by Maeve Binchy
Elsa and David’s taxi arrived in the old square that was the center of Kalatriada. The driver wondered where to leave them.
“Here is just fine,” Elsa said, paying him handsomely. David wanted to share the cost but she insisted it was her treat.
They stood and looked around the village where they had arrived up twisty, perilous roads. It was not a tourist spot, and most certainly not a place that had been discovered by developers. The sea was far below, down another narrow track. Half the buildings around the square seemed to be tiny restaurants or cafés. There was a selection of pottery shops.
“I’m sure you want to go find your temple,” she said to him. “This is a good, safe place you brought me. I can hide here.”
“I’m in no great rush to see the temple,” David said. “I can sit with you for a while.”
“Well, after all those turns and corners I must say I would love a coffee.” Elsa smiled. “But truly this is a fine place to come to, I can breathe properly here. You really are my hero, you know.”
“Oh, hero you say!” David laughed at the idea. “Not my usual role, I’m afraid.”
“Now don’t try to tell me that you’re normally cast as a villain!” Elsa was cheerful again.
“No, nothing as dashing. The buffoon, more often,” he admitted.
“I don’t believe it for a moment,” Elsa said.
“That’s because you don’t know me, you haven’t seen me in my real life, where I just mess everyone up.”
“That’s not so, you told us you don’t see eye to eye with your father. That’s not a hanging offense. Half the men in the world feel the same way.”
“I’ve let him down in everything, every single thing, Elsa. Honestly, if he had been given any other kind of son it would have worked. A ready-made business, a position of honor in the community, a lovely home, but it all choked me and made me feel trapped. No wonder he despises me.”
“Will we sit here, do you think?” Elsa indicated the nearest place and sat down on a broken-looking chair in a very basic café. The waiter came and spread a piece of waxed paper on another chair.
“Better chair for the lady,” he said.
“They’re all so nice here,” she marveled.
“Everyone’s nice to you everywhere, Elsa, you are so full of sunshine.”
David ordered two metrios, the medium-sweet coffees. They sipped them companionably.
“I didn’t know my father, David. He left us early, but I had many, many arguments with my mother.”
“You see, that’s probably more healthy. In my case, I don’t have any real arguments at all. It’s all sighs and shrugs,” David said.
“Believe me, I said far too many things to my mother, far, far too much criticism. If I had my time over I would have said less. But that’s women and their mothers, they always say!”
“What kind of things did you argue about?”
“I don’t know, David. Everything. I used to say that my way was right and hers was wrong. Her clothes were awful, her friends, you know, the usual destructive thing.”
“I don’t know, you see. Because we don’t talk at all.”
“If you had it to do all over again, what would you do?” Elsa asked.
“The same, mess it up, I imagine.”
“That’s so defeatist. You’re young. Much younger than me, your parents are alive, for you there is time.”
“Don’t make me feel worse, Elsa, please.”
“Of course not, I just think it’s fair to tell you we share something, but I don’t have a chance to put it right. My mother’s dead.”
“How did she die?”
“In a car crash with one of her unsuitable friends.”
David leaned over and patted Elsa’s hand. “It was quick and I am sure it was painless for her,” he said.
“You are such a kind boy, David,” she said in a shaky voice. “Finish your coffee and we’ll go and investigate Kalatriada. And then at lunch I’ll tell you my problems and you can give me advice.”
“You don’t have to, you know,” he said.
“Peaceable David,” she said with a smile.
“Where’s this place you said was so good?” Shane grumbled.
His attention was drawn by a noisy bar they passed. “Maybe this place would be fine,” he suggested.
It wasn’t at all the kind of place where she could have told him the news, so Fiona refused to consider it. “Much too expensive tourist prices,” she said. And that settled it. They moved toward the fish restaurant on the point.
Andreas sat with his brother in the police station. Georgi’s desk was piled high with reports about the accident. His phone was ringing constantly. Now there was a lull. “I wrote to Adonis today,” he said slowly.
“Good, good,” Georgi said after a little time.
“I didn’t say sorry or anything.”
“No, of course not,” Georgi agreed.
“Because I’m not sorry. You know that.”
“I know, I know.” Georgi did not need to inquire why his brother had written to the long-estranged son in Chicago. He knew why. It was because the death of Manos and all the people on the boat had shown them how very short life was. That was all.
Thomas passed the television crews and photographers in the square beside the harbor. It was a job like any other, he supposed, but they did seem somehow like a swarm of insects. They didn’t gather where people were having a good time and getting on with life, only where there had been a disaster.
He thought about Elsa, that golden, handsome German girl. She had been fairly dismissive of her own role in it all. He thought he had seen her earlier and wondered where she had been going today in the taxi.
Perhaps she even knew these German television crews who were gathered around the harbor. Greece was a popular destination for Germans; there were even two German visitors said to have lost their lives on Manos’s boat. But even though he looked, Elsa was nowhere to be seen. She must not have come back from her taxi ride. He walked on to the restaurant on the point.
