The Italian Affair

by Helen Crossfield

  “It was complicated,” Issy replied “really complicated. In the end that is what it came down to and I can’t say I know the full reasons why he finished our relationship. And I doubt now that I will ever know. But I am complicated too probably for different reasons. A lot of things happened in my life well before Jeremy arrived that made me susceptible to falling in love with him. Maybe in the end it was as much my fault as his I‘m only just trying to figure some of it out myself.”

  “What sort of things happened in your life that made you fall in love with him?” said Dan who seemed reluctant to let the conversation end now they’d only just got going.

  “Lots of really sad things as well as some quite funny quirky things, stuff that I’ve never told anyone before” Issy replied curling her toes at the thought of even trying to explain to a stranger.

  “Well. You can‘t get away with saying something like that and then not sharing anything Issy Mead. Not with me around. Not now you’ve got me all interested,” Dan said propping himself back up on his elbows. “I’m even prepared to give up my siesta for you, and I don’t do that lightly.”

  Issy squinted up at the sun to buy some time. Here she was on a beach with a man she’d met only that same morning, and she was about to tell him things that were personal, things that she’d never shared with anyone in her life – not even her immediate family – things that she had bottled up years ago. She had no idea if she opened them up now what would happen. The strategy to talk about them was just too risky.

  As Issy finally lifted her eyelids and looked over at Dan, she stared at the random freckle formations on his face. Could she trust him? And did she really want to unburden her pain? Where would it get her if she tried to unpack her emotional baggage bit by bit? There were too many parts to her story and none of them fitted together in any logical sequence.

  “IF I tell you some of my story I don’t want you to laugh or judge me on it Dan,” Issy said. “I don’t know who I am. I just feel all at sea. I find talking about personal stuff virtually impossible for some reason even now I don’t even know where to begin,” Issy continued nervously picking lichen out of the rock as she spoke.

  “I would be honoured if you shared some of your complications with me” replied Dan quietly watching the nervousness in Issy’s hands as they fiddled with the rocks. “I am a master at unraveling things mainly because I’m complex too. But don’t feel you have to say anything if it makes you so uncomfortable. Only tell me if it is going to help you in some way.”

  “Right” said Issy bracing herself. “I am blaming everything that comes out of my mouth in the next five minutes on the Greco del Tufo.”

  “I can’t promise you I won’t laugh, if it’s totally strange by the way,” said Dan kindly as he watched her face contorted with anguish “but I can promise you I won’t ridicule you and I’ll treat you in exactly the same way as I did before you told me anything.”

  At those words of reassurance, Issy felt comforted enough to continue. She took a deep breath, looked at Dan square in the eye and started to describe the point at which her world had spun on its axis and put her emotional development and perception of the world and what life was supposed to be about on a wholly different course.

  “When I was six years old,” Issy said solemnly “my dad died suddenly right in front of my eyes. I watched his last moments as he fell to the ground in slow motion. The speed at which it happened and the shock was so painful that I buried it deep inside me. The only way I could process it was to try to understand why it had happened and where he had gone to. I blocked out most parts of the world that did not give me the answers I was looking for.”

  “That’s so terrible Issy” Dan said sitting up straight. “I wasn’t expecting your story to start with your dad’s death.”

  Issy shook slightly, just talking about her dad set off emotions and feelings that she had never ever really dealt with.

  “I know. But I keep going back to that in my mind to understand where I am today and why I ended up with Jeremy. Dad’s death made me feel beyond terrible, he died of a massive heart attack in front of my eyes” Issy continued. “My mum was out teaching piano at the time and I was washing up at the sink with him after breakfast. I noticed that he hadn’t cleaned one of the plates properly, and so I asked him to wash it again. And then, shortly after that, without any warning whatsoever he collapsed onto the kitchen floor and died. There are some images I’ve never been able to escape from. His face as he fell and his body contorted in pain as it hit the floor. I’ll never forget the kindness of our beautiful old cat Snoopy as she watched over his body and waited with me until mum came home.”

  Dan clasped his hand over his mouth and said “God. You were so young to witness something like that by yourself.”

  “I know,” Issy said. “I was with him on my own for over an hour. I knew something terrible was wrong but I was too little so didn’t really even understand the finality of death. There was a memorable piece of music on the radio that came to symbolize his last moments which, I later found out, was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto 1. That’s the music he died listening to and the music that continue to play whilst I stroked his arm as he lay there.”

  “Christ,” said Dan slowly letting it all sink in. “I don’t know what to say I just can’t imagine what it must have felt like.”

  “At the time it happened I didn’t really compute the magnitude. My final memory of him though is a strange one and it has never ever left me. Sometimes it comes back and haunts me in the most unexpected moments and normally when I am extremely stressed. You see, weirdly just before he collapsed, he was desperately trying to undo his collar as he fell. But couldn’t because he was wearing bright yellow Extra Large Marigold washing up gloves. I’ve had a lot of nightmares about Marigold washing up gloves all my life. The colour, the squeaky noise they make when wet and the texture of the insides.”

