One Cretan Evening and Other Stories Read online

  Andreas returned to his village near the capital, Nicosia, and Claire found herself an apartment on the edge of the city. The view was predominantly of the other white-washed blocks that surrounded her in all directions, some of them only a few decades old but their paintwork already chipped and the plaster falling away in lumps from the concrete walls. What the architects had failed to visualise in their blueprints of these fast-expanding cities were the air conditioning units hanging off at angles, the jumble of solar panels and satellite dishes, and the metal rods that protruded from the roof tops like walking sticks. Lines of garish laundry pegged out on every balcony completed the picture of chaos.

  There was no lack of opportunity in Cyprus for an articulate expatriate willing to work hard for little pay and Claire now had a job in a bookshop and a routine that was not so unlike the life she had left behind. There were details that differed, however. The working day was longer and the heat made it seem longer still as she struggled home on foot, carrier bags bursting with quantities of seasonal vegetables and household goods whose names she still struggled to decipher. Though corners of this island were almost English, it was nevertheless distinctly a foreign country. In her apartment, with the doors and windows thrown wide in an attempt to catch the breeze, the air was filled with the competing sounds of a dozen different TV stations. Some evenings, driven demented by the relentless cacophony of blaring music and voices, she would shut the windows and, though the heat was stifling, at least she could then enjoy the silence.

  It was not the ex-pat life that her friends envisaged, of late nights and parties and daily visits to the beach, but she was strangely contented. She and Andreas saw each other at weekends and for now that had to suffice.

  That December day, she was standing outside the Christmas shop waiting for Andreas to pick her up. He was finally to take her for the much-anticipated visit to her prospective in-laws. In-law, to be precise. And she was nervous. Such an introduction carried more significance here than it would in Yorkshire.

  ‘I know she’ll like you,’ said Andreas attempting to reassure her. ‘But don’t be put off if she seems a bit unfriendly.’

  ‘Why should she be?’ asked Claire, with faux naivety, knowing already the reputation of Greek mothers.

  ‘It’s just the language barrier,’ he answered. ‘She won’t really be able to talk to you, that’s all.’

  As they drove up into the hills above Nicosia, they could see the faraway spaces of the part of the island occupied by Turkey. The division of the country was rarely mentioned by Andreas but, with the clear view of a Turkish flag provocatively carved into the hillside, Claire was reminded of this uneasy separation. Soon they reached his village and the streets narrowed. The buildings were warmly characterful and most of them had been home to several generations of the same family. Several of them seemed to be held up by thick boughs of bougainvillea and vine that were now inseparably entwined.

  ‘Look,’ he said, as they passed a blue door. ‘There it is.’

  An elderly woman, slim, with birdlike features, appeared at the entrance of one of the larger houses. She looked frail enough to be blown over in a breeze. Her arms were folded and her face expressionless. Until she caught a glimpse of her son. And then it was as though the sun had emerged from a rain cloud.

  Andreas parked his car in a dusty space at the top of the hill and they strolled back down towards his home. His mother waited on the doorstep, her smiling eyes now fixed on her son. Although she was as thin as a stick, Kyria Markides had the strength to embrace her son with bone-crushing warmth and effusive cries of ‘Angele mou! My angel! Matia mou! My eyes!’ and all the while she looked over his shoulder at Claire and fixed her with a steely glare. In spite of the warmth of the day the young woman almost felt her heart freeze.

  They went inside the house and gradually her eyes became accustomed to the gloom. They sat awkwardly at the table for some time as the elderly creature in widow’s weeds bustled about in the kitchen. Claire looked around her. The walls were covered in the same icons that she had seen in other Cypriot houses, but in addition there were perhaps thirty photographs. Some of them were wedding pictures but most of them were formal portraits of the same man, handsome, moustachioed, proudly wearing army uniform.

  ‘Your father?’ enquired Claire.

  ‘Yes,’ Andreas replied.

