‘Why are you sitting there?’ his mother asked, bustling over with a terracotta clay pot in her oven-gloved hands. ‘You are in the centre of everything. Move to a table in the corner.’
Elias slugged at his wine. ‘No.’
‘What did you say?’ his mother asked him, the clay pot still in her hands. Elias could smell its contents on the steam rising from the small hole in the centre of its lid. Stifado. Beautifully tender pieces of beef that had been simmering slowly for hours – possibly days – together with baby onions all swimming in the thickest tomato and herb sauce. His mother’s stifado was almost legendary among the locals. It was a recipe that had been handed down through generations.
‘I said,’ he began, trying not to lick his lips and make his mother realise just how much he needed the food she was holding. If he wasn’t careful, she could just as easily put it down in front of the locals outside, still sitting around their backgammon games. ‘I am happy with my choice of table… and this wine is… better. A good year for the apples this year?’
Something seemed to shift in his mother’s eyes then, a dulling of her furore perhaps. She put the pot down in front of him and he reached for the lid. Immediately she slapped him away with one of her gloved hands. ‘What are you doing? It is hot like fire! It has come straight from the oven! Do you want to burn your hands off?’ She picked up the lid, her hands protected from the heat, and carefully put it down on the table opposite him. ‘And there is nothing different about the wine. The wine is always good.’
‘The wine is not always good,’ Elias told her. ‘The wine is usually terrible. But no one complains, either because they are locals and have been drinking it for thirty years and have got accustomed to the terrible wine, or they are tourists and they think it is meant to taste like that because the grapes have been crushed by hand – or foot – or by goats.’
His mother sat down in the seat opposite him, hands still gloved.
‘Mama,’ Elias said softly. ‘What is going on?’
‘Nothing is going on. Eat your stifado before it goes cold.’
There was not going to be anything cold about this dish for at least an hour judging by the amount of steam that was coming off it and misting his eyeballs. It was good he wasn’t wearing his glasses.
‘My father is living in a storage shed,’ Elias said boldly.
‘Did he take you there?’ his mother asked, tutting and shaking her heavy head of hair, the style unchanged in all the time he had known her. ‘He has a luxury mattress, a fridge-freezer and a poster of Nana Mouskouri on the wall.’
‘Mama,’ Elias said again. ‘Why is he living there? Why is he not here with you?’
‘I expect he told you a grand story about how he is completely innocent in all of this. I am guaranteeing that he said I am going crazy and it is my hormones, or inherited from my mother or… both of these things.’
‘He said very little,’ Elias answered, picking up a fork. ‘He said I should ask you.’
‘See!’ his mother exclaimed, raising both gloved hands in the air then, seeming to suddenly realise she was still wearing them, she shook them off onto the table where they knocked over the pepper pot. ‘He blames this all on me, like always.’
And Elias still had no idea what had transpired to cause a solid marriage to be on such unstable ground… in his father’s case, ground that was covered in ants marching to and fro with some of the dregs of the smaller contents of his fridge-freezer. If this separation had happened, why wasn’t his father staying in Elias’s house? His late grandmother’s house. The one he had been given as a wedding present. The one he wasn’t sure he could ever go in again. He opened his mouth to speak.
‘Why are you here?’ his mother asked him. ‘Did someone from the village contact you? Was it Areti? Because I told her if she contacted you, I would make her drink a tea made from the juices of the cooking of lamb lungs.’ She sucked in a breath. ‘I should have known she likes this! She must drink this all the time!’
‘No one contacted me,’ Elias replied. ‘I am here for business.’ And he was. He needed to stay in Liakada because it was near Chad’s villa. The ‘happy’ coincidence was seeing his parents and setting foot back in the village that had all but ostracised him. It was a challenge and a challenge he was accepting. Except he hadn’t bargained on coming up against this separation issue.
‘You have a property you are helping to sell?’ Now his mother was fully turning the attention away from her marital problems. And here was the other white lie he had laid down when he had set up his own business in London. His mother didn’t think he was an estate agent, but she did think he was still in conveyancing. He knew if he told her his speciality was now divorce, that she would make something of that. And there was nothing to make of it…
Before he knew it, he was saying: ‘Yes.’ He physically cringed at himself and had to adjust his position in the chair and top up his wineglass as the humidity of the night seemed to increase ten-fold. There was no air-conditioning in this snug of a shop-cum-bar just a couple of fans that had seen better days whirring slowly. Even the mosquitos were able to evade the barely moving blades, almost dancing around in the air between them, mocking. Elias cleared his throat. ‘It is a house not far from here. One of the villas near the sea. An English woman lives there. Mrs Carmichael. I really need to meet with her. Has she been here at all?’ He reached into the pocket of his trousers to retrieve his phone. He had a photo he had plucked from Chad’s Instagram ready to show.
‘Why do you not go to the house?’ his mother asked. ‘If she is living there, waiting for you to come to help with the sale of her house?’
His mother was as astute as ever and was now looking at him like he was ten years old and still the naïve boy who had had his hand slapped for taking still-warm baklava from the oven.
‘It is… a difficult case,’ he answered coolly. ‘There is more than one owner involved and I want to… get a feel for… how she is.’
‘How she is?’
Elias fanned the neck of his shirt, needing some movement of air. ‘Yes.’ He thumbed icons on his phone, calling up the photo.
‘You are expecting her to bark at you like a stray dog?’ his mother asked. ‘Or snap at you with venom like a viper?’ She chuckled then, seeming to find his show of uncomfortable amusing. ‘Such a fuss over bricks and stone!’
‘Have you seen her?’ he asked. He held out his phone with Kristina Carmichael’s photo on it. His mother grabbed it, holding it close to her eyes, closer than she had held things to her face before. He couldn’t deny that both his parents had aged since he’d been gone.
‘I know this woman,’ his mother announced almost immediately. ‘But you are calling her the wrong name.’ She handed the phone back to Elias. ‘Her name is not this Car-Michelle you keep saying. Her name is Ms O’Neill.’
Elias nodded. So, Kristina must have already started using another name before the divorce was even halfway to being finalised. It made perfect sense with everything that Chad had been telling him about her distancing herself for the longest time.