‘Now, stop pestering poor Izzy, Theo. You’re needed over here. My parents are keen to learn some Greek and we’ve appointed you their teacher.’
He allowed himself to be dragged back to the rest of the group, and as he set about entertaining them by imitating their inaccurate pronunciation, he watched Izzy’s face grow steadily more sombre. He had a strong urge to leap from his chair and go to her. More than anything he wanted to see her face light up with a smile.
Chapter Nineteen
Izzy was never going to be able to get back to sleep. She had tossed and turned for most of the night and when eventually she had dozed off, it had been only for a couple of hours.
She kicked off the sheet, which had twisted itself into a wrinkled second skin around her, and went and stood outside on the balcony. The sky was pearly-pink, fresh and beautiful, glowing in the dawn light. Still and subdued, the smooth surface of the sea glistened serenely, scarcely a trace of a wave breaking against the shore.
Images of smashed china, of her mother crying, of her father cradling her in his arms had kept her awake. She had thought she was over her father, but after yesterday she realised that all she had been doing since his death was to keep on adding yet more layers of pretence to cover the cracks in their relationship. She understood now that the tears she had shed for him since the day he had died were nothing compared to the unshed tears of confused sadness and regret that she must have been storing up since she was a child.
She had been cross with herself yesterday for reliving that morning in the kitchen when her mother had lost control. Cross, because it had provoked too many other memories, too many other disturbing incidents. She had never blamed her mother for what she had done. Her mother had been ill with depression, her self-control precariously balanced as she struggled through each day as fraught and uptight as those little squares she knitted later in life.
After that terrible day her mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and arrangements were made for Izzy to go into a children’s home. To this day, Izzy never knew why she had been put in the home — it was not a subject that was ever discussed in front of her. Why hadn’t her father taken care of her? Or her aunt?
Her memories of the place were mostly a kaleidoscope of hazy but evocative sensations, of smells and sounds — but there were other more vivid flashes of recollection.
It had been just before Christmas that she had been taken there. She knew it was Christmas, because on a table at one end of the echoey dormitory she had slept in there had been a small silver tree draped in red tinsel and wonky decorations speckled with glitter that the other children had made. The floor had been shiny clean and smelt of polish and disinfectant, but the clanking bed with its austere metal frame and peeling white paint had seemed dirty. The sheets had been like paper, hard and starched; the woollen blanket, rough and scratchy, and the pillow had smelt of vomit. Above the bed there was a flickering light and a window criss-crossed with metal bars.
Mealtimes were noisy and chaotic. The food wasn’t what she was used to. One day she had been forced to eat a bowl of rice pudding sprinkled with brown sugar. That night she was sick, and pushed into a freezing cold bath. When she had been lifted out, shivering and frightened, somebody had dressed her, changed the plaster on her head, and taken her back to bed where the sheets had been changed. Impatient hands had tucked her in, jolted the mattress with quick-tempered movements. She was given a stern warning that she wasn’t to be sick again. With the smell of unfamiliar soap in her nostrils, and pinned down by the taut bedclothes, she had cried herself quietly to sleep, terrified of causing any more trouble and thinking —
knowing —
that this was her punishment for having broken one of her mother’s precious statues.
Her greatest fear was that if she wasn’t good she might stay for ever in this prison. And it was a prison, she knew that, for why else were there bars at the windows? She missed her own small bedroom, where she could hide under the ancient wooden bed that had once belonged to her father, and which was so high she had to climb up on to it. It was there, hidden in the dark and by the light of a torch, that she would draw her pictures, slipping them beneath the rug if she heard the sound of her mother’s sharp, impatient footsteps approaching.
Her father visited her at the home.
As she was so young, and had no grasp of time, she never knew when he would arrive. She would sit waiting anxiously for him in one of the playrooms, watching the other children dig around in the large toy boxes. She would close her eyes and imagine that when she opened them he would be there, that he had come to take her home.
