‘What sort of work do you do, Derek?’ said Wendy.
He looked depressed. ‘I’m a lawyer.’ He reached forward and wrenched a large purple plastic container with a lid from the cup holder and drank from it deeply. Wendy watched him, with his rumpled clothes and his sorrowful face, and wondered if he were a drunk. She gripped her seat and looked out of the window again, about to remark on the Greek mythology she had been reading on the plane, but Derek said, peering through the windscreen as they tore around a steep bend, ‘The internet is very useful, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ cried Ruth from the back seat, her little face suddenly appearing by Wendy’s shoulder.
And Wendy could leave the two of them talking, as Ruth began detailing the bookings they had made, the pleasures of something called PayPal.
Wendy’s fingers wrapped around the little plastic salad dressing container in her pocket. She watched the turquoise water beyond the dark branches of the pines sweeping past below them.
Suddenly Derek braked hard, and the car swerved to the side of the road and lurched to a stop. His door burst open and he leapt from the car. Both the women yelped. The car, driverless, began rolling slowly down the hill.
‘Oh my God!’ cried Ruth. Wendy gasped. But then Derek’s long arm reached in and yanked the handbrake on, and the car stopped. He stood out on the road and flattened himself against the car as a large dusty truck heaved past. Then he removed his jacket and climbed back inside, stuffing the jacket under his seat.
‘Bit hot,’ he said, revving the engine again.
By the time their bags sat on the paving stones outside the house on the hill, Ruth had abandoned any pretence at manners. She charged off with the house key while Wendy thanked Derek too many times and wondered whether she should offer to pay him.
His car gone, she stood on the terrace of the tall white house they had chosen from a picture on the internet. Grapevines curled along a series of crossed wires above her, and a small iron table and two chairs were set in a convivial arrangement beneath the canopy. A little iron balcony overlooked the terrace from the first floor. The air smelled of pine and ocean. She was in the Greek Isles, the Islands of Magnesia. It sounded mythical and momentous. It was still so hot that the air seemed to vibrate.
Inside the stone house it was all coolness and gloom. The heavy wooden shutters were closed, and the floors were flagstone. She could hear Ruth calling from upstairs, aghast. ‘You’re not allowed to flush toilet paper!’
Wendy climbed the stairs, the dark banister thick in her hand.
Ruth was reading a small sign on the bathroom wall explaining that the ancient plumbing could not cope with toilet paper, and the covered bin was there for your convenience.
‘That’s disgusting,’ Ruth said.
Wendy stepped away from the bathroom and then saw that Ruth had taken the small single-bed room for herself, leaving Wendy the master bedroom. Ruth’s things were already spread around the poky little room, her suitcase opened and sandals lined up beneath the wardrobe.
She stood in the doorway of the main bedroom with Wendy.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said, and waited.
Wendy knew she should protest, that they should argue for some minutes until she finally persuaded Ruth that this was her big holiday, it was her daughter’s wedding, and insist that all Wendy’s own life she had had the chance to travel the world and stay in beautiful rooms like this, and now it was Ruth’s turn.
But they leaned there looking into the room, at the simple double bed with its pale blue sheets and the white curtain at the window where a single shutter slanted open, allowing a sliver of bright light to fall across the Turkish kilim on the wooden floorboards, and suddenly all the hours since they left home came crashing down upon Wendy, and all she craved was to lie down, immediately, upon that square of clean sheets.
‘Thank you,’ she said to Ruth, and marched into the room.
Wendy woke with a start in the darkened afternoon. From outside, beyond the shutters, came the sharp clapping of a child’s rubber sandals running along the shallow steps outside the house. A woman’s voice shouted in Greek and the child shouted back, all sound carried perfectly, crisp and audible, along the tall stone corridors.
She turned to look at the little yellow Tupperware container on the bedside table. It was from an old, old picnic set. The ageing plastic was crazed with fine dark lines of age. She had snatched it up in the last minutes before the taxi came, and scooped the ashes in with a teaspoon and jammed down the greying lid before popping it into a zippered compartment of her handbag. She had held her breath each time the handbag went through the X-ray machines. She had no idea what she would have said.
