One Cretan Evening and Other Stories (3 page)

‘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 while 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.

T
HE 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.

‘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.

She got up quickly, planning to fetch a bucket of water but keeping her eyes on the blaze. As she did so, she noticed something. The wall of flame was almost mirror-like and before her eyes emerged the image of a woman. This time, the figure was unmistakably herself: neat, dark-haired, even wearing the same jeans and a jumper that had become her day-to-day uniform in the past year. But the woman in the image was not alone. Two small figures, one on either side, held hands with her, and the three of them stood there in a row like cut-out dolls. The picture remained there for some moments.

She hadn’t noticed Richard come back into the room. He was standing behind her, looking into the fire.

‘My God!’ he said. ‘That’s fierce. We’d better put that out!’

‘No, don’t,’ said Amanda. ‘Look!’

‘What?’ he responded, turning back.

‘Can’t you see it?’

‘No, I can’t see anything.’

The image had faded away now and the flames had dropped.

‘What was it?’ he asked again.

‘Just something . . . but it’s gone now. Don’t worry.’

Richard reached for the half-bottle of Moët (he had felt a whole bottle inappropriate) and popped the cork.

‘We’ll never forget last year,’ he said, filling two glasses. ‘And nor should we . . .’

And as the clock chimed and the warmth of the fire wrapped itself around them, Richard looked up to see an unfamiliar look on Amanda’s sweet face.

For the first time in a year, she was smiling.

B
ACK IN OCTOBER
, Jennifer had gone to seasonal fairs to find the exact shade of ribbon that she had envisaged for displaying this year’s cards. It was the palest Tiffany aqua, to pick up the cool tones of her newly painted hallway. The entire house was now beautifully decked out for Christmas and this year her theme had been inspired by some images of Nova Scotia that she had seen in a magazine.

Jennifer, or ‘Jen’, as she signed herself, always had her cards written and posted by the first week of the month and it was a source of irritation that other people did not do the same. If cards were going to be incorporated into her bunting-inspired display then it was severely inconvenient to have them arriving after the middle of December. Everything had to be in place by the fifteenth at the very latest.

For her, the whole season was about efficiency as much as creativity. Computerisation had streamlined the card-sending operation beautifully and now, at the push of the button, she could watch a satisfying concertina of address labels emerging from her printer, certain that the list would be up-to-date. When last year’s cards had come down on 6 January, she had made a note of those which came from newly acquired friends,
and before neatly boxing them, had updated her records to ensure that they would receive a card later that year.

December was the most frantic month of the year. All the others were a holiday by comparison, except of course the last fortnight of November which was when she did the Christmas shopping. She aimed to purchase (and ideally to wrap) all her presents before the first window of the advent calendar was opened.

By 15 December her perfect vision of Christmas was beginning to take shape. A twenty-foot, symmetrical, non-dropping tree stood in the hallway adorned with clear glass icicles and perfectly positioned white (non-flashing) lights. At its foot was a neat pile of presents in foil wrapping with silver ribbon and labels. Philip, her husband, and their teenage boys had carried the tree into the house, but that was where their involvement with the aesthetics ended. George, eighteen, and Henry, sixteen, hardly noticed the wreath nailed to the front door let alone appreciated the fact that the clementines that adorned it were fresh, and replaced every three days by their mother. They certainly did not listen to her appeal to avoid slamming the front door, which badly disturbed her perfect waxy fruits.