The people in charge tried to make her join in, but she wouldn’t. The other children frightened her: they were all bigger, noisier too. They seemed quite happy to be there. The only toy she played with was a box of Fuzzy-felt. While she waited for her father to come, she would sit at a table near a window — just to make sure she didn’t miss him, or that he didn’t miss her — and watch the snow fall while putting together brightly coloured scenes of make-believe happiness: a house with a red door, a tree with green apples, a yellow sun, a mummy with curly brown hair, a daddy with long legs and a black triangle for a hat, and a little girl with a pet dog at her feet. Except there wasn’t a dog in the faded and stained box, it had got lost, so she had made do with a pig. It was from another box of shapes and she knew it looked silly, its fat pink body dwarfing the rest of the picture, but she had wanted it to be as complete in her mind as she could make it.
She hated it when her father had to leave. It seemed that he had only just arrived when he was getting his coat back on, patting her shoulder and saying goodbye. She would watch him from the window as he walked away, his collar pulled up, his head hunched into his shoulders. Sometimes he waved, sometimes he didn’t. When he didn’t wave, she would carefully, and very slowly, dismantle the Fuzzy-felt picture, and return the pieces to its box.
She had no idea how long she was there, but she was sure it was weeks rather than days because the artificial Christmas tree disappeared. When she went home nobody spoke about what had happened. Her mother seemed different. Quieter. Slower. More watchful. Which made her even more scary.
As time went by, Izzy began to wonder if the home had been a frightening dream. But one look in the mirror told her that she hadn’t imagined it. Reflected back at her were the familiar silvery grey eyes — poor man’s blue, as her mother called them — and a vivid scar on her right temple that hadn’t been there before. Something else new about her was that she couldn’t bear to have her face immersed in water — it brought back that petrifying night when she had been sick and plunged into the bath of icy-cold water.
The following Christmas, when Auntie Trixie had been staying with them Izzy had heard her say, ‘Well, thank goodness Isobel was so young when she went into that dreadful home, she doesn’t remember it.’ The crashing silence that had filled the room had convinced Izzy that she had not dreamed her time away from her parents. It also reaffirmed what she had pieced together from snatches of grown-up conversation: that it was a subject best not mentioned. And though her mother’s mood swings were less marked, Izzy lived in dread of doing anything that might upset her, and which would result in a return to that prison. She moved around the bungalow as though on eggshells, trying to make herself less obtrusive.
Exhausted with the strain, she soon became a bundle of nerves, jumping if her mother spoke her name too sharply, flinching if a hand moved too fast. She searched constantly for ways to help, to make everything right.
Yet nothing she did helped. She was destined to cause trouble, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But it was all such a long time ago. It shouldn’t still affect her. But it did, of course. She wouldn’t be human if when the threads of her childhood tweaked she didn’t feel it. She realised now, with guilty confusion, that she felt angry with her father — that he had never protected her from her mother, and angrier still that he had left her in that home.
This newly identified emotion wrapped itself around her heart and squeezed painfully.
For once, Mark was up before Theo. He made himself a pot of coffee and took it out on to the terrace, with his A4 notepad and fountain pen. His intention was to work, but as he sat at the wooden table where he had found Theo last night when he got back from Kassiópi, he suspected this would not be the case. For one thing, it was too quiet — he was up so early that not even the cicadas had got going yet — and the second reason was that he was annoyed with Theo for making a fool of himself.
‘I’ve upset her again,’ he had said forlornly last night, as Mark had sat down with him, noting the empty bottle of Metaxá and the unusually miserable expression on his friend’s face. ‘What is wrong with me, eh? And please, do not suggest that I’m losing it. Do that, and I will happily smash this bottle over your big ugly head.’
Having arrived back from Kassiópi, expecting to share his tale of having bumped into Dolly-Babe and Silent Bob, Mark had been unprepared for this impromptu late-night heart-to-heart. It wasn’t often that Theo got drunk.
‘Izzy?’ he had asked.
