Those You Trust: compelling women's psychological fiction

by Bernie Steadman

  Dad stood up, carefully. ‘Let’s go and check out the front, Anna. Tell me what you think of the changes.’

  I followed him into the restaurant. It looked great, too. Michael had persuaded the parents to ditch the tired old Greek posters, and change the checked tablecloths and cutlery. It looked good, and much more modern. ‘I like it. It will attract younger customers, I’m sure.’

  He brushed imaginary crumbs from a table and sniffed. ‘It’s not my style, but yes, Michael has made such a difference, and allowed us to keep going through all this. But now…’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Well, it is time we sold the restaurant so me and your mother have a little time for ourselves. We are just staying on until Michael has found his feet, and then we will sign the papers.’

  ‘Oh, Dad.’ Sell the restaurant? Sell my home? ‘I can’t imagine you not being here.’ And I couldn’t. It was the only family home I remembered; we’d lived there since I was a baby. ‘But perhaps it’s for the best.’ Perhaps it was meant to be.

  ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, you know. It’s hell for a while, then it’s better for a while. But it goes on forever, it seems.’

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Just having you here is wonderful.’ He took my hand. ‘I have never told you how proud I am of you, Anna, for all the things you have achieved. When you think that I came here as a boy from Crete, with little hope… well, we haven’t done too badly, have we?’

  I gave him a hug. ‘No, Dad, we’ve done pretty well. You’ve done pretty well.’

  Mum came through at that moment and we had a family hug. It must have been almost thirty years since our little family had held each other like that. And even longer since we had all cried together.

  I went back up to my room and unpacked a few things, then put on my flat boots, coat and rearranged my scarf. It was time to have a walk through my old neighbourhood, clear my head, and decide how best to approach my father. Mum had been sneaking worried glances at me all morning, hoping I wouldn’t just blurt it out. I wouldn’t do that. There had to be a way to do it without hurting him.

  Promising not to be gone long, I set out along Wilmslow Road then turned off and walked along Mauldeth Road to the little park, where I sat for a while and watched small children playing and their mums chatting or scrolling down their phones. I used to come here a lot for a bit of peace when things got too much at home. My small group of girlfriends had used the park as our private hanging out space. We used to get really annoyed when local boys tried to share it. Happy days. I wondered briefly what they were all doing now.

  Life felt very normal back in Manchester. It had been so easy when I’d lived here. I knew the rules, knew how to behave, knew that mad people would not be coming after me, knew that the only man who mattered was my husband, knew that sadness walked with me. Thank God I’d run away. I let out a shaky laugh. Yes, these last few weeks had been terrifying, but I felt alive, properly myself. I had been brave. I could do things all by myself, and I was not intimidated by thugs.

  I pulled myself up off the bench and set off to walk down Burton Road, past the red-brick terraces and the blossom trees in full bloom. Spring had come to Manchester. I did a circuit and popped into the bank for some cash, and then I switched my phone on and waited for a British network to take over from my Greek one. Unsurprisingly, there was a missed call from Will, so I plucked up courage and rang him. Better out here on the street than at home, although I did pop down a side street to get away from the ever-present noise of road traffic. I’d become used to the relative quiet of my little street in Kissamos.

  ‘Hi, Will, it’s me.’

  ‘At last, you deign to call me.’

  Frosty at best. ‘Look, I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to your calls. I foolishly expected my parents to tell me what was happening back here. Daft, eh?’

  ‘They didn’t want to worry you. I thought it would come better from me.’

  ‘Did you?’ I couldn’t hold onto my temper any longer. ‘So, as usual, you decide what’s best for me, and for them? You’re not part of my family anymore. Nothing’s changed for you, has it, Will?’

  ‘Darling, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must be tired after your long trip. Let me take you to lunch so we can have a proper chat. I’ll pick you up at, say, one o’clock? We could go to The Lime Tree down the road, that’s always good value and I know you love their desserts…’

  It sounds pathetic, but tears of frustration prickled at the corners of my eyes. He always did this. Just took over my life. I may well even have stamped my foot, although I had learnt finally, through sheer bad experience, the best way to manage Will Hunter. ‘Stop it, Will! We are divorced. We’re not planning a date. I have no intention of ever seeing you again. Go and find some other innocent girl to manipulate. You leave my parents alone, and you leave me alone, otherwise I’ll get my lawyer back onto you again. Got it?’ I didn’t wait for a reply. I blocked his number.

