Wrong?
That was the first she had heard of it going anywhere other than straight ahead, turn right, turn left, then up the aisle to the altar.
Though perhaps those weekends he had spent in Blackpool visiting his ailing great-aunt in the old people’s home, the sudden change in clothes and aftershave, the frequent mood swings and need for personal space should have set the alarm bells of suspicion ringing. In truth, they had been chiming faintly, but she had told herself to ride it out, to see it through. It was a concept she had been taught from an early age. But she had failed the test so many times. All she had learnt from it was that she was destined to fail because she always made the wrong choice.
‘Isobel Jordan,’ her mother would say, her hands on her aproned hips, ‘I see you’ve still not finished that embroidery. Do you want to know why? It’s because you picked the most difficult one, didn’t you? You always think you know best, but you don’t ... So you’re giving up on the recorder lessons? Well, that doesn’t surprise me. I said you’d be too lazy to practise ... You always did pick the biggest sweet in the shop then find it tasted of nothing.’
The most frequent piece of advice was: ‘You know what your problem is, young lady? You don’t have the conviction to see anything through. You’re a butterfly brain, just like your auntie Patricia.’
Now, with well-practised constraint, Izzy said, ‘I’m sure if there was a real problem you wouldn’t let your differences with your sister get in the way of her helping you, should the need arise. Which I doubt very much it will. You look extremely well to me.’ She marvelled at her courage and self-control. There had even been a hint of assertiveness to her voice.
In response her mother gave her a flinty look, and slipped seamlessly into another line of attack. ‘Have you been seeing that counsellor again?’ She uttered the word
counsellor
with weighty disapproval. Prudence had never forgiven Izzy for airing her dirty washing in public.
Counselling had been Alan’s idea. According to him, it had been the means by which they would explore and face the negative feelings that were destroying their relationship.
It turned out that it was an easy way for him to tell her he was leaving her for somebody else, that her own behaviour had driven him to it; a typical bit of playacting on his part. She supposed that he had thought the counsellor would protect him when Izzy learned the truth. That the non-threatening environment of her office, with its marshmallow pink walls, its comfortable chairs, the carefully positioned box of tissues, the thoughtful cups of coffee and the counsellor’s earnest, reassuring voice, would keep the peace.
He could not have misjudged it more.
Once the truth was out, Izzy had leapt up, grabbed her untouched cup of coffee and thrown its cold contents at him. Then she had passed the therapist the tissues, told her to mop up the mess and to stick her non-threatening environment up her Freudian slip. ‘How’s that for naming that emotion?’ she had added, flinging open the door to make her getaway, ‘and guess what, I think I’ve just released the feeling and now I’m going to move beyond it!’
‘No, I’m not seeing her again,’ Izzy replied evenly, proud that she was still on top of this conversation. Then, she reached forward to put her cup on the coffee table, and somehow dropped her cake plate to the floor, scattering pink and yellow crumbs over the carpet.
So much for being a grown woman of thirty-one! She was instantly a fumbling, nervous six-year-old, waiting for the inevitable reprimand and wishing she could hide at the bottom of the garden with her father. With a sad, faraway look in his eye he had spent his time feeding leaves and small branches into a charred metal bin with a funny little chimney. His hair and clothes had always smelt of smoke, and Izzy could never pass a bonfire without being reminded of her father and the wall of silence that had surrounded him.
‘Still as clumsy as ever, then,’ her mother tutted. ‘I suppose you want me to fetch you a clean plate from the kitchen, do you?’ She made the journey to the kitchen sound like a two-month trek across the freezing waste-lands of Siberia.
That night, Izzy had slept in her old bedroom. The mattress of her childhood bed, lumpy and unyielding, smelling of mothballs, had ensured a nostalgically restless night. As had the memories invoked by that poky room, with its flaking paintwork, swirly patterned carpet, tiny knee-hole dressing table and teak-effect shelves, which held an assortment of old board games and incomplete jigsaws, which only saw the light of day at Christmas.