‘Well, of course it’s Izzy,’ snapped Theo. ‘Who else would it be?’
‘So what did you say this time?’
‘I put my foot straight into it.’ He groaned, holding his head. ‘No deeper could I have gone.’
‘Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad.’ Mark’s tone was slightly impatient. Since he had kicked the bottle into touch he had a limited supply of patience for anyone else’s alcohol-induced ramblings. Was this really the man who ran a mini empire and had an intellect sharp enough to slice bread?
Theo raised his head and looked at him petulantly. ‘You think I am play-acting, eh? You think I am behaving in the manner of a spoilt child who can’t get his way, is that it?’
Mark looked at him thoughtfully, seeing two very different men. There was Theo the sharp, practical businessman, and Theo the sentimental and hopelessly romantic philosopher. It was probably a fair summing up of your typical Greek man. ‘You’ve always been a spoilt child, Theo,’ he said, ‘so I’m not going to refute that. But what I think you’re experiencing, and for the first time, is what the rest of us mere mortals have to endure more regularly. The phenomenon of rejection. Welcome to the club. I wish I could say that membership was exclusive, but I’m afraid it isn’t. So tell me where it went wrong.’
‘Ti hálya!
I blundered in where angels — ’
‘Keep to English, Theo, and just get to the point.’
He did.
‘But that’s a mistake anyone could have made,’ said Mark, once again feeling that his friend was turning the episode into an over-the-top Greek tragedy. It still puzzled him why and how this girl had got under Theo’s skin in the way that she had. ‘How were you to know that she hasn’t got over her father’s death? My advice is not to take it personally. The next time you see her, just apologise as discreetly and courteously as you can.’
‘That is easier said than done. The look she gave me, it could have yammered a nail into a wall.’
Mark had laughed. ‘I think you mean
hammered.
I also think you’ve drunk too much. I guarantee that in the morning you’ll see I’m right.’
He gave up on the idea of working. He wasn’t in the mood. He finished his cup of coffee and decided to go for a walk, as he frequently did at this time of the day when he could be sure of having the beach to himself.
But today he found he didn’t have that luxury. Perched on the rock where he often sat was the cause of Theo’s problems. He stopped short, was about to retrace his steps and slip away unseen when she turned and looked straight at him. He could see she had been crying. That she still was.
Few men know what to do when confronted with tears, and Mark was no exception. He would also be the first to agree that listening isn’t instinctive to men. Without another thought, he pretended he hadn’t seen her and started walking in the direction he had just come. He didn’t need this. There was no reason for him to get involved in somebody else’s emotional problems. But gradually he slowed down and thought of Theo. What if Theo had turned his back on him all those years ago? What if he hadn’t searched for him until he had found him in that hell-hole of a squat? And what if Bones hadn’t been patient enough, or thick-skinned enough, to ignore the abuse Mark had flung at him?
But this was different. He was a stranger to this girl. How could he possibly help her?
But a stranger could sometimes be of more use than one’s friends or family. A stranger could offer an objective view, a detached analysis of the problem.
And if that wasn’t straight from Bones’s gob, he didn’t know what was.
He came to a standstill. Okay, he told himself. I’ll do it this once. I’ll interfere, just this once. For the first time in my life I’ll be Mark the Comforter. He was relieved when he approached her to find that she had stopped crying. He noticed, though, that it was now her turn to pretend she hadn’t seen him, and even when he was standing no more than a few feet from her, she still kept her head resolutely turned away. He felt oddly cheated. Here he was, prepared to do his bit, and she was trying to ignore him. So much for Mark the Bloody Comforter. But he had come this far, he was damned if he was going to let her get off without offering her some glib piece of reassuring advice. The least she could do was play along and stop him from feeling such a prize idiot.
He cleared his throat to speak, but couldn’t think of one sensible thing to say. He might earn his living by the pen and be known for writing realistic dialogue, but in this situation it was clear he was no spontaneous soother. And as she continued to ignore him, he despaired of ever finding the right words.