by Sara Alexi
‘Scary,’ Ellie says, wide-eyed.
Stella wants to hug her, tell her it will all be fine, make everything unpleasant go away, and coo and cluck like a hen, bask in taking care of the girl. The feeling is so strong, she firmly closes her mouth and turns her wedding ring on her finger, thinking of Mitsos and the care he needs. But her urges will not be suppressed so she allows them to manifest by nipping out of the room to get Ellie some water.
Before the door has swung closed, she is back with a bottle of water, wiping the condensation off on her skirt. Ellie takes it gratefully and drinks deeply. Sarah reaches for the air conditioning remote on the table and clicks it on.
‘It’s just too scary,’ Ellie repeats, having drunk half the bottle.
‘And the alternative?’ Stella asks.
‘Go home. Face where I am, see if I can make a go of it, like that friend of yours, Sarah, the old, old woman who had the arranged marriage.’
‘Well, I guess you know best,’ Sarah replies, convincing no one.
‘Only you can decide, Ellie, but if you go, remember that you can always come back,’ Stella says.
‘Ellie, you are stronger than you think. You will work this out. We have both done it.’ Sarah makes eye contact with Stella. ‘And we, or at least I, was nowhere near as confident as you are now, nor as smart. You are part of the new generation. You can do homework with your iPod in your ears whilst watching television.’ Ellie manages a giggle. ‘You have so much clicking in your head that I have no doubt, if you slow down and breathe, you will find your true course.’
‘We are all here for you, Ellie,’ Stella says, not trusting herself to say any more. There are tears in her eyes.
‘I must go, Stella. You have been wonderful, both of you, and I am not ungrateful. It’s just that I didn’t expect to meet someone like Loukas. I will go, I have to. But I will keep in touch.’
‘With me too, please,’ Sarah requests.
‘Yeah!’ Ellie smiles, ‘With both of you.’ She looks from one to the other.
‘So when do you want to go?’ Stella asks.
‘Today, tomorrow, as soon as I can. It breaks my heart to be here now without him, and I cannot risk seeing him again.’
‘Shall I arrange that then, Stella?’ Sarah asks and Stella nods.
‘But,’ Stella says as the door closes after Sarah, ‘I insist that you come back in a years’ time.’
Ellie agrees. But leaving feels as unreal as staying.
Both of which feel as unreal as returning in a year’s time.
Chapter 18
Stella leans back in her chair in her office.
‘Why is life never easy?’ she asks the chart on the wall. Her heart is with Ellie but her eyes trace the various delivery dates for the things that keep the hotel running smoothly. The people who do the deliveries offer a very comprehensive service. They have a brother who has a laundry so her sheets are in with the deal too, as is the daily bread that comes from a bakery in Saros, run by a distant cousin of Mitsos. It was he who recommended the service in the first place. In truth, Mitsos’ cousin’s bread is good, but it is not as good as Loukas’. But it was part of the deal, so it is as it is. Anyway, it is a total package and it took away much of the worry in the first tentative weeks of opening the hotel’s doors. In the long run, she needs to break that package apart and find cheaper sources for everything.
That’s if she can remain open. She and Mitsos had another argument over a troubling letter that came from Saros’ planning department. Mitsos immediately started to worry and told her, in unusually harsh terms, that she had taken too big a risk inviting the mayor and his friends to the big opening. She in return made him get his own coffee, which was not kind. She watched him struggle with his one arm and stood by mutely when he knocked over the coffee tin reaching for the matches to light the stove. That was unkind. But the mayor was her hope. That was why she invited him in the first place. She was so sure that he could help with the planning legalisation, oil the way somehow, and on the night of the party, he gave her the impression that he would. But the next day, there was the letter saying that there were irregularities that needed ironing out. It wasn’t signed by the mayor, but by some under-secretary. The reality amounted to the same thing.
