‘That’s a terrible thing to say! You should be ashamed.’ What did he mean, again? I stood, annoyed, but as I looked down at my father, I saw his tears rise. A deep sob shuddered through his body.
‘Why did you do it, Bridget? Why? Now look what’s happened. I wasn’t worth it, darling girl!’ he cried.
‘Oh, Dad!’ What was this thing that tortured him?
Through my childhood, there was little contact between us. My parents were always strangers to me and I felt nervous and shy in their company. I withdrew into myself whenever they returned to Dublin. Over the years, I had letters from my mother, which I kept but rarely answered. They came to visit at Christmas, and I remember the occasional phone call, stilted and awkward, along with birthday gifts given to me by Uncle Quinlan.
My father calmed down and remained silent with his thoughts.
After a while I kissed his cheek and said, ‘I love you, Dad. Try not to worry too much. I’ll phone you every day.’
‘If you must go, be careful. There are bad people out there.’ He paused, then looked straight at me. ‘Are you quite sure this was an accident?’
‘Of course it was an accident – who would want to hurt her?’
His brow furrowed and he glared at nothing, perhaps recalling a painful memory. After a moment he said, ‘I’m not happy about you going through all this on your own. Can’t that young man of yours keep you company?’
‘Ah, I wanted to tell you.’ I sighed. ‘We split up. The wedding’s off.’
His eyes met mine again, but this time they softened. ‘Then it wasn’t meant to be, Irini, love. Better to find out now than later.’
I wondered if he referred to his own marriage.
*
The kitchen phone rang.
‘Don’t hang up!’ Jason, my two-timing fiancé – ex-fiancé. ‘I’ve just heard about your mother, Irini. I’m really sorry. Is there anything I can do? Shall I come by this evening, help with the arrangements?’
I wanted to yell: ‘She’s not dead yet, you lying, cheating bag of shit!’ but my heart shattered. I had an enormous feeling of loss, and loneliness, and abandonment – not for the first time in my life. Grief rushed through me and I broke into tears that seem trivial compared to my painful emotions.
After a moment, I tanked my feelings, steadied my voice and said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ and hung up. The call was kind of him. Remnants of Jason’s love still lingered in the cracks and crevices of my heart.
Hemmed in by four walls, I grabbed my mug and escaped to a garden bench in the backyard. Met by a dull, damp morning, I tugged my dressing gown closer, but the cold seemed to come from inside me rather than the weather. I could hear the build-up of traffic, a pneumatic drill, children going to school, and a cat mewling at my feet. Tinker, from next door, jumped into my lap. I stroked him, wishing the pain in my heart would ease.
A picture of my mother in intensive care gathered in my mind. Tubes and graphs and lights blipping. Stiff white sheets, silence, the smell of disinfectant, and an empty chair waiting for me at her bedside.
When the travel agent’s opened, I planned a walk into town to get a flight organised. I had tried to do it online but couldn’t concentrate and ended up drinking half a bottle of wine, something I hardly ever do because I suffer more than most after drinking alcohol. I woke at midnight with my head on the kitchen table and my laptop battery flat. Pathetic.
If I sold my beautiful solitaire engagement ring, the money would buy a flight and leave enough cash to deal with my responsibilities. I glanced around, absently searching for direction.
A single bright yellow dandelion poked from between grey cement slabs. The high wall enclosing the yard was a flaking abstract of crumbling brickwork and white paint, topped by broken glass. It was bin day; I needed to haul my wheelie through the terraced house and onto the front pavement.
Storm clouds, as grey as my miserable soul, threatened rain. Uncle Quinlan and my parents were the only family I had. Like many Irish Catholics, the rest of my relations had emigrated to Australia, years ago. I never really knew them.
I still had to tell dear Quinlan the bad news.
Fat raindrops plopped onto the flagstones. As I plucked the dandelion, tossed it into the bin, and returned to my empty kitchen, I recalled last Wednesday evening when my hopes and dreams were smashed.
When I caught Jason kissing one of the bar staff from Donahue’s pub, he admitted to an affair. Devastated, I cancelled everything I could for our wedding, which should have taken place next month. Kohl-eyed Calla, all chick-lit and cheap clothes, had won the day and my man.
