It wasn’t Jack she needed to worry about. It was Greco, with his broad chest and mass of curly black hairs sweeping down to his navel.
‘You’re going to Athens?’ he had exclaimed when she’d casually mentioned that she needed to visit suppliers. Over the years, Rosie had learned to speak Greek fairly fluently, but Greco usually spoke to her in English. ‘It so happens I have some business there myself. I will go with you, yes?’ He’d laid a hand lightly on her arm, as he did to any woman under ninety. ‘A beautiful woman like you should not travel alone.’
She had laughed him off, pointing out that she’d been independent for a very long time and was quite used to looking after herself, thank you. Anyway, she’d added with a slight edge suggesting she didn’t fully believe his story, what kind of business did he have out there himself?
‘You still think after all these years that I am just a fisherman?’ he had replied, his eyes twinkling. ‘I will surprise you, Rosie. Just you wait and see. Besides, it will be good to have some time alone together, will it not?’ His face grew serious. ‘Away from the island and all those prying eyes.’
He had a point.
What had got into her? Rosie asked herself, stepping into her shower and shuddering as the cold water spurted out, suggesting that the hot had run out again. Greco, of all people! When she’d arrived, all those years ago, pregnant with Jack, she had been warned, almost immediately, by Cara who had run the villa at the time.
‘That Greco, he bad boy.’ The old woman, whose command of the English language had been shaped by visitors to the island, had waggled her short brown index finger. ‘You do not fall for his charms, yes?’
Back then, Rosie wasn’t falling for anyone’s charms. She’d already made one grave misjudgment, and look where that had got her.
Now, slipping into a pair of white cut-off trousers and her favourite turquoise halter-neck top which (according to Greco) brought out the colour of her eyes, Rosie grabbed the suitcase she’d packed the night before, shut the door behind her (it had taken a while to be convinced there really was no need to lock up in Siphalonia) and made her way over the cobbled stones.
Every now and then, she paused to stroke one of the cats and to say ‘Ti kanis?’ (‘How are you?’) to her loyal band of women who were already hard at work, scrubbing the stone floors of each cottage and changing the linen so there were crisp white sheets ready for the next batch of new arrivals.
As she did so, Rosie’s mind wandered back to her old life in the small seaside town on the borders of Dorset and Devon where she’d been at school with her old friend Gemma. The pair had been inseparable. In fact, it was Gemma in whom she’d confided when she’d first suspected she might be pregnant.
‘You can’t be,’ Gemma had gasped, despite the fact that they weren’t meant to talk in the school library. ‘Surely you haven’t actually done it?’
But she had. It had only been the once and Rosie wasn’t quite sure how it had happened. All she knew was that it was done, Charlie was gone, and that the result, confirmed later by the pregnancy kit which Gemma bought with her, proved her worst fears were true.
The strange thing was that although Rosie was terrified, she also felt oddly calm. When her father had yelled ‘Get out of my house and never come back’, she wasn’t that surprised. Dad had never been the same since Mum had died. He’d always had a short fuse for small things like running out of tea bags or leaving a light on. But they faded into insignificance compared with an unmarried, pregnant seventeen-year-old daughter.
So she’d packed her bag, hugged Gemma goodbye and hopped on the next ferry to France, feeling sick with nerves and pregnancy. If only Charlie had answered her letter …
Rosie soon discovered, when she got bigger, that a lone pregnant woman in a foreign country elicited a certain amount of empathy and incredible generosity. A kindly mother of two in France had given her a job in her bar for a while, plus a room at the top of the house. And a couple in Spain had taken her on temporarily, to help the chef in their restaurant.
But by the time she had pitched up in Siphalonia, after waitressing her way through Italy, she was ready to stop. Her earlier, naturally bright attitude to life was fading as her bump became more and more pronounced. Only now was it really coming home to her. She was expecting a baby. And she had neither home nor security to offer it.
