‘That is not the point I am making!’
‘Then what point are you making?’ Spiros demanded to know. ‘Your mother and I might not behave as if we love each other at the moment, but we always have and we always will love you.’
There was a depth of emotion in his father’s voice that cut Elias to the quick. He lifted the pick quickly and smashed it into the ground once more with the loudest of grunts. The chickens leapt up into the air, flapping their wings and washing swayed a little on Areti’s line. Was she behind a double sheet listening? Why did he care? He didn’t live his life by the laws of gossip like this village did. He looked at his father, swallowing a lump in his throat. He should have come back sooner. What good had hiding done?
‘So,’ Spiros continued, waving the cigarette in the air as he gesticulated. ‘While we are on the subject of not knowing things and relieving the stresses of life with the help of soil and tobacco, when are you going to tell us about your real job?’
‘I… don’t know what you mean,’ Elias replied.
‘Elia,’ Spiros said, stroking a hand through his thinning hair, slightly better tamed today. ‘Your mother had to find out from the pages of a glossy magazine belonging to one of the villas she cleans for.’
His mother knew what he really did? When he had lied to her about conveyancing? Could this day get any worse?
‘Lawyer Elias Mardas on modern-day matrimony and going for broke when it comes to divorce and dissolution.’ Spiros sniffed. ‘I memorised it.’
He cringed at his father citing word-for-word an article that had singlehandedly caused his business’s rapid growth. He had been sad and humiliated and oh-so angry when the reporter had caught up with him, but he had also been completely focused on making a success of the worst moments of his life.
‘I did not recognise the man in the photographs,’ Spiros carried on. ‘Sitting confidently on white leather sofas wearing suits that look a size too small. He was handsome and, without a doubt that is something he has inherited from his father. But there was a fierceness about him. He was not the person who smiled and laughed and danced around a lamb on a spit with honey in his hair.’
All the reverie from his childhood hit Elias then. Running through the olive groves, bright wildflowers licking his shins, sunshine all around, crunching over Avlaki beach and diving into the waves…
‘She hurt me.’ It took Elias a second to realise it was him who was speaking. He should stop. He should withdraw. There was safety in withdrawing. But his words came again: ‘She hurt me so much.’
And then there were tears. Tears he thought he had spent long ago at the very beginning of this break-up, pouring out of him in front of his father. He ached to stop, but his emotions simply weren’t complying.
He felt a hand on his back then, a solid and comforting pat from the man who had raised him. The man who had had a heart attack and not told him. The man who was living in a shed…
‘I do not live in your house, Elia, because it is your house. Marriage or no marriage, it was always going to be your house. It is yours to do with what you wish,’ Spiros said, continuing to pat as Elias attempted to recover. ‘And, in life, there is nothing that cannot be reversed. If that is what you want.’
Reversing. No, he did not want a backward step. He only wanted to move forward. Except he still wasn’t exactly sure what that looked like now. It definitely wasn’t going to involve his house in Liakada, but it was quite possible it was going to involve Villa Selino.
‘I suggested reversing to your mother,’ Spiros told him, throwing the cigarette down into the dirt and stomping on it with his shoe. ‘I said it was time for us to change up through the gears and start again. Begin a new journey and add miles to our map of marriage.’ He sighed. ‘After three months of watching her dance with Constantine every chance she got and admiring the produce of Leandros, I told her I thought we should try living together again. And do you know what she said?’
Elias shook his head, sniffing as he looked through damp eyelashes.
‘She said, “Spiro, until you realise the difference between the handbrake and the accelerator then we have no hope of even getting to the nearest petrol station to refuel”,’ Spiros stated, hopelessly. ‘I have no clue what she meant. And I started off with using the car terminology!’
Elias put a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Papa, you need to tell me what’s happened since I’ve been gone,’ he ordered. ‘All of it.’ He held Spiros’s shoulder firmly, shaking a little. ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ Spiros agreed with a nod of his head. Then his father turned to face the fluttering double sheet at the end of the garden. ‘Did you get all that, Areti?’ he shouted. ‘My son, Elias is back to see his parents and he does not care what any of the village thinks about that. I love my wife and I do not care who knows that either! And we are now going to drink ouzo in the middle of the day!’
There was no sound until the interruption of the lone cockerel, crowing loudly from the enclosure at the bottom of the plot and then Areti’s voice called:
‘Good! Yammas to you, Spiro!’
Spiros nudged Elias with the point of his elbow and raised his eyes.
‘And,’ Areti continued loudly, ‘just so that you know, there is nothing wrong with turnip in a moussaka!’
Thirty-Six
‘People are staring. Why are they staring? Did I get more than the twenty mosquito bites I’ve found on the walk here? Is my body covered in welts I can’t see that have already started weeping?’ Petra alternated between looking at the backs of her thighs in the short red playsuit she was wearing and meeting the gaze of villagers sitting at tables outside an establishment that looked like neither taverna nor bar. There was a yellow sign attached to the railings that showed an emblem of a Greek-looking warrior and the words ‘Hellenic Post’. It was a post office? Where people could drink while they sent letters? How civilised! Past the tables outside, through the front door were signs of groceries. Was this the shop Eleni owned? What had she called it? A café-something…
Petra had been right about the boxes of blooms and houses clustered together, clean washing swaying in the humid air. It was as chaotically charming as it was peaceful, locals going about their business – on mopeds, 4x4s, a donkey – ramblers with their walking poles and backpacks strolling along or stopping at the square to guzzle water, cats sitting outside the one taverna in groups of three, waiting for the slightest indication that a tit-bit might arrive.
‘Are you getting bitten?’ Petra asked Becky. ‘I considered putting that cleaning fluid on me instead of my bug spray, seeing as it seems to successfully eradicate everything. I think it’s saved my cut-offs BTW.’
‘I read before I came here that everyone gets bitten by mosquitos, but that some people simply react worse to them.’
‘What a heartening, slightly middle-aged fact that is,’ Petra responded, rubbing her calf. ‘Why have we stopped here? Aren’t we going into the bar-shop place and trying to get some juice on Elias from Scary Eleni? She seemed like a woman to know everybody.’
‘Maybe we should have something to eat in the taverna instead,’ Becky suggested. She had agreed coming to the village tonight to either find Elias or to find out about him was a good idea, but it was bothering her she hadn’t managed to make contact with Ms O’Neill yet. It would have been handy to touch base before they arrived here. She was still half-hoping the owner would say that, yes, the house was about to be put on the market and she hadn’t told her because her partner was organising it and she hadn’t realised it was all happening so soon.