  ‘You look quite a lot like him . . .’

  ‘That’s what my mother always says. Sadly, I don’t remember him.’

  Claire had known that Andreas had no siblings. She also now saw how much this only child was doted on and adored by his mother. She suddenly felt the awkwardness of being here. It was not just the nostalgia for home, a place where even if it did not snow on Christmas Day, the likelihood of frost was strong. It was also the sense of being an outsider, particularly here, in this house.

  She sat quietly through the meal. A few other relatives had joined them: cousins and their children, three aunts and two very aged uncles. Claire smiled when she was spoken to, though she did not have a clue what was being said, and took a little from every plate that was handed to her, even eating one of the minute baby birds, ambelopoulia, cruelly caught and killed on their maiden flight. She did not want to let Andreas down, but at the end of the meal, when glasses of fiery zivania had been swallowed and it was time to depart, she was exhausted from keeping up the pretence of enjoying herself. Kyria Markides gave her a cursory handshake as they left.

  The atmosphere in the car on the way down the hillside was tense. Claire felt that she had done her best but the iciness from Andreas’ mother had been worse than she had anticipated.

  ‘Why does she have to be like that? What is wrong with these Greek mothers? Why are they so possessive?’ The tension had been building in her since the moment they’d arrived and she could not contain her anger.

  Andreas did not answer and Claire was unable to make out his expression on this dark moonless night.

  A few minutes later she repeated her question.

  ‘Well? Why?’

  His silence only provided further provocation.

  ‘Your mother will never accept me,’ she said with resignation. ‘I’m an outsider here and I’ll never be anything else.’

  They were now driving into Nicosia. Claire glanced out of the window and noticed they were passing the same shop window she had seen this morning with its fake pine trees and falling snow.

  She also realised that he had now taken a turning that led away from her area of Nicosia but after a while he drew up.

  ‘There’s somewhere I want to take you,’ said Andreas.

  They walked, apart, down a street illuminated with festive decorations and in the far distance Claire could make out a Christmas tree. It was standing in the middle of the pavement, not illuminated with fairy lights but festooned with ribbons. As they got closer she saw that there was something stranger still. Instead of baubles, this tree was hung with photographs, black and white pictures, mostly of men, with words and a date underneath. 1974.

  ‘Look,’ said Andreas. The caption under the picture he was holding read: ‘Giorgos Markides’.

  The photograph was faded and had evidently been there for many years.

  ‘But why is his picture here?’

  ‘My father was one of the “disappeared”,’ explained Andreas. ‘Like fifteen hundred others, who vanished when Cyprus was invaded by Turkey, he has not been seen since. The pictures keep the memory of them alive.’

  Andreas had only just been born at the time and his mother had waited, and waited, expecting each day her husband’s return. Every day she had lit a candle in the church and prayed, meanwhile lavishing on her son all the love she had for Giorgos and much more.

  Claire touched Andreas’ arm, half-expecting him to draw away.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘No wonder she fears losing you. It makes perfect sense.’

  Andreas looked at her and smiled.

  ‘I think it will take a w
hile for her to realise that you’re not going to take me away from here, that’s all,’ he said.

  They stood on the pavement contemplating this strange tree that was there not just for December but for every day of the year, and Claire’s urge to be in England left her entirely. This was where she wanted to be, far from frost and ice, with sweet balmy air around her and the sight of this pine without snow.

  By the Fire

  THE FIRE HAD been lit for many hours and now glowed luminously orange. From time to time a log let out a hiss and showers of sparks followed in a bright burst up into the chimney.

  It was New Year’s Eve. An hour from midnight. Amanda sat on the worn Persian rug in front of the fire, her legs curled up underneath her, cat-like. She was cracking the last of the remaining Christmas walnuts, carefully prising away sharp pieces of shell to extract tiny fragments of nut, then tossing the debris into the embers and watching them flare. Her cheeks were flushed with warmth.