David and Elsa walked around the ruins of the temple. They were the only visitors. An elderly guide asked them for half a Euro and gave them a cloakroom ticket in return. Also an ill-written and near incomprehensible account of what the temple had once been.
“There could be a fortune made by writing a proper leaflet in German,” Elsa said.
“Or even in English,” David laughed.
They wandered back to the square. “Let’s see about this great lunch I’m going to take you to,” she said.
“I’m easy, Elsa . . . Look, the waiter where we were before is waving at us. I’m happy to go back there if you are.”
“Of course I am. I’d prefer to, as it happens. But then I wanted something more grand because I have to ask another favor of you.”
“You don’t have to pay me with an expensive lunch, and I don’t think Kalatriada has a posh restaurant, anyway.”
Their waiter ran out, delighted to see them. “I knew you come back, lady,” he said, beaming all over his face. He brought a dish of olives and little bits of cheese, and indicated the kitchens, where they could see dishes kept warm in big, heated cabinets. Proudly he opened up each dish so that they could choose what they would eat.
They sat companionably and talked as if they were old friends. They wondered what it would be like to have grown up in a small hill village like this, instead of in big cities as they had. They marveled at the tall, blond Scandinavians who had come from the northern cold to work here as jewelers and potters. It was only when they were sipping the dark, sweet coffee that she said, “I’ll tell you what this is about.”
“You don’t have to, we’re having a lovely day.”
“No, I have to tell you because, you see, I want us not to go back to Aghia Anna tonight. I want us to stay here, to stay until tomorrow when the funeral is over.”
David’s mouth opened. “Stay here?”
“I can’t go back to t
he town, David. My television crew is there, people will recognize me, they’ll tell Dieter, our boss back home, and he’ll come and find me. I couldn’t bear that.”
“Why?”
“Because I love him so much.”
“So that’s bad—if the man you love comes to find you?”
“If it were only as simple as that,” she said, and she took his two hands and held them to her face. He felt the tears splash down over his fingers and onto the table.
“I understand. Of course we have to stay here in Kalatriada tonight,” said David, who felt that he was indeed becoming more like a hero every hour of this day.
It was early. Fiona and Shane were the only people in the restaurant. The waiter left them alone with the fish and the wine by the dark blue sea and white sand. Shane had drunk two beers and a bottle of retsina very quickly. Fiona watched him, waiting for the right time to tell him her news. Finally, when she could wait no longer, she put her hand on his arm and told him that she was seven days overdue. She said that since she was twelve years old she had never been one day late. And with whatever medical knowledge she had as a nurse, she felt sure that this was not a false alarm and that it really did mean they were pregnant.
She looked hopefully into his face. She saw disbelief written all over it.
He drank another glass of wine before he spoke.
“I can’t take this in,” he said. “We took precautions.”
“Well, we didn’t . . . all of the time . . . If you remember . . .” She was about to remind him about one particular weekend.
“How could you be so stupid?” he asked.
“Well, it wasn’t only me.” She was hurt.
“God, Fiona, you really have a way of spoiling everything and wrecking everyone’s life,” he said.
“But we did want children, we said, you said . . .” Fiona began to cry.
“One day, I said, not now—you’re such a fool—not now that we’re only a month out on the trip.”
“I thought . . . I thought . . .” She struggled to speak through her tears.
“What did you think?”
“I thought we might stay here, you know, in this place and we could bring up the baby here.”
“It’s not a baby, it’s a seven-day overdue period.”
“But it could be a baby, our baby, and you could get a job in a restaurant maybe, and I could work too . . .”
He stood up and leaned across the table to shout at her. She could hardly hear the things he was saying, so hurtful and cruel were they. She was a whore, like all women. Scheming and plotting to get him tied down with a brood of children and make him work as a waiter. A waiter in a godforsaken place like this.
She must get rid of the baby and never think of coming up with this kind of fairy story again. Never. She was a stupid, brainless fool.
She must have argued with him, none of it was clear, but then she felt the stinging blow on her face with such a shock that she had begun to reel back as he was coming at her with his fist clenched.
The ground was coming up at her. She felt sick and was shaking all over. Then she heard the running and shouting behind her and two waiters held Shane back, and Thomas, who had arrived from nowhere, pulled her away, guiding her to a chair.
She closed her eyes as he dabbed her face with cold water. “You’re all right, Fiona,” he said as he stroked her hair. “Believe me, you’re all right now.”
FIVE
The restaurant gave Thomas the number of the police station. Fiona heard Shane laugh when he heard that the call was going to be made.
“Waste of time, Thomas, she’s not going to press charges, and even if she does, it’s only a domestic. That’s what they’ll say. Even worse, a foreign domestic, no chance of anything holding up.” He reached for another glass of wine.