She felt a bit at a loss for where to turn next. Maybe she should get the local lawyer, Babis, involved, but if she goes down a legal route and it does not go her way, then that is that. It’s over. Forever. If she sticks to the personal approach, maybe finds someone else more directly involved in planning, she could smooth the way herself. Didn’t Loukas say that his mother-in-law’s cousin works in that office? Maybe he could help?
Chapter 19
The rain streams horizontally across the oval window, the thick double layer of glass lending definition to the rivulets. As their speed reduces, the angle of the water steepens until the droplets gather more naturally and run down the glass vertically. Everything beyond the window is grey, the sky a sheet of cloud. The wet tarmac reflects back the runway lights even though it is only mid-afternoon. The tanned passengers, many still in flip-flops and shorts, radiate an air of despondency. The children on board are whining and a baby is crying. Ellie is in the middle seat and the woman in the window seat—two weeks on a beach on Aegina island; the service in the hotel was appalling; there were sea urchins that stopped her going in the water, and every time she ordered a coffee, it was cold—nudges her to start moving, to join the crowd in the aisle, fight to get her bag down from the overhead locker and begin the dash to the bottleneck at passport control.
Ellie would have been even more tired if Mitsos hadn’t driven her to the station at Corinth, where the train connects directly to Athens airport. He apologised all the way for letting slip she was married. His English was not very good, so he kept just saying bits in Greek followed by ‘sorry’. Ellie tried to reassure him that it was not his fault, that it was never a secret, but she is not sure he understood. Such a sweet, gentle man. Perhaps Loukas will be like him as he gets older. He has the same sort of character.
Mrs Cold-Coffee nudges her a second time just as the seat belt signs are switched off. There is a rush of general movement, so Ellie follows their lead and stands. There is nowhere to go; the aisle is blocked, and now that she is on her feet, there seems little point in standing and she sits again, in the aisle seat.
‘It’s no good sitting there, dear. It’ll be hell at passport control if you don’t move yourself. Come on; look lively.’ Mrs Cold Coffee’s accent is thick, but it is deep, gruff Northern English, not the easy enunciated lilt of Greek. It is a strong accent and familiar to Ellie’s ears.
Why do English people that age think they can speak in such an authoritative way to her, to people who look her age? Sarah and Stella didn’t. They treated her as an equal, with respect. So did the Greek people she met.
‘Lady, where is it you would like me to go? The aisle is blocked.’ Ellie decides that she is not going to put up with the condescending way older people speak to her any more.
‘Alright, no need to get an attitude,’ the woman is quick to retort.
‘I am not “getting an attitude”, I am merely pointing out a fact.’ Ellie remains calm.
The woman purses her lips and as Ellie looks back to the aisle, she hears, ‘Young people, think they own the world.’
As it is, Ellie’s long stride, hurried by the comparative cold, makes her one of the first to passport control, which is absolutely empty but nevertheless corralled so travellers have to zig-zag back and forth across an empty room to make any progress down towards the exit booths. As if to annoy, Mrs Cold-Coffee is one step behind her, almost treading on her heels to push past. Ellie stops, lets her pass, and then ducks the ropes, one after the other to make a direct line to the nearest exit. The passport man checks her ID and waves her through and as she leaves, she can hear Cold-Coffee, who is still zig-zagging down the room, stating as loudly as she dare that the ropes are there for a reason an
d people shouldn’t think themselves so grand as to flaunt the rules. Looking back, she catches a young couple also ducking the ropes as the corral is filling with people behind the complaining woman, whose bag on wheels keeps tipping over to one side and each time, it seems to need more strength than she possesses to right it. It’s now her turn to be hassled by the people behind her.
Even this does not make Ellie smile. She may never smile again. She walks straight through baggage reclaim, as she has nothing but her small rucksack containing her t-shirt dresses, her sandals, and her underwear. The decor matches her mood as she passes from one sterile, blank air-conditioned area to another. She follows the signs to the bus station; it will be cheaper than the train. As she steps out of the terminal, the cold, bracing English air hits her. It is still raining. It’s always raining.
