One Summer in Crete Read online

  Sex had never been a problem between them, indeed it was an important element in their relationship – you could say it was the glue that kept them together. However, since the night of the discussion something shifted in their lovemaking. James was almost hesitant if Calli initiated sex, wary of her motives, and Calli’s sexual appetite was likewise affected. But that night, the elation of her success, the flattering attention from her colleagues and their consumption of champagne had heightened their desire and finally in the back of the black cab on the way home they both let down their guard.

  ‘Oh baby, that’s what I love about you,’ James breathed into her ear, ‘you are such a minx!’

  ‘Wait till I get you home,’ she said, feeling like her old playful self again.

  She had been oblivious, had thought nothing of that evening until she missed her period, which always arrived like clockwork. She hadn’t been taking the pill for a couple of years – her gynaecologist advised her to take a break from the regime – so they had been using the rhythm method and condoms. The two together worked well and they never had problems or mishaps with the arrangement – not until now, that is.

  ‘Maybe you’re pregnant,’ her mother told Calli when she mentioned her concern about a possible medical problem. ‘Have you considered that?’ Eleni asked, wondering why her daughter didn’t think of the most obvious reason for a missed period.

  ‘Well, no, Mum!’ Calli replied. ‘Because we take precautions for that and it has never failed before.’

  ‘In my experience there is always a first time for everything,’ Eleni replied.

  The confirmation that she was indeed pregnant filled Calli with a jumble of emotions and concerns. Would she cope? Would she be a good enough mother? How would James react and what sort of a father would he make? But her initial and strongest response was one of absolute elation. ‘YES!’ she shouted, punching the air with her fist as she sat on the loo with the test kit and a huge smile across her face. ‘My eggs are healthy and well and haven’t gone to seed!’ she rejoiced. So much for her Greek aunt, whose words had haunted her for nearly ten years. Calli disposed of the kit, pulled herself together and walked into the living room in search of her mobile to call her mother. James, she decided, needed to hear the news in person, not over the phone. With that thought Calli took a deep breath and told herself that surely this time James would come round to her news. This was different. Planning to have a baby, trying to make a conscious decision to start a family, was harder to accept but now that it was a done deed it was out of their hands. The decision was made for them and they would cope.

  This time she didn’t prepare James’s favourite dessert or cook dinner for him. Instead she met him in town at their favourite restaurant, the one they always chose for celebrations, around the corner from his law firm in Soho. She was early – excited and a little nervous, she ordered a Virgin Mary and some bread and olives while she waited. She watched him walk down the stairs into the restaurant looking handsome in his dark work suit, his eyes searching the tables for her.

  ‘There you are!’ he said, crossing the room to her table and beckoning the waiter as he bent down to give her a kiss. ‘I’m famished and I need a stiff drink. What a day I’ve had,’ he complained in typical James fashion, loosening his tie as he dropped down beside her. ‘What’s the occasion?’ he asked, popping an olive into his mouth. ‘Have you been nominated for another award or something?’

  ‘Let’s have a drink and order first,’ she replied, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

  The return of the ice-blue glare sent shivers down Calli’s spine. Again that stubborn silence, the grim expression, the tightly set mouth. Oh no, no! her brain screamed inside her head, not again, no!

  ‘Oh, Calli, Calli . . .’ he finally said, shaking his head, his voice almost inaudible. ‘How could you do this?’ he hissed now. ‘What part of I have never wanted this, not now not ever, did you not understand from our last conversation, and from living with me all these years? Did you really think that hanging out with your friends with children was going to change my mind?’

  She tried to speak but had no voice. She kept her eyes as wide as she could to stop them from flooding as she looked silently at him.

  ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ he went on, staring coldly at her.

  His words, like a slap across her face, made her snap out of her state of speechlessness and she hit back with force.

  ‘I do not have to say anything for myself, James!’ she hissed back at him. ‘I did not do this behind your back or on my own!’ Her fury was quickly getting the better of her and her tears finally found their way down her cheeks. ‘You were fully present when it happened, or have you forgotten?’ She turned her head away from him; she couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.

  ‘It’s no good, Calli. I never signed up for this.’ His voice was harder than she had ever heard it before. ‘If you wanted a baby, you should have chosen a different man. You knew that from the start. If you want us to stay together, you choose. It’s either me or it.’ And with that, James stood up, drained his glass of wine, put a handful of money on the table and stalked out of the restaurant, leaving Calli with a pain like a sharp blade in her heart. Eventually she picked up her handbag, pulled out her mobile and called her mother.

  ‘Get in a taxi and come over immediately!’ Eleni’s worried voice instructed. ‘Or, better still, your father will come and collect you.’

  ‘No, Mama, don’t send poor Dad into town,’ she replied in a small voice. ‘I’ll be fine, I’ll make my own way,’ she added, even if at that moment all she wanted was to fall into her parents’ arms and have them take care of her. But no, she thought, she could manage; she was a grown-up.