One of the older boatmen, who had taken her from the mainland to the small Greek island, detected her exhaustion and directed her to a small white house close to the harbour, with the sign ‘Villa Rosa’ on the outside. ‘Cara,’ he had said, nodding understandingly. ‘She will take care of you.’
Rosie stood there, shaking with exhaustion and trepidation. Villa Rosa? The baby lurched inside her; suggesting that the name, so like her own, was a sign that she would be all right here. For a while, at least.
‘Ti yinete?’ said the speckle-faced woman who came to the door. (Rosie later found out that this meant ‘What’s up?’). The older woman’s eyes passed over her, taking everything in. Then she took her arm, in a motherly fashion. ‘You stay here.’
Rosie discovered that the Villa Rosa was a small, run-down equivalent of a B&B in England. To her embarrassment, Cara refused to let her pay for her hospitality. ‘I can waitress for you,’ Rosie had protested, but Cara would hear none of it.
‘I had daughter like you once,’ she had said with a wistful look in her black eyes. ‘Now I think maybe you are her, coming back to me.’
The poor old thing had lost her marbles, thought Rosie, but the lure of a clean bed with proper sheets was too much. Jack clearly felt the same, for he arrived two weeks early, with the help of Cara and the local doctor. After that, it became an unspoken agreement that Rosie would stay on to help at the villa, which Cara had owned for years but which had got too much for her since her husband’s death.
Rosie hadn’t been wrong about Cara not being quite right in her head. Although she declared herself to be ‘not a day over fifty’, she seemed much older. Often her mind would ramble or she would tell her tales about the daughter who had been ‘lost at sea’, although the details were clearly too painful for Cara to recall.
For a while, Rosie carried on looking after Jack, who was a model baby, and helping Cara. Eventually, at Gemma’s instigation through increasingly persistent letters, she forced herself to write to her father, telling him where she was and enclosing a small picture of his two-year-old grandson. There was a gap of a month before he wrote back to say that her maternal Scottish grandmother had died and left her a fairly large sum of money.
The tone of the letter was grudging, implying the legacy was more than she was entitled to. To her disgust, there wasn’t a word about Jack or even a question about how they were getting on so far from home.
Rosie had put the letter carefully back in the envelope and gone to find Cara, who was chopping aubergines in the kitchen and yelling at the small boy to take the next lot of orders ‘before you’re old enough to start shaving!’ Today was a good day, from the look of things.
‘I wonder,’ asked Rosie, looking out of the window to where Jack was asleep in his pushchair in the shade of the olive trees, ‘how you’d feel about having a partner?’
And so the Villa Rosa was reborn. With Cara’s agreement, Rosie used her grandmother’s money to build two cottages near the villa, in order to take on more guests.
They advertised through the classified pages of The Lady, and of course the local tourist board. By the time Cara decided it was time to retire with a nephew on the mainland, leaving Rosie in charge, the Villa Rosa had earned a good reputation and attracted a small number of select holidaymakers from all over Europe who returned again and again.
Cara wasn’t great at communicating, apart from the odd poorly spelled letter. But Rosie never forgot the lessons her mentor had taught her. ‘Always trust your gut instinct about people you don’t know. And look out for that Greco.’
Still, Rosie told herself as she made her way
into the main house to check that the cook had started to make breakfast for today’s departing guests, people changed, didn’t they?
When she had first arrived on Siphalonia, Greco wouldn’t leave her alone – perhaps because she was one of the few young girls who refused to fall for this impossibly handsome Greek with the bold nose, almond-shaped brown eyes and deep, hypnotic voice.
‘Forget it,’ she would tell him when he brushed against her, reeking of lemon cologne, or asked her once more if she would share a carafe of wine.
‘You do not mean that, I think,’ he had laughed, raising his eyebrows in that quizzical, how can you turn me down? fashion. But eventually he got the message, becoming instead a good friend. Rosie soon came to realise that Cara had perhaps been rather unfair in her criticism of this man, who was always happy to carry shopping or mend a leaking pipe at the Villa Rosa.
