by Lynn Freed
I looked at my watch. And what if I don’t think ahead? I asked myself. What, in God’s name, would happen if I failed to remember bananas? Or that the car needs gas? Be in the moment, Agnes had told us in the way of the mind-emptying Californians she embraced. But what moment? The minute you were in one moment, it had passed and the next was upon you. Which was where I was now, waiting from one moment to the next for Bess to put her bloody shoes on and come out for the walk I’d wanted to take alone.
And then, suddenly, standing there, I thought of Stefan Gripp, and how I’d made such a big deal, after eleven Gripp novels, of killing him off in the grand finale (that spectacular choking incident, modeled closely on Amos’s demise), timing the end of the series so nicely with my escape to Greece—that I could hardly admit to myself that I was lost without him. But of course I was. Every day for twenty-five years I’d been waking to the thought of what would come next—book to book, year to year. And now this.
I buttoned my jacket against the late afternoon wind. What, if anything, I wondered, could settle me into enjoying this so-called freedom I’d so exultantly wrested for myself? Allow me to wake up to it with delight? Walk about with it? Enjoy the length and the breadth of it, not just with a glass of ouzo in the evening, but also in the afternoons, right here, right now? Not waiting impatiently as I was, a priggish aging malcontent thudding with irritation because her dear old boastful friend had exposed herself in the face of petty blackmail as a coward and a fool—just waiting, with the sort of ease and contentment that used to come after hours of labor, and seemed so hard to find without it, even in Greece?
“Here I am,” said Bess, puffing up. “By the way, we need bananas. I ate the last one this morning.”
* * *
à gg, Greece
One of the things that is hardest to take about Greece is the toilet paper situation: used toilet paper must not be flushed, it must be deposited in a bin next to the toilet, often quite full already. Even though the bins themselves usually have lids and pedals—even though one is warned that the sewage pipes are ancient and narrow and that violating the toilet paper rule can land the toilet, restaurant, hotel, or house in a sea of sewage—the custom invites furtive flushing. Somehow, preserving used toilet paper seems like a sin against toilet training itself. And decency. And, really, ew, that bin!
But there it is in every toilet: “Pleas! No Paper In Toilet”
The only one of us who complies absolutely is Dania. She considers Bess and me rather suspect in our fastidiousness, although, three months into our time here, she’s less prone to saying such things outright. So we tell each other toilet stories. When she climbed Kilimanjaro, she says, one of the bearers actually carried a toilet on his back for the tourists. I tell them about my old lover—the one I still miss from time to time—how he only cleaned his toilet when he knew I was coming over, and even then did such a lousy job of it that I lined the seat with paper and took care to keep my clothing off the floor. Mushrooms sprouted around his bathtub. And, when he went to bed, he tied up his garbage bag and put it in the freezer to keep it from the mice.
Ew! they said. Ugh!
Considering him now, depositing used toilet paper in a bin seems rather mild. After all, you’ll never see it again. And as long as everything else is clean, so what? Just think of the sort of women who are too fastidious to sit on a toilet seat at all, and poise themselves over it. How many times has one had to wipe down a wet toilet seat in the women’s restrooms of America? Keep one’s pants from touching the floor? By all rights, such women should be confined to hole-in-the-floor toilets, and then made to shake hands with the sort of women one encounters in French lavatories, emerging from the stall and making straight for the door without benefit of soap and water.
By contrast, Greek toilets are spotless. And anyway, as Greeks are quick to tell you, the whole arrangement is the fault of the British, who laid down the sewage pipes in the first place. And, let’s face it, the Brits aren’t so hot on cleanliness themselves.
* * *
STANDING ON THE UPSTAIRS VERANDA in the early morning, looking out over the sea, I felt open not only to the sea and the sky, but also, somehow, to the past and the future. The light on the island was like the biblical light of the world, the town itself the biblical city built on the hill. Early each morning I went out there, when Dania and Bess were unlikely to join me, just to feel open in this way. And then, standing there one morning, it occurred to me that this—this—was what Agnes had meant, this emptiness. Except that it wasn’t empty—it was full of possibility. And it was the closest I had come in the forty years since leaving South Africa to feeling at home.
