‘Gran.’ Nina growled at her and waggled her eyebrows in warning.
‘What? You know I only drink Tetley tea at home. That’s why I have coffee abroad. No Tetley tea bags. Maybe they’ve got coffee.’ She twisted around in her chair but the tea lady and her helper had moved on.
‘I believe they’ve offered us what they have,’ Leo said. ‘I had a quick chat with Yasin and he knows the family; I think they’re second cousins of the driver’s mother. Or was it his father? Anyway, the driver managed to get the coach as far as here because he knew we’d be welcomed.’
After several cups of tea and some very sweet and tasty baklava, they were ready to go again, the tyre fairy having put in an appearance after all. Nina was pleased, for as nice as it had been sitting under the trees, chatting and getting to know their fellow passengers, the day would be long enough without the delay.
‘Have you used the facilities?’ Yasin asked, as they filed onto the bus one at a time. ‘For there is no stopping between now and the restaurant where we will have lunch. We have used all the stoppings.’
The “facilities” were a hole in the floor, albeit a tiled floor with quite a clean hole.
‘Traditional Turkish toilet,’ Leo said, when he returned from his visit. ‘At least we’re getting to see more of the real Turkey. They ought to put this on the itinerary for every trip to Ephesus.’
Nina opted to pass on the experience, hoping her bladder didn’t give out before they arrived at the restaurant, while Flossie thankfully, had seemed to manage on her own, although a brace of middle-aged ladies who had been sitting the back of the coach kept giving her grandmother very odd looks indeed since their visit to the bathroom after Flossie. Nina had no intention of asking what had gone on; she guessed she was better off not knowing.
‘Are we nearly there?’ Flossie piped up as they took their seats once more and the coach pulled off.
‘Not yet, Gran. We stop for lunch in an hour or so, and I think it’s at least another hour after that,’ Nina said, thinking great, we’ll get there just at the hottest part of the day.
Lunch gave Nina the opportunity to find out what the hell Flossie was playing at, as the table her and her grandmother were directed to sit at had only two seats left, forcing Leo to sit elsewhere. Or maybe he was relieved to get away from the grumpy woman and her weird grandmother – she thought she would be, if she were in his shoes.
Flossie waggled her fingers at Leo, who lifted a hand in response. Nina watched him charm the ladies at his table, while also engaging their menfolk in conversation. He had an easy, relaxed way about him, she noticed, liking his modest confidence.
‘May I ask you what all the questions were about? Are you gay?’ she huffed at her grandmother. ‘What sort of thing is that to ask a total stranger?’
‘Leo didn’t seem to mind,’ Flossie retorted tucking into her plate of kofte and rice.
‘What is that?’ Nina asked, making a face.
‘Spice minced lamby things. Bit like a burger. Try one.’ Her grandmother speared one of the pieces, which looked far too much like something a cat might leave in a litter tray, and pointed it at Nina.
Nina shook her head. No thanks; she’d stick with her salad. You knew what you were getting with a bit of lettuce. ‘Well?’ she persisted.
‘Just making conversation,’ Flossie said.
‘What you were asking him was rather personal, don’t you think?’
‘No point in wasting time when you get to my age. Gotta cut to the chase.’
Nina lowered her voice. ‘Oh yes, that reminds me – your age.’
‘Got you a front seat view, didn’t it?’
‘Have you no shame?’
‘I’ve had two kids and more internals than you can shake a stick at. Shame packed his bags a long time ago.’
Nina paused, trying to push the image of her grandmother naked from the waist down, with her legs in stirrups, and a doctor poking around at the grim end. Ew!
‘What do you mean “at your age”? He’s young enough to be your grandson.’
‘Not for me, you prat – for you.’
‘I can find my own man, thank you very much.’
‘You’ve not done a very good job so far. You couldn’t find one if he sent you a written invitation and a SatNav.’
‘I object to that,’ Nina hissed.
‘No sex Nina,’ Flossie hissed back, rather too loudly.
