the queue for the ferry –and spots that the handsome local hustler dressed up in a fake uniform is back in business. She watches him size up an affluent looking older couple with copious amounts of luggage and slip into his routine. He is so charming. So persuasive. Within minutes, they will allow him to carry their bags to the head of the impatient queue…’the captain would wish it’. Only then, would he demand a hefty tip.
She listens to the subsequent row, which she can rehearse, almost word for word. Should she have intervened? Perhaps she should have done. Yet, the most useful experience is the most hard-won and Piraeus is a tough, chaotic place.
The queue moves forward. Embarked, Polly will head forward, which allows her to manoeuvre between sun and shade, her book for the trip easily accessible in a rucksack pocket. This year it is Anna Karenina, and she anticipates biting down on Tolstoy’s combination of story and philosophy. The idea of reading only one book on her travels is to ensure that its text becomes second nature. In this way, she has tackled seven classics, each one soldered imaginatively to the place she read them. Great Expectations is Rhodes. A Portrait of a Lady is Crete.
At the front of the ferry, she would watch the sea, with a touch of heat haze layering above it. At Skopolos the ferry would lumber into its berth with the usual noise of arrival in any port. Then, she would search for a bed and breakfast. Check for insects. Check the water ran properly. Check for an extra blanket. She would be loose in time and space, her past discarded as easily as tossing old bread crust into the water.
Dan.
Seven years ago, he died. Her new husband. Each year, on the anniversary, she travels alone, for three weeks or so, and always around the Greek islands. It is something which is now second nature. Cyclades, Dodecanese…there were as many as there were years in which to face life without Dan.
The sun was growing hotter. The queue is undulating. She swings her rucksack up onto her back. Her foot is on the gangplank…
Dan.
Dan?
She feels his hand grasp her hair. The smell of him which she loved.
She needed him. He needed her.
His warm skin.
He is living in her, and she suspects he always will.
Polly, he says. Don’t do this.
Why tell me now? she cries silently. I am about to go in pursuit of the memories.
Because Polly…
Suddenly, she swivels on her heel and, pushing her way through the hot, cross tourists, retraces her steps. In the Metro she is forced to balance her rucksack on her knees. Dense with odours of discarded food and bodies crushed too tight together, it is impossible to read.
It is late afternoon when she reaches Nico and Helena’s house. The front door is open and in Polly walks.
The kitchen is very warm, steamy and filled with good cooking smells. Nico is chopping onions and Helena is stirring a pot on the stove. The table is piled with vegetables and cheeses wrapped in waxy paper. Since yesterday, someone had strung dried peppers over the door leading to the garden and they make a necklace of blood red drops.
‘Hallo.’
Helena drops the spoon into the pot. ‘Polly…’
‘Do you mind? I have come back…like you said.’
Helena gestures to the garden where the table has been laid. ‘We allocated you a place.’
‘How did you know?’
‘We didn’t. But each year Nico and I hope.’
Polly licked her fingertip and caught up a grain of sea salt on a chopping board and put it in her mouth. The insides of her cheeks pucker.
Nico continues with his chopping. ‘You can only go on so long, Polly. The time comes…’
‘You are good to me,’ she says with a rush of emotion.
Helena wipes her hands on her apron and grabs Polly’s hand. ‘Do you remember…afterwards that you came to stay with us and we looked after you? That makes you family.’
The onions were making Polly cry. She holds on to Helena’s hand. ‘I suddenly thought I didn’t want to be alone today. And Nico…’
Nico stopped the chopping.
‘Nico, you knew Dan. For just a few seconds, but they were important ones. You shared the moment of his death.’
Nico frowns and Helena shakes her head at him. ‘Go on Polly.’
‘I can’t go on thinking about it. I can’t go over, and over the details any more.’
‘At last,’ says Nico.
‘It’s as if I am travelling over the same ground, over and over again, and never getting anywhere.’ She pauses. ‘I never arrive, however carefully I prepare.’
Helena extracts a clean knife from the rack and hands it to Polly. ‘The tomatoes need chopping. Can you do that?’
Polly smiles. ‘In slices?’
‘If you like. They’re for the sauce.’
‘But I must do it right.’
‘You do it the way which suits you,’ said Helena.
Polly sets to, the red flesh falling away from the knife blade and the seeds spurting onto the board in a crimson gel. Just like blood. She hesitates.
‘Go on Polly,’ urges Helena. ‘It’s getting late.’
Polly smiles at them both to show that she is perfectly in control. Her movements gather speed and dexterity.
Helena adds a handful of thyme to the saucepan. ‘A bed is made up,’ she says. ‘No need to go back to the hotel.’
She glances at her watch. At this moment, the ferry would be berthing at Skopolos and a brief, but intense, regret flits through her mind. Then it is gone.
She glances up at the laid table where her place is waiting to be occupied. The image of Dan, held so long and violently in her mind, dims and softens into the bearable.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
Elizabeth Chadwick
Born in Bury, Lancashire, ELIZABETH CHADWICK began telling herself stories as soon as she could talk. She is the author of more than twenty historical novels, which have been translated into sixteen languages. Five times shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association Major Award, her novel To Defy A King won the historical prize in 2011. The Greatest Knight, about forgotten hero William Marshal, became a New York Times bestselling title, and its sequel The Scarlet Lion was nominated by Richard Lee, founder of the Historical Novel Society, as one of the best historical novels of the decade. The Summer Queen, the first novel in her new trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine was published in June 2013.
When not at her desk in her country cottage, she can be found researching, taking long walks with her husband and their three terriers, reading, baking, and drinking tea in copious quantities.
She can be contacted at her website www.elizabethchadwick.com At Twitter @chadwickauthor On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.chadwick.90