The bus shelter does little to stop the wind. Hunching in her thin jacket, Ellie reads the timetable. She’s just missed the bus, and it will be at least an hour’s wait for the next one. She is about to return indoors when a bus pulls up.
‘Sorry about the delay. The motorway is at a standstill with this rain.’ The driver greets her cheerfully. The inside of the bus is moist with the breath of the other passengers and the steaming of their wet clothes in the warmth. The windows are fogged with condensation and Ellie wipes a hole with the back of her hand to look out at the grey. Grey buildings, grey roads, grey trees, grey people.
The tarmac reflects orange street lights that have come on even though it is nowhere near evening. The sky is one expanse of bruised cloud. The rainwater under the bus wheels hisses and splashes, giving the impression that they are driving up a stream. They build up some speed onto the motorway, where they immediately slow down again. Without the protection of buildings on either side of them, they are even more exposed to the elements. The windscreen wipers thrash back and forth and the water runs incessantly down the glass in a sheet. The driver is hunched forward, peering out into the deluge.
To come back for this! England in the summer! Why? Her heart talks to her but her head is quick to silence it with platitudes about decency, respectability, and responsibility.
The bus continues its crawl through the onslaught. The driver turns up the radio enough for Ellie to hear the travel news. An accident is causing tail backs. There may be a delay of an hour or more, and drivers are advised to use alternative routes. A man at the back of the bus begins to snore loudly. The time passes imperceptibly and the bus slows to walking pace. Ellie almost gives up the will to live.
Hours later, just before they reach the depot where she will have to change to a local bus, the skies slowly clear. Ahead, it is less grim; the blanket above the world softens and lightens but there is still not a touch of blue sky anywhere to be seen.
The local bus is dominated by a party of women returning from a hen night yesterday evening in the city. They are shivering in bunny girl outfits, with orange-peel thighs blue with cold, misshapen acrylic cardigans pulled over their skimpy outfits to cover bosoms squeezing out of sagging cut-away tops and stomachs bulging and rolling as they laugh. There is no longer either will or energy to suck in, no longer a motivation to give the illusion of their bellies being flat. Their voices are loud and coarse. When they alight, the silence brings the focus back to the weather. It has started to rain again.
Ellie is the only person to get off at her stop, which is not surprising.
She passes the patisserie that supplies both the large village and the smaller one. It advertises home-baked bread and cakes, but Ellie suspects the goods in the window are mass produced in Bradford. The crusty bread on display brings a sharp stab of memory of Loukas.
Looking ahead, she purposefully avoids the lane along which Brian lives. Her steps hasten as the road drops into the valley where she crosses the railway line. The slight incline on the other side takes her up to Little Lotherton.
There is a break in the clouds and a patch of blue clears.
Chapter 20
On the corner of the lane she now calls home is an old-fashioned red telephone box. It must be one of a very few left in the country and even more unusual is that it has not been vandalised. Originally, she thought that the majority of the street mustn’t have phones, mobile or otherwise, judging by the amount of use it gets, but when she went to use it herself one day, she found that the coin mechanism had been tampered with, meaning that it is possible to make calls from it for free.
Marcus liked that when she told him. He likes all the slightly anarchic aspects of the village. His first real enthusiasm for Lotherton came just after they moved in, when he noticed that the place seemed to attract people who did not want to live in the modern world. Proof of this, he said, was that there were neither satellite dishes nor aerials on any of the roofs, if you didn’t count the old couple at the top corner, who have both. A good sign, he insisted, although Ellie had her doubts. She felt that her lack of being part of the world growing up denied her so much useful knowledge. But Marcus was sure it was a positive thing, and so his television remained without an aerial. He did, however, install broadband for his laptop.
Even though the rain has stopped, the cobbles are awash, and the water nearly tops the narrow stone-flagged pavement. There are lights on in almost every house, glowing warm in the bracing wind which now whistles down from the moors, the smoke from each chimney blown flat.
