite fathom why he’d care to listen to all this soul-searching by a woman he’s never going to see again after this week. ‘And then when my own mother will be gone… there’ll be no one behind me, and no one in front of me, no one tying me to anyone, and won’t that be the loneliest feeling in the world?’
‘There are always people, somebody…’
‘But it’s family that really counts. The thing is—and I’ve really only realised this recently—other people are the point of life, Georgios. We all think we’re the point of our own lives, but we’re not. Other people are. It’s not what we take from this life, it’s what we leave, and what others leave us.’
‘You are wise.’
‘Well, with Jonathan’s death I think I grew up by about forty years.’ But wisdom, just like life, isn’t always kind. Sometimes it tells you a few things you wish you didn’t know.
We sit just watching each other for a while.
‘Do you not have a mother?’ I ask him.
‘She died when I was four. I was grown up by my father and my brother, and my grandmother, and an aunt. It was a combined effort. Maybe that explains why they did not get me right.’
‘What’s not just right about you?’ The thought of going to bed with him brings a ripple through my body, like a gentle tide rolling up a beach.
‘Lots of things, or so women have told me.’ His eyes smile.
Georgios is a player. This much I believe I know.
‘It’s late. I should probably get you home.’
He gets up and carries plates over to the small, ancient, peeling sink. I look at the crusts of bread left lying on the table. The jar of olives lying open. The bottle of green olive oil. The red wine in the bottom of my glass.
‘I don’t mind staying up late.’ It sounds like a proposition.
He glances over his shoulder at me, then he abandons the dishes and comes back to the table. ‘Stay then,’ he says. ‘There is no hurry on my part. I am enjoying this.’ He slumps down in the chair, cocks his head, and looks at me inquiringly.
~ * * * ~
The first time I had sex with Jonathan, he said I almost attacked him. I don’t remember any attack, to me it was just urgency. Everything about our meeting had been urgent. He’d given me three minutes to ditch my boyfriend. And I had. I think in two. I wanted Jonathan more than I’d wanted any other lover. I could pretty much count all of them on one hand. Ok, two hands. But I was sure Jonathan was going to be my last.
We stood in the hallway, the sounds of the house party going on behind us. ‘Just because I dumped the guy I came with doesn’t mean I’m going home with you,’ I told him.
I had turned and attempted to walk away. He reached out to pull me back, drew me to him, like a dancer draws his partner into a hold. Only it was into a kiss. It was a nine on the Richter scale of kisses. There was no point in trying to act unbothered. His mouth blotted out all the pretence. There was to be a future here. I think we both knew it.
I let him walk me home, but I wouldn’t allow him to kiss me at the door again. ‘I don’t sleep with men on the first date.’ I gave him a small push when he was moving in on me.
He moved in so close I could see all the tiny black lashes on his lower lids. His face stayed there, and he just looked at me for what felt like a very long time. ‘We haven’t been on a date, though, have we? I met you at a party, two hours ago.’
‘Hmm…. That should make it worse, shouldn’t it?’
I pulled him, ravenously, by his sweater and we practically fell in my door.
~ * * * ~
I feel Georgios’ breath on my face, as he bends over me, studying my face. ‘What are you thinking now?’
‘Nothing,’ I tell him.
‘I think you’re thinking something,’ he sits down, rests his chin on the backs of his hands.
I’m thinking that my heart is thrashing, but I don’t know whether it’s from the anticipation of Georgios, or from remembering Jonathan and my first kiss, which is the last sort of confusion I want right now.
‘Come on!’ He stands up suddenly and holds out his hand. ‘I want to show you something.’ He picks up his keys from the countertop and leads me outside.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask him. But he doesn’t answer. I listen to our feet crunching the gravel as he walks to his car.
The white Suzuki jeep bounces its way through the darkness, climbing higher and higher, as though we are on a path to the moon. I can smell the olive trees without seeing them. Georgios drives confidently as the rugged ground seems to throw itself at us under the beam of the headlights. ‘How can you even see where we’re going?’ I ask him.
‘You don’t have to see things to know they are there, Angelina,’ he says.
When we reach the top, it’s like that day when he brought us here, that feeling of being in the celestial heights. Georgios shuts off the engine, and all I hear is the sea, a dim and steady swash below us. The only light is from the crescent moon, like a bright smile lying on its side.
‘Let me tell you about a story. A story about Selene. Selene was Goddess of the moon. One night, as she rides across the sky, she looks down, and she sees Endymion a humble shepherd. Endymion is sleeping there, outside...’ He looks across at me. ‘Of course, she was immediately attracted to him… So she go to him and she kiss him, just lays a kiss on his eyes, on his face… Now Endymion feels this kiss, strongly. So when he wakes up… he realises she came to him only in a dream. But of course, now there is a problem for him. Now he has tasted her kiss, he can think of nothing else. His waking world has no appeal anymore. All he desires is sleep, so she may come to him and kiss him again.’
I stare far across the darkness.
‘Selene fell in love with him. She loved him so much that she asked Zeus to give him the most special of gifts—to allow for him to choose his own fate. So Endymion chose to never grow old and to be in eternal sleep, where he would be visited every night by Selene and her rays of light.’
I smile at him. ‘Did she do it?’
‘Every night. She come. And somehow, even though he stays in everlasting sleep, Selene managed to give birth to fifty daughters from him.’
‘I look at his scratched hand resting on the wheel. ‘Fifty daughters! That’s a lot of stretch marks.’
‘I think ten might have been good.’ His eyes twinkle at me. ‘Fifteen is most.’
‘I’m glad you’re a modern man.’
We smile long and fondly. I wonder if Selene is up there, languishing on the crescent moon, and what she might be making of us.
After a while, he says, ‘Let us go back,’ and he gives one final glance up at the moon. I’m a bit bummed out, because I was thinking that a kiss might have been in order, under the moon.
We drive down the mountain in the darkness. Neither of us talks. Until we get back to the house, where he turns off the engine and sits there looking awkward.