by Maeve Binchy
“Is something wrong?” Elsa asked.
“That house I was in just now, the woman is pregnant. The father was one of those who drowned on Manos’s boat. She doesn’t want the child. It’s just such a mess. Dr. Leros won’t hear of doing a termination, so she’s going to go to this woman who ‘manages things’ as she puts it, in a village about fifty kilometers away. She could die, she could certainly get septicemia. Why she can’t have this child and love him or her is not clear. I’ve been there for an hour saying we’ll all help her to look after the baby. But will she listen? No.”
“That’s an unusual position for you to be in, Vonni. People not listening to you,” Elsa teased her.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, we all listen to you, and take great notice of everything you say, believe me. We spent hours talking to David about your theory that his father might be ill.”
“Not might be ill, is ill,” Vonni said. “And what did he decide? He wasn’t too pleased with me, I can tell you that.”
“Well, he thinks it’s all a trap, a way to get him home and then it will be harder for him to get away again. But you’ve unsettled him.”
“I didn’t want to do that,” Vonni said.
“Yes, you did, in a way, you wanted to shake him up, make him think. And you’ve succeeded. He’s going to call his home today.”
“Good.” Vonni nodded her approval. She stopped at a small, ill-kept building. “I’m going into this house. Come with me. I have to give Nikolas some magic medicine.” She took a small clay pot from her woollen shoulder bag.
“You make magic medicines too?” Elsa gasped.
“No, it’s an antibiotic cream actually, but Nikolas doesn’t trust doctors and modern medicine so Dr. Leros and I have this little ruse.”
Elsa watched as Vonni moved around the old man’s simple house picking up things here, arranging there, talking away effortlessly in Greek and then producing the magic ointment and applying it solemnly to the sore on his leg. When they left, the old man smiled at them both.
Elsa and Vonni continued to walk companionably down the winding road. Vonni pointed out landmarks and told the names of the places they passed and what they meant in English.
“You love it here, don’t you?” Elsa said.
“I was lucky to find this place. Maybe I would have found another place, a different place, but Aghia Anna was good to me. I’d never live anywhere else.”
“I’ll be sorry to leave, I really will,” Elsa said.
“But you are leaving? Going back to Germany?” Vonni did not sound pleased.
“Yes, of course, I have to move on,” Elsa said.
“Move back more like, move back to what you ran away from.”
“You don’t know . . . ,” Elsa began.
“I know what you told me, how you made up your mind to escape a bad situation, and how he came here, found you, and changed your mind.”
“No, he didn’t change my mind. I changed my mind,” Elsa said, stung.
“Oh yes?”
“Really, Vonni, you of all people should know what it is to love someone and cross a continent to be with him. You did it, for heaven’s sake. You should understand.”
“I was a child when I did what I did, a schoolgirl, you are a grown, sophisticated woman, with a career, a life, a confident future. We are not comparing like with like.”
“We are, it’s exactly the same; you loved Stavros and gave up everything to be with him because you loved him, I’m doing the same thing for Dieter.”
Vonni paused in her walking and looked at Elsa in astonishment. “You can’t believe that it’s remotely the same. What are you giving up? Nothing. You’re getting everything back, your job, your man whom you still don’t trust. You are returning to all that you ran from, and you think that’s a victory.”
Elsa was angry. “That’s not true. Dieter wants to marry me. It will all be out in the open now. We will live together as man and wife, no more hiding, and then in time we will be man and wife.” Her eyes flashed.
“And the reason you ran away in the first place . . . that was all about forcing him to propose, was it? I thought you said you felt betrayed because he hadn’t told you about this daughter, that he had abandoned her and thought it didn’t matter. Has all this disgust with him vanished?”
“We only have one life, Vonni. We have to reach out our hands and take what we want.”
“No matter who we take it from?”
“You took what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“Stavros wasn’t promised to anyone else. He was free.”
“What about Christina?”
“I didn’t know about Christina until I got here, and he had left her and the baby died, so it was different.”
“What about the money, you took that money? You can’t claim to be whiter than white,” Elsa blazed.
“It was only money and I paid it all back, every single penny.”
“How could you have raised that money?”
“Well, I’ll tell you how. By cleaning floors in the police station, by chopping vegetables up in Andreas’s taverna, by cleaning the kitchens in the delicatessen, by teaching English in the school, once I got sober enough for them to trust their children to me.”
“You did all these jobs? Washing floors?”
“I didn’t have your qualifications, Elsa . . . or your confidence or your looks. What other way could I raise the money?”
“You got over Stavros in the end, didn’t you?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. I need to know, in case I make a different decision.”
“Oh no, Elsa, you’ve made your decision. Go back and reach out your hands and take what you want.”
“Why are you so cruel and destructive?” Elsa cried.
“Me cruel and destructive? Me? Oh, you should talk, Elsa, for God’s sake. Just listen to yourself speaking. I told you before that beauty was very cruel and very selfish. And I mean it. There’s a careless selfishness about beauty. Magda had it, you have it. It’s a lethal thing to have because it gives you too much power for a time. For a time.”
