Among the Lemon Trees

by Nadia Marks

  ‘Oh no, Thia! Don’t you remember? I used to come every summer with Mum and the children.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course,’ she said with a sigh. ‘It seems so long ago now.’

  ‘Max and I often spend time apart; he travels a lot for his work, we’re used to it.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see little Alex, he must have grown so! I wish Chloe was coming with them.’

  ‘I wish so too,’ Anna said and felt a pang of longing for her daughter. ‘She’s camping in France and due to go home soon; but you never know, she might surprise us yet!’

  ‘Have you missed London, Anna mou? Are you looking forward to going home?’

  Home! That word again. She still hadn’t worked out where that was or what she felt about it. She was perfectly at home on the island. She had missed her family, but London? She didn’t think so.

  ‘You are happy, aren’t you, Anna mou?’ she heard her aunt say as Anna stood pondering at her question. ‘Max is a good man, isn’t he?’ she suddenly said, putting the spoon down to look her niece straight in the eyes. ‘Alexis says he couldn’t have wished for a better son-in-law, but it doesn’t matter what Alexis thinks.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Anna interrupted. ‘Max is a good man, Thia, we’ve had our troubles, who hasn’t, but yes, he is a good man, and yes, I am happy. But sometimes we all need to question our lives, don’t we? Or perhaps we shouldn’t.’

  ‘Who says you shouldn’t?’ she said sharply; it was Ourania’s turn to interrupt now. ‘We are Greeks, aren’t we? We must question, we must reflect! After all, “The unexamined life is not worth living”,’ she said, quoting Socrates, her favourite philosopher.

  Anna first saw Alex waiting to get off the boat. He looked taller and thinner than when she had left for the island at the beginning of summer. She couldn’t believe that he’d grown that much in less than three months. He was tanned and healthy-looking, his hair, which for the last year or so had been cropped like a convict’s – much to Anna’s dislike – had grown past his ears and was bleached by the summer sun. Her boy, she thought, looked absolutely gorgeous! He’d grown so much this past year; he was a regular sixteen-year-old heart-throb! He was carrying his rucksack over one shoulder and holding a bright yellow plastic bag in his left hand. Max came behind him carrying only a small holdall, always the master at minimal packing due to years of getting on and off planes. He too looked thinner and a little more drawn than when she had left him but also quite tanned, unlike most of the other tourists around him with their pallid northern skin. Typical, she thought, London had apparently waited for her to leave to let the sun shine on it.

  Anna stood rooted to the spot, watching them both walk through the crowd towards her. Her heart raced with anticipation. A large group of boisterous Italians were getting off at the same time and for a few minutes they were lost in their midst. Pushing through the mingling crowd, she ran to find them.

  ‘Mum! Mum! Over here!’ she heard Alex calling out from somewhere.

  ‘Anna!’ Max said, suddenly next to her. Dropping his bag on the floor he put his arms around her and held her tighter than she had ever felt him do before.

  ‘What were you doing, Mum! You were running in the opposite direction!’ Alex laughed and ran to give her a hug. He too seemed to hang on to Anna for ever; not since he was a little boy had he given her such a lingering squeeze. Then, out of nowhere, she felt another pair of arms wrap around her from behind and the unmistakable scent of Miss Dior, Chloe’s favourite perfume, flooded her senses.

  Anna sat with her children on either side of her while they drove up the hill towards the house, basking in their presence and still glowing from Chloe’s unexpected arrival.

  ‘You guys . . . you really fooled me well and good!’

  ‘We know how much you love surprises, Mum,’ Alex joked.

  ‘Not really,’ Anna protested, ‘but this was the best kind! Thank you for coming, Chloe, I missed you both so much.’

  ‘I missed you too, Mum,’ Chloe said and reached for Anna’s hand, her eyes searching her mother’s. At eighteen Chloe had picked up on her parents’ tensions and her summer had not been worry-free. ‘This has been the longest we’ve all been apart. It’s good to be together.’

  As the car got closer to the house Anna could see her father and aunt standing at the garden gate waiting to greet them.

  ‘Kalosorisate! Welcome!’ they both shouted.

  ‘Max! It’s so good to see you!’ Alexis said as soon as they got out of the car. ‘Alex, my boy! And Chloe, my beautiful girl! You have come too. What a wonderful surprise!’ he shouted, rushing towards his grandchildren to embrace them.

  ‘You seem to have grown even more!’ Alexis said to his youngest grandchild and namesake. ‘I will have to stand on my toes in order to kiss you soon, young man.’

  ‘I remember when I used to stand on a chair to kiss you, Bappou,’ Alex replied, kissing his grandfather on both cheeks before turning to his great-aunt. For a few minutes she just stood looking at him in disbelief; finally she walked towards him and, taking his face in both of her hands, kissed his forehead.