Lying in bed, trying to sleep, she had felt the familiar sensation of being trapped inside an airtight plastic box. She always felt like this when she came home. A few hours into any visit with all the secrets and memories stored in the ageing wallpaper and carpets, and the walls of the gloomy bungalow began to move in on her. As a child she had promised herself she would remember how many times she had hidden in this room, under this bed, wanting to escape the charged atmosphere but she hadn’t been able to keep a tally: the occasions had been too numerous.
Any time spent with Prudence left her feeling drained, and this time she had been consumed with guilt that she had even considered a holiday.
Emotional blackmail was a relatively new trick of her mother’s. It had surfaced last year, on the day they had buried her father, and a month before Alan had left her.
‘I suppose one good thing will come out of his death,’ her mother had said, as she had nodded to Izzy to pass round the corned-beef sandwiches to the mourners who had gathered awkwardly in the sitting room. ‘It will bring Isobel and me closer together. She’s all I have now.’
Her father had spent the last six weeks of his life in his dressing-gown, a blue and green tartan affair that had seemed to get the better of him, outgrowing his frail body, making him look small and redundant, diminished. He had had a stroke, had lost the power of speech and the use of his right arm and leg, and had spent most of his time staring out of the window, through the army of unblinking statues, at his beloved garden. Until Prudence had it covered with crazy paving. How unnecessarily cruel that had seemed to Izzy. She had visited as often as she could, reduced to tears each time she saw how fast her father was declining, flinching at her mother’s no-nonsense rough handling of him, seeing the glimmer of light go out of his eyes, not that it had ever been very bright. He died on a Friday afternoon, his life trickling away quietly as Izzy set off on the long drive to see him, and his wife knitted another taut square while watching Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman on
Countdown.
His death caused barely a dent in her mother’s daily routine. She had her hands full anyway, what with the new postman to whip into shape and a young milkman who still hadn’t learnt to close the gate quietly at six in the morning. If Prudence missed her husband at all, it was because she had no one on whom to take out her frustration.
Which was why Izzy was getting the full treatment.
Laura had shaken Izzy out of her guilt. ‘She’s a wicked old woman for trying to manipulate you like that,’ she had said on the phone. Knowing Izzy as well as she did, she had called to make sure that the visit to Prudence had passed without incident. ‘And what if she did snuff it while you were here with us enjoying yourself? So what? We’d get you back in time for the funeral. What more could she want?’
Izzy hadn’t known Max and Laura for long, but it felt as though they knew her better than anybody else did. They had met when Izzy had moved up to Cheshire to start her new job and she had been renting a tiny cottage in the village where Max and Laura lived. She had been reversing into a small space in the high street, a manoeuvre she normally avoided at all costs - bonnet first or find a larger space, was her rule - but she had been in a hurry and there was nowhere else. Come on, she told herself, an articulated lorry could get in there. A thud, followed by a light tinkle of glass, told her, however, that she had failed. As she stepped out of the car to inspect the damage, her heart sank. Of all the cars she could have rubbed bumpers with, she had picked the shiniest of black Porsches. Damn! This would be expensive. She was just writing a note of apology for the car’s owner when a voice said, ‘Oh, dear, what a terrible shame. Will it be very difficult to replace the parts for your lovely old car?’ The smiling man with his silvery-white hair didn’t seem bothered by his smashed head-lamp, or the dent in the moulded bumper. He placed his shopping on the passenger seat, bent down to inspect the ruined chrome-work on Izzy’s Triumph Herald, then said, ‘You look a bit shaken, are you okay?’
‘I’m so sorry. This could only happen to me. I knew I shouldn’t have tried to park here.’
They exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and the following evening she had called on him with the necessary insurance details and a bottle of wine to add weight to her apology. His wife had answered the door of their fabulously large house and insisted she stay for a drink with them -‘Max said a beautiful girl had bumped into him in the high street,’ she had laughed, leading the way through to the kitchen where the smell of cooking reminded Izzy that she had passed on lunch that day. ‘I thought he was exaggerating his good fortune as usual. But it seems I was wrong.’
Meeting Max and Laura had been Izzy’s good fortune, though, for since that chance encounter she had made two very good friends.
She was a great believer in chance, though she had to admit it didn’t always work in her favour.