‘May I go fishing with Greco?’ Jack kept asking when he was eight. And because she knew that the man was a respected fisherman who never took chances with the tides, she allowed it. Her son needed a masculine figure in his life, she told herself. It wasn’t good for him to be surrounded by women all the time.
Over the last few years, Rosie had noticed that Greco had matured and become more responsible, while still bearing an innate charm that made her insides flutter, in a way they hadn’t when they’d first met.
Or perhaps it was because she was just plain desperate. It wasn’t as though there was anyone else available. Most couples got married around here in their mid-twenties. Rosie was nearly thirty-four now.
Greco was virtually the only man left. But what a man!
‘He makes me melt,’ she confided to Gemma during their last Skype conversation. ‘But you have to be so careful here. No one misses anything in Siphalonia, so I’m not going to commit, until I know it’s right …’
‘You won’t know if you don’t give him a chance,’ Gemma had pointed out. ‘Besides, it’s been ages since …’
Her voice tailed off but she might as well have said the name. Charlie. Rosie’s first love. Her only love. However hard she tried to block him out, he still kept coming back into her head, even though he had let her down so badly. Was it surprising? After all, her beloved Jack was a daily reminder.
And now, here she was. Ready and packed, despite her huge reservations. Breathless with anticipation and excitement and fear, although of course she tried to hide all that.
Greco was already waiting for her in the kitchen, wearing a crisp white shirt and freshly pressed blue jeans. He took in her bare shoulders approvingly. ‘So! You are ready?’
The transition from friendship to possibly something more had been so slow that it had taken her a while to recognise it. Such was his generally flirtatious nature, that she wasn’t even certain he felt the same. Besides, nothing physical had happened. Yet.
‘I’m still worried about Jack,’ she whispered, hoping that no one else was listening in. The problem with living on the job was that there was never any privacy.
‘Nonsense.’ Greco shrugged, stroking the hint of stubble around his chin. As he picked up her little navy blue case she couldn’t help noticing his muscles rippling. Rosie tried not to remember the three children – sometimes it was four – he was rumoured to have scattered around the Greek islands. ‘Your Jack is a big boy. A man now. I was his age when I owned my first boat.’
Rosie wavered. ‘I’ll be away for the new intake of guests.’
Greco touched her right shoulder lightly, sending electric waves through her. ‘If you do not give the boy responsibility, he will never learn.’ He was very close to her now. ‘Nor will you.’
Rosie stood back just in time as the cook – an elderly man about to retire – appeared from the larder. He gave her a knowing look, making her blush.
‘Are you off now, Mum?’ Hastily, Rosie broke away from Greco as her son strode into the kitchen. If it wasn’t for the fact that he had her smile and blue eyes, they might not be taken for mother and son. Jack, with his mop of black hair just like his grandfather, was the colour of a native with his tanned complexion, and spoke the local dialect as fluently as he spoke English. Everyone loved him for his happy nature, polite manners and willingness to please. She was so lucky.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Unable to stop herself, she hugged him, even though she could barely reach his shoulders. How was it possible that boys could grow so tall? Hungrily, she breathed him in. He smelt of pine; to his delight and her shock, Jack was one of those boys who’d needed to shave from the age of twelve.
‘’Course I don’t!’ Jack wriggled away with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘Besides, if you don’t get the boat, you’ll miss those supplies you’re after.’
Rosie flushed. Her son was no fool. He could sense the vibes between his mother and this man whom he’d known all his life. It was almost embarrassing, but something in her warned that if she didn’t take this leap of faith, she might regret it.
‘He’s right,’ said Greco firmly, placing his hand on her shoulder again. ‘We must go.’
Rosie stood there for a moment, looking from the older man to the younger. ‘You’ll look after the new guests when they arrive tomorrow? They’re newly-weds. It’s their honeymoon. So don’t forget the rose petals on the bed and the heart-shaped chocolates and—’
‘Mum.’ Jack’s voice had an edge to it that she’d never heard before. ‘I’m not a kid any more. Give me a chance. Please. Besides, you need to enjoy yourself. See you in three days.’ He hugged her. ‘And have a great time.’