The village seems to have a communal liking for hanging baskets, too. Each door has at least one swinging in the gusts. Those with wooden porches have two, one either side of the door. Window boxes are also a strong feature and in the eerie, white, stormy light, the street is peppered with riots of colour flowers.
The one house that is dark is hers. She pictures the house inside, the warm, earthy colour that they picked for the walls, the plain brick-red throw over the sagging sofa and the piles of cushions on the floor by the open fire. Marcus’ abstract art works on the walls, the colours lifting the room, and the rug they found in the attic that covers most of the sitting room floor.
The old metal gate has dropped on its hinges and needs lifting in order to open it. The solid wooden door yields to a kick at the bottom once she has turned the latchkey. It is not that warm inside, which makes Ellie wonder why Marcus has not stoked the Aga. The solid metal wood-burning cooking stove that also heats the water for the central heating is almost cold. Lifting open the stoking door shows that there are only embers in the bottom of the grate. This is unusual. Marcus likes to be warm. Maybe he forgot this morning and has been out all day. Although, judging by the level and the glow of the ashes, it looks as if it wasn’t stoked yesterday either.
There is no wood stacked by the stove. Ellie opens the back door, bracing herself for the wind. The small yard at the back opens directly onto the moors. When the wind is really cold in the winter, the sheep press against the house walls, seeking shelter. The gusts take her breath, enter her ears and whip the door out of her hands as she opens it. An armful of wood from under the tarpaulin is enough for now and when she returns inside, the last of the heat has left the one room and she battles, using her whole body, to shut the door. It is not often this windy in the summer, although the rain comes at any time.
The dry wood catches quickly and Ellie opens the vents to give it plenty of air, help it to burn hot. They tend to burn coal on the open fire so once the wood is alight in the Aga, she will use the tongs to take a piece or two over to the fireplace to set some coals smouldering. Once the Aga door is closed, she finally puts down her rucksack, but it is too cold to take off her coat. Instead, she puts the kettle on. She is glad her mother made this contribution to the house. Marcus only wanted to use the wood stove. The water pops and cracks as it heats.
The sink is full of washing up, no surprises there, and the bin is overflowing with beer bottles and pizza boxes. That is not like Marcus. He brews his own beer, is very keen on recycling glass, and very rarely do they have a takeaway pizza. There is wet washing in the washing machine and the
drying rack above the Aga is still hung with the clothes she put on to dry before she left. It is odd that she never thought of Marcus as a slob, but maybe she has been too busy trying to be the perfect, newly married wife to find out.
On the wooden kitchen table are flowers she put in one of Marcus’ ceramic vases before she left. They have wilted and died and there is a plate with toast crumbs beside them.
The split logs in the Aga are now firmly alight so using the tongs, she takes first one and then a second piece to the fireplace. The chimney draws hard on them and the flames lick up the soot-stained backplate. Careful positioning of the coals ensures they will catch quickly. She also adds more wood to the Aga. It is still not warm enough yet to take her coat off.
When they first moved into the cottage, the whole trip back in time aspect thrilled her. It still does, even though she’s cold. But whilst she has been away, it seems something has changed. Something inside her. It is not that she likes Lotherton any the less, rather that she likes the village in Greece more. But no doubt that will fade with time. Already being back in a familiar environment has made the people of the Greek village seem unreal.
The kettle boils, so she makes herself a coffee and wonders what time Marcus will be back. If she is going to make this work, she needs to do it wholeheartedly, forget about Greece. Maybe she should cook. That’s a good idea. Wash up, cook, change the linen on their bed. It needed changing before she went away, and it seems unlikely Marcus will have thought about it, if the evidence in the kitchen is anything to go on.
She could also roll the rug back and sweep and wash the flagged floor. Opening the back door always brings bracken and heather dust, bits of bark from the wood pile, and general dirt. If she has time, she will also polish Marcus’ mother’s brasses that he has lined up on the hearth, which, as usual, is covered in ash. Personally, she hates them but if she keeps them polished, she could use that as a sign that she is on track, thinking straight, making an effort.