Under an Amber Sky

by Rose Alexander

  ‘OK, I’ve got it now.’ Anna plunged her fingertip emphatically onto the map. ‘We could stop off at the holiday residence of the former royal family on the way there. And then I thought we would …’ She continued to explain her plans as Sophie drifted off. Once the idea of a road trip had been planted in her mind, she couldn’t help thinking of undertaking it with Ton, of being on his bike, her cheek pressed against his leather jacket, the world whirling past them as they left its troubles behind and ventured further and further into the wilderness.

  ‘So – what do you think?’

  Sophie jolted abruptly back to the present and Anna, who was beaming at her expectantly. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands, pleased with the pain she had caused herself. Her thoughts about Ton were not only ridiculous but also disloyal to Matt and she didn’t know where they were coming from. Maybe seeing Frank and Anna so loved-up was making her jealous for something she would never experience again.

  ‘It sounds …’ she searched her fatigued mind desperately for the right words ‘… wonderful. Awesome. Fabulous.’

  ‘Great.’ Anna seemed satisfied with his choice of adjectives. ‘Now – there’s just one thing I should explain before we set off.’ She paused and pouted thoughtfully. ‘Darko’s coming with us.’

  Sophie couldn’t help but laugh. ‘OK. I’m sure that’s his dream come true – to accompany three British females and one Pole on a magical mystery tour through deepest, darkest Montenegro.’

  ‘Well – I do have an ulterior motive.’ She cast a sharp glance in Sophie’s direction. ‘And before you get your knickers in a twist, it’s nothing to do with you.’ Anna carefully refolded the map. ‘We need a translator and interpreter to get the most out of our explorations. And – he can do the driving. On the tricky bits, anyway.’

  Sophie nodded. The road to Lovcen was notorious for its hairpin bends and unprotected drops. It seemed to make perfect sense, if Darko was up for it. But Anna looked abashed.

  ‘I know I’m normally fearless,’ she continued, apologetically. ‘But there’s fearless and fearless – and even I don’t want to drive us all to our deaths. He offered and I accepted and it’s all working out just tickety-boo.’

  Sophie laughed again. It was funny when Anna, who retained a trace of her Polish accent, used quintessentially British phrases and idioms.

  Katie and Sue were arriving the next day and they would set off the day after that. The distraction of preparing everything prevented Sophie from constantly checking her phone for a message from Ton in reply to the ones she had sent him. None came.

  Just before all four of them piled into the car on departure day, Sophie ran up to her bedroom and put her phone on the bedside table. She would leave it there. In a way, she tried to convince herself as she sprinted back downstairs, it was liberating not having any reason to take it with her. There was no one who needed to know where she was, no one she had to report back to. She could just enjoy herself with her friends, nothing else to worry about.

  In the hire car, Darko was at the wheel, broodingly handsome in dark glasses, one slim, elegant, tanned arm lying casually on the open window. In contrast, Anna was leaning out of the passenger seat and frantically shouting instructions to Irene and Frank, who were entrusted with the care of Tomasz for the next few days.

  ‘You young people have fun. We oldies – and Tomasz – will be quite all right without you.’ Irene’s voice was firm, implying: ‘just go’.

  Frank, who was only forty-two, opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again. ‘I ain’t including myself in the oldies statement,’ he opined, plaintively. ‘But I’m more than happy not to spend ninety-six hours squashed into a hot tin box with you four.’ He winked at Darko. ‘Good luck, mate.’

  Darko nodded, and leapt out of the car to shut the back door properly, which Katie had failed to do. He was so unfailingly courteous, thought Sophie, noticing at the same time how Katie couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  Over the next few days, she did everything she could to engineer alone time for Darko and Katie, sending them off to scout out the best restaurant, asking them to take some photos on her camera while she had a little rest and generally ensuring that all paths to romance were as smooth as possible.

  When, on the third and penultimate night of their trip, she left her room to use the bathroom late one night and just caught sight of Darko disappearing through Katie’s door, she went back to bed feeling well satisfied. If there was no love in her own life, at least she could help ensure it featured in other people’s.