  Having calmed down from that little episode, I rang Alex, who was hard at work on the underbelly of his boat, which he promised was almost ready to go back in the water. At which point he said we could go out for a little sail, just the two of us. I could hear the heat in his voice over the crackly line. I couldn’t wait to get back to Crete. At the end of the call, he said, ‘Bye, love you.’ And my heart gave a wallop. He still loved me.

  Dad was upstairs printing out the day’s specials menus in the little office, and Mum was making coffee when I got back. Mum and I went and sat in the living room, clasping hot mugs.

  ‘Are you going to talk to him?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, I need to. Have you said anything?’

  She shook her head and gave a shrug at the same time. I understood. It was a tough one to broach, especially with him.

  Dad walked into the room and sat in his usual chair. He drank down some coffee but pulled a face. ‘I can’t taste anything with this stupid chemo,’ he grumbled. ‘Everything tastes disgusting.’

  I laughed, but gently. ‘It must be awful, Dad. What you need is a bit of sunshine, and some warmth on those bones.’

  He jerked away from the china mug, put it down carefully on the table and glared at Mum. ‘You, what have you said?’

  ‘She hasn’t said anything, for goodness’ sake. Look, Dad, I’m living in your mother’s house, in your home town, on Crete, your island, and you haven’t asked a single question. You must want to know about what I’ve been doing?’

  ‘So, tell me then. What have you been doing?’ He folded his arms across his chest.

  ‘Dad, don’t get angry, but I’ve met Uncle Nikos and talked to him. I’ve met Mum’s relatives and talked to them. I know about what happened.’

  He looked shocked for a moment, but then he grunted. ‘What was the point of finding out? It upsets your mother and means nothing to me.’

  ‘Rubbish, it means so much to you that you couldn’t even tell me about your own family. I’m not a kid anymore, Dad; I know what this long silence has all been about. And it’s time it was over. Please come back with me and stay for a while. It’s time.’ I reached across and took his hand, but he pulled it back and scrubbed hard at his face.

  ‘You don’t understand. There is a feud that can never be…’

  ‘Was, there was a feud. Forty years ago you were banished. Not yesterday. Your father died fifteen years ago, your poor mother two years ago, and you never got to see them before they died. Why? Because of a cruel, stupid decision taken by your father when you were just a boy. He’s gone now, Dad. Let’s put it right.’

  He jerked again. ‘But what of Nikos? He has never tried to make amends. Never contacted us, even when your mother took you there. He took it all from me.’ The bitterness, almost anguish, was too much for him to bear, but I had to push on.

  ‘Oh, Dad, I’ve talked to Nikos, and he is so sorry for what happened. He wants to see you too. Really. He wants to apologise. He would love you to
come home. Can’t you just move on, and give him a chance to put things right? He owes it to you, and he wants to do this.’

  Dad stared at the shelf of Cretan pottery over the sideboard. I realised with a pang that this was Aunt Irini’s pottery, and that Mum and I had brought it back from our trips many years before.

  Mum said, ‘Think, Theo. It broke your mother’s heart when Andreas made that terrible decision. She never spoke to him again.’

  ‘And,’ I added, grateful for her point, ‘Nikos has built another house for himself. He couldn’t go back into the old family home, after it happened. He isn’t proud of what he did. He feels your loss terribly,’ I said. ‘And, Dad, you’re not getting any younger, and Nikos needs to make amends. Please let him apologise.’

  Dad put down his coffee, leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. ‘I cannot simply “move on”, Anna, as you say. And what about Stephanos, banished to America at sixteen years of age?’ He let out a sigh, almost a sob. ‘We lost everything, Anna. You don’t understand how hard it was. And Nikos, he could have said no to our father, but he didn’t.’ He wiped his eyes on the cuff of his shirt. ‘You have no idea what it has been like, not to see my homeland for all these years. Andreas ripped out our hearts.’ He banged on the table with a closed fist and got to his feet.