* * *
LONG AFTER WE’D ALL FORGOTTEN Dionysos’s wife, in she stormed again.
“Missus Beess?” She stood in the middle of the living room, fastening her gaze now on Bess herself.
If Bess hadn’t looked up from her mobile and raised her hand like a child in school, the woman might well have thought she’d missed again. But, as it was, she stormed over to the window seat like Artemis on the rampage, and stood there shrieking incomprehensibly as she tore up some pages she’d been clutching, ripping them into furious confetti and hurling them over Bess.
Bess was just sitting up to brush them off when the woman leaned forward and spat at her in a great torrent, missing her face but catching the sleeve of her caftan. Then she gave out a loud derisive laugh, rolled into another volley of invective, wheeled around, and stormed back out through the front door, slamming it so hard that it bounced open again.
For a few moments we all stayed where we were, staring at the door in case she came back. But when she didn’t, Bess sat up, pulled her dress over her head, and threw it to the floor. “Could we please keep that door locked in future?” she said.
“Listen,” I said, regaining my breath. “I told you she’d be back. We’re only lucky she didn’t bring a weapon.”
Bess lay back, abundant in her bra and matching thong. “What can he possibly see in that bleached pig?” she said to the ceiling.
“Melina Mercouri maybe?” said Dania, who had never quite got the hang of rhetorical questions.
Bess’s mobile binged. “What now, for God’s sake?” she said, staring into it. “What!?” she shouted. “WHAT?”
Dania looked at me. What now?
“They send this in a text?” Bess cried.
“What?” I said. “Send what?”
“Wilfred and that Tarquin of his!” She looked up as if she’d just remembered we were there.
“Duckwin?” said Dania. “It’s a name, Duckwin?”
“They’re going to adopt the child!”
“I thought they’d already adopted one?” I said. More and more it was becoming clear that our children didn’t have to be with us in order to disrupt our lives.
“They did! They have! But that tart of an au pair is refusing to have an abortion—”
“Gott!”
“Yes, Gott!” Bess snorted.
“Well, better for Gladdy the new one will be white, no?” said Dania breezily. “Maybe now she can go back there to help?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dania,” Bess said. “This is not funny!” She stood up, hands on fabulously naked hips. “It’s about as unfunny as that ‘patient’ of yours. Perhaps you should tell us now what she’s got on you? It might help when she, too, comes storming in here.”
Dania glanced at me. You told her?
But Bess caught the look. “What’s going on between the two of you anyway?” she demanded, turning her fury on me now. “I feel as if I’m in kindergarten again.”
“Nothing to do with Ruthi,” Dania said quickly. “I did a stupid thing, that’s all. But I can’t talk about it.”
“Why not?” said Bess. She went back to the window seat at last and sat there, one bare foot twitching like the tail of a cat.
Gladdy came in from the veranda, the gate key swinging on its chain around her neck. “Hey, Bessie, why yo
u nekkid like that?”
Bess snorted. “There’s spit on my dress. Please put it in the wash.”
“Spit?” Gladdy picked up the dress and inspected it. “Who spit on you?”
“Just make the tea,” Bess said haughtily. “I need some cake.”
Before Gladdy had arrived, we’d bought baklava, almond cookies, and rich, honey-soaked cake from the bakery in town. But now, every week, there were jam squares, or butter biscuits, or sometimes, like now, a Victoria sponge with vanilla icing. When I marveled at their familiarity, Bess just laughed. “They should be familiar,” she said. “They’re your grandmother’s recipes. Our grandmother,” she added. “She gave them to the cook at the hotel. Isn’t it funny how the grandmothers had to meet like lovers? Isn’t it romantic?”