  As well as the burgeoning love affair, the spectacular beauty they were confronted with at every turn of the road was enough to take anyone’s mind off their troubles. The four of them got used to gasping at yet another stupendous view, shrieking at yet another death-defying switchback, ogling yet another sight of outstanding natural splendour. The glacial lakes of Biogradska lay glass-still under mantles of pine trees, and the mountains above were a chaos of limestone crags, piled haphazardly one on the other.

  From the park, they took a white road that serpentined down the hillside, crossing a river like a green snake before arriving in a tiny village in the valley far below. It was an enchanted land of fairy tales and myths, one made for storytelling. Darko was a mine of information and regaled them with legends and history at every turn. Sophie would have liked to travel on for ever, never stopping, in this place that time seemed to have forgotten and her grief was strangely absent from.

  They ate copious quantities of delicious food: home-cured meats and cheeses, sublime olive oil, and garden-fresh organic vegetables. Sophie could feel herself filling out, the health being restored to her face and figure, both of which had become unbecomingly thin in recent months. Darko noticed the difference.

  ‘You look more beautiful than ever,’ he told her one day, standing on the pier that stretched out over a still and silent lake.

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied, simply. ‘But I think you have eyes for another woman now.’ She paused, gauging Darko’s reaction. It was sometimes hard to tell what was going on behind that black gaze. ‘I’m not wrong, am I?’

  He smiled, the eyes lightening delightedly. ‘You are very perceptive.’

  Sophie didn’t tell him about seeing the room-hopping incident. ‘Always,’ she agreed, grinning. ‘I’m so happy for you,’ she continued. ‘I wish you well.’

  Darko nodded. ‘She is – amazing. Perfect. I don’t think I realized before what true love could feel like.’

  ‘I never saw true beauty till this night?’ questioned Sophie, before she could check herself. Why did she make ridiculous literary allusions in conversation with someone who couldn’t possibly be expected to understand them? Was she pretentious or just stupid? Perhaps she’d simply been an English teacher too long to change. You can take the girl out of the literature department but you can’t … and so on and so on.

  But Darko got it.

  ‘Romeo and Juliet, I know it well. But even if Katie is my Juliet, you are no Rosaline, Sophie. At least – I hope you haven’t sworn to become a nun. That would be a shame. And you certainly aren’t a crow.’

  They both burst out laughing.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m fickle, that I fall in love with every girl I meet,’ continued Darko, suddenly reverting to seriousness, his voice intent. ‘I have thought about it – about you - long and hard and I confess that I fell for your vulnerability. You seemed more than fragile – you were broken.’ He paused and studied Sophie carefully, as if checking that he were not causing offence or speaking out of turn. ‘I suppose the truth of it is that I felt sorry for you and I wanted to fix you and put you back together. But nothing was going to do that except time and anyway, pity is the wrong foundation for a relationship.’

  Sophie’s heart swelled with increased love – entirely platonic – and gratitude for Darko. Such thoughtful, self-aware, forgiving people were rare, she knew.

&
nbsp; ‘You’re a gem, Darko,’ she said. ‘An absolute diamond.’

  They both, inexplicably, burst out laughing, so loudly that Katie came to see what was going on. Darko confessed to her that their secret was out and from that moment on, they were inseparable. Anna even gave up her coveted front seat in Katie’s favour.

  ‘I thought you had to sit there because otherwise you get carsick?’ protested Sophie. ‘I don’t want you vomming on me, thanks very much.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Well, maybe I exaggerated a little. And anyway – better me a little carsick than Katie and Darko lovesick.’

  Sophie shook her head in exaggerated despair. ‘Whatever. Let’s just hope that Katie can read a map better than you can.’

  They had taken a number of unplanned diversions over the last few days, on account of Anna’s seeming inability to tell right from left – although to be fair to her, the depth and detail of the map they were working from did leave quite a lot to be desired.