She knew it was ridiculous. Or deranged, or something.
She heard Ruth’s mobile telephone ring, her shy, hesitant voice, and then its relief. Wendy sat up, throwing off the sheet in a buff of sweet cool air. Leonie and the groom, Jeremy, and their friends were staying all around the island, in various houses.
Wendy sat listening, waiting for Ruth to call out to her that Leonie wanted to say hello. But after a while she realised Ruth had stopped talking, and then she heard the shower running downstairs.
She lay back down in the bed and drew the sheet up beneath her chin.
When Leonie and Paul were little, Wendy and Jim would bring them presents from their travels—a fur-lined hat made of yak leather from Nepal, or wood-and-paper parasols from China. Of course Wendy knew the children would rather a Barbie doll or an Action Jackson, but she knew too that the hats and parasols—and the folklore books, and the French stockings for Leonie as she grew older, and the cufflinks from New York for Paul—all of these were investments in her future with her sister’s children. They were learning about the world and all its wild, colourful possibilities, something they would certainly never glean from their own parents, from Wendy and Jim.
She was never pushy. Neither of them were. She and Jim lived their own lives, with their own friends and jobs and travel. And then, drawn by this richness, sometimes one or other of the children would come and stay for a weekend or a week, or visit for an afternoon for photography lessons from Jim, or be taken for a ritual expensive restaurant dinner with a friend of their choosing when each of them finished high school. Wendy felt that, by example, she had taught them to cook and to travel; she gave them Marquez novels in their twenties and Elizabeth David cookbooks for their wedding presents.
Wendy knew Ruth and Alan did not think much of her. She thought they might describe her to their friends as hoity-toity.
Once she had walked into Ruth and Alan’s living room in Thornleigh when the children were in their early teens to find the whole family sitting on their ugly, squashy vinyl couches massaging each other’s bare feet while they watched television. Paul and Leonie and Ruth and Alan, all in a sort of distracted, fleshy chain of idle fondling and stroking. Wendy had not known where to look. It had seemed to her obscene. Alan knew it, and enjoyed her discomfort. He called out to her, Siddown, Wendy. Want a foot rub? and had laughed at her prim smile, her stiff, bodily revulsion.
When Ruth’s children came to Wendy and Jim’s house there was always a dinner table, and serviettes, and sometimes (not always; they were not pretentious) a decanter. She had never been pretentious or prim, but in Ruth’s house she was made to feel it, repelled by what was natural to Ruth and Alan, and battered by their hardhearted jokes.
When Ruth and Alan came to Wendy’s house the tables were turned, but Wendy took care—Jim did not need to, it came effortlessly to him—to treat them generously. She was careful to instil a sense of warmth and comfortable, well-travelled chaos about the house. Nothing was untouchable. The children were encouraged to pick things up, even the most delicate things: the dried seahorse they had found on a beach in Sri Lanka, the little blue bird’s egg from an orchard in Puglia. She and the children would hover over the things, their heads touching, and she would say to them, One day you must go there. We migh
t even take you.
Once, long ago, Ruth had said to Wendy in a grave, warning voice: ‘They’re my children, you know.’ And Wendy had not said anything. She had not said, Yes but you don’t own them, they can make up their own minds.
She had never said it to Jim, or even acknowledged it fully to herself, but in some hazy depths of her future Wendy had hoped she and Jim, in giving to the children without expectation, in standing back and urging them out into the world, would be rewarded. She saw now she had hoped Ruth’s children would, of their own adult volition, choose to become Jim and Wendy’s children too. Or even, perhaps, instead.
Wendy was shocked at the raw clarity of this admission, here in the dark room. But the disgrace of it was immediately extinguished by the much larger, cold fact that things had not turned out that way. For the fact was that once they left home, Ruth’s children quickly drifted away and hardly ever saw Jim and Wendy at all.
And then, two years ago, Wendy had turned over in the night and reached out, as she often did, to lay her palm flat over Jim’s calm, sleeping back. And she had found it stone cold.
She was filled with dread again, here in the room.
She reached out and took hold of the little plastic tub, and clutched it in her fist beneath the pillow.