I smiled as I always did but, really, it wasn’t funny to me, and certainly not romantic. When I thought now of the way my mother had questioned my father, the flaming rows they’d had behind the bedroom door, there was a deep stab of pity for her. Had I known the reason then, I’d have blamed him myself, taken more notice of Bess when her grandmother brought her for tea. But, as it was, if I’d considered Bess at all, it had been as an oddity—a wild child brought up in a hotel by her grandmother, no parents in sight.
And yet who was I to be so fastidious? I, who’d had my own love child all those many years before? One rule for everyone else, none for me? Probably so. The fact that I’d detested Clive—I knew now how deeply and broadly I’d detested him—had been irrelevant. I’d been married to him; I’d taken Hugh as a lover and had had his child. And if Hugh had had a wife in the mix, I wouldn’t have blamed her for storming in and spitting on me herself.
* * *
Ruth, dear, the toilet edit works well, but could we now move on from showers and toilets to something more of the order, say, of Greek cuisine? Sorry to be confusing, but when I said normal life I didn’t mean take out the big guns:) That recipe for the marinade brought in a huge response, by the way. More of same? Another thought: I’m hearing that some of those islands are known for the longevity of their inhabitants. Could you look into this? It might do for a few columns—say, women versus men? Diet? Exercise? We’d pay expenses, of course, within reason. Sxx
* * *
à gg, Greece
Cats in Greece, like cats everywhere, know just how to arrange themselves to best advantage: under restaurant tables, along the tops of walls, in the shade of a church. But stay here for more than a summer and you learn that they lead desperate lives. There is not enough food for them, or shelter. And so, during the winter, most of them sicken and die, or are drowned by the locals. There are cat rescue organizations, of course, and sterilization campaigns, but how can they keep up? One female cat and her kittens can produce five thousand cats in four years, they say. Is it any wonder then that one seldom finds an old cat in Greece?
Still, I saw one yesterday—an old gray shorthair with the tip of one ear missing. He was snoozing on an upholstered bench at a popular outdoor restaurant and, when I tried to unseat him, opened one eye in warning and then went back to sleep. I tried again, but this time he let out a low warning growl. So I took the chair next to him and glanced up into the enormous ficus overhead to see whether there might be any more up there, just waiting to leap.
There weren’t. And I was sipping my Greek coffee in the afternoon heat, enjoying the sight of the foot traffic going past, when suddenly the cat leapt up and flew over my lap like an enraged panther. He was after a dog that was approaching quite casually with the stream of tourists. Seeing the cat, the dog skidded to a stop, spun around, and fled, his tail between his legs, with the cat in wild pursuit. After a while, the cat returned, jumped up onto the bench, curled up again, and fell asleep.
* * *
IT WAS AFTER GLADDY TOOK off for South Africa to see to her grandson that Bess, restless without her or Dionysos, began to say she might go back for a visit herself. We’d been in Greece for five months now, she pointed out, and the weather had turned, which meant that most of the restaurants were closed for the season and, really, what was the point of Greece when the sun wasn’t shining? she said. It was depressing, that was what—wet and cold and gray, almost as bad as London. Anyway, she’d only be gone for six weeks, and would still, of course, be paying her share of everything—just keep a tally, and wouldn’t Dania and I enjoy some time to ourselves? For old time’s sake?
There was no point in arguing with her, I could see that. I’d learned over the months that when Bess brought up the possibility of doing something, it was a way of preparing us for the fact that she’d long since made up her mind to do it.
“Of course you go!” said Dania. “Of course, of course!” Clearly, the prospect of six weeks without Bess delighted her. “Gladdy is not so terrified in that country anymore?”
“She is, she is. So, that’s another reason. She’s terrified in Patience’s flat. So, when I’m there, she’ll come and stay with me. I’ve found a B&B for us up the coast, in some sort of compound, with gates and walls and guards and God knows what. Much too dangerous to stay along the beachfront anymore, I hear.”