  ‘Ouch!’ Sophie yelped, in response to Anna’s punch. ‘Come on, Darko, let’s get going.’

  Watching Katie and Darko in the front of the car together, sharing a joke and a bottle of water, Katie’s hand gently placed on Darko’s knee, Sophie felt so many emotions swirling around inside her that she could hardly distinguish one from the other.

  The only one she could clearly identify was jealousy, raising its ugly head above them all. She was not jealous of Katie having won Darko’s heart; there was no element of her that wanted Darko for herself. The jealousy was for their togetherness, their growing intimacy. Their sense of a future that would be shared, of plans to make, lives to live with each other always there to support, encourage, affirm. The life she had had with Matt, and longed to have back, and missed with an urgency that ate a black hole in her insides.

  Chapter 26

  The long, hot summer days passed slowly. Sophie’s enthusiasm for her garden, in the sweltering temperatures of August, receded. It was too hot to think, too move. Katie and Sue went back to London, and the house – despite its remaining five inhabitants – seemed empty, echoing with the absent voices and laughter of the visitors.

  The only productive thing Sophie managed was to apply for a job. Browsing idly on the teacher employment database, she was amazed to see that there was an international school just around the bay by Porto Montenegro. They needed an English teacher. Before she could think twice about it, Sophie filled in the application and emailed it off.

  Obviously she wouldn’t get the job – but if she did, it would secure her long-term future in Montenegro. Her funds were running low and she had started to worry about how she was going to manage. A job here, locally, would mean she didn’t even have to contemplate returning to London. She didn’t, even to herself, say ‘to go home’ any more. Home was here, not the UK.

  In the hours of unfilled time, when she was not minding Tomasz, shopping, or cooking for the household, she read and reread the translations of Mira’s letters. Darko’s research on Mamula and those imprisoned there had so far yielded no further information, but on the other hand, what with their road trip and Darko’s preoccupation with his love affair, Sophie wasn’t sure how much he’d done to follow up on his initial inquiries. After all he had done to help her, for free and asking for nothing in return, she could hardly pester and hassle him to get a move on with it.

  Instead, all she could do was dream. Dream of a happy outcome for Mira, Dragan, and Jelena, of a future all together as the perfect family they were so clearly meant to be. But the reveries kept getting tangled and muddled, images of Mira cradling a baby morphing with herself doing the same, heart-stopping visions of Mira and Dragan’s reunion becoming enmeshed with fantasies of her and Matt – dreams that often, inexplicably, became torridly sexual as well as emotionally draining. Sometimes, bizarrely, Ton appeared in her mind’s eye, and she rapidly banished him, knowing that she would never see him again.

  She tried to work through Total Serbian, but it was like a ball and chain, dragging her down, always accusing her of the underachievement of which she was only too aware. August was kolovoz – the month of back from holiday – and she managed to articulate one sentence to Sandra, asking her where she had vacationed – and that was it. Apart from the bit of the answer that was ‘up to the mountains’ she understood nothing of the rest of Sandra’s extensive explanation.

  On returning to her bedroom, she picked up the book and threw it petulantly into the corner. Language learning was just one of the many things she was absolutely no good at.

  Instead, she read novels, drowning her longings and doubts and loneliness in fiction through the baking summer days as she had done when she first arrived at the stone house, as the bay had descended into winter. But she couldn’t concentrate, kept reading one page, ten, twenty of a new book and then casting it aside, filled with an ennui she couldn’t explain.

  She took to swimming five times a day, pushing herself to go further out into the bay, or for longer distances following the shoreline. Her house to Prcanj marina. Her house to the end of the village. Her house to the start of Muo. But though the exercise exhausted her body, her mind remained as hyperactive as ever.

  ***

  And then one exceptionally hot day, as Sophie sat wilting in her bedroom, trying to compose an email to her mother that wouldn’t sound self-pitying and send Helena into a tailspin, she heard something outside her window. The familiar sound of a motorbike engine: something she might hear ten times a day as the traffic made its way up and down the bay road. But this sound was different. It was the sound of an engine slowing, then cutting off. The scrunch of heavy biker’s boots upon the gritty, sandy surface of the tarmac.