  As Issy fell silent she looked over at Dan before trying to give him some context to what she’d just said to gauge his reaction. “Dad had psoriasis you see, so he always wore Extra Large Marigold washing up gloves in the kitchen and even in the garden. It was his signature look. So whilst the gloves protected his fingers and hands in life, they gave him no flexibility as tried to undue his shirt when he was dying. When he fell, by the time I’d wobbled off the stool I was standing on next to the sink and grabbed hold of one of his hands he was gone.”

  “That is so tragic Issy,” Dan said looking down into the sea. “So you never even got to say a proper goodbye?”

  “No,” Issy replied quietly “not even a single syllable. He never uttered a word to me once he reached the kitchen floor. As he fell he stretched out his hand towards mine and his eyes flickered as they tried to refocus through the intense pain in his chest. That’s what I remember most vividly, the pain in his eyes and the finality of that last look at me.”

  “Bloody hell” Dan said pulling himself up from the ground. “I am so sorry. Please forgive me for being so insensitive I had no idea that you needed to go so far back to tell me your story. I just thought you would talk about the affair and that by sharing what had happened with Jeremy it might help you in some way.”

  Issy stretched her hand upwards and pulled him back down beside her.

  “Hey! You weren’t to know about my dad. I’m just thinking of the past to see if it helps me make sense of the present, that’s all. I suppose the shorthand is that the fact I lost my father probably draws me towards older men. Maybe I was just looking for a father figure and that’s why I felt so strongly towards Jeremy. He was strong, good looking, intelligent and interested in me just like my father. It was a potent combination at a time I was feeling so lost and alone. I guess he just helped remove me from the void of my own reality.”

  “Um yes I understand,” said Dan scratching the top of his head. “All of those things added together no doubt had a quite a bit to do with why you fell for him.”

  “Or maybe,” said Iss
y putting her sadness to one side and smiling “all of what I’ve just told you explains why I fell in love with an ancient Greek first and then fell in love with a married man!”

  “Er hang on,” Dan said with his mouth wide open. “That’s a big jump for my small brain to make. Can you please explain the ancient Greek bit?”

  “Don’t laugh. You promised me you wouldn’t do that.” Issy said self-consciously. “I’m allowed to laugh at myself but you aren’t allowed to laugh at me. That’s the deal. I’m going to go for a swim to cool down and, afterwards, I’ll decide if I’m going to tell you anymore.”

  As Issy slid off the rocks into the water like a mermaid, Dan watched as her body disappeared into the water. Standing up he shouted out after her. “You can’t leave me here onshore hanging like an overripe piece of fruit. Not at the very moment you were about to tell me about an ancient Greek and how it follows that you ended up with a married man in Oxford.”

  Issy was pleased that there was no one around as they had started to descend into a kind of madness. As she watched Dan clamber to his feet, and jump into the water, she noticed as soon as he started to swim towards her that he seemed much less sure of himself afloat than when he was on dry land.

  As Dan splashed around messily to keep his head above water he started to ask more questions unashamed of his inability to swim. “Ok. Where were we? You said that loving an ancient Greek and your dad dying young led you to the married man at Oxford called Jeremy – or for now I’d prefer it if we called him Charles Ryder II. Please explain before I drown in Priano bay HOW all of those things are related?”

  As Dan swam closer, Issy started to swim away from his questions and the painful memories of her fractured past. She liked Dan but trying to piece it all together would take time. It took her back to a point in her own history and to a place she tried hard not to remember.

  Confused, Issy lowered her head a few inches beneath the sea line so her ears could only hear muffled words. She luxuriated in the cool stillness of the water, taking her time to think about how best to describe her “affair” with Socrates and then the real affair that had followed much later with an Oxford Classics professor.

  As she pondered the sequence of the major events of her life, her face reflected golden sheaths of early evening sunlight as she slowly came to the surface. To get the full effect of the light and the warmth, Issy rolled over in the water onto her back and looked up at the cloudless sky, letting the water take the weight of her body as she moved her feet gently to remain afloat.

  She wanted to be immortalised here forever undisturbed. “Dan would never dare swim this far out,” Issy thought to herself as she watched him paddling around in the water. “It would be so much easier to leave it at that. Did she really want to talk about Jeremy and how being forced to leave him to his unhappy marriage had seemingly triggered an emotional breakdown in much the same way her father’s death had?”

  Finally, as her mind became too cluttered Issy closed her eyes, breathed in deeply and dived a few feet under the water. “Maybe if she shared her feelings with Dan,” she thought “together they could make sense of things, more so than she had been able to do so far on her own.”

  “Issy,” shouted Dan in a loud voice which echoed out across the top of the dark blue water. “Where have you disappeared to?”

  Hearing a slight anxiety in Dan’s voice, Issy re-appeared and started to swim back towards him. Swimming playfully with the tide she finally started to answer his question about the link between her father’s death, an ancient Greek and a Classics professor at Oxford.

  “Ok, here are some of the answers to your questions. When I was at school,” Issy shouted slowly “I loved the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. They used philosophy to find answers to the really deep stuff about life, love and death. When dad died I gave myself the task of finding out what had happened to him. Reading what they had to say about death seemed to make the most sense. I didn’t really like the more orthodox religious take on death, all that stuff about heaven and hell and everything in between made no sense whatsoever. But the Greeks seemed to have intelligent answers to everything, and knew much more than anyone else I spoke to, about life and death, including my teachers at school.”