  ‘At last I see you again, my little one,’ she told him. ‘You have grown into a fine young man, Alex mou, and you look a lot like your bappou when he was your age! And you, my beauty,’ she said, looking at Chloe, ‘you are the reincarnation of your nonna.’

  Under the vine the table was already laid out with the appetizers, little plates of mezethakia, a carafe of Ourania’s own ice-cold lemonade, and a bottle of wine for the customary welcome drink. Anna had especially requested that they hold the big get-together with the rest of the family later to give them all a little breathing space alone, to catch up. The evening celebrations would go on all night, that was a given.

  While Alexis and Ourania were busy showing the grandchildren around the house, Max slipped his arm round Anna’s waist and led her to the furthest part of the garden. The old wooden bench under the fig tree had been there since Anna was a child. She remembered how she and Max would escape there with a newspaper and a coffee, when all the children had gathered at the house and their noisy games got too much. Some planks at the back of the bench were missing now but the seat still held well. They sat as they had done dozens of times and Max reached for Anna’s hands. He cupped them both in his and looked at her. His voice was at first weak but it picked up momentum as he talked.

  ‘Do you think you can ever forgive me, Anna?’ he started, but before Anna could reply he continued. ‘I have been a fool, an idiot, a cretin. It was a moment of madness.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly a moment, Max,’ she heard herself protest.

  ‘I know, of course . . . of course. It felt like a moment. It meant nothing.’

  Anna found that she was relishing Max’s plea for forgiveness and she let him continue for a long while till she decided she had heard enough. He talked about how his illness had affected him, his loss of virility and youth, thinking he was going to die, and that like a fool he had allowed himself to be seduced by flattery and fear and that he pledged to cherish and appreciate Anna and value what he’d nearly lost.

  ‘You and the children mean everything to me, Anna, I know that now. I always knew. I had a moment of lapsed sanity.’ He lifted her hands to his lips. ‘Please try to forgive me, Anna, that’s all I ask. I have told the university that I won’t be doing any more long trips.’ He searched Anna’s face for a reaction. ‘I think we have spent too much time apart and that’s all my fault. I let my work take priority over us. We must talk more, Anna, we must never stop again.’

  ‘Yes, Max, we must talk,’ she told herself and thought of all the things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to talk about her feelings for a change, tell him all she had learned and experienced in the course of this summer and how it had changed her. Yes, Max, she thought again, ‘you have absolutely no idea just how much we have to talk about!

  ‘We have a long road ahead of us, Max,’ she finally replied, feeling dra
ined as they got up to join the others. She knew it was her turn now to say something, he had had his say, but she had done all the talking and listening she wanted to do for now. Her turn was going to have to wait a little while longer.

  Soon, one by one, they gathered together at the table under the vine and Alexis poured them all a drink.

  ‘Welcome back, all of you,’ he said, standing up and reaching across to toast each one. ‘It was about time we returned to the island, to the old house. We have all been greatly missed, and I assure you that this gathering, my beloved family, will be the first of many more to come.’

  ‘Stin ygeia mas!’ To our health, Ourania added, lifting her glass, her face aglow with joy.

  The last time they were all together like that, sitting around that same table, Rosaria had been with them, and like so often since she’d died a wave of sadness washed over Anna. How could it be that her mother no longer existed? How could she be dead, be gone from her, how can they all still be here without her? They were the testimony of her existence. Alex, Chloe and Anna came from her, they carried her genes. They belonged to her, they all loved her, yet she was gone, banished to live only inside their minds.

  Chloe, as her aunt had commented earlier, resembled Rosaria in her physical appearance but also in temperament too. She was tender and kind. Anna saw her mother every time she caught a certain look from her daughter. The same warm brown gaze and laughter that would trickle out of her with such ease, infecting everyone nearby.

  ‘That girl is a radiator,’ Anna’s friend Sam, Chloe’s godmother, would say. ‘Everyone is drawn to her, she exudes warmth.’ Chloe also possessed a wisdom far beyond her young years. If she hadn’t been her daughter, Anna would have wanted her as a best friend. There had been many a time in the past year when she had longed to confide in Chloe, ask for her advice, or cry in her arms. But of course she hadn’t; protecting her children from the aftermath of their marital problems was Anna’s main goal.