Ruth peered mournfully at the menu, and Leonie leaned back in her chair. They were having lunch in the little beachside taverna where the wedding would be held in two days’ time. There were tables and wicker chairs set on a concrete slab, in the shade of a large awning. All around them were olive trees, and musty yellow grasses, and across the pale gravel track of the road was a grey-pebbled beach, a bank of deep turquoise water, the sky.
Wendy watched her niece across the table.
Ruth and Wendy had met Leonie down on the waterfront, where the boat masts tinkled and sang, and motorbikes buzzed along the dusty road. Seeing her from a distance, Wendy was filled with a rush of love. Despite the adult facts of Leonie’s life—her own children growing up, a bad divorce and her job in the upper echelons of a large bank—here, standing in the sun with the sea behind her, one hand shading her eyes and the other arm waving vigorously in the air, Leonie still seemed the lanky, eager teenager Wendy had drawn into her arms so often.
She hurried ahead of Ruth across the street to greet her niece, calling, ‘Leonie!’, and holding her arms wide.
But Leonie cried, ‘Watch out for cars, Wendy!’ in an irritated voice, and clasped Wendy in the briefest of dry hugs before turning away, with a broad grin, to her mother. Wendy had closed her mouth and stood by while they embraced.
Now, at the taverna, a breeze shifted the olive branches. Ruth was still grimacing at the menu, fussing over what there was that she possibly could eat.
Leonie was forty, but looked younger. She was of that new generation of middle-class women who employed an army of other women to take care of their bodies; she and all her friends had pedicurists and hair colourists and massage therapists and personal trainers and beauticians giving them facials, all the time. She went away for weekends to spa retreats with groups of women friends. They were shiny-haired and their bodies were youthful, trim and tanned. Now Leonie wore a sarong and a thin-strapped singlet, and her limbs and her elegant bare feet were smooth and brown, her neat toenails polished bronze.
‘What about Greek salad?’ Wendy said to Ruth, her patience draining away rapidly.
‘But that’s got that cheese in it!’ said Ruth, with a grimace of disgust. Then she gasped. ‘Goat. Oh my God.’ She closed the menu and slapped it down on the table, and craned around at the other tables, staring at their plates with open-mouthed fear.
Leonie seemed unembarrassed but Wendy was ashamed, to be sitting here on a Greek island with her sister, a grown woman—an old woman—who refused feta, spat out olives, wanted butter instead of olive oil. Ruth caught her sister’s expression, and cried—it seemed with pride—‘I’ve always been a picky eater, Wendy! You know that!’
Wendy looked out at the sea, and at the great walls of limestone shearing up on either side of the little bay. There would be a private small space out there, between the rocks, for a person’s ashes. If she was even going to do anything with them. She didn’t yet know. The force that had thrust the little tub into her bag was not reason but some quick flare of fear. She had never travelled abroad without Jim. She could not leave him behind.
Eventually, the waiter standing by, Ruth stabbed a finger at a picture. ‘That.’
Wendy and Leonie each ordered a salad of feta and tomatoes and oil-soaked toasted bread and chopped olives, and glasses of beer.
As she looked out at the gritty beach, an image formed in Wendy’s mind, of herself crouched by a rock pool after dark, after the wedding, when others were dancing. But Jim had never even been to the Greek islands, let alone with her. It would be strange, and wrong, surely, to leave even a tiny bit of him mixed here in the sand.
‘Efkharisto,’ Wendy murmured to the waiter as he set down their glasses, while the others said thanks.
As he walked away, Ruth, her plump arms folded, looked at Wendy with open dislike. ‘What did you say to that fella?’
‘I said thank you.’
Ruth raised her eyebrows and drew her mouth into a long pout to show that Wendy was being pretentious. Leonie sat back with a half-smile, watching them both. Ruth shook her head and said to Wendy, ‘You’re a mystery to me, you really are.’
Leonie spoke at last. ‘So, how’s the house, Aunty Wendy? Your room sounds gorgeous.’
Wendy felt her cheeks grow hot at the accusation.
Ruth’s chef’s salad came; a small plateful of waxy yellow cheese cubes, chopped green lettuce with no dressing and half a dozen squares of cubed ham from a tin. Ruth tucked in cheerfully.