The chatter on their table ceased abruptly. Nina managed a sickly smile, dropping her head so low she practically had her face in her salad bowl. Perhaps the green of the leaves and the cucumber thingy would counteract the tomato red of her face.
Things didn’t improve when they all trouped back onto the bus.
‘You sit next to Nina,’ Flossie said to Leo. ‘She could do with talking to someone her own age. How old are you anyway?’
‘Thirty-one.’
‘Got all your own teeth?’
‘Yep. See.’ Leo opened his mouth to show her as he reached his seat.
Flossie manoeuvred around him so he was nearer her own seat than his.
‘I thought you had to sit in the front,’ he said, and Nina winced.
‘Oh that,’ Flossie waved a hand in the air. ‘My turns, they come and they go. I’ll not be having one today.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I do. Now sit down, there’s a good boy, and keep my granddaughter company. Oh, before I let you loose on her, what do you do for a living?’
‘I do research.’
‘Wonderful! You can tell my granddaughter all about it.’ Flossie plonked herself down in Leo’s seat, giving him the choice of either sitting next to the old woman, or sitting next to Nina. Nina thought it was touch and go for him for a second – lesser of two evils?
He chose her.
Why did she feel so pleased?
‘You’re a researcher?’ she asked, as an opening gambit after several minutes when he’d said nothing while she wished he would. She was acutely aware of his tanned arm close to hers and when she shifted position, the soft golden hairs on his forearm tickled her skin. He moved to the right, giving her a little more space.
‘Yes.’
‘What is it you research?’
‘Quantum mechanics.’
‘Oh.’ That certainly wasn’t an area she was terribly familiar with. ‘Where?’
‘I’m based at the University of Bristol.’
‘I’m a teacher in a school near Worcester,’ Nina offered, wondering if all his answers were going to be as short. If so, it was shaping up to be a long ride indeed.
Leo showed a bit of interest with a cock of his head. Nina took it as an invitation to carry on.
‘History. GCSE and A-level,’ she said.
‘Is that why you’re on this excursion?’
‘Partly, though neither syllabi cover Greek or Roman history, more’s the pity. I did try to offer classics as a subject but got no takers. Apart from needing to get away from your friend, are you here for the history too?’
‘I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to see one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I went to Egypt last year and saw the pyramids. Fantastic!’
Oh, so he was a box-ticker, was he. A been-there, seen-that person.
‘There are only three of the Seven Wonders left. Such a shame, all that knowledge and history gone to waste. Thank goodness we are better at preserving our past than we were. To think the Lighthouse at Alexandria was systematically torn down, stone by stone, to use for other buildings.’
‘It was more or less destroyed by a succession of earthquakes before that,’ Nina pointed out. ‘It was in ruins already.’
‘So are most of the Norman-built castles in Britain, but you wouldn’t advocate pulling them down, would you?’
Nina smiled. He was passionate about history. Ephesus wasn’t a touristy thing for him, like it wasn’t for her. For Nina, it was almost a pilgrimage; the chance to see something so old, so steeped in
the past… For a while she wished she’d taken archaeology at university and not a teaching degree in history. But as usual, she’d chosen the safe option, the one with more job prospects at the end, the one with a straightforward career progression. The one which was stilted and prescribed, giving her no chance to follow her heart.
Oh well, too late now. She’d made her bed and she had to lie in it.
‘Tell me about Quantum Mechanics,’ she said, hoping Leo hadn’t stifled his own passion for the dryness of physics, and he appeared to need no further invitation. Nina prepared to be bored to death, but to her surprise, she discovered he hadn’t sacrificed his passion at all.
Leo, she found, was a passionate man. Very passionate indeed.
Chapter 21
He was still enthusing about the ins and outs of wave particle duality (whatever that was – Leo did sort of explain, but it went over her head a bit. Okay, a lot. But he made it sound so interesting, even if she didn’t have much of an idea what he was talking about. He had a nice voice though, rumbly and quite soft, with the gentlest hint of an accent she still couldn’t place) when Yasin picked the mic up once more, sending a surge of squeaks and squeals down the length of the coach.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, tapping it, and making the noise worse. ‘Can you hear me? Good. We are almost at our destination. It is,’ he checked his watch, ‘three o’clock. You have until five-thirty in Ephesus Ancient City.’
