Send Me A Lover (16 page)

‘So you go around wishing you’d checked the Internet before. Because you think you should have somehow saved him. This is why you said there was a conscience in your pain. Because you blame yourself.’

We look at one another for a moment or two and I can’t answer. ‘You know, when I’m tinkering around with my computer if I do something wrong, I can just press the refresh button and go back to a time before the damage. That’s what I’d like for life. A refresh button. I just want to backtrack and press reset’

‘It would be a good tool to have,’ he says.

There’s a fair pause, and then he says, ‘It’s not easier if they die of cancer. My father did. And there were things I could have said to him when I knew the time was short, but if you are not used to speaking those kind of words, they are no easier to say in the final hours. We have an ideal of how things should be, and then there is the reality of how they really are.’

I look at the scratch on his hand. ‘How did you get that?’

He glances at the wound, smiles. ‘I have a friend who is involved in sea turtle rescue. I went to help her …’ He looks dismissively at the hand again. ‘There was a broken beer bottle in the sand. Tourists, you know…’ he shakes his head. ‘I had to have a surgery.’ He seems faintly embarrassed, shrugs. ‘But now it is nearly healed.’

I wonder if she’s his girlfriend.
He’s obviously not a monk. ‘Do you regret not saying things to your father when you had the chance?’ I try to peel my attention away from that hand. This seems like a safer topic than girlfriends.

He seems comfortable with the easy way our conversation jumps around. ‘I don’t regret what I never said. I regret more what I never did.’ He breaks off a piece of bread and drags it around his plate, cleaning up the tomato sauce. ‘I was always too… my mind was always on how different we were for me to try to accept that we may be similar.’

‘It’s funny because the only thing my dad and I had in common was that we both liked to sleep with our feet sticking out the bottom of the duvet.’

He smiles. ‘So did you regret not having closeness with your father?’

‘I regret not getting to know him better… things about his life, when he was growing up… It seems I know so much about my mother’s, and very little of his. And of course now he’s gone, I can’t ask him, can I? All his stories die with him. All his history.’

‘You love your mother very much. But you love her with complications.’

‘Actually, yes, you’re right on the mark.’ I wonder how he picked up on that. I turn my face to the breeze coming in the window, welcoming the air.

‘May I ask how old your mother is?’ he says.

I laugh, wondering why this topic is now coming up.

‘Why you laugh?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I felt that coming… She’s sixty. She’d kill me for telling you though.’ I can hardly say she’s fifty, or that she used to be fifty-nine!

His eyebrows shoot up. ‘Sixty? I was thinking fifty!’

‘You and a lot of other people.’ I feel bad for betraying her, even if it is harmless.

‘She is stunning,’ he says.

‘She is. She just had her sixtieth a few weeks ago actually. It’s not a good topic. In England you become a pensioner at that age. It means you’re officially old.’

‘But she is not old.’

‘No. She’s younger than me in many ways.’

‘She has passion.’

This description of my mother moves blithely around us as we eat, easily, without speaking for a while. ‘What about you? Were you ever married, Georgios?’

‘No. But I’ve come close many times.’

‘How many times?’

‘Well, three. But I am forty-five, and I first was interested in women from eleven. So that is not so terrible a record.’

I pull the last bit of oil-soaked aubergine off the plate before Stavros removes it. ‘What happened? You didn’t love them enough to commit?’

‘Or maybe they didn’t love me.’ He says something to Stavros in Greek, I assume a compliment about the food. ‘Let me tell you of a true story,’ he relaxes back into the chair. ‘A true Greek tragedy. A man was to marry a girl. On their wedding day, a cousin who had been living in America, he comes here for a visit. The groom has not seen his cousin in a very long time. And so… the cousin arrives, and he and Helena….’ He clicks his fingers.

‘I think Helena is the bride to be?’

He nods. ‘Well, here they are… strangers … they don’t even live in same country. Yet they know that somehow they have drawn to each other and they cannot be pulled apart.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, Helena left her fiancé for his cousin, just hours before her wedding, and for a life in a foreign country. And she did it because in her heart and mind she would rather take a risk than make a bad choice.’

‘That’s quite a story.’ I’m suddenly aware that I feel tanned, and thin, and blonde, and very close to this man, and not entirely sober. ‘Was the groom very pissed off?’

‘Not pissed off.’ He looks at me cryptically across the table. The room feels like it’s suddenly gone dark, except for the light of the candles on tables. ‘The groom was I.’

‘You!’ I pretend to be surprised.

‘It was odd to explain… I loved Helena. But it was the love I could have felt for any good person I knew well. Ours was not, how would you say, an epic love story. I was twenty-eight. I wanted to be the man who fights the shark and kills him, the Gladiator who takes down the lion. I wanted that sort of force, as it could apply to love. So she did me a favour.’ He smiles, almost sadly. ‘And I haven’t found it, even though I have looked everywhere. I am beginning to think that perhaps it is not existing. It is one of those ideal things I was talking about earlier. It is not reality.’ He looks for a moment at his hand, at the scratch. ‘I was right not to marry Helena. It was the workings of the gods, who some believe never truly gave up their power, and sometimes they come down to earth to play in the lives of mortals. It is that some believe that Zeus has the power to undo the direction of our fate.’

