Byron Easy (50 page)

The following day she was due to return to Spain. Mandy drove us all to Heathrow in stony silence—Montse still furious at her only-surviving daughter’s deviance, Leo fuming that her grand plan had come to nothing. Ian Haste had agreed to meet us in the departure lounge to see them off, as he had always got on tolerably with Leo. I knew this was not because Leo reminded Mr Haste of Ramona—no, she couldn’t have been more different from his wife: Leo was timid, restrained, decorous. It was rather that they were old allies against common enemies: first his truculent mother-in-law, latterly his impossible daughter.

We sat over cooling cappuccinos, Ian Haste’s endless legs absurdly unaccommodated by the low table. The subject of conversation turned to Montse’s proposed ejection to England.

‘Are you sure this is your final word on it, Mandy?’ said Mr Haste, his tired face looking more like a skull on every encounter. There were smudges of strain, almost as black as boot polish, beneath his eyes.

‘Don’t tell me you’re on her side, now?’ Mandy groaned.

‘He’s on the side of reason and fairness,’ said Leo, with a properness to her English diction.

‘You two always gang up, I remember—’

‘Corta el bacalaol.’
Montse said to herself.

‘Translate please,’ I asked Mandy.

‘It means, “Whoever cuts the fish decides”, and comments like that get us nowhere, Gran. You can’t expect me and Byron to put you up. We can’t afford it.’

‘But I will pay for everything!’ Leo said brightly

‘It’s not the money we can’t afford, Leo. It’s, it’s—the nervous breakdown. Look at her! She would drive a priest to suicide.’

‘That’s no way to speak about your elders,’ she said, but gently, persuasively. Despite her doctrinaire manner, her school-matronly hips and hands, she was a big believer in diplomacy. I could see how important her new life and freedoms were to her. There was something super-sensitive and soft about the old auntie; on the last lap now, before sixty. She was transparent, her soul visible in the quick wrinkling of her brow or tiny twitches of her hirsute upper lip. I felt sorry that she had to deal with the old Señora. She deserved better.

‘Ah, de perdidos al rio,’
burst out Montse, with a vigour that belied her four-score years.

‘
Qué?’
I said, to Mandy.

‘From lost to the river,’ my wife translated, unhelpfully.

‘Whoever wants me can have me,’ moaned Montse. At this point she called over the waiter. ‘Hey!
Guapo
.’ Do you like experienced women?
Si?
Then live with me. I am no trouble!’

‘Mother,’ said Leo angrily. ‘Keep your voice down. You’ll embarrass him.’

‘Embarrass him!’ Montse cried. ‘What about the shame you have caused me? I cannot even stand to sit next to you on the plane with thinking of the filth you have performed with an innocent girl.’

‘She’s not innocent, Mother,’ said Leo. ‘Carmen is thirty-five and has a
niño
to take care of.’

‘Ai, ai, ai, dos y dos son cinco!’

‘Just quieten down,’ persisted Leo.

‘
Me cago en la mar salada
…
me cago en la puta,
’ snarled the old woman.

‘Escoria!’
snapped back Leo.

Now I was completely lost. I said again, ‘Translate please.’

‘That’s unrepeatable, I’m afraid,’ said Mandy. She turned to the trembling old woman. ‘Now, we’ll come and visit you as much as we can. I know Leo has bought you some nice things from Harrods for your special diet. It will be spring soon and you like that, don’t you? Flowers and newness and light. And Leo, you know this is not for ever, don’t you? It’s just the wrong time. She can’t walk into our lives like this and expect us to cope.’

I looked at Mandy as she said this and felt the stirrings of my old admiration. She could be remarkably even-handed when it suited her. I know I would have caved in years ago faced with the perdition of the devious old dear and the quietly steely auntie. No, I was too easy for that double act. I thought, with a twist of anguish, about Grandma Chloe, and how sane and sweet she had been. I pictured then her liver-spotted hands and prune-like face, blowing bubbles from the bubble-blower kit in the back garden of Dovecote Lane. Her human essence rich in sympathy. The distance between her elegance and the maddened old señora stretched before me like a chasm.