Nina’s heart sank. She’d known they didn’t have long, but two and a half hours to explore a site of such size was nowhere near enough.
‘At the exit, there is a place to purchase cold drinks and souvenirs. This will be our meeting place. After Ephesus Ancient City, we drive for an hour and forty minutes to our hotel for the night, which is near to Pamukkale, and the terraces. Once we are at the hotel, we will enjoy dinner.’
I’ll be the judge of that, Nina thought, remembering the less-than-wonderful lunch.
After selling them bottles of cold water and reminding his passengers to wear hats and put on sun cream, Yasin finally freed them from the coach.
Nina gasped. Dear lord, the heat was tremendous. She turned to her grandmother – the old lady couldn’t be expected to traipse around in this, no matter how sprightly she was.
‘Perhaps I’ll stay on the bus,’ Flossie said, flapping a hand in front of her face. She looked exhausted and Nina sympathised. Travelling for hours on end was tiring. There was no way her grandmother would make it around the ruins. Not today.
‘You cannot stay on the coach,’ Yasin said. ‘It will be locked, however you can sit in the lokanta.’ He saw their bewildered expressions. ‘A lokanta is a place which serves drinks and food, more than a bar perhaps, but not a restaurant. It is at the exit where we will be meeting, over there.’ He pointed to a building a couple of hundred feet down the road.
‘Do we have to go through Elephant… I mean Ephesus, first?’ Nina asked, wanting to get her grandmother out of the sun as quickly as possible.
‘No. It is where the drivers sit. You can walk along the road.’
‘Come on, Gran, we’ll go and have a nice cold drink, and wait for the others. I might even treat you to an ice cream.’
‘There’s no need to speak to me like I’m three,’ Flossie retorted, huffily. ‘I’m not senile yet, and I don’t want a cold drink; I want a strong cup of coffee.’
‘Sorry.’ Her grandmother was right. Nina had slipped into “I’m-talking-to-an-old-person” speak. How patronising of her and how irritating for the elderly person being spoken to.
‘I can make my own way there,’ Flossie continued. ‘You go and enjoy Elephant. I’ll be here when you finish.’
‘I’m not leaving you on your own.’
‘I’ve been on my own before, you know,’ was the tart reply. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Nina was torn. She’d come all this way to see Ephesus but it wasn’t fair or right to leave an old lady all alone in a foreign country when she couldn’t speak the language. Anything might happen.
It did. The driver and a pack of cards happened.
Yasin said, ‘Mustafa will accompany her and will stay with her until you return. She will be as safe as if she were in your own care.’
‘But he doesn’t speak English and she doesn’t speak Turkish,’ Nina objected, feeling horribly guilty at the possibility of being able to explore the ruins after all.
‘We don’t need to say anything,’ Flossie said, her eyes lighting up when the driver waved the pack of cards and gave her a gap-toothed grin. ‘But how do you say, “you’re cheating” in Turkish? That might come in handy,’ she asked Yasin as she took Mustafa’s arm.
Nina hovered uncertainly, watching the old lady trot down the dusty road, hanging onto a man neither of them had met until this morning.
Poor bloke. He had no idea what he was letting himself in for.
‘Go. Enjoy. I have my phone. If there is a problem I will call you,’ Yasin said to Nina, and they swapped telephone numbers.
With a much lighter (though still guilt-ridden heart), Nina strode off in the direction of the entrance. So much to see, so little time.
To her surprise, Leo lounged against a wall waiting for her, one leg cocked, arms folded. He was tall and lean, and she noticed the way his shirt pulled across the tops of his arms at his shoulders as the muscles bunched underneath. He really was quite fit under all that niceness.
She hoped he was going to continue being nice and not think she’d abandoned her grandmother. Unfortunately, she couldn’t see his expression because of his sunglasses.