  Across the table next to Chloe and Alexis, sat her son. Her baby boy, Alex! When had he become such a budding young man, with as much masculine presence at sixteen as his grandfather at eighty? He looked like Alexis, the physiognomy was shockingly close, but when you looked further the likeness to his father was also apparent. The eyes, not as brown as the rest of them, were tinged with hazel. The hair, too, wasn’t quite as dense, dark and curly as the Greek clan, but sleeker and sun-kissed, something of the Anglo-Saxon in him too. ‘My little Piscean,’ Anna would muse of him. ‘Always in a world of his own.’ He was the total opposite to his Aquarian sister, who was down to earth and practical. When she was pregnant with him, a friend of Anna’s who knew about horoscopes had told her, ‘You’re lucky to be having a Piscean baby, because it will always feel your pain.’ That particular trait of Alex’s kicked into action big-time when Max was sick, Alex always secretly worrying about his dad and keeping a watchful eye on him. But a Piscean baby has another characteristic that Anna was soon to discover: head in the clouds and an ability to switch off when things got tough. ‘You see, Anna,’ the horoscope friend had told her with a giggle, ‘in due course you will find that there is reality as most of us perceive it, and then there is Piscean reality.’ This aspect of Alex’s character actually proved to be beneficial for him during the last year. Even if he was worried about his father’s health, when it came to the family issues he was, much to Anna’s relief, able to switch off and escape into his Piscean reality.

  She was grateful for both of her children. Her family was everything, her most precious possession.

  She looked at her daughter and her son, her father and her aunt in turn, and her heart swelled with emotion. Then she looked up at Max and she could see in his eyes that he was guessing what was going through her head. Max’s eyes always betrayed him. She couldn’t have lived with him for all those years without knowing that about him. Even if he wanted to, they could never conceal his feelings; at that moment, sitting across the table from him, his eyes told her that he too was her family, that she might not have her dear mother any more but she did have everyone else and that she had him too if she still wanted him. That he was there to stay, that he was sorry.

  Glancing around the table at the most important people in her life, Anna was filled with a sense of history, a sense of belonging, and a word came to mind: home. In fact it came to her not so much as a word but more as a feeling.

  When her Thia Ourania had asked a few weeks ago where home was for her she didn’t have an answer. Now it was all clear. Now Anna realized that it is possible to be at home in many places; to inhabit many worlds, in our heads, our hearts and in our bodies. To belong to any or all of them at the same time and be happy enough. But perhaps, she thought, in the end what we call home is not a place but a feeling.

  She looked at Max again. He was her husband, the father of her children, the man she had spent the best part of a lifetime with and the man who had out of the blue announced that he wanted to be with someone else. To her surprise, for the first time since his betrayal, she felt no bitterness towards him, for she realized that in fact Max had set her free. She was free to love another, free to be herself; a self she could never have imagined before. Here they both sat, the same, but different.

  She thought of the journey she had been on, of the four kinds of love that she had been blessed to feel. Never in such a short period of time had Anna experienced the intensity of love in all its aspects. She felt the force of Éros, for Nicos, the splendour of philía for her new-found friends, and the intensity of storgé for her aunt and father. Her heart swelled with agápe and all its glory for all her family and those who came before her and had suffered so much.

  Maybe, she thought, there was even a fifth kind of love, the love of freedom, of opening the cage and setting the bird free. She was no longer the little girl that Max had swept off her feet all those years ago.

  This summer she had discovered a new freedom, a new honesty. She was now her own woman. Would Max be able to accept that?

  London, Greece, the world; she looked at her son and daughter and was filled with love and pride. Wherever she was in this world, travelling towards a new millennium, she would continue to be a good mother to her children, she would continue to love, but this time by her own rules.

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt thanks go to all those who helped, encouraged and believed in me, that not only could I write this novel, but that when I did, it was worthy of publication.

  I thank my agent and now also dear friend Dorie Simmonds, who always believed in both me and the book and who has been a continual source of inspiration and motivation for me. I would also like to thank Caroline Hogg and Louise Buckley at Pan Macmillan who loved this story enough to publish it. My thanks also go to my dearest friends Alison Sheriffs Brown and Gill Brackenbury who read chapters as I went along and gave me feedback. To Linda Kelsey, who was the one to encourage me to write a novel in the first place; Trudy Whyle, who was the first to read my synopsis and give me advice before I started writing; my cousin Christina Zira and friends Sally Faulkner and Gill Macdonald, who read and loved it and gave me a glimpse of hope that perhaps it could be published; Anne Boston, who read and edited it for me as an act of pure friendship and gave me the most valuable advice, and Justin Somper and P. J. Norman, who approved of everything.

  My thanks also go to the Hornsey Library in Crouch End, and to all my Italian friends, Roberto, Serena, Paolo, and the delightful Mr Costas Kavathas, who shared his childhood memories of wartime on a Greek island with me, and also I cannot forget Thoth, Rafael and Mike.

  I thank my parents with all my heart for loving me always and wish that my mother was still alive. I miss her more than words can say but am grateful for my wonderful father who continues to remind me each and every day about the four Greek words for love and many more.

 

 
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