by Lynn Freed
“And I am Dania,” announced Dania from her customary chair.
He went over to shake her hand. Soon she would be excusing herself to take the first of her morning phone calls. Gladdy was down at the shops, Bess wouldn’t wake for another hour at least and, oh, God, what was I going to do with him?
“Do you have luggage?” I said, sitting on the couch.
“Left it down at the hotel,” he said, settling himself at the other end. “Charming room, with a view of those beautiful dovecotes they build here. The whole flock seems to leave and return together. But it’s nothing like your view up here. Isn’t this just heavenly!” He sat back and stretched out his long legs, quite comfortable, apparently, with the space and time he was taking up.
“Gladdy’s friends tried to teach her to make stuffed pigeon,” I offered, “but she won’t hear of it.”
“Ah, Gladdy!” He smiled. “Where’s the old Cerberus?”
I laughed. What was it to me that he’d lost Bess’s money? Or even that he’d turned his back on a pregnant au pair? In fact, I almost envied the au pair her fecundity.
Dania looked at her watch. “I have in my room an appointment,” she announced, standing up.
He leapt to his feet. “Perhaps you’ll all dine with me tonight? At the hotel? Or anywhere you choose. I feel as if I know you both already from Bess’s e-mails.”
So Bess had been e-mailing him? I wasn’t really surprised. What did surprise me was the man himself. If I’d written him into a Gripp novel, he’d have been the victim—too decent, too superior in his views of human nature to have seen it coming. Or too much in love with the spy herself to resist being veered off course.
“Does Bess know you’re here?” I asked casually.
He laughed. “I sail these islands every May. This year it’ll be the Turquoise Coast.”
“Oh, I see.”
But I didn’t see, of course. Where was the Turquoise Coast? And would he be carrying Bess off with him? Anything seemed possible.
Outside, the fish man began his wail and the church bells started up, setting the dogs howling.
“Ah Greece!” he said, smiling out again through the glass doors. No man except Hugh had ever shocked me into this sort of attention, never mind how beautiful he happened to be. Usually, if there was an appeal, it arrived with the game of conversation. But here was Rex, quite comfortable with silence. And so, watching him, I settled comfortably into it myself.
And then suddenly he leaned forward. “Bess doesn’t know this,” he said, “but Irina’s child will probably be born this week or next. That’s why I slipped away early.”
“The au pair?”
He nodded. “I asked her to have a DNA test, you know.”
Apparently, this was a question. But before I could think of an answer, he said, “Were the child mine, she would surely have agreed, wouldn’t you think?”
I longed to look at my watch. It could be another hour before Bess emerged to bring this to an end.
“The fact is, I’m unable to have a child,” he said. “Bess knows this, and Irina knew it, too.”
“And if it is yours?” I said quickly. “Such things do happen.”
He shrugged. “Were the child mine, I’d believe in a god. Believe me, I would.”
* * *
Hester #5
Talking to Rex about the baby he’s so hoping is his, I couldn’t help thinking back to the birth of Hester—how young I was then, how cut adrift by Hugh’s murder. And then of Lily as a newborn, folded under Hester’s arm or laid across her opulent body. How happy Hester was with her there—how complete, uncomplicated, triumphant. Watching them, I understood for the first time what she had missed with me. And I was sorry for both of us, sorry for myself never to have been trapped like her in that desperate bond, made irrational by it, one-eyed, devious, homicidal.
* * *
DINNER AT THE HOTEL WAS like a celebration. We sat at a long table outside, under the trellis, a brazier burning at either end against the chill. Bess had insisted on asking Dionysos to join us, and so there he sat at the foot of the table, between her and Gladdy, ordering, offering, overseeing food and wine as if he himself were the host.
Which, as it turned out, he was. And then off he went with Bess, leaving Rex to watch them go.
“What did you think?” said Dania as we climbed the hill afterward to the village.
“Of Rex?”
“Of course of him. Ruthi! How long have we known each other?”
We often asked each other this, although we both knew perfectly well it had been more than forty years.
“I don’t know what to believe about him,” I said. “Or who.”
“Just be careful,” she said. “He’s got a mean face.”
“What?” I stopped where I was. “The man’s a beauty!”
She shrugged. “What can I do, you like mean-looking men? It’s because of your father.”
“My father!” All these years I’d stopped short of telling her what I really thought of the men in her life, including her own tiresome, boastful father.
But, before I could find a way to tell her this now, she’d stretched out her arms and was touching her toes. “Thanks Gott I do my exercises every morning,” she said. “Who would believe it? Seventy, and I’m still climbing mountains!”
“Seventy,” I said, “and still boasting.”
She cocked her head at me, and then threw it back and guffawed. “Oh, Ruthi!” she cried. “We have to learn each of us a lesson in silence before the next birthday!”
* * *
à gg, Greece
As the year progresses, I’ve been thinking more and more of how differently our various backgrounds persist in fashioning the way we are as adults. Bess and I, for instance: having both grown up in what was once part of a great empire—savage in its self-justifications, relentless in pursuit of its own interests—I learned very early not to try to answer the furious question, so antithetical to the idea of empire itself, that lay at the heart of its strict code of conduct: Who do you think you are?