  Sitting in the back of the black cab, tears streaking her face, she remembered the last time she and James had shared a taxi and how the passion flowed between them. She was partly to blame for this, she told herself. James had shown his true stubborn colours to her on so many occasions, yet she had always chosen to ignore them. Now she could have no doubts, he had revealed them in glorious Technicolor and with such clarity that no more excuses could be made for him. As her best friend Josie always used to say, ‘When a person shows you their true colours you’d better believe them.’ Josie often told her this, especially when someone or other had let her down, but given her nature, most often Calli turned a blind eye.

  ‘The trouble with you, my friend,’ Josie would scold her, ‘is that you choose to see what you want to see in people, and it so often leads to disappointment.’

  Now at long last it was time to open her eyes and see James for who he really was.

  ‘Selfish, that’s what he is!’ said Keith, Calli’s father, as he listened to his daughter explain what had happened earlier that evening at the restaurant. Keith was a solid, dependable, loving family man, who found it beyond him to understand why anyone would shun their responsibilities in such a way. His private opinion of James had never been high – he thought the young man rather pompous and full of himself – but he believed that if his daughter was happy, he had nothing to say on the matter, until now.

  ‘What sort of a man would behave like this?’ Eleni added, glancing at her husband.

  ‘Incredibly selfish,’ Keith repeated. ‘And with no soul,’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘What really hurts me after all these years of being together,’ Calli told them, ‘is that at no point did he ever stop to think about me . . . about what I might want.’ She looked at her parents. ‘I guess it’s my fault for always going along with whatever he wanted, always trying to please.’

  ‘None of this is your fault, my girl.’ Her mother reached for her hand. ‘Remember what I told you once? What matters is that you are now pregnant. Provided you are happy about it that is all that counts, because it means you know that you want your baby and that the time is right for you regardless of James . . .’ Eleni got up from the table and with open arms walked round to where Call
i was sitting. ‘Your father and I and your brother will be here to support you and love you and the baby, no matter what.’ She bent down and took her daughter in her arms. ‘And if James is fool enough to turn his back on you both, then he is not worthy of our love. It is his loss.’

  3

  Calli returned to their flat just once, to collect her possessions with her father’s help when she knew James was at work. She could never share a home with him again, she considered his behaviour unacceptable. It was true that they had both spent years rejecting the notion of a child but then they were both in agreement. Now there was neither a choice nor a decision to be made by her about the baby, the choice was James’s. From now on, she promised herself, she would face this alone; as far as she was concerned the relationship was finished.

  ‘I know you have always been independent, Calli mou,’ Eleni had said, ‘but while you are pregnant it will be good for you to stay here with us. Later on you can decide what to do.’

  Returning to the bosom of her family temporarily suited Calli well. She needed their support, not only because of the pregnancy – she was healthy and robust – but also to recover from the blow of James’s rejection, which had left her reeling emotionally. She had always been good friends with her mum, and her dad was a good listener. When her younger brother Alex, a martial arts instructor, first heard what James had done, he offered to go and punch him on the nose.

  ‘He’s an idiot,’ he said. ‘Someone needs to teach him a lesson!’

  ‘Thank you, Alex, but I don’t need you to teach him anything.’ Calli laughed at her little brother’s demonstration of solidarity. From as young as five or six he had declared himself his sister’s protector even though he was four years her junior. Everyone rallied around Calli, not only her family but friends too, her own and others she had shared with James as a couple.

  ‘I know he used to say kids weren’t his thing,’ Nick, a mutual friend, said, while trying to fathom how a man could turn his back on his partner at such a time, ‘but I never really believed him. I know I wasn’t so keen on the idea at first but as soon as Sarah fell pregnant, I came round to the inevitable.’

  ‘It’s true,’ added Sarah. ‘Nick was pretty shaken at first but as soon as Lucy was born he was over the moon and wanted another one straight away. I’m truly surprised at James’s behaviour.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised at all,’ Josie had told Calli when she first heard the news. ‘I always thought of him as a supremely selfish person, but then I wasn’t the one living with him.’

  ‘I guess for a long time we were both selfish together . . .’ Calli replied. She paused before continuing, ‘It’s when one person changes and the other doesn’t that the trouble begins.’

  ‘And the trouble of course began because you actually grew up,’ Josie said, ‘while James remained, and probably will always remain, in a state of arrested development.’

  ‘I don’t know, Josie . . .’ Calli hesitated. ‘I do now see that James is selfish, but not necessarily because he didn’t want children . . . There are many people who don’t want to be parents, for whatever reason.’ She stopped for a moment to gather her thoughts. ‘The fact is,’ she began again, ‘the more I think about it, the more I accept that it was as much his right not to want the baby as it was mine to want to keep it. But what I can’t accept is his behaviour towards me after all these years, his refusal to even enter into a discussion, his utter disregard of me. For that I can’t forgive him.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to forgive him,’ Josie replied, reaching for her friend’s hand. ‘Do you think he’ll want to have anything to do with the baby when it’s born? Will you allow him access?’

  ‘Yes, if he wants it,’ Calli replied. ‘It’s still his child.’

  ‘Have you asked him?’

  ‘Not yet. I can’t bear to speak to him at the moment, but I will at some point.’