“How far up the coast?” I said, suddenly thinking of Hugh’s bungalow, long since knocked down to make way for just such a gated community.
“Beyond Umhlanga, maybe up where you were, near the sugar estates.”
I smiled. It had been over forty years since I’d lived in Hugh’s bungalow, and still it was the place and time from which, for all these years, I’d felt most exiled. I glanced at Dania, wondering how to say what I suddenly wanted to say—that I wanted to go myself; that we could all go, and so what if we closed up the house here for six weeks? What did we have to lose except a stalker and a crazed Greek wife?
And then, as if on cue, Bess looked up and said, “Why don’t you two come along? I’ve looked into the airfares—really, they’re not bad if you go via Cairo or Istanbul. You could think of it as a holiday from a holiday!”
Dania frowned. “One minute that country is too dangerous for Gladdy, and the next we must all go because there are gates and walls? It’s too crazy.”
* * *
à gg, Greece
The grannies are on the go again, at least two of us are, this time to South Africa. Dania decided not to join us. Her daughter and grandchildren will come to Greece for their Christmas holidays, giving her a chance to see them without violating the rules we set up at the start. She’ll also have time to write what she now categorically calls her last book (number seventeen, but really number nine, not counting translations).
Meanwhile, we are receiving a lot of comments via So Long from women who feel the need to straighten us out on the subject of grandchildren and, not incidentally, to assure us as to how much they treasure their own. “Our lives are busier since grandchildren,” writes one, “but my husband and I wallow in the joy of it all. Between our time with them, we swap stories about them with our friends who have grandchildren.”
How to respond to such a declaration? And do I dare to correct the grammar? Or do I simply enter into the competition and assure this happy granny that I, too, am really, really, underneath it all, wallowish about my grandchild, banking up stories to lob at the other grandparents I know?
What I’ve found is that there’s no winning in this arena. Apart from which, there is something so bleak to me in the lives I imagine behind such declarations that I begin to feel quite bleak myself. I am still feeling bleak when Hester, my daughter, Skypes in on Sunday evening at the usual hour and I have to drum up questions for my sixteen-year-old granddaughter, whose eyes keep dropping to the mobile on her lap. When Hester scolds her for this, it is I who come to her defense, because, really, the exercise is exhausting for all of us, this strange new world of grandmotherdom.
* * *
THE B&B BESS FOUND TURNED out to be a “guest house,” although the distinction between the two was unclear to me. Whatever the case, this guest house did not allow children under the
age of fourteen, and so there was no screaming around the pool, no whining at meals, none of that—only a few decorous teenagers (a surprise in itself) with their parents. They were shy in the old-fashioned way, blushing, awkward, and so a pleasure to observe.
The day after we arrived, I rented a car, and found that delightful as well. Forging off on my own without Bess or Dania to accompany me, I sang as I drove, and when I returned, there would be Bess, waiting for me. She and I had fallen quite naturally into parallel rhythms. She spent her days under an umbrella at the pool, or called for a taxi to take her to one of the many malls that had sprung up around the city.
Until I’d met her, I’d thought of myself as a natural shopper. But I saw now that, for me, shopping was just a pastime—desultory, sometimes profligate, occasionally triumphant, and quite often fraught with remorse. For her, on the other hand, it was more like a calling. Even there, where the things that would normally have interested her were few and overpriced, she took life from the hunt, returning to the guest house with a new set of sheets, hand embroidered with local flowers, or last season’s Italian clutch, three times the price she could have had it for in America. And so what? she said. It happened to be in just the shade of mustard she’d been after, and doubtless would be off the shelves everywhere but on eBay, which she didn’t trust for one minute.
As I saw it, once she’d seen something she might like, she couldn’t stop wanting it until she had it. And if, after a few days, she looked at it and thought, What did I get this for, it’s just another thing?—still, if she hadn’t grabbed it when she’d seen it, it would have haunted her until she had.