Читать книгу Truly, Madly, Deeply - Romantic Association Novelist's - Страница 24

Polly consults the ferry timetable. Having puzzled over it many times during the past seven years, she knows its little ways.

Buried in its print, is the key to the vessels which skim over the sunlit Greek seas and plough through the stormy ones. And, yes, there is one due to sail from Piraeus at 11.30 the following morning. This gives Polly plenty of time to arrive at the port and to find a coffee and sandwich. She is sometimes sea-sick and copes better being so on a full stomach.

Dan used to tease her about that.

In Athens, she checks in at her usual hotel –discovered quite early on in her travels. It is cheap and central and nobody bothers about her there. In her room there are the familiar blue-and-white striped ticking window blinds and the matching bedspread.

The mirror is new though, and Polly peers into it. She has left London in a rush –working in the office until the very last-minute, which meant there had been no time for leisurely preparation. She doesn’t much care what she looks like but others do. If you’re travelling on your own, it’s best to make an effort.

She phones Nico at the salon.

‘Ah Polly, Polly. Please come at once.’

Nico owns a chain of hairdressing salons but is always to be found in the one near Avidi Square. He is waiting for her when she walks in.

‘Hallo beautiful Polly,’ he says in his mixture of Greek and English. ‘Very, very good to see you.’

Polly replies in a similar mixture of language–only, in her case as she often teases him, her Greek improves each year.

Nico sits her down and wraps her up in a gown. ‘Your hair is good.’ Their eyes meet in the mirror. ‘You have kept it well.’

She has. She has. Shoulder length and still blonde with touches of honey and toffee, Dan loved her hair.

Nico examines a lock in a professional manner. ‘A small trim?’

‘Please.’

He cuts it wet and gives Polly his news. The fifth grandchild arrived. The family is well. Times are hard.

He knows that Polly will not respond with similar information. Polly’s lack of family always shocks him.

The scissors emit a faintly metallic sound and, despite herself, the hairs on the back of Polly’s neck rise.

No, she lectures herself.

‘And where are going to this time, Polly?’

‘Skopolos.’

Nico cuts a meticulous half inch of hair across her back. He knows that, after his ministrations, Polly is unlikely to visit a hairdresser for weeks and he has a professional reputation to maintain.

‘Why Skopolos?’

‘I’ve never been there.’

‘When are you going?’

It’s a question Nico has asked seven times before and he knows the answer. He sighs and puts down the scissors. ‘Helena is expecting you at seven-ish. Is that alright?’

Polly grins at them both in the mirror. ‘Your wife is a very good woman.’

Helena never changes. Never looks a day older. Her hair is still as dark and her olive-y skin still as smooth.

‘You’re thinner,’ she says. She gives the once-over to Polly’s tamed, shining hair and her skinny jeans and jacket. ‘But very smart.’

Polly kisses Helena and gives her the selection of expensive teas she has bought from England. ‘I gather another grandchild has just arrived. I hope I’m no trouble.’

‘Trouble? My role is to deal with trouble. Nico earns our money. I arrange the important things.’

The new mother, Andrea, is sitting in the garden feeding the baby. Her other two children wheel like starlings around the adults who sit and gossip until Helena calls them into eat.

Halfway through the meal of rice and meatballs, Nico rises to his feet. ‘We are so glad to have you with us again, Polly. Nothing can take away the circumstances of how we met but the friendship which has come from them…well, there is something good.’ He raises his glass. ‘Let us meet for many, many more years.’

Towards midnight, Polly gets up to go. ‘How can I thank you both?’

The new baby cries and Andrea catches it up with a great deal of cooing and shushing. They are happy sounds.

Helena rests her hands on Polly’s shoulders. ‘Tomorrow is the anniversary…’

‘Yes.’

Walking hand in hand with Dan along a crowded Athens street. The car veering out of control. Body and bone impacting on it. Dan sprawled on the pavement outside Nico’s salon. Bright red blood. Too bright to look at.

Scissors in hand, Nico running out and shouting, ‘Get back everyone.’ Nico cutting Dan’s shirt away with the scissors.

Polly cradling Dan and begging him. ‘Don’t die.’

Nico holding Polly.

‘What time?’

‘Mid-morning.’

Helena looks long and hard into Polly’s eyes. What she sees evidently does not please her. ‘Spend it with us,’ she says. ‘It’s Sunday tomorrow and the whole family will be here. I keep telling you that you should be with family and not travelling alone.’

Polly says. ‘I think it’s what I do best now.’

She kisses them all fondly, thanks them over and over again and returns to her silent room in the hotel.

Emerging from the Metro the following morning, the warmth hits her. It’s 22 or 23 degrees which is normal for late spring. Knowing what to expect, she is dressed in linen trousers and good quality cotton T-shirt unlike many of the sweating, overdressed tourists who are arriving from the airport.

She makes for the coffee shop adjacent to departure gate E8 and queues.

‘I’m worn out,’ says the woman directly in front of Polly.

Her companion, a woman with white hair and bright pink lipstick, looks alarmed. ‘We’ve only just got here.’

‘And my feet have swollen.’ The woman points to her unsuitable leather shoes. ‘See.’