I think back to that idea again of the dead intervening in the lives of the living. Jonathan’s promise to me, lovely and true that is was. ‘I’m not sure I believe that. I may really want to, but I’m not sure I can.’

‘Well there is perhaps nowhere else in the world where you can. But let me tell you, when in Greece, you can believe anything you like.’

I think I’m going to cherish that idea for now.

Stavros brings us desserts—homemade halva, as Georgios tells me—Greek semolina pudding. I dig in, aware that I am happy. ‘Do you think people have to have an epic love though?’

I remember how Jonathan and I felt when we first met. In the few months we’d known one another, we had developed a strange attachment. He went nowhere without me, and if he did, he said he could concentrate on nothing except his desire to be with me again. He said he’d always wondered how he’d know when he was in love, but once he felt it, it was like spotting a hole in your socks: it’s there and you see it clearly for what it is. He said it was embarrassing how often people told him he looked like he was off in space, or asked him what was he thinking about. And half the time he was just thinking about how happy he was.

And it was the same with me. I wanted Jonathan with an almost unhealthy necessity. I wanted him physically, without a breather; I wanted him softly, caringly, like a baby bird cupped in my hand. The very idea of me wanting to be a free agent forever—another badge I’d worn with pride—went sailing right out of the window the minute I fell in love with Jonathan. The thought that he might one day be somebody else’s made me want to coax commitments from him that perhaps he might not have been ready to make. That felt pretty epic at the time. But once I got him and stopped idealising him and started to see his faults, the epic-ness wore off, and I just loved him, the way you love. The way you truly love.

‘Perhaps epic is too big a word,’ he says. ‘But I do believe that for each and every soul, there is somebody sent for us.’

My heart gives three or four little pulses in my ear, like whispered words.

‘What is that look for?’ he asks.

I search him with my eyes, reading new meaning into him. ‘I don’t know… Just something you said.’ It was a fluke. A coincidence.

Why would Jonathan send me a man in another country, where I’m never going to live? To complicate my life? Yes, Jonathan would do that, because a part of him would probably believe that the complications might be good for me.

‘A soul mate,’ he adds. ‘Plato said that the two shall be one, and after death you shall be one departed soul, not two.’

‘That’s lovely.’

He pours more wine into my glass. ‘The ancient Greeks believe that when a person is born, their existence is decided by the three goddesses of destiny. Between them, a person’s path of life is determined. Clotho is the spinner, who spins the living thread that creates when we breathe air. Lakis decides how long our life will last. And Atropos stands at the end of the thread with her shears, ready to cut the life.’

‘That’s a frightening picture.’

‘But it makes it easy, no? Perhaps if we believe that we were meant to marry the people we choose, then it becomes easier to settle our disagreements, or to forgive.’ He looks my face over, intently. ‘Have you cared for anyone else since your husband died?’

For some odd reason the man I went on my first proper date with comes into my mind. Roger. ‘It hasn’t been long enough.’ I think of the flicker of possibility that I sensed was there, until I killed it.

‘How long is long enough?’

I drag my attention back to Georgios. ‘Some happy medium between what feels right for me and what I think will feel right to other people.’

He seems to think about this for a while. ‘What do you miss most by not having him?’

‘Is this an interview?’ I tease, then answer his question. ‘His arm laying across me when I sleep. It always would. Even when he got up to go to the toilet he’d get back into bed and lay that arm across me again.’ I smile. ‘But really, what do I miss the most? I don’t know. There are so many things…’

‘I’m sure it’s the thing you feel the strongest, and the thing you find hardest to say.’

I stare at the stars again. ‘I suppose… I miss having somebody to believe in. Somebody who believes in me.’

He nods. ‘You will have that again.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

He looks right at me. ‘I am sure.’

We’ve eaten, we’ve finished all the wine, but he makes no move to leave. And even though I feel we’ve exhausted all there is to say, I am in no hurry to go.

He suddenly blows out the small candle that flickers between us, and his face becomes a silhouette, and I wonder why he did that, because now, nothing in this restaurant seems to exist, except an invisible thread that somehow connects us across the darkness.

‘Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like if you could have him back just for one day? One day that would be your last together…. What would you do? How would you spend it?’

A tear drops. ‘I have. So many times you can’t imagine. I’d give the world to have one more day with Jonathan…. just a few more fantastic, ordinary hours with him.’

‘Well I told you already… in Greece you can believe in any kind of magic. If somebody made me God, I would make it so that we all get one more day with the departed. Where they come back to us, and they are exactly as we remembered them, when they were healthy and we were happy together.’

I lean across the table, wishing he hadn’t blown out that candle, because I can’t see him clearly any more. Who is this man who says all these right things and seems to see inside my soul?

‘So what are you suggesting, Georgios? What is this thing that can happen in Greece if I let it?’

‘That’s up to you,’ he says. ‘I’m just saying take one day of this holiday and make it yours and his. Give yourself one last day with him. And then say goodbye. And then don’t go back.’

I fight the tears back. ‘Isn’t that a little bit mad in the head?’

‘Is it? Why is it? Who decides what is mad? And why would you care what those people think? Maybe it’s what you have to do to let him go.’

The candle flickers back to life again, even though I thought he’d blown it out. I suddenly see his face again. The face of Georgios, my new Greek friend.