*
I marched into the family jeweller’s near Grafton Street and plonked my small blue ring box on their counter. My smile bright, but my heart breaking. I’d worn black, it seemed appropriate.
‘Hi, my boyfriend and I bought this a year ago but . . . well, I guess you know how it goes. I wondered if you would buy it back?’
Shortly, ringless but rich, and with tears dangerously close, I passed a travel agency. The words ‘Crete’ and ‘Last Minute Bargain’ caught my eye. Perhaps they had a late deal for Santorini? I stepped inside. I had been too exhausted to properly look for flights online the night before. They seemed few and far between and horribly expensive.
‘Sorry, fully booked for the next two weeks,’ the woman said cheerfully. ‘Peak season.’
‘What? No flights! What am I going to do?’
‘We’ve got the final seats to Crete. It’s only sixty-something miles from Santorini and there’s a fast ferry that runs every day. You could go on a day trip while you’re on holiday in Crete.’
‘No, you don’t understand. It’s not a holiday.’ I found myself telling the travel agent about my mother and almost breaking down in the process. Her sunshine smile clouded over.
‘Let’s see what I can do.’ Her long nails clacked on the keyboard, then she spoke to an on-line colleague using words like ‘emergency’ and ‘death in the family’. Back on the keyboard, she worked in silence, her eyes flicking up to meet mine now and again.
Eventually, she nodded. ‘Right, here’s the best solution. You fly to the island of Crete tomorrow afternoon, arrive at eight in the evening. Transfer to the last internal flight for Santorini, leaving at nine. Your accommodation in Crete’s included, so you can go back to it whenever you want in that fortnight. You’ll have to collect your luggage at Crete, so with only an hour between flights, it’s tight.’
CHAPTER 3
BRIDGET
Santorini, 29 years ago.
THREE DAYS AFTER FINDING my darling Tommy in the grip of a coronary, I returned to Santorini and the archaeological site. The egg mayo sandwiches had gone – mice and birds, I guess – the bottles lay warm and bloated on the ground. Tommy remained in hospital on the island of Crete, awaiting further tests. For the first time since running away together, we were apart. I glanced at the sky and crossed myself.
Please God, don’t take my Tommy yet. He’s a good man and I love the bones of him. He’s all I have.
Defeated, and as low as I’d ever been, I realised the archaeological site was nothing but dust and ruins without the man I loved. We had travelled this adventure together, abandoning work, family, and friends in our search for proof that Santorini was Atlantis. The Atlantis that captured Plato’s imagination hundreds of years after its disappearance. The magnificent and wealthy island that the Egyptians traded with and wrote about in their hieroglyphics.
Sniffing and swiping at tears, I stared around at four thousand square metres of light brown pumice and a maze of old stone walls. The magic had gone. Perhaps the site had always been that way, but with Tommy near, the place held the enchanted air of myths and legends.
Awash with tiredness, I up-righted a chair in our lunch corner and fell into it. I had hardly eaten in days. After being flown to the Heraklion hospital, doctors had bombarded me with information about Tommy’s heart. His condition was serious.
Staring int
o the distance, I went cold thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t felt those pangs of hunger and gone looking for my husband. Just as well we hadn’t managed to start a family yet. I might not have been at the site if there had been children to care for.
We both longed for the day I could tell Tommy we had a baby on the way, but it never happened. Over time, my monthly disenchantment faded into reluctant acceptance. Pregnancy could still happen, of course, but it seemed unlikely after so long.
We had little in the way of savings. Like my parents, our emergency fund was a gold wristwatch that came from my grandmother. When I was a child, that watch had been in and out of our Dublin pawn shop more times than I cared to remember. Thank goodness Ma had not worn it on the day the bomb went off. That awful day when I became an orphan and moved in with Uncle Peter, Aunty Agnes, and their five freckle-faced sons.
‘Hello! Is anyone here?’
The man’s voice made me jump. Our four archaeology students appeared from between the ruins.
‘Ah, Bridget, why so glum?’ Aaron, leader of the student group, lumbered towards me. ‘We’re back, you’ll be pleased to know, and a grand time was had by all. Ephesus is awesome.’