Polly has some sympathy. She remembers the early years of her annual pilgrimages. The decision to go, but where? What to wear? What to pack? How to live without Dan? The unknown is tiring and mistakes are made.

Coffee in hand, she moves off to join the queue for the ferry –and spots that the handsome local hustler dressed up in a fake uniform is back in business. She watches him size up an affluent looking older couple with copious amounts of luggage and slip into his routine. He is so charming. So persuasive. Within minutes, they will allow him to carry their bags to the head of the impatient queue…’the captain would wish it’. Only then, would he demand a hefty tip.

She listens to the subsequent row, which she can rehearse, almost word for word. Should she have intervened? Perhaps she should have done. Yet, the most useful experience is the most hard-won and Piraeus is a tough, chaotic place.

The queue moves forward. Embarked, Polly will head forward, which allows her to manoeuvre between sun and shade, her book for the trip easily accessible in a rucksack pocket. This year it is Anna Karenina, and she anticipates biting down on Tolstoy’s combination of story and philosophy. The idea of reading only one book on her travels is to ensure that its text becomes second nature. In this way, she has tackled seven classics, each one soldered imaginatively to the place she read them. Great Expectations is Rhodes. A Portrait of a Lady is Crete.

At the front of the ferry, she would watch the sea, with a touch of heat haze layering above it. At Skopolos the ferry would lumber into its berth with the usual noise of arrival in any port. Then, she would search for a bed and breakfast. Check for insects. Check the water ran properly. Check for an extra blanket. She would be loose in time and space, her past discarded as easily as tossing old bread crust into the water.

Dan.

Seven years ago, he died. Her new husband. Each year, on the anniversary, she travels alone, for three weeks or so, and always around the Greek islands. It is something which is now second nature. Cyclades, Dodecanese…there were as many as there were years in which to face life without Dan.

The sun was growing hotter. The queue is undulating. She swings her rucksack up onto her back. Her foot is on the gangplank…

Dan.

Dan?

She feels his hand grasp her hair. The smell of him which she loved.

She needed him. He needed her.

His warm skin.

He is living in her, and she suspects he always will.

Polly, he says. Don’t do this.

Why tell me now? she cries silently. I am about to go in pursuit of the memories.

Because Polly…

Suddenly, she swivels on her heel and, pushing her way through the hot, cross tourists, retraces her steps. In the Metro she is forced to balance her rucksack on her knees. Dense with odours of discarded food and bodies crushed too tight together, it is impossible to read.

It is late afternoon when she reaches Nico and Helena’s house. The front door is open and in Polly walks.

The kitchen is very warm, steamy and filled with good cooking smells. Nico is chopping onions and Helena is stirring a pot on the stove. The table is piled with vegetables and cheeses wrapped in waxy paper. Since yesterday, someone had strung dried peppers over the door leading to the garden and they make a necklace of blood red drops.

‘Hallo.’

Helena drops the spoon into the pot. ‘Polly…’

‘Do you mind? I have come back…like you said.’

Helena gestures to the garden where the table has been laid. ‘We allocated you a place.’

‘How did you know?’

‘We didn’t. But each year Nico and I hope.’

Polly licked her fingertip and caught up a grain of sea salt on a chopping board and put it in her mouth. The insides of her cheeks pucker.

Nico continues with his chopping. ‘You can only go on so long, Polly. The time comes…’

‘You are good to me,’ she says with a rush of emotion.

Helena wipes her hands on her apron and grabs Polly’s hand. ‘Do you remember…afterwards that you came to stay with us and we looked after you? That makes you family.’

The onions were making Polly cry. She holds on to Helena’s hand. ‘I suddenly thought I didn’t want to be alone today. And Nico…’

Nico stopped the chopping.

‘Nico, you knew Dan. For just a few seconds, but they were important ones. You shared the moment of his death.’

Nico frowns and Helena shakes her head at him. ‘Go on Polly.’

‘I can’t go on thinking about it. I can’t go over, and over the details any more.’

‘At last,’ says Nico.

‘It’s as if I am travelling over the same ground, over and over again, and never getting anywhere.’ She pauses. ‘I never arrive, however carefully I prepare.’

Helena extracts a clean knife from the rack and hands it to Polly. ‘The tomatoes need chopping. Can you do that?’

Polly smiles. ‘In slices?’

‘If you like. They’re for the sauce.’

‘But I must do it right.’

‘You do it the way which suits you,’ said Helena.

Polly sets to, the red flesh falling away from the knife blade and the seeds spurting onto the board in a crimson gel. Just like blood. She hesitates.

‘Go on Polly,’ urges Helena. ‘It’s getting late.’

Polly smiles at them both to show that she is perfectly in control. Her movements gather speed and dexterity.

Helena adds a handful of thyme to the saucepan. ‘A bed is made up,’ she says. ‘No need to go back to the hotel.’

She glances at her watch. At this moment, the ferry would be berthing at Skopolos and a brief, but intense, regret flits through her mind. Then it is gone.

She glances up at the laid table where her place is waiting to be occupied. The image of Dan, held so long and violently in her mind, dims and softens into the bearable.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’