It was too late now to insist about the room, Wendy supposed. Should she insist? Change the sheets and just move Ruth’s things in there? But this would be accepting Ruth’s way of never saying what she wanted, of always stepping back with lips pressed together, arms folded, and then complaining about being made to wait. It angered Wendy to think of bowing to it.
‘Derek is nice,’ she said, to change the subject.
Leonie groaned. ‘Bloody Derek.’
Ruth said, through a mouthful of ham, ‘He nearly killed us!’
Leonie groaned again, leaning forward to lay her head melodramatically on her outstretched forearms on the table, then sat up. ‘He’s Jeremy’s old friend from uni. He’s lived here for years. He’s a pain in the arse—sorry, Wendy—but he’s sort of useful.’ She sipped her beer.
She gazed thoughtfully out across the water, with her chin in her hand, and then said, ‘Derek’s alright. He’s just sort of . . . depressing.’
Wendy felt a surprised stab of pity, and solidarity, for Derek.
The day before the wedding, while they slept after lunch, there was a knock at the door. Wendy groped her way down the dark stairs and padded across the flagstones. When she opened the door, Leonie strode in with another woman, and called up the stairs to her mother as she went to the fridge and pulled out a jug of iced water.
The other woman’s name was Lucy. She had thick bushy hair and a loud sharp voice, and wore bangles that clacked up and down her arms when she moved. Lucy was her make-up artist friend from London, Leonie told Wendy, and she had offered to do them all for the wedding.
Ruth, clambering down the stairs, was already calling, ‘Oooh, lovely.’
Wendy had never really worn make-up, except the occasional smudge of lipstick and some rouge, as they used to call it. When she was younger she scorned make-up; it was a thing suburban women like her sister were interested in. But also, more secretly, Wendy had found that any make-up other than lipstick—the other things: foundation, and mascara, and eye shadow—made her look strangely like a dressed-up man. So now while the other women discussed make-up Wendy laughed lightly and waved her hand no thank you, as she refilled the water jug and returned it to the fridge.
&n
bsp; The woman Lucy met her eye across the room, and shrugged and said, ‘Well, if you change your mind.’
Then Ruth’s son Paul came striding in, carrying a heavy-looking cardboard box. Wendy had not seen him for eighteen months, and he looked even taller, and now tanned and more masculine. He was forty-three now, and married with two children, but Wendy still thought of him as a wastrel university student, full of potential and wit and unbloomed talent.
She hurried around the table towards him, calling his name. He grinned and said, ‘G’day, Wendy,’ and leaned his head down sideways for a kiss, before kneeling at the fridge to put the box down. When he set it down, he didn’t then get up to greet Wendy properly, but began tearing open the cardboard box and stacking bottles into their fridge, carrying on a conversation with his sister and mother that seemed to have been started without Wendy.
It had been decided that tomorrow Wendy and Ruth’s house would be ‘the girls’ house’; that there would be a champagne breakfast, with Lucy and her cosmetics set up on the terrace, where any of the women guests could come and have their make-up done in the hours before the wedding.
The house was to be overrun. Nobody had asked Wendy’s opinion about this, although her money was paying half of the rent. As she stood in the room and listened to them all talking, it galled her to think that since Jim died she was no longer a person to be consulted.
She didn’t say anything. She knew it would be ridiculous to complain. It was a wedding. Ruth’s daughter’s wedding. She was lucky to be here at all.
She left Leonie and Paul and the friend and Ruth, and went out walking.
The steep streets of the town were populated by hundreds of slender, pretty cats. They crept along balconies and strolled the shadeless stone stairs. They swarmed around the orange plastic bags of garbage that appeared on odd days at selected laneway corners.
Wendy had been told by one of Leonie’s friends that a man with a donkey came clopping down the stairs to collect the rubbish, but in three days she had not seen or heard any donkey, though the rubbish disappeared every day or so somehow. She heard the little motorbikes, bumping noisily up and down, their sound coiling off into the distance. And yesterday she heard the sonorous, yearning prayer-song of a priest in the church far above them. There was a clock somewhere that struck bells on every hour. But no donkey.
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