‘Hi, guys.’ I forced a smile.
‘Where’s Tommy? Skiving again?’ Aaron glanced around excitedly. ‘Tell us what’s new, Bridget. Did you find remarkable things while we were away?’
Unable to think of anything but Tommy, I shook my head, then dropped it into my hands and wept.
‘Oh no, Bridget . . .’ Aaron sat in Tommy’s chair and put his arm around my shaking shoulders. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’
I shook my head again, then nodded at the youth whose good humour and enthusiasm for ancient history inspired us all. ‘It’s Tommy – he’s had a heart attack. It’s serious, Aaron, and I’m completely lost in it all.’
‘Poor you. Come on, dry your eyes. Look, I’ve got a hire car for a couple of days, let’s lock your bike in here and I’ll take you home.’ Even at the age of twenty, Aaron showed the steady dependability that leaders are made of. ‘Can I take you for something to eat? You look as though you need a good meal.’
‘Very kind, but I need to be near the phone in case there are any changes in Tommy’s condition.’ I would be glad to have Aaron there when I re-wound the answerphone. I dreaded listening to the messages on my own.
He stared at the ground and nodded. ‘Right, then we’ll pick something up on the way back.’
*
Night had fallen by the time I started a third beer on the patio. I found myself telling Aaron things I had never recounted before, and with the telling a weight lifted from me.
‘How did you and Tommy meet?’ he asked, sensing my need to talk.
I smiled, remembering myself as a love-struck student. ‘I got myself lost on my first day at college and wandered into the sports hall. Tommy was playing ping-pong with the wall.’ I paused. It seemed like yesterday. ‘He asked if I wanted a game. My God, he was so handsome I blushed like hell and told him I’d never played before.’ Recalling the moment made my face heat up again. I placed a hand on my cheek and laughed. ‘ “Good!” Tommy said. “This means you might be my very first win,” and with that he handed me a paddle and beat me straight down the line.’
‘That’s Tommy for you, competitive to the end.’
‘Do you think so? I’ve never thought that. I was a poor orphaned kid, and felt I had no right to be in a grand university with all those wealthy and intelligent people. I was nervous, tired, and oh so lonely. I had a job with a cleaning company, vacuuming banks and offices before dawn, and a weekend job stacking supermarket shelves, all to help pay for books and clothes and a little housekeeping money for Aunty Agnes too.’
‘Must have been tough.’
‘It was, to be sure, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. I was driven by necessity. The next day I started my course, and Dr Tommy McGuire was the tutor. He was the youngest tutor at the university and he had a relaxed aura about him, like he knew he was bordering on genius. I hung on to his every word, but he was a git and picked on me all the time. Like many new, wide-eyed university kids, I had an instant crush on the professor. This made me desperate to impress him with my work. People said that part of my infatuation was because I longed for a father figure. You see, my parents had been killed ten years earlier. The troubles, you know?’
Aaron gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Before my time, Bridget, but I vaguely remember them from school, of course.’
I nodded and sipped my beer. ‘Tommy avoided me like the plague, but for me, it was love at first sight. Poor Tommy resisted my advances for almost four years.’
‘A man of steel, our Tommy, then?’ He sat back, grinning at me.
I smiled. ‘I guess starry-eyed students were an occupational hazard. Anyway, I persisted, and joined the ping-pong club – so square, hardly any other students joined, but I had to be near him. I couldn’t cope. Life without him wasn’t worth living. Things got worse when I told my aunt and uncle the reason for my love-sick misery. They were horrified!’
‘Because you’d fallen in love with your tutor, or because he was that much older than you?’
‘Well, that as well, but mostly because he was a Protestant. You see, it was a Protestant bomb that killed my mother and father.’
‘That must have been difficult for them to accept.’
‘You’re not wrong. Though the seventies was an era of ban the bomb and fight for equality for women in Britain, the fact was, Ireland remained way behind the times. In those days women were not allowed to buy any form of birth control and it was against the law for a woman to refuse to have sex with her husband – can you belive that? We Irish women were second-class citizens and the only thing the seventies did for us was make us realise it.’