  Living with her parents again felt strangely pleasurable for Calli. Her brother lived nearby and when he came to visit, which was now often, they would regularly eat their evening meal together as they had before they left home. Eleni and Keith were delighted to have their two children to themselves again after all this time.

  ‘She will be fine,’ Eleni told her husband. ‘She’s strong, our girl, a regular Cretan woman just like my mother. I always said that Calli is more like her grandmother than me.’

  ‘She’s got a lot of you in her too, my love,’ Keith said, slipping an arm around her slender waist. ‘You are one strong woman, my darling. It’s that Cretan spirit of yours that bewitched me, don’t you know?’ he said again and kissed her full on the lips, the chemistry and love still evident between them even after all their years of marriage. Every time Keith thought about James and his ‘treacherous’ behaviour, as he saw it, his anger flared. He was a passionate husband, loyal to his wife and children: they were his world, he would defend and protect them to the end. ‘How could that man abandon our girl?’ he would protest to Eleni. ‘And the baby too, what more could anyone ask from life?’

  Keith had met and fallen in love with Eleni while on holiday in Crete, having taken a year’s sabbatical to travel around Europe in the summer of 1980. He had completed his PhD at Oxford and wanted a break before starting his first full-time position as a university lecturer in London. He and two of his friends had spent a couple of months travelling all over Greece and ended up in late August on the island of Crete. They had hired a car, determined to explore the entire island, especially its archaeological sites. Moving from place to place, they finally arrived at a remote village surrounded by mountains, with an equally remote beach by a sea more crystal-clear than any of them had ever set eyes on. Enchanted, they set up camp there and stayed far longer than they intended, not only because of the physical beauty of the location but also because Keith had fallen under the spell of a pretty girl who worked in the local grocery shop. Eleni was a teacher at the village primary school and was helping out at her family’s shop for the duration of the summer holidays.

  ‘He’s really got it bad,’ the other two boys, John and Tony, joked to each other when Keith would walk back from the shop laden with groceries that they didn’t need.

  ‘Can you at least wait till we eat the last watermelon you bought yesterday before bringing another one?’ they would tease. But Keith couldn’t let a day go by without seeing Eleni. The girl too was eager each day to see the English boy with the green eyes, golden suntan and long hair, until eventually, Keith, urged by his friends, summoned up enough courage to ask her for a date.

  ‘You can’t keep up this love-sick act for too long,’ John told him, ‘it’s a real downer on everyone! For heaven’s sake ask the girl out.’

  ‘She’s guarded within an inch of her life by some fierce-looking types in the shop . . . maybe her father, uncle, brother, cousin, I don’t know,’ Keith complained.

  ‘Well . . . in that case you’d better watch out. They have quite a reputation, these Cretans!’ Tony laughed. ‘You’ve seen Zorba the Greek, haven’t you?’

  But Keith was braver than he appeared and his crush on Eleni was greater than his fear. He did approach her, and they did start talking, and when he realized that she liked him too he made a point of chatting to the uncle or cousin or whoever was in the shop while he was spending his money on groceries. And, as it turned out, they were all perfectly friendly and polite. The fact that he took the trouble to speak to them in Greek, even if his vocabulary was limited, went a good way towards their acceptance of him. Having graduated with a first in Classics from Oxford together with three years of modern Greek, the English boy’s command of the language was reasonably good. He was something of an oddity, unlike the usual hippy types they were used to seeing backpacking on the island. The first time they heard him speak they fell about laughing, making no attempt to hide their mockery and amusement, but Keith was determined.

  ‘Kalimera sas,’ he said, bidding good morning to all present in his strong and,
to their ears, comical English accent. ‘Poly zesti simera,’ very hot today, he continued, causing more hilarity as he looked around the room.

  ‘Kalimera,’ Eleni replied sweetly, ignoring her male relatives and their teasing. She was touched that the boy was making an effort. From that day he would sit and practise words and sentences from his Greek dictionary and phrase book before setting off to the shop. Eventually the men stopped mocking him, and when he suggested to Eleni that she go out with him one evening she told him that she would have to ask permission from her father.

  ‘I don’t want to cause offence. I know things are done differently here from the way we behave in England,’ he had said to her. ‘If you would like me to speak to your father, I shall be glad to do so.’

  ‘No need,’ Eleni replied, ‘it’s fine, I’ve already asked him. He’s seen you coming to the shop every day and he likes you, my brother and uncle too.’

  When Keith eventually had to return to London the romance continued at a distance for several months. He wrote to her in Greek and she started to take English lessons. The following spring at Easter he returned to Crete and asked for Eleni’s hand.

  ‘He’s a good boy, and a teacher too, you know,’ Eleni’s mother, Calliope, told the neighbours when it was obvious that her daughter had made her choice for a husband.

  ‘Good for her!’ her unmarried elder sister Froso said approvingly. ‘She is a modern girl! Remember how she used to tell us when she was little that she wanted to marry for love?’

  ‘I do, I do!’ her mother laughed. ‘When she was five years old she announced that when she grew up she would marry that boy Georgos because she was in love, remember that?’