“Did Magda lose her looks? Is this what you’re telling me?”
“How would I know?”
“You’d know. Someone will have told you,” Elsa said grimly.
“Well, funnily enough, someone did tell me. A few people told me, in fact. And she did lose her looks, and she has lost quite a lot of Stavros too. Apparently there’s a younger woman who works in their business and Stavros sees a lot of this woman.” Vonni smiled at the thought.
“What kind of people tell you these stories? Vindictive people carrying tales?”
“Let me see, what kind of people. Possibly people who think I deserve some reward for losing everything and clawing my way back to some position of respectability again.”
“You don’t care about respectability,” Elsa scoffed.
“Oh, but I do, we all need respect to be able to live with ourselves and make sense out of the whole thing.”
“You’re a free spirit. You don’t care what other people think,” Elsa insisted.
“I care what I think of myself. Oh, and by the way, I did get over Stavros. I think of him from time to time. I know his hair is white now, but I would like to see him come up the street, if we could talk as normal people talk. But it’s not going to happen.”
“All right. Back to my situation.” Elsa was businesslike. “Why should I not go back to Dieter? Just tell me calmly without us arguing about it. Please.”
“It doesn’t matter, Elsa.” Vonni sighed. “You’re not going to take any notice of what I say. You are going to do what you want to. Forget I spoke.”
And they walked in awkward silence until they reached the town.
“Shirley?”
“Yes, Thomas?”
“Is Andy there?”
“You don’t really want to talk to Andy?”
“No. I was just hoping
that I might be able to talk to my son without Andy the athlete hopping a ball and getting him away to more training, more workouts.”
“Are you picking a fight, Thomas?”
“No, of course I’m not. I’m telling you straight, I just want to talk to my kid. Okay?”
“Well, hold on. I’ll get him for you.”
“And without Muscle Man Andy breathing down his neck, please.”
“You are grossly unfair as usual. Andy always makes himself scarce when you call, then he asks Bill did he have a good chat with his dad. The only one making any trouble is you.”
“Get him, please, Shirley, this is long distance,” Thomas said.
“Well, whose fault is that?” He could almost hear her shrug.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Bill, tell me about your day,” he said and half listened as the boy went on about a track-and-field event for families at the university. He and Andy had won a three-legged race.
“Father-son race, was it called?” Thomas asked bitterly.
“No, Dad, they don’t call them that now, you know, so many families have sort of re-formed themselves.”
“Re-formed themselves?” Thomas gasped.
“Well, that’s what our teacher calls it. It’s got to do with so many people being divorced and everything.”
It wasn’t such a bad word, but it didn’t begin to hint at the whole story.
“Sure, so what do they call the race?”
“A senior-junior race.”
“Great.”
“Are you upset about anything, Dad?”
“Are you on your own now, just you and me?”
“Yes, Andy always goes out to the yard when you call, and Mom’s in the kitchen. Why do you want to know?”
“I wanted to say that I love you.”
“Dad.”
“It’s okay. I’ve said it now. I won’t say it anymore this call. I got you a wonderful book today at a bookshop here in this tiny place. It’s stories of Greek myths but written for the modern day. I’ve been reading it myself all afternoon. Do you know any Greek stories?”
“Is the one about the kids who flew off to find the golden fleece a Greek story?”
“Sure it is, tell me a bit about it,” Thomas said, pleased.
“It was about this brother and sister, they rode on the back of a sheep . . .”
“Did you read it at school?”
“Yes, Dad, we have a new history teacher. She keeps making us read stories.”
“That’s great, Bill.”
“It’ll be great when I have a brother or sister next year.”
His heart felt like a lump of lead. Shirley was pregnant again. And of course she hadn’t had the courtesy or courage to tell him. Now she and Andy were starting a family and she had said nothing. He had never felt so alone in his life. But he must keep every door and channel open to Bill.
“That’s great news, certainly,” he heard himself say through gritted teeth.
“Andy’s painting a nursery for it. I told him how you made one for me and put in bookshelves even before I was born.”
And Thomas felt the tears in his eyes as he waded in with his two big feet and broke the whole mood. “Well, I guess Andy will be busy putting up shelves for trainers and trophies and sports gear for the poor little kid. To hell with books this time around.”
He heard Bill gasp. “That’s not fair, Dad.”
“Life’s not fair, Bill,” said Thomas and hung up.
“Tell me about it,” Vonni said when she saw Thomas’s face a couple of hours later.
Thomas didn’t move from the chair where he had sat motionless all day. He told her about his conversation with Bill.
“Come on, Thomas, you messed it up again with that kid, didn’t you?”
“I got out of his hair, gave him space, did all the things you should do—what would you have done?”
“Gone back there, claimed your territory, been a presence for him. He’ll need it all the more now since his mother is pregnant. But no, you have to be noble and distant and break that child’s heart by giving him space he doesn’t want at all.”