TRUE HONEYMOON STORY
‘My husband flaked out at the reception so I put him to bed and then went back to the party. I had a great time.’
Anonymous, now divorced
Chapter Four
EMMA
‘Mummy! What’s a hornymoon?’
Gawain’s blue eyes stared trustingly up at hers, with that clarity and utter belief in another person that only came from a child. ‘Granny says you and Daddy are having one – without us.’
Emma knelt down on the floor of the village hall, flicking away a piece of pink horseshoe confetti which had got caught up in the folds of her off-white taffeta bridal gown, and took her son’s small, warm hands in hers.
‘Actually,’ she said, ignoring the titters around her, ‘it’s called a honeymoon.’
His eyes widened. ‘Is that cos it’s made of honey from the moon?’
Carefully, she tried to find the right words that would be truthful without denting the wonderful image in her son’s head.
‘What a lovely idea, but the moon is really made of rocks.’
He was frowning now. ‘But what is a honeymoon?’
Emma tried to sound bright, brushing away her own misgivings. ‘It’s a holiday when two people who have just got married go away for a few days on their own.’
There was a sniff from a passing great-aunt. ‘Usually people do it before they’ve had kids. Still, better late than never.’
Ignoring the barb, Emma gathered her son to her, breathing him in. God, she felt awful – and not just because she’d finally done it. Given Tom the wide gold ring that they had chosen together. Received one in turn – just as Gawain, all done up in his pageboy costume and flashing-light trainers, had called out, ‘Mummy! I need a wee-wee!’
Everyone in the church had roared with laughter, including Tom, but Emma could have wept. Didn’t that prove that her children needed her? How could she possibly leave them for a whole week?
Ever since Bernie and the girls had sprung the surprise wedding present on her, Emma had felt horribly uncertain and wobbly. She and Tom had never once left the children overnight: even when Willow had been born, she’d made sure she was out of hospital and back home before Gawain’s bedtime so they could all be together.
Now, just because others had decided that a honeymoon was the thing to do, she was being torn away from the two people who meant most to her. Even more, she had to admit, than her own husband.
Of course she loved Tom. But it was a different kind of love from that all-consuming, unconditional passion that meant she wouldn’t think twice about running in front of a car to push her children to safety.
Would she do the same for Tom?
Of course.
Maybe.
‘Can we come too, Mummy?’ Gawain’s voice came out muffled against her too-stiff skirt, making her heart twist in pain. How handsome her little man looked, with that jaunty red bow tie, even though he’d insisted on wearing his Spider-Man costume underneath. How vulnerable. So, too, did Willow, fast asleep in Tom’s arms now, thumb in mouth, orange juice spilled down her bridesmaid’s dress. They needed her. She needed them.
‘I’m sorry, poppet.’ She scattered light kisses over her son’s downy head as she spoke. ‘Hornymoons – I mean honeymoons – are just for mummies and daddies. You and Willow are going to have a lovely time with Granny instead.’
Gawain broke away from her arms and glared. ‘But I want to go with you.’
See, Emma said silently, shooting an I told you look at Tom. She knew this would happen. The children didn’t want them to go away any more than she wanted to leave them. How dare Bernie interfere? Tom was no better.
‘You should have discussed it with me first,’ Emma had snapped on the day that Bernie and the girls had given her the honeymoon envelope.
Tom had looked uncertain, giving her one of his owlish looks behind his thick-rimmed glasses. ‘We thought it would be a nice surprise.’ He shifted awkwardly from one leg to the other. ‘The lads and I were talking in the pub and I just happened to mention to Phil that we couldn’t afford a honeymoon. He said something to Bernie and that started the ball rolling.’
‘It wasn’t just that we couldn’t afford one,’ Emma had sniffed. ‘It was because I didn’t want to be away from the kids.’
Tom had put his arm around her then. ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘But don’t you think we need some time on our own? It’s only for a week, and your mother is used to looking after Willow when you’re at work.’
After the Honeymoon Page 4