One didn’t answer this, of course, because one knew it was simply a lesson in humility: in the eyes of that world one was nothing—a pebble on the beach, a brick in the wall. Privately, one might consider oneself hot stuff—invaluable to the family, the society, the world, the universe, and so forth—but in one’s public demeanor one was to be nothing more than that pebble or that brick.
And yet Bess, who grew up in the same place, if not the same society as I, never seems to have cottoned to the public/private aspect of the who-do-you-think-you-are question. She tends to embrace the whole idea of being nothing more than that pebble or that brick—uses it quite often, in fact, saying, Who am I to decide? And then, somehow, managing to decide for herself anyway, doing just as she pleases.
At the other end of the spectre, as Dania would say, is Dania herself. Who-do-you-think-you-are had no part in the world in which she grew up. There, each child was a triumph over the murderous fury and rage of the Germans, the indifference of the world. I tell myself this when her boasting, yet again, gets out of hand. Or when, as fed up as the rest of us by children, she will admit to this only in a whisper. It is as if she considers the admission as shocking as I would my own were I to boast to her, or to anyone, that, come to think of it, I really was hot stuff.
Which, I should add, I most certainly am not.
* * *
I TRIED TO ENVISAGE REX as the sort of harebrained dreamer who would lose a woman her fortune but, with the man actually before me, it was impossible. When I’d asked Bess how he’d done it, she’d just thrown up her hands. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know. He seemed to lose it lump by lump, and then suddenly there were no lumps left.”
“Like on what?”
She stretched back against the pillows. “Like the silk lampshades he was going to make a fortune on. Trips to India first class—and who knows who he took with him? Certainly wasn’t me. I mean, who eve
r thought of losing money on lampshades?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t seem to fit.”
“Well, you’d better watch out. Next thing he’ll be carrying you off on a yacht and then suddenly you’ll be on your beam ends like me.”
“At least I wouldn’t be pregnant.”
She laughed. If she’d been like a violent Greek wife over the au pair, she certainly wasn’t anymore. Day after day Rex strolled in, settled himself next to me, and fell into the sort of talk that couldn’t possibly interest her. Stefan Gripp, for instance. What had made me think of having him play Bach when he had to think through a case? Rex wanted to know. Surely I must play myself? How else could I possibly have described so accurately the satisfaction of playing Bach for oneself, even poorly? The way it focuses the mind and settles the spirit?
“Ruthi is a very good pianist!” Dania announced.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. Apart from the fact that Dania had never heard me play—apart from the fact that I hadn’t played for years, decades, and even then had never amounted to much—she was damned, I could see, if she was going to let this mean-faced man leap the forty years she and I had shared and into the sort of intimacy that had me, for once, agreeing to discuss Stefan Gripp.
“Why did you kill him off then?” he asked, ignoring her.
“She was probably sick of him,” Bess said. She lowered her magazine and looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Women can get quite sick of knowing what’s coming next, you know.”
It was the first sign of sharpness she’d shown toward him.
“But that was the trouble,” I said. “I didn’t know and, as a matter of fact, I got quite sick of the struggle to find out.”
She snapped the magazine back into place with a snort, and he lifted his eyebrows. I didn’t join in, I didn’t need to. For the first time in twenty or thirty years, the triumph of routing a rival was sweeping over me. How on earth had I endured the way she’d swept Finn off for herself? And then sauntered back again when Wilfred turned up, trying to make a joke of it all? Well, here I was, and here was Rex suggesting sotto voce that perhaps I’d show him round the island before he took off.
My phone binged—another urgent text from Stacey, for God’s sake. “How would now do?” I said. “I’ll just grab my bag and we can slip out.”
* * *
BUT, CLOSED INTO THE CAR with him, I was suddenly mute as a teenager. “I was wondering,” he was saying, “how you’d get away from the two of them. But then there you were, sailing right out like Athena.”
I stared soberly ahead, negotiating a curve. Athena, for God’s sake!
“Ah!” he said, rolling down his window. “Greece!”
But nothing he could say now seemed able to elicit from me more than a nod. And so, as if to balance things, he began to wax voluble himself. How did we make it work, he wanted to know, three such different women in such close quarters? And what was Dania’s story? How did she cope with Gladdy? And what about Dionysos? Poor sod didn’t have a chance once Bess had set her sights on him, did he?
I stepped on the accelerator, plunging us downhill. With him grilling me like this, the outing didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. Ridiculous as it was, I was missing the others, even Bess. Up there, with her looking on, talking to him had been easy. But here, locked into the car, I wanted only to find a way to shut him up.
I squealed around the bends, slamming on the brakes, swerving to avoid oncoming cars.
“Jesus!” he said when we came to a stop at the restaurant. “Do you always drive like that?”
I smiled, restored a bit by his fright. “I love this place,” I said. “I don’t know why I don’t come down here more often.”
“Well, if you don’t plunge us off a cliff on the way, why don’t we come back tomorrow? I leave on Friday, you know.”
