by Anne Fraser
It was nuts. After Ben she’d only ever had one other significant long-term relationship—with Steven, one of her colleagues. When that had ended, after he’d been offered a job in the States, she’d been surprisingly relieved. Since then, although she’d been asked out many times and Sally had tried to fix her up with several of the unattached men she or Tom knew, and she’d gone out with two or three of them, no one had appealed enough to make her want to see them again beyond a couple of dates.
Relationships, she’d decided, were overrated. Many women were single and very happy—as was she. She could eat when she liked, go where she pleased without having to consult anyone, holiday where it suited her and work all weekend and every weekend if she wanted to. Until her mother’s death, she had rarely been lonely—she hadn’t lied to Crystal when she’d told her she preferred being on her own, but that didn’t mean she didn’t miss physical contact. That didn’t mean she didn’t miss sex.
She felt her flush deepen. But sex without strings had never been her cup of tea.
God! She’d thought more about sex over these last two days than she had in months. But it was hard not to think about it around all these nude statues. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea choosing to come here instead of lunch. Lunch might have been the safer option after all.
A replacement car still wasn’t available when they returned to the rental company.
‘Really!’ Katherine muttered. ‘It’s almost six.’ Unlike Alexander, she needed to cool off, preferably with an ice-cold shower. And to do that she needed to get home—and out of Alexander’s company.
‘He promises he’ll have one by seven. If not, he’ll give you his own car.’ Alexander grinned. ‘I did warn you about Greek timing.’
‘But aren’t you in a hurry to get back?’ she asked, dismayed. ‘I mean, you’ve given up the best part of your day to help me out. You must have other stuff you’d rather be doing. And I should get back to my thesis.’
‘Nope. I’m in no rush. As I said, I’m not expecting my cousin and Crystal home until later. And surely you can give yourself a few more hours off?’ The laughter in his eyes dimmed momentarily. ‘Trust me, sometimes work should take a back seat.’
It was all right for him, he clearly found it easy to relax. But to spend more time in his company, blushing and getting tongue-tied, was too embarrassing. Still, she couldn’t very well make him take a taxi all the way back home—even if it was an appealing thought. Maybe she should get a taxi home? Now she was being ridiculous! She was behaving like someone with sunstroke. She almost sighed with relief. Perhaps that was it? She clearly wasn’t herself. She realised he was watching her curiously. What had he been saying? Oh, yes—something about dinner.
‘In that case, dinner would be lovely,’ she replied, pulling herself together. ‘Do you have somewhere in mind?’
‘As a matter of fact I do. It’s down by the shore. They sell the best seafood this side of Greece.’ He tilted his head. ‘You do like seafood, don’t you?’
‘I love it.’
‘Good. We can wave goodbye to the cruise ships and more or less have the place to ourselves. We’ll leave the car here. It’s not far.’
They walked along the deserted main street. Without the hordes of visitors and now that the shopkeepers had brought in their stands that had been filled with tourist souvenirs, maps and guides, the town had a completely different feel to it. It was as if it were a town of two identities—the one belonging to the tourists, and this typically Greek sleepy one.
The restaurant was situated at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac and it didn’t look very prepossessing from the rear, where the entrance was situated. Understated was the word Katherine would use to describe the interior with its striped blue and white table runners and unlit candles rammed into empty wine bottles. But when they were guided to a table on the veranda by the maître d’, the view took Katherine’s breath away. White sands and a blue, blue sea glittered as if some ancient god had scattered diamonds onto its surface. Alexander pulled out a chair for her beneath the shade of a tree and she sank happily into it.
When Alexander chose the lobster, freshly caught that morning, she decided to have it too. And since he was determined to drive they ordered a glass of chilled white wine for her and a fruit juice for himself.
They chatted easily about Greece and the recent blow to its economy and Alexander suggested various other places she might want to visit. Then he asked which medical school she’d studied at and she’d told him Edinburgh. Surprisingly, it turned out that it had been one of his choices but in the end he’d decided on Bart’s.
‘What made you decide to study in England?’ she asked.
‘I was brought up there. My mother was from Kent.’ That explained his excellent English.
‘So you have a Greek father and an English mother. I’m the opposite. How did your parents meet?’
‘My mother met my father when she was working in a taverna while she was backpacking around Greece. It was supposed to be her gap year but in the end she never made it to university. Not long after she and my father started dating, they married. They moved to an apartment in Athens and after a couple of years they had me, then my younger brother. But she always pined for England. My father lectured in archaeology so he applied for a post at the British Museum and when he was accepted, we upped and left. I was five at the time.
‘My father always missed Greece, though, so we came back as a family whenever we could, particularly to see my grandmother—my father’s mother—and all the other family—aunts and uncles and cousins. Greece has always felt like home to me. Dad died when he was in his early forties. My grandfather died shortly after he did and, as my father’s eldest son, I inherited the villa I live in now, as well as the land around it. It’s been in our family for generations. Naturally my grandmother still lives in the family home.’