  In a capacious armchair sat Richard, generous chintz cushions enveloping him like a nest. He rested a glass of red wine on the arm and his cashmere-coated feet rested on the hearth. Thick curtains kept most of the draughts out of the old cottage but a gusty wind rattled the panes.

  ‘You didn’t mind not going out, did you?’ asked Amanda.

  On the mantelpiece above them, nestling between greetings cards and some drying sprigs of holly, was an invitation to a party sent to them by someone they hardly knew. Their close friends knew to leave them alone that night.

  ‘8 ’til 8. Don’t be Late! It’s an important date! Dress: optional!’ screamed the invitation.

  ‘Er . . . no. Not at all. It sounded awful, that party,’ murmured Richard. ‘I don’t think we’d really be in the mood, would we?’

  ‘There’s just so much pressure to have fun, fun, fun on New Year’s Eve. As far as I’m concerned, tomorrow is just another day.’

  Richard looked at her, uncertain how to proceed.

  ‘But it’s more than that, isn’t it?’ he said quietly.

  Amanda continued methodically cracking nuts, as though hoping she might one day perfect the technique and extract one whole.

  ‘It’s a turning point . . . an ending,’ said Richard, ‘. . . and maybe a beginning, too?’

  ‘Mmm. Yup,’ she said crisply. ‘Hope you’re right.’

  She glanced up at him, for a moment interrupting her activity.

  She was neat and economical in everything she did and almost unchanged since she was a schoolgirl, still able to sit comfortably cross-legged on the floor as though she were in the third form in assembly, her long dark hair still loose around her shoulders, just as she had worn it when she was sixteen. Her clipped response to Richard was typical of late; she kept everything under control, contained.

  Richard sipped his wine and stared into the fire.

  ‘People say you can see your future in the flames,’ he said.

  ‘I think that’s probably nonsense,’ retorted Amanda. ‘You’ll just see what you want to see.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think that’s maybe the point. Your imagination helps you to work out what you want and then you aim for it.’

  ‘But we know what we want. And I don’t want to see it on fire.’

  She looked into Richard’s eyes and could see them watering. It was not the smoke from the fire, she was certain of that. The events of that year had made them both fragile, but Amanda hid it better, arming herself with a brittle carapace. She wanted to forget their pain.

  Precisely a year ago to the day she had been lying in a hospital bed. The baby was due to be born that night and they knew the midwife wanted Amanda to hold on until the stroke of midnight so that the baby would be the first of that year. ‘You could even get in the newspapers,’ one of the nurses said excitedly, ‘if the timing’s right!’

  Things had gone well at first; she was wired up to a monitor and the baby’s heart had a perfect, even beat, almost in time with the ticking clock whose hands rhythmically worked their way towards midnight. Only when the pattern changed, at around five minutes to the hour, did the calm and ordered scene change to one of chaos and panic. She saw it on the nurses’ faces. She saw it on Richard’s. A paediatrician burst through the door, breathless. They spoke as if she was not really there, ignoring Richard’s pleas to know what was going on. It was too late for an emergency Caesarean, that much they understood, and as the hands of the clock met on the moment of midnight, the baby slithered out. Stillborn, the cord wrapped around his neck. A disaster, a terrible shock, a statistic. No one to blame.

  So this year, when the postman delivered cards showing a picture of a Renaissance Madonna with child, Amanda dropped them straight in the bin. She had always thought Mary looked smug, but now she found her unbearable. If the prophets had foretold of a stillbirth, the whole course of history, the story of civilisation, would have been so different, she reflected. But Jesus came out happy and smiling and Amanda found herself resenting even the Son of God and most definitely his mother.

  She was angry that her friends had failed to see that such an image would remind her of what was known among them, in whispered tones, as ‘the tragedy’. The first days of confusion, the funeral with the tiny coffin carried in the undertaker’s arms like a shoe box, Amanda’s stubborn insistence that Sam should appear in both the Births and Deaths in The Times.