  “Ok, so far so good,” Dan shouted back. “None of that sounds too strange or out of the ordinary, it all sounds perfectly sane. I have nothing against the ancient Greeks or the Romans for that matter – they knew their stuff. Go on I still want to know more.”

  “Well, it does get a bit stranger” replied Issy. “As I got older, I immersed myself in the musings of the great Classical philosophers. I used to stare out of the window and wish I had been born in ancient Greece. I also went to libraries in pursuit of ancient teachings and, in the process, I kind of fell in love with Socrates.”

  “Oh my God” laughed Dan without meaning too. “Do excuse me as your dad dying is terrible, and I’m really sorry about that and don’t want to detract in any way from the tragedy. But I would be disingenuous if I also didn’t say that you being in love with Socrates is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard. Did you tell Jeremy about your former crush?”

  “God NO,” Issy replied laughing self-consciously at herself. “I realised at the end that he never really knew me as I never opened myself up to him emotionally. Our relationship was based on fulfilling basic needs that were as strong in both of us. And anyway, thankfully my crush on Socrates – if that is what you insist on calling it – had subsided by the time I met him. But I am sure that the fact I had loved and admired Socrates mixed in with the feelings of needing to be loved by an older man had a lot to do with the fact I fell for Jeremy who was a Classics professor and a leading master of ancient Greece and Rome.”

  “Blimey” said Dan. “Put like that I can now some new and persuasive logic emerging.”

  Feeling brighter Issy started to splash around in the water, partly out of an acute embarrassment now she had given so much of herself away and partly because she felt joyously lighter now she had started to unpack bits of her past.

  “Obviously my relationship with Socrates was not real,” Issy continued. “But it was the only reality I had. When my dad died I just froze emotionally and never developed as a normal girl should have done from the moment he crashed onto the kitchen floor.”

  “Do you think Jeremy truly loved you or was it just lust for him? I really hope he did. You out of everyone I have ever met deserves someone to love you” Dan said kindly as he hauled himself out of the sea and stood on the rocks dripping water.

  “It’s a good question,” Issy replied. “It was a kind of lust in the beginning with Jeremy on both sides, definitely. The ancient Greeks describe it in a better way than I ever could as they had words to describe the type of fatal attraction we had – “‘Theia Mania,’ – which describes love or lust at first sight as a kind of madness of the Gods.”

  “I like that description” said Dan who was now reapplying sun tan lotion rigorously all over his wet body.

  Issy treaded water while she continued to explain their first meeting. “It was so strange the moment our eyes met. We were drawn to each other like magnets. It felt like we belonged to one another immediately and it wasn’t just lust. The feelings were so intense I never even tried to rationalise it whilst it was happening. What got me in the end though, was how something so perfect could end up so broken. The really difficult thing for me now is this. If I am so intelligent how come I got it so wrong?”

  “Doesn’t everyone get relationships wrong a lot of the time however intelligent they are?” asked Dan.

  “No. That’s a lazy answer and not everyone does” replied Issy.

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean you should beat yourself up over Jeremy. It takes two to tango. And anyway you‘re young so you can afford to make mistakes. Better to do it now than later” countered Dan.

  “I know” said Issy. “I guess I just feel stupid that I let him use me as that’s now how it feels.
He must have been faking how he felt big time. How can he have just led me on like that? He must have a really cruel heart. And yet somewhere deep down inside I know he doesn’t. It felt like he truly loved me, it felt like it was meant to be forever. But now it is broken, kaput and gone, forever.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. That is just the picture you have decided to paint. He may coming running back to you when he realise what he’s lost.” Dan said indignantly.

  “NO,” Issy replied loudly. “Please don’t say that Dan. It is over. Jeremy told me it was over in no uncertain terms. He told me he had to be true to his wife. He also told me to go and find a new life for myself and forget about him and the time we’d shared. He made me promise that I would do that. And yet when he said those words whilst I believed that is what he truly wanted me to do I could see in his eyes a deep hurt and a haunting. I understood without him having to tell me that there was a story and a complexity he wasn’t willing to share.”

  “Did Jeremy not know anything about your dad and how that must have affected you?” asked Dan changing the course of the conversation back to her father.

  “No. I told him nothing about my dad,” Issy replied. “Until just a few minutes ago when I told you, I have hardly mentioned it to anyone although the ancient Greeks knew as I used to speak to them as if they were my friends. I think I had buried it so far down in my sub-conscious that it never seemed close enough to the surface to share with anyone. And I think that’s the main reason why I made friends with Socrates and Plato. They were great listeners and were already dead so couldn’t hurt me by dying on me like my dad had done. Does that make sense?”

  Dan replied after a few moments of deep thought. “Yes. In a way it does. But it doesn’t matter if it makes sense to me now. It obviously made sense to you then and helped you. I guess Jeremy gave you a glimpse of the ancient world as a Classics professor, he also gave you a sense of security and safety by being older and those things combined to make him irresistible. That would be my amateur assessment.”