Katherine wanted to ask about his wife, but judging by his terse response in the village consulting room earlier that was a no-go area. ‘And where’s your mother now?’ she asked instead, leaning back as their waiter placed their drinks in front of them.
‘Still in England,’ Alexander continued, when their waiter had left. ‘She hasn’t been back since my father died. I don’t think she can bear to come anymore. She lives close to my brother in Somerset.’
‘Doesn’t she miss her grandchild?’
‘Of course. However, Mother’s life is in England—it’s where her friends and my brother and his family are. We visit her often and, of course, there’s video chat.’ He took a sip of his drink. ‘That’s enough about me. What about you? Is there someone waiting for you in the UK?’
‘No. No one.’
He looked surprised. ‘Divorced, then? I’m assuming no children otherwise they’d be with you.’
She hesitated. ‘Not divorced. Never married.’ She swallowed. ‘And no children.’
‘Brothers and sisters? Your dad?’
‘My dad passed away when I was fifteen. And no brothers or sisters.’
‘So an only child. Being on your own must have made your mother’s death even harder to handle, then,’ he said softly.
The sympathy in his voice brought a lump to her throat. But she didn’t want him to feel sorry for her.
‘As I told Crystal, I like my own company. I have loads of friends in the UK when—if—I feel the need to socialise.’
‘No one who could come with you? We Greeks find it difficult to imagine being on our own. As you’ve probably noticed, we like to surround ourselves with family.’
‘Plenty of people offered to come,’ she said quickly. ‘But this trip was something I needed to do alone.’
He said nothing, just looked at her with his warm, brown eyes.
‘I wish I could have come with Mum before she died, though. She always hoped to return to Gr
eece, with Dad and me, to show me her country, but sadly it never happened,’ she found herself explaining, to fill the silence.
‘Because of her MS?’
‘Yes. Mostly.’
But even before her mother’s diagnosis the trip had been talked about but never actually planned. Her parents’ restaurant had taken all their energy, money and time. At first it had seemed to be going from strength to strength, but then the unimaginable had happened. Dad had died and without him Mum had become a shadow of herself and had talked less and less about returning to Greece.
It had only been later that she’d realised that her father’s death and struggling with a failing business hadn’t been the only reasons Mum had been listless. She’d hidden her symptoms from her daughter until the evening she’d collapsed. And that had been the beginning of a new nightmare.
‘What do you do when you’re not working?’ he asked, when she didn’t expand.
‘I kind of work all the time,’ she admitted ‘It’s honestly my favourite thing to do.’
He frowned as if he didn’t believe her. But it was true. She loved her work and found it totally absorbing. Given the choice of a night out or settling down to some research with a glass of wine in one hand, the research won hands down.
Their food arrived and was set before them. Katherine reached for the bowl of lemon quarters at the same as Alexander. As their fingers touched she felt a frisson of electricity course through her body. She drew back too quickly and flushed.
He lifted up the dish, his expression enigmatic. ‘You first.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So why public health?’ he asked, seeming genuinely interested.
‘I thought I wanted to do general medicine but I spent six months in Infectious Diseases as part of my rotation and loved it—particularly when it came to diagnosing the more obscure infections. It was like solving a cryptic crossword puzzle. You had to work out what it could be by deciphering the clues, and that meant finding out as much as you could about your patient—where they, or their families, had been recently, for example. Sometimes it was obvious if they’d just come from Africa—then you’d start by think of malaria—or typhoid or if they’d been on a walking holiday in a place where there were lots of sheep, making Lyme disease a possibility. It was the patients who made the job so fascinating. When you’d found out as much as you could, you had to decide what tests and investigations to do, ruling diseases out one by one until the only one left was almost certainly the right answer.’
She rested her fork on the side of her plate. ‘Of course, it wasn’t always a good outcome. Sometimes by the time you found out what the patient had it was too late. And what was the point in diagnosing someone with malaria if you couldn’t stop them getting it in the first place? I became really interested in prevention and that’s when I moved into public health.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to go on. But when I get talking about work...’
‘Hey, I’m a doctor, I like talking shop.’
‘Why did you decide to come back to Greece?’ she asked.
Something she couldn’t read flickered behind his eyes. ‘I wanted to spend more time with my daughter,’ he said shortly. ‘But we were talking about you. How did your parents meet?’ It seemed he was equally determined to turn the conversation back to her.
‘Mum met Dad when he was in the armed forces. He was stationed in Cyprus and she was visiting friends there. They fell in love and he left the army and they moved back to Scotland. He tried one job after another, trying to find something he enjoyed or at least was good at. Eventually he gave up trying to find the ideal job and started working for a building company. We weren’t well off—not poor but not well off. We lived in a small house bordering an estate where there was a lot of crime. When I was eight my father became unwell. He didn’t know what was it was—except that it was affecting his lungs. He was pretty bad before Mum persuaded him to see his GP.’ She paused. ‘That’s when I began to think of becoming a doctor.’