  Sophie rushed downstairs, tore open the heavy green front door – and saw him. As she gazed, he took off his helmet, ran his hand through his hair to release it from the damp stickiness of his forehead – and looked towards her with eyes so impossibly blue it was as if they had taken the colour of all the oceans in the world for their own.

  ‘Ton.’ Sophie’s breath caught in her throat.

  ‘Hi, Sophie.’ He was beside her, smelling of leather and sunshine and maleness. She inhaled the scent and felt faint, giddy. On the threshold, he halted.

  ‘May I come in?’

  Silently, she moved aside. He went to the tap and poured water, drinking it greedily.

  ‘There’s beer in the fridge, if you’d like one.’ Her voice was wavery, faltering. She caught his look and a smile burst through her dizziness. ‘It’s OK, it’s not Frank’s. We can drink it and live to tell the tale.’

  Ton laughed. ‘Good to see nothing’s changed.’

  Sophie swallowed hard. Resisted the urge to say, but everything has. Everything. She went to the fridge, took out two bottles of beer, and opened them. She gestured to Ton to follow her outside. The house – enormous, spacious – suddenly felt claustrophobic.

  They sat on two plastic chairs under the juniper trees, looking out over the bay. Her fisherman didn’t come in the heat of the day now, the sun too intense even for him. The pier was empty – at this hour, all sensible people were inside, hiding from the heat.

  ‘So where have you been?’ Her first slug of beer gave Sophie the courage to ask.

  ‘I took a job.’

  ‘Oh. Where?’ What kind of job meant you couldn’t answer texts, couldn’t tell anyone where you were?

  ‘Yemen.’

  ‘Yemen?’ Sophie said it as if she were saying ‘Mars’ or ‘the moon’. Somewhere unknown, impossible.

  ‘There’s a terrible conflict going on there that half the world has never heard of and the other half has chosen to ignore.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sophie had to include herself in the first half. ‘I had no idea. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Why should you be?’ Ton contemplated his bottle of beer and then lifted it to his face and ran it over his cheeks and forehead. The condensation left clear streaks of water on his tanned
skin that shone like glass.

  ‘I owed it to the paper,’ he continued. ‘But it’s the last one.’

  Sophie wanted to ask why it was the last but didn’t. Couldn’t you have told me? her internal voice cried out. But she didn’t say it. He wore his exhaustion on his face, his anguish in his eyes. He must have had his reasons.

  ‘I’m pleased you’re back. I – we – missed you. Tomasz has been asking for you.’

  A child’s need was somehow so much more acceptable than an adult’s. Ton smiled at the thought of the little boy.

  ‘He’s cute. I’ve got a present for him.’

  He didn’t elaborate on the gift. They sat in silence for a few moments.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.’ The statement came out of nowhere. It stabbed Sophie in the heart.

  ‘Why?’

  Ton shrugged. His taciturnity remained unchanged. Irene had been right when she had said he was a man of few words.

  Changing the subject, he pointed to the two stone troughs that stood on concrete supports next to the juniper trees, flanking the waterside. ‘What are those bags of compost doing there?’

  The volte-face in the conversation took Sophie by surprise. Her eyes followed in the direction of his.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly remembering one of her gardening plans. ‘I went to the nursery and bought geraniums and soil for the troughs. You see them blooming with flowers up and down the bay but these have always been empty. I thought it would be pretty to fill them up. It would enhance my view from my bedroom window,’ she concluded, loftily. And then laughed. The beer seemed to be doing its job; she was feeling a bit more relaxed. Able to speak again.

  ‘Shall we do it, then?’ Ton was already halfway out of his chair.

  ‘What, now? In this heat.’

  He pulled a face and waved his hand dismissively. ‘No time like the present. And if you’ve already bought the plants, it would be better to get them into position and well watered as soon as possible.’