  Mum got up too, and put her arms around him. She spoke softly in Greek, so quietly I could hardly make out a word, but Dad reluctantly sat down again.

  ‘Tell me about him, about Nikos,’ he said.

  So I did. I told him about Delphine and the oil and wine business and the huge building business, Nikos’ new charity, and the big house.

  ‘All so good for him, I get it,’ Dad grumbled. ‘I’ve heard enough now.’

  ‘But you haven’t, Dad, you haven’t heard it all.’ Now or never. ‘Nikos has made me heir to his business empire.’ I watched his face, waiting for the explosion.

  ‘Mother of God,’ he said, hitting one fist into his other palm. ‘Then there is justice. We will get it all. Justice that he has no children to love and take on his name. I am glad, glad that his name will die out when he dies, and God willing it will be soon.’

  ‘Theo!’ shouted Mum. ‘He’s your brother. Don’t wish him dead, not when death hovers over this family already!’

  You see, you can take the girl out of a village in Crete and bring her to a sophisticated country like the UK and she can run a successful modern business, but deep down, she still has the superstitions of an old Greek woman. ‘Mother! What an awful thing to say! Death isn’t hovering anywhere, thank you very much. Dad will get better. It’s the chemo making him feel awful.’

  They stood next to each other, staring down at me. I don’t usually shout at them. ‘For God’s sake, sit down, the pair of you. There’s more.’

  When they were back in their seats and we had drunk some of the coffee and calmed down a bit, I explained about Leo and his takeover bid. Obviously I said nothing about him hurting me.

  ‘So, I will contact Stephanos, too, but for all I know, he put Leo up to it. But I want him to come back to the island, too. I think you all need to sort this out between you before it’s too late. Stephanos has three sons, and grandchildren, Dad.’

  Mum took a deep breath. ‘Theo, I have stayed away from my family for all these years because of you, because I love you and I am your wife, but now I am begging you. Please let us go home. Now is the time. We are selling up the restaurant. What is there to keep us here in the cold and the wet?’

  ‘Just come for a holiday,’ I begged. ‘Come back with me next week.’

  He reared again. ‘Pah, don’t be stupid. I am in the middle of chemo. How can I fly away? How could I get insurance to cover me?’

  He’d got me there. But only for a moment. ‘You know what? Stuff it. Fly without insurance. If you come for two weeks, you’ll be back in plenty of time for your next injection. Or, better still, I’ll get Delphine to arrange for you to have the chemo at the hospital in Chania. Then you can stay longer.’

  ‘You could do that?’ asked Mum, eyes wide.

  ‘She could. The Kokorakises are one of the most powerful families on the island, Mum. I’m sure she can arrange to transfer treatment to Crete for a while.’ She could certainly afford to do it privately, I thought. She could probably afford a private jet, too, but we wouldn’t need that, I hoped.

  Dad looked between us, at his wife’s shining face, and my earnest one, and gave the tiniest shrug. ‘Let me alone, both of you, I need to rest. I’ll speak with you at dinner.’ He struggled back up and shuffled off to the bedroom, where he closed the door and I heard the sound of a bedspring creak as he climbed in.

  ‘We have exhausted him,’ said Mum.

  ‘It’s a lot for him to take in, but I could see it in his eyes, like I can see it in yours. He wants to go home.’

  ‘He feels he is near the end.’ She held up a hand to stop me from interrupting. ‘I know what you say, but that is how he feels.’

  I took her hand. ‘You’ll be surprised at how healing the sun will be for him. You know, Aunt Irini will be delighted to see you. I can just imagine the pair of you chatting away in her lovely garden. Oh, Mum, please get him to say yes, you really need to do this.’

  ‘She is your second great cousin, Anna, not my mother’s sister.’

  ‘I know that, though how you remember it all, I have no idea. It’s easier just to call her Aunt, and she doesn’t mind.’