He leaned forward. ‘Go on.’
‘We used to go, as a family, to his doctor’s appointments. We did everything as a family.’ Sadness washed over her. ‘First there were the visits to the GP, but when he couldn’t work out what was going on, he referred Dad to the hospital. I was fascinated. Everything about the hospital intrigued me: the way the doctors used to rush about seeming so important; the way the nurses always seemed to know what they were doing; the smells; the sounds—all the stuff that normally puts people off I found exciting.
‘Of course, I was too young to understand that the reason we were there was because there was something seriously wrong with my father. His physician was a kind woman. I remember her well. She had these horn-rimmed glasses and she used to look at me over the top of them. When she saw how interested I was, she let me listen to my father’s chest with her stethoscope. I remember hearing the dub-dub of his heartbeat and marvelling that this thing, this muscle, no larger than his fist, was what was keeping him—what was keeping me and everyone else—alive.
‘I was always smart at school. It came easy to me to get top marks and when I saw how proud it made my parents, I worked even harder. My school teachers told my parents that they had high hopes for me. When I told Mum and Dad—I was twelve—that I wanted to be a doctor they were thrilled. But they knew that it would be difficult if I went to the high school in our area. It had a reputation for being rough and disruptive. They saved every penny they could so they could send me to private school.
‘My father had received a payment from the building company when he left—by this time he’d been diagnosed with emphysema from years of breathing in building dust—but I knew he’d been planning to use the money for a down payment on a mortgage to buy a little restaurant—Dad would be the manager, Mum the head cook—and I didn’t want them to use their life savings on me, not if they didn’t have to.
‘I persuaded them to let me apply to one of the top private schools. My teacher had told them that the school awarded scholarships to children with potential but not the funds to go to the school. She also warned them that it was very competitive. But I knew I could do it—and I did.’
‘I am beginning to suspect that you’re not in the habit of letting obstacles get in your way.’
Suddenly she was horrified. She wasn’t usually so garrulous and certainly not when it came to talking about herself. Over the years she’d become adept at steering the conversation away from herself and onto the other person. Now she was acutely conscious of having monopolised the conversation, and when she thought about it she realised she’d made herself out to be a paragon of virtue when nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps it was the wine. Or the way he listened to her as if she were the most fascinating person he’d ever met. Her heart thumped. Perhaps this was the way he was with everyone. She suspected it was. In which case he’d be an excellent family doctor.
‘So how long have you been back in Greece?’ she asked when their waiter left them, after replenishing their water glasses. She really wanted to know more about him.
‘Just over two years.’ His gaze dropped to his glass. He twirled his water, the ice cubes tinkling against the side. ‘Not long after I lost my wife. I worked at St George’s in London—As I mentioned earlier, I trained as surgeon before going into general practice—but my wife, Sophia, wasn’t really a city girl, so we bought a house in a nearby suburb and I commuted from there. And when I was on call, I slept at the hospital.’ A shadow crossed his face. ‘In retrospect, that was a mistake,’ he murmured, so softly she couldn’t be sure she’d heard him correctly. ‘Why did you change to general practice?’
His expression darkened. ‘I gave surgery up when I decided to return to Greece.’
It wasn’t really an answer and she had the distinct feeling he was keeping as much back from her as he was telling her. Had he
really been content to give up the challenges and adrenaline rush of surgery to return to Greece to be a GP? But bereavement often caused people to change their lives.
‘Was your wife Greek?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she work while you were in the UK?’ she asked. How had she felt about leaving her country and going to a much colder, much greyer London? But, then, she had been with the man she’d loved and who had loved her. No doubt she hadn’t cared.
‘She was a musician,’ he replied. ‘She always wanted to play in an orchestra. She gave that up when we moved to England and taught piano instead.’
‘Crystal must miss her terribly.’
‘We both do. I see her mother in Crystal every day.’ He swallowed and averted his gaze from hers for a few moments. ‘What about you?’ he asked, eventually. ‘Don’t you want children?’
He was looking at her again with that same intense expression in his eyes.
‘Don’t most women? But...’ She dropped her head and fiddled with her butter knife, searching for the right words. ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ she finished lamely. Her heart thumped uncomfortably against her ribs. Keep the conversation on neutral territory, she told herself. ‘I enjoyed the trip to Olympia. You know a lot about Greek archaeology and history,’ she said.
He slid her a thoughtful look as if he knew she was deliberately changing the subject.
‘My father was an archaeologist and my wife shared his passion,’ he said. ‘What chance do you think I wouldn’t be? I doubt there is an archaeological site in Greece I haven’t been to. Every holiday, when we returned here, that’s what we did. I think my wife thought it was her mission in life to educate me.’ His face clouded and Katherine knew he was thinking of his wife again. He had loved her very much, that much was clear.
What would it be like—the thought almost came out of nowhere—to be loved like that? To know that there was one person in the world who treasured you above all else? That there was someone you could turn to in your darkest moments, share your deepest secrets and fears with?