Chapter Three
Laura had set the table for lunch at the shaded end of the veranda, where the low, sloping eaves of the villa provided the most protection from the fierce midday sun. While Max poured the wine and Laura drizzled locally produced olive oil over a large pottery bowl of salad leaves and diced cucumber, Izzy took a moment to catch her breath. She and Laura hadn’t stopped talking and laughing since Max had parked the Jeep an hour ago at the front of the villa and brought her inside.
Laura had given her an immediate guided tour, seeking approval, rather than fawning admiration. ‘Stunning’ was the word that kept tripping off Izzy’s tongue, as she was shown each beautifully decorated and furnished room. The walls had either been washed with fresh white paint or a more subtle tone of buttermilk; dazzling watercolours of seascapes added splashes of vibrant colour. The floors were all of cool, polished marble or white tiles and in places were covered with antique rugs that were attractively worn and faded and helped to give the villa a lived-in look.
The sitting room, the largest and most spectacular of all the rooms, faced the sea, and its row of french windows opened directly on to the veranda, which ran the full length of the house. This was edged with a low, colonnaded wall that was painted white and lined with earthenware pots filled with shocking pink pelargoniums and pretty marguerites. It was here, in the shade, that they were having lunch and the mood round the table was as bright and informal as the setting.
‘So what’s it to be, Izzy?’ asked Max, taking a hunk of bread from the basket in front of him and mopping up the pool of golden olive oil on his plate. ‘An adventurous boat trip into Kassiópi with Captain Max or a swim and a gossip with Laura?’
‘Hands off,’ Laura intervened, before Izzy had a chance to reply. ‘Izzy’s mine for the rest of the afternoon.’
Max topped up Izzy’s glass. ‘Looks as though you’re in for a tongue-wagging session.’
‘I won’t be fit for anything if I carry on drinking at this rate.’
‘Oh, baloney! Alcohol intake doesn’t count when you’re on holiday, didn’t you know that?’
‘Is that true of calories?’ asked Laura, giving Max’s hand a playful slap as he reached for another piece of bread.
‘Yes, my sweet,’ he laughed. ‘Nothing’s ever the same when you’re away from home. The value system changes completely.’
‘Ah, so that’s why so many people have a fling when they’re on holiday,’ joked Izzy.
‘Well, not that I’m speaking from personal experience,’ said Max, ‘but you’re probably right. It’s like getting done for speeding in a foreign country - it doesn’t mean anything because without any points on your licence it doesn’t matter. Why? Thinking of giving it a whirl?’
‘Heavens, no!’
‘Perhaps you should,’ said Laura.
Izzy looked at her, shocked. Was this really the woman who, only a few days ago, had agreed with her over coffee that she ought to give men a miss for a while? ‘If I’m not mistaken, that’s a slightly different tune from the one you’ve been whistling of late.’
‘You’re right, but maybe it’s time to take stock and see what’s out there.’
‘But a holiday romance. It would be so shallow. So meaningless. So — ’
‘And potentially so much fun,’ cut in Laura.
Since she had started reading that book on the plane Modern Woman seemed to have taken up residence inside Izzy’s head. Don’t listen to her, she warned.
In your current state you need an emotional entanglement like a fish needs a hook in its mouth.
‘It would be rather reckless, wouldn’t it?’ said Izzy, trying to be sensible but already tempted by a picture of herself wandering along the beach with a handsome man beneath a moonlit sky.
‘But having fun doesn’t have to be reckless,’ persisted Laura. ‘If you understood at the start what the outcome would be, that you would both know and accept that you’d be waving goodbye at the end of the holiday, where would be the harm?’
‘Is it really possible to do that?’ asked Izzy doubtfully, knowing that she was an all-or-nothing girl.
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ smiled Laura. ‘Give it a try.’
That afternoon when Max retreated to his den to watch Henri Le Conte in the over-thirty-fives doubles, Laura and Izzy changed into their swimsuits and took the path down to the beach. Tied to a post at the end of a wooden jetty that belonged to Villa Petros, two boats bobbed in the water; one was small and modest, the other a much more expensive affair.