“Vonni, you of all people know how hard it is to do the right thing for a child. You’ve spent a lifetime regretting that. You should understand.”
“Do you know, I hate that expression ‘you of all people’ must know this or that. Why should I of all people know anything?”
“Because you had a child taken away from you, you know that pain, others only guess at it.”
“I get impatient with people like you, Thomas. Very. I know I am a different generation, my son is your age, but I have never indulged in self-pity like you do. Especially since the solution is in your own hands. You love this child, nobody but yourself is putting any distance between you and him.”
“You don’t understand, I’m on sabbatical leave.”
“They’re not going to get out the FBI if you go back to your hometown to see your own son.”
“Would that it were so simple.” He sighed.
Vonni went toward the door as if to leave.
“Your bedroom is that way, Vonni.” He nodded his head toward the spare room.
“I’m going to sleep with the hens tonight,” Vonni said. “They are oddly comforting in a way, just clucking and gurgling. They don’t complicate their lives unnecessarily.”
And then she was gone.
Fiona was talking to Mr. Leftides, the manager at the Hotel Anna Beach, about a job.
“I could mind the guests’ children for you, take them off their parents’ hands. I’m a qualified nurse, you see; they would be safe with me.”
“You don’t speak any Greek,” the manager objected.
“No, but most of the visitors here are English-speaking, I mean even the Swedes and Germans all speak English.”
She saw Vonni across the foyer stocking the shelves of the hotel’s tiny craft shop. “Vonni will speak for me,” Fiona said. “She’ll tell you that I can be relied on. Vonni,” she called out, “can you tell Mr. Leftides that I’d be a good person to work here?”
“As what?” Vonni seemed curt.
“I’m going to need somewhere to live when Elsa goes back. I was asking Mr. Leftides if I could work here in exchange for board and lodging and a very little money.” Fiona looked pleadingly at the older woman.
“Why do you need a job, aren’t you going home?” Vonni was terse.
“No, you know I can’t leave here until Shane comes back.”
“Shane is not coming back.”
“That’s not true. Of course he’s coming back. Please tell Mr. Leftides that I’m reliable.”
“You’re not reliable, Fiona, you are deluding yourself that this boy is coming back to you.”
Mr. Leftides, who had been looking from one to the other as if he were at a tennis match, decided he had had enough. He shrugged and walked away.
“Why did you do that, Vonni?” There were tears of annoyance and upset in Fiona’s eyes.
“You are being ridiculous, Fiona. Everyone was sorry for you and kind when you had the miscarriage and all that upset. But surely by now you have come to your senses. You must know there’s no future for you here waiting foolishly for a man who will never return. Go back to Dublin and take up your life.”
“You’re so cruel and cold. I thought you were a friend,” Fiona said in a shaky voice.
“I’m the best friend you ever had, if you had the intelligence to see it. Why should a friend try to help set you up in a non-job in this hotel so you can prolong the agony for yourself? What would you do on your own?”
“I wouldn’t be on my own. I have friends—Elsa, Thomas, David.”
“They’re all going back. Mark my words, you’d be on your own.”
“Would it matter if I were on my own? Shane will come for me despite what you think. Now I have to find somewhere else to work and to live.” She turned away to hide the fact that she was crying.
“Vonni, do
you want a Morning Glory?”Andreas often looked into the craft shop and treated her to this specialty of Yanni’s delicatessen, a little metal dish with three colors of ice cream.
“No, I’d prefer a bottle of vodka with a lot of ice,” she said.
Andreas was startled. Vonni never joked about her drinking, and did not refer to her alcoholic past. “Is there a problem?” he asked.
“Yes, there is. I’ve fought with every one of those foreign kids, every single one of them.”
“I thought you liked them; they’re all very attached to you.” Andreas was very surprised.
“I don’t know what it is, Andreas. I’m like a weasel, nothing would please me these days. Everything they say annoys me.”
“That’s unlike you; you are always keeping the peace, smoothing things over.”
“Not these days, I’m not, Andreas. I feel like stirring everything up. I suppose it was the boat and all the unnecessary waste of life. It makes everything seem pointless. I can’t see any sense in anything.” She was pacing around her little shop.
“There’s a lot of sense in your life,” he said.
“Is there? Is there really? Today I can’t see any. I think I’m a foolish woman perched here in this faraway place until I die.”
“Vonni, we are all perched here until we die.” Andreas was bewildered.
“No, you don’t understand, there’s a sense of uselessness about it all somehow. I used to feel like this years back and then I would go up to the top of the town and hit the raki until I was senseless. Don’t let me go that road again, Andreas, my good friend.”
He laid his hand on hers. “Of course I won’t. You’ve fought so hard to get out of that pit you fell into. Nobody is going to let you fall in again.”
“But what a stupid life I’ve lived, people having to mind me, look after me, rescue me. I think telling those young people all about it over the past couple of days made me realize how stupid I’ve been, how selfish. That’s why I suddenly want to drink and forget it all.”
“You normally forget problems by helping other people, that’s what gets you by, that’s why they all love you so much here.”