The two waiters looked at Thomas as if for advice. Should they let Shane drink, or should they restrain him? But Thomas just nodded slightly. The drunker Shane got, the worse the impression he would make when Georgi, the brother of Andreas, turned up to deal with things.
He went into a back room to make the call privately and introduced himself to the police on the phone, who immediately knew who he was.
“You were one of the generous people who gave such a donation to the family of Manos.”
“It was really your brother who did that; he didn’t charge us for the meal.”
“He said you were friends.” It seemed simple to Andreas’s brother.
“And we are proud to be his friends, but, sir, we have a problem . . .”
Thomas explained it all to Georgi, who understood the situation instantly. There was remarkably little red tape. Then Thomas quietly asked the waiters to take Shane into a back room and lock him in. Shane didn’t even put up a struggle.
“It’s a waste of time, a waste of police time, believe me, you’ll be sorry when they’ve been and gone. Know-it-all Thomas bleating yesterday about not being able to communicate with your son. You couldn’t communicate with a cat, Thomas, you don’t have the style.”
“And you do of course, and the fists of course,” Thomas said.
“Very droll, very droll indeed.”
“They don’t take kindly to hitting women here, you’ll discover that shortly.”
“I’ll walk out of here with that girl on my arm. It’s happened before; it will happen again.” He looked cocky and confident.
Thomas felt the bile of anger rise in his throat, and he realized that his hand had turned into a fist without his intending it to. Shane saw and laughed.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to behave like a man at last,” the boy sneered at him.
But the anger had left Thomas almost as soon as it arrived. He was calm again.
“Leave him some wine, I’ll pay,” he said to the waiters and went to sit down beside Fiona, whose tearstained face looked like that of someone still in shock.
“It will be fine,” he said, stroking her hand.
“It will never be fine,” she said with a terrible finality.
“We survive, you know, that’s why we’re all here roaming the earth instead of being extinct.”
And then he didn’t say any more while they waited for the police van to arrive. They sat there listening to the waves crashing against the rocks under the restaurant. Her face looked sad and empty, but Thomas knew that he was some kind of strength and company for her just by being there.
When Georgi arrived, he told Shane that an assault had been seen by three independent witnesses, that he would be locked up in the police station for twenty-four hours.
“But she didn’t mind.” Shane was slurred now and nervous. “Ask her. I love her, we’re together, we might even be going to have a baby.”
“That’s not important,” Georgi explained. “The complaint has not been made by this lady; what she says is irrelevant.”
Then he handcuffed Shane and helped him into the police van.
The van had driven off in the sun when people started to arrive for their lunch. The waiters were relieved. They were young and inexperienced. It had all been disturbing—a fracas, the arrival of the police van, an arrest—but order had been restored and trade had not been interrupted. It had been a busy morning so far.
Fiona had said nothing during the whole time, but now she started to cry. “I wish I had a friend, Thomas,” she said.
“I’m your friend.”
“Yes, I know, but I meant a woman friend like Barbara back home; she’d tell me what to do, she’d advise me.”
“Do you want to call her? I have a telephone in my apartment,” he suggested.
“It’s not the same now, too much water under the bridge, too many times when she offered to help and I didn’t listen; she couldn’t understand how much is changed. How much has happened.”
“I know, you’d have to start too far back.” He was sympathetic.
“I could talk to Elsa, but we don’t know where she is, and anyway she might not want
to listen to all my complaints,” Fiona said sadly, wiping her eyes with a napkin.
“We could find out where she is. I think I saw her getting into a taxi this morning with someone who looked like David. I don’t know where they were going. But why don’t we have something to eat, build you up a little.”
“You sound like my mother.” She gave a weak little smile.
“I’m good at mothering skills,” he said. “When you are strong enough to walk, we’ll go ask the taxi drivers, they won’t have forgotten someone like Elsa.”
“It’s a bit feeble of me, really.”
“She’s very warm and sympathetic . . . just the person to talk to,” he reassured Fiona.
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, I do. Oh, Fiona, another thing?”
“What?”
“Is it true what he said—that you might be pregnant?”
“He said that? I didn’t realize—” There was a pathetic hope in her face again.
“He only said it hoping that he wouldn’t get taken by the police.”
“I thought he might have been pleased.”
“No. I don’t want to be cruel, but he didn’t sound pleased. Might it be true?”
“It might.” She sounded glum.
“We’ll have an omelette and then we’ll go interrogate the taxi drivers. If they can’t remember Elsa, they are certainly not worthy of being called men.”
He was right. They all remembered the German blonde and the small man with glasses. The man who had taken them to Kalatriada said it was a wonderful fare.
“Let’s go there,” Thomas said, and offered the startled taxi driver his second great fare of the day.
It was certainly a twisty road up through the hills. Once they got to the small town of Kalatriada, it was easy to find Elsa and David.