  She chuckled. ‘I haven’t seen her since I took you so many years ago. We talk on the phone, but how I long for the sun, and going home again, but it has all been a dream. Until now. It smells completely different over there, you know, with the wild flowers and the herbs. Oh, and the markets, the churches, the festivals, the flowers. I miss it all so much.’

  ‘I know, Mum,’ I said gently, ‘I live there now.’

  ‘And we would be all together in Crete. It would be a dream come true.’ Her eyes shone with tears.

  ‘And I can help you to find a house, and decorate it for you.’ I told her about the Andreanakises and the fire, and how Delphine had taken over sorting it out for them.

  ‘So Nikos is not as good as you have painted him.’

  ‘No, he’s a businessman before everything else. It’s where he gets his self-respect from. But I’m getting him to see things a little differently, I hope. I seem to be getting through to him, anyway. He agreed to set up the charity in his name to help unemployed youngsters, so that’s a step forward for him. Ideally, I’d like him to take the decision to sell it all before I have to inherit anything because I’ll sell it anyway. There’s no way I’m running a huge business like that. I haven’t got it in me. But I’m going to get there slowly. I don’t want to alienate him.’

  ‘And, of course, you have a cousin claiming his share?’

  ‘Not just one cousin. There are two more brothers in America, too, also sons of Stephanos, and who knows what they might want?’ I shrugged. ‘You know, Mum, I don’t want any of Nikos’ businesses. I want to be a designer and live in my little house and be happy, but I’m not letting Leo get his greedy hands on any of it. And he’ll harass me for the rest of my life if I don’t get rid of it.’

  She squeezed my hand. ‘It used to be guns, when old Andreas was alive. That’s how the family made their fortune. He would smuggle them in from Morocco and Turkey, and sell them to the resistance. Your grandmother helped him. She was quite famous for her work in the resistance. That money of Nikos’ has always been dirty. That’s what I used to tell your father when the anger threatened to eat him up. We don’t need dirty money, I would say. We have each other, and we have you, and we have a good life here.’ She smiled at me, sadly. ‘But it isn’t home, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t home.’

  Knowing that we would have to wait for Dad to reappear before I could do any more, I persuaded Mum to go shopping with me in Manchester for some new summer clothes, and we had a great girly afternoon buying sandals,
tops, a new swimming costume, several skirts and some more cropped jeans. I could see that I would need to add hold baggage for the return journey, especially as I intended to take back mature Cheddar cheese and boxes of proper tea bags. Enough of that Lipton stuff.

  We piled back into the flat, lugging bags of shopping and giggling about the cost, to find Dad sitting on the old sofa in the living room, a glass of something red in his hand. He looked up and gave Mum the warmest smile. ‘It’s good to see you looking happy again, Galena. We have been so sad recently.’

  Then he looked at me with a very different expression. My heart thumped. I stood in the doorway.

  ‘When you left us I didn’t think your mother would ever recover. Our only child, who couldn’t even give us a grandchild to love, leaving her husband and going off on some adventure, to the one place I could never agree to.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘And then, illness. Cancer.’ He spat the word out. ‘And I thought it was all over for us. I thought she would die of a broken heart, and I? Well, I will just die of this.’ He thumped his stomach.

  Mum dropped her bags on the floor and collapsed down beside him. ‘Theo, please, don’t do this to yourself.’ She kissed his hands.

  I stood there gasping like a fish on dry land. How could he talk to me like that? Like I’d hurt them on purpose? ‘Is that what you think? That I wouldn’t have children to spite you?’ I dropped to my knees in front of him and held onto his other hand. ‘Dad, I want children, of course I do, but it wasn’t in the plan.’

  Their faces showed only confusion.

  ‘Will’s plan: “There must be no interruption to our rise and rise”. Children would have meant mess, confusion and me having to take time off work and there was no room for that in the plan. So I wasn’t allowed. In the same way I wasn’t allowed to wear red or curl my hair, or eat proper food or have friends of my own. My life wasn’t real, Dad. It was all a show to stroke his ego. Do you see? That’s why I left him. He was strangling me slowly.’ With a tasteful taupe silk scarf.