  ‘He was born,’ she had screamed at Richard. ‘Born dead!’

  He did not contradict her and duly placed the notices.

  As people do when there is a birth or death, they sent floral tributes. When the bereaved couple returned home the following day, the house began to fill up with flowers: huge bouquets of roses (some deep red like blood); arum lilies (huge white trumpets that reminded Amanda of the Annunciation); conventional arrangements of chrysanthemums (that would have sat happily on a grave). Amanda did not want any of these flowers. They gave her no comfort. For her, such gestures needed to be associated with celebration. Richard put them in vases, which sat on the floor in a corner of the kitchen until the blooms withered.

  She had not been numb with grief; she had been demented with it, and only in April had it begun to subside. When they eventually entered the room that had been done up as the nursery, they saw that everything still gleamed: the shiny mobile hanging from the ceiling, the unopened packet of nappies sitting in the corner, the pile of Babygros neatly stacked, still in cellophane. The pale blue space was like a fridge.

  Richard and Amanda needed this hour to pass, knew that the awful, inevitable, revival of that pain would intensify as the clock struck twelve.

  ‘Look,’ said Richard, with Amanda now curled up on his lap, ‘it’s been a terrible year but the next will be better.’

  ‘It couldn’t be worse, could it?’ replied Amanda. ‘Your poor dad, too. I still feel so guilty about him.’

  They had both been too preoccupied at the beginning of the year to visit Richard’s eighty-year-old father in his retirement home or to notice that in the spring he rapidly deteriorated. He died in May, and Richard’s sister made all the funeral arrangements. Amanda felt nothing. She could not cry as the coffin went past. It just looked so cumbersome and ugly, and she found it hard to see the point of grieving for someone of eighty. All she thought was how incredibly lucky he had been to have all those long years of life. Why were people wearing black? They should be celebrating. Nothing that other people took for granted made sense to her any more. She had looked up at Richard standing solemnly next to her in his sombre suit and saw that his eyes too were dry.

  ‘Nothing went well this year, did it?’

  ‘You know, we should be happy to see the end of it, shouldn’t we? Sort of “good riddance”,’ he said, with an attempt at levity.

  Richard was always so good at trying to lighten the mood, and it was extraordinary how he could find laughter in the most banal and unlikely places. How she loved him. This year he had been her strength and he had never wavered.

&nbs
p; ‘Have you any idea how much I love you?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope as much as I love you,’ he answered. ‘Look, I’m going to get a bottle of something. I know we can’t really celebrate, but we need to say hello to next year.’

  Amanda uncurled from her husband’s lap and stood up. Richard disappeared to fetch a bottle from the old brick outhouse at the bottom of the garden and she heard the back door open and shut. There was a brief gust of wind that blew over the cards on the mantelpiece. Some of them floated down and landed on the edge of the fire. The corner of the invitation ignited and was soon consumed, along with an image of Father Christmas.

  She threw another log on the fire and enjoyed seeing the flames enfold it. As she watched, different shapes began to play in front of her. She saw an ‘S’, of course. Many of them, curling out of the logs. A thousand of them danced in front of her. She leaned forwards from the big armchair, her head in her hands, and watched. It was mesmerising, hypnotic, this ever-moving sequence of images and patterns, graceful as the images emerged and then slowly melted away or transformed into something else. She saw the tall figure of a woman who seemed to perform a pirouette in front of her and then was distorted and stretched into another form altogether. From out of her emerged shapes: a tree, a fox, a cat, even a horse.

  The back door slammed for a second time and another strong gust blew in. This time it had more force, entering the room with such power that the baubles on the tree knocked together, and sending a chill into the room that momentarily made her shiver. The dying embers were stirred again to new life.

  From a point in the centre of the fireplace rose a huge flame that spread across the grate like a screen. It could not have been more dramatic if someone had doused the logs in petrol. Amanda feared its sudden intensity and panicked that it might set the chimney alight.