‘I didn’t really want to leave Flossie,’ Nina began, but Leo interrupted her.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I understand. She’ll be fine, believe me. Shall we go in?’ He gestured for her to lead the way and she gave him a grateful smile.
Ephesus (or Elephant as it would be forever known), was right in front of her. She was here, really here, on this site which had been occupied since before the rise of Christianity. She opened her guide book, wanting to make sure she didn’t miss anything.
‘There was a settlement in this area in Neolithic times,’ she read aloud, ‘and Elephant itself was constructed around three thousand years ago – bits of it – the later stuff is Roman.’ She guessed Leo probably knew this already, but she was so excited she simply had to share.
He was more interested in something else. ‘Elephant? You do know it’s called Ephesus, right?’
‘Elephant is what Gran calls it. When I said I wanted to visit here, she pretended to be deaf, and she calls Pamukkale, Pinky Moon.’
Leo mouthed Pamukkale a couple of times, trying to transform it into Pinky Moon. ‘I sort of get it.’
‘I think she’d switched off at that point,’ Nina said, pulling a crumpled straw hat out of her bag, tugging it into shape, then popping it on her head. She knew she didn’t look particularly glamorous, but the sun was fierce enough to give her heatstroke if she wasn’t careful. She hoped her gran was sitting in the shade, preferably somewhere inside. ‘I only persuaded her to come on this trip by having to agree to go on a jeep safari and diving with her.’
‘Diving? Wow! She’s really good for ninety-four, isn’t she?’ Leo said.
Nina coughed, and suddenly became very interested in the communal Roman toilets. Ninety-four indeed!
Although there was no roof (had there ever been?) on the ancient toilet block, the outline of the building was still very clear; large and square with waist high walls, all four sides had a kind of seat running around it with holes at regular intervals.
‘Imagine the men, and women too, coming here for a social poop,’ she said to change the subject about Flossie’s age. ‘It goes against our sense of propriety a bit. I’m not sure I could pee alongside someone else, let alone do anything more substantial.’
Leo barked out a laugh and the two of them stood side by side, peering down into the round holes chiselled into the long slab of marble. The stone was smoot
h and Nina wondered if it had been worn away by the friction of countless bottoms.
‘Water constantly flowed through these channels, taking the waste away,’ Leo pointed out. ‘Quite sanitary really, though I do wonder where it ended up.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Better than the medieval method of throwing it into a ditch running down the middle of the street.’
They looked at each other and grinned.
‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Leo misquoted.
Nina, delighted they were on the same wavelength (she adored Monty Python, and The Life of Brian was possibly her favourite film ever), joined in with enthusiasm. ‘The aqueduct?’
Leo carried on in character, using a funny voice, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s true, they did give us that. But what else have they given us?’
‘The sanitation,’ Nina quoted.
‘All right, I’ll give you the sanitation and the aqueducts.’ He wasn’t quite word perfect, but he was close enough.
‘And the roads,’ she giggled.
‘Obviously the roads. But apart from sanitation, the aqueducts and the roads, what else have they given us?’
‘Irrigation, education, medicine.’ Did she have that in the right order? Oh, who cared. ‘And wine.’
Returning to his normal voice he said, ‘I love that film.’
‘So do I.’
Their eyes met, Leo gestured to the toilets, and they started laughing again, unable to help themselves. He bent over, clutching his sides, and spluttered. ‘Then there’s that scene where the centurion catches Brian writing graffiti on a wall, and tells him to conjugate the verb to go…’ he mimed painting the words and snorted.
‘And then orders him to write out the correct sentence a hundred times!’ Nina had tears in her eyes from laughing so hard.
‘I hope you don’t threaten your kids with that if they get their spellings wrong.’
‘God forbid. You’re not even allowed to tell them off these days,’ Nina replied, gasping for breath.
‘They should have lived in Roman times, then they’d know what it’s like to be hard-done-by.’
‘At least they’d have toilets, and roads, and aqueducts,’ she chortled.
Summer on the Turquoise Coast Page 14