I chose a table right at the edge of the dock. It was the first time since September that I’d come down here, and the umbrellas were out again, the cats and the kittens, and the fishing boats tied up in the heat of the day.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m generally quite a sober driver.”
“Well, you’ve managed to drive me to alcohol.” He settled back into his sardonic smile. “Shall I order us some wine? Red? White? Both?”
“Both,” I said. Wine, I thought, might restore me to myself. Clearly, there was no understanding this at any age.
“I think they have the right idea here with their siestas,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“God, no! If I slept all afternoon I’d sleep even less at night.”
But he was busy with the waitress now—ordering, consulting, ordering some more. “Insomnia?” he said vaguely, turning back to me. “You don’t look like the sort! Do you take pills for it? Like Bess?”
Ah, Bess again.
“I forgot to ask whether you’d rather have ouzo,” he said.
“No ouzo, thanks.” Why, I wondered, were we still finding it so difficult to land on normal conversation?
“It’s always been an ambition of mine to learn to like ouzo. Or even grappa, though grappa is worse, I think.”
“I learned early to like ouzo,” I said. “There are better and worse versions, of course, and one is always being told one hasn’t tasted the right sort. We have some ouzo at the house. You could test your ambition there.”
“I’m not sure Cerberus would appreciate my spitting it out into her sink.”
“I’ve been considering a column on ambition,” I said quickly, “how it tends to lift with age. Don’t you find that?”
The truth was that, until that moment, I’d been considering no such thing. And, now that I did, I saw that the lifting applied only to me. Dania, whatever she said, counted on commanding the summit or, at least, being seen to command it. And Bess, a complete stranger to ambition, couldn’t see the point of it at all, either in man or woman.
I looked over at him for an answer, but he was staring at a yacht coming into the harbor. His mouth hung open slightly, and then drew itself into the sort of apprising smile of a practiced roué. It was something that would have had me standing up to leave were he Finn, and the yacht, indeed, another woman. But he wasn’t Finn, and I reached over for the carafe, rather wishing that he were.
“Oh, do forgive me!” he said, spinning around. “I was captivated by that gorgeous creature out there! What is it you were asking?”
I smiled indulgently.
“I’d give anything to sail something like that,” he said, shaking his head. “But, whoo, I’m under the whip hand now.”
I looked at him, this man who seemed to bring all subjects back to Bess. “How was the money lost?” I said. What are you living on now? I wanted to know. And who will be paying for lunch?
He stretched back in his chair. “It wasn’t I who spent it, my dear, it was she. Granted, she spent it on both of us—handed over control, in fact. All her other men, you see, had paid the bills themselves, one way or another. Had I been another man, I would have stepped in and stopped her. But I’m not another man, you see, so I rather gave myself over to her extravagance. And then came the coup de grâce with the au pair.”
“And the lampshades?”
“Oh that. Oh yes. That, I admit, was a mistake. I had an Indian mistress, you see, so the lampshades were really just an excuse.”
Despite myself, I felt my blood rising on Bess’s behalf, or on my own, it was hard to tell which. “Other mistresses as well?”
He laughed. “An insuperable weakness of mine,” he said.
And he reached over for my hand.
* * *
Ruth, dear, Amy thinks the piece on empire, etc., might be perfect for, say, a literary quarterly, but for our readership she wants a little more of that Greek sunshine:) Or even snark:) Those recipes you promised? Soon? We’re closing, like, now! Sxx
* * *
à gg, Greece
Many of you have written to ask how we decided to divide up our daily ta
sks and chores once Gladdy joined us here. All I can say is that we all, including Gladdy, seem to have come to an unspoken accord in the matter.
Take cooking, for instance. Unless we go to a restaurant, Gladdy cooks our meals. In itself, this is no hardship as she’s a marvelous plain cook. But she’s also bossy, and has idiosyncratic standards that preclude, for instance, gyros. So, if we want a gyro, we are reduced to creeping out to get one when she isn’t looking. She disapproves of gyros from the corner shop. And she disapproves of restaurants, which, as she terms it, are “essravaguss.”
Why, one may well ask, does one care what she approves or disapproves of? But this would be to ignore the fact that she refuses to consider herself an employee. Nor will she agree to be paid as one. What she will accept is a gift of money every week, which, we are to understand, is a present, not a wage. What’s wrong with earning a wage? Well, if she earned a wage, says she, she would have to do what we told her to do, and this doesn’t suit her.
The trouble is that if things don’t go her way, she can make life pretty awful. First, she won’t hear you when you speak to her, and then, if you put yourself in front of her, she won’t see you either.
All this has made me vow never again to agree to an arrangement in which, if services are rendered, they are not properly contracted and paid for. Bess says Gladdy has always been this way, even when she first came to London for the birth of Agnes, Bess’s daughter. And anyway, she said, Gladdy has accumulated a far larger fortune with her weekly “presents” than she would have done had she had to pay taxes. She keeps her stash in the bank, says Bess. And except for the times she’s had to shell out to her own daughter or grandson, she’s been frugal beyond imagining and could probably buy and sell us all a few times over by now. Which wouldn’t be too difficult when it came to Bess herself, now that she’s cheap on the market.
* * *