Aaron blinked at me, taking it all in and clearly speechless for a moment. ‘I didn’t realise it was that bad.’
I nodded. ‘I was expected to put all this archaeology nonsense out of my head and become a history and geography teacher. Everyone would have been proud. Naturally, I was supposed to find a nice Catholic boy, marry, give up work and have lots of nice little Catholic children.’
‘Of course you were.’ He laughed. ‘They didn’t know you very well then?’
‘They did their best, God love them, but with their five boys I was an oddity that they cherished. They did love me very much, I don’t doubt it, but I wanted to spread my wings and fly to my professor. Tommy persuaded me to take a year out. He got me a placement on an archaeological site in England. Now I look back, I suspect he thought I would meet a suitable boy my own age and fall in love.
‘For a year, everyone was pacified, apart from me. When I returned to Dublin for my finals, I knew Professor Tommy McGuire was the only man I wanted to share my life with. Three months later, we were secretly seeing each other. Six months later, we were saving for our wedding. But then we were found out. In those days, having a relationship with a student was totally unacceptable. This resulted in Tommy resigning so that I could finish my studies.’
‘No way! Wow! What an amazing sacrifice.’
I nodded. ‘It was indeed. Tommy sent me a letter telling me to get my degree, then I could join him in Greece if I still wanted.’
‘And did you?’
‘Sort of, but that’s another story.’
*
Talking to Aaron had helped me come to terms with the situation. When he had gone, I dragged an old suitcase from under the bed and delved beneath musty cable-knits and heavy jeans, stored for ten months of the year. At first, I couldn’t find the metal box, but then my fingertips touched the tin that had once contained Oxo cubes. When I lifted the lid, a distinct smell of salt and malt brought back childhood memories. Steaming hot drinks on cold nights, intricate ice patterns on the insides of my Dublin bedroom window, and my mother’s voice.
‘Are you cold, child? Here, get this drink inside you and I’ll
put the coats on your bed. Warm you up, it will. Have you said your prayers?’
I had shaken my head. ‘The lino’s cold on my knees, Ma. It makes them hurt, it does.’
‘Now come on, be a good girl.’
Shivering in my pink flannelette nighty, I kneeled at my bedside, joined my hands and said:
‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon this little child.
Make me humble as thou art, with thy love inflame my heart.
God bless Mammy and Daddy and everyone who knows me. Amen.’
Then I scrambled back into bed, pulled the covers tight around my neck and waited for Da. I forced my tired eyes open when I heard the stairs creaking.
‘Will you tell me a limerick or a jingle, Da?’ I preferred his rhymes to Ma’s prayers, and there was a kind of mischievous conspiracy between me and my father.
‘Close your eyes then.’ And I would, knowing he smiled down on me.
‘If I had a penny, do you know what I would do?
I’d buy a rope and hang the pope,
And let King Billy through.
’Cause if the pope were dead, sure everyone does know,
Me little Bridget would be spared, the pain of cold lino.’
We giggled together, then the scrape of his red beard and his good-night kiss on my cheek.
I had loved my father so very much.
From the Oxo tin, I pulled out my mother’s pink plastic rosary beads that had come from Lourdes, and an envelope containing my birth, baptism, and wedding certificates. I unfolded a yellowing page from the Irish Times, neatly wrapped around my grandmother’s gold watch. The inheritance that was sure to give my darling husband more time on this earth.
Exhausted by the day’s events, I lay on the bed and thought about my life with Tommy, united in our quest to find Atlantis. I closed my eyes and allowed one memory to lead to another.
Only in my dreams had I seen the place we searched for, and in those visions, it was I myself that ruled utopia. That seed had grown from a variation of Plato’s stories, as told to me with grand embellishments by Uncle Peter. Later, crazily in love with my professor, I still imagined myself as ruler of Atlantis. Omnipotent, and loved by the populous, this queen dedicated her life to the peaceful and happy existence of her subjects. As a hobby, I continued to research Greek legends that told of the fearless queen who led her people in war against Libya, and in peace on her island of Atlantis.
Secrets of Santorini Page 3