As the flight was called, Mandy’s father said: ‘You say it’s not the money, Mandy, and you can’t afford the time? Is that correct?’

‘That’s right,’ she lied. I remembered the story of all the dodgy ruses Ian Haste had had to employ to make his loot, and the even dodgier ones used to hang on to it. Coming from nothing, from a stinking tenement in Bow, he knew how difficult it was to get on when you knew no one and had nothing. And even more so when you bore these handicaps in big letters on your face. His dark eyes held sad knowledge about the tides that run in the affairs of men.

‘You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. She’s offering to buy you a bloody house,’ said Mandy’s father, his voice suddenly making use of the blunt importuning vowels of the East End. He no longer relied on incremental movements of his greying brows to register annoyance.

‘We can get by without you lot, thanks all the same,’ said Mandy.

‘But Leo’s made you a very good offer. You could all live together in this place; stop pouring money down the toilet on rent. Those landlords of yours must be laughing all the way to the Caribbean.’ As he said this, his eyes met mine. Over the years he had changed from being a suspicious and protective father to an enthusiastic detractor of Mandy and her crazy ways. Not quite a confidant or ally, but more certainly on my side than that of his capricious daughter.

‘Yeah, somewhere a landlord laughs so hard he pisses his pants!’ I volunteered, quoting Lou Reed. There was a sudden silence around the low table. This wasn’t a good idea. All eyes fell on me, containing varying quotients of outrage. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s a song …’

Mandy gave me the evil eye and got to her feet. She looked at her father, Leo and Montse in turn, then stated with finality: ‘Sorry No can do. Now, let’s get you back to Spain.’

Thirty, that famous and dispiriting summit, that Mont Blanc of the psyche, was staring me in the face. In the last few months of our marriage, before that dreaded line in the sand, we took our final holiday together. A package trip to Cephalonia. For once I had managed to save some money by working a band-saw at a furniture restorer’s on the Camden Lock market (a job which played havoc with my twisted recalcitrant spine), so I was able to pay my way. Incredibly, Mandy would later travel to Italy three times before the summer was out, where she would have to rely on the kindness of strangers. But I quickly found my new dough meant nothing to her. It was ‘pocket money’ again. I had thought this might have reestablished some parity between my wife and myself, but I was sorely mistaken. It was the holiday from hell.

It started promisingly, however. There was a great feeling of life decelerating, of a tense string slackening, when we disembarked in the warm air of Argostoli’s airport. As Venus stepped onto the tarmac (Mandy was looking especially good in those last months: fragrant, sexual, magnetic) followed by her trusty bag-carrying Vulcan, the sun greeted us like a loving father. Helios, present in an unbroken sky for a week, his grand paternal gestures sweeping the glittering oceans, soon to infuse our limbs with a daily warmth. We sparked up by the luggage conveyer belt, sweat bubbling on the concave hotplate of my head. ‘This is paradise,’ said Mandy ‘Yeah,’ I concurred. ‘I feel I could even do some writing.’ But she didn’t like that last observation.

The ramshackle coach to our apartment, high in the hills near Mount Aenos, creaked past monasteries ruined in the great earthquake of the fifties. Newly painted pastel churches now filled the old sites, with ornate iron gates casting detailed shadows on the sun-basking stucco. Cicadas sang in the early evening and great insects came in at the open windows of the coach, landing with a friendly softness on your knee before flying off. Everywhere was a scent of pine cones on the sea breeze. Our luggage followed behind on a flat-bed truck, like the entourage of an English lord. There was something about the quality of the light on the island that struck me immediately—a splintering clarity. I realised I hadn’t actually seen light so powerful and pellucid before. What I had witnessed during an English summer was merely a poor artist’s impression: soggy, cloudy, reluctant to hang around for more than a day at a time. We stashed our baggage in the marble-vaulted apartment, said hello to the maître d’ and his leering teenage son, and went for dinner on the high terrace. It was sunset, a blood-soaked sheen of dying light that infiltrated everything. With the smell of the sea and the potent herbs of the kitchen it felt like a perfect hour of existence.

After coffee (which Mandy refused to drink because she claimed it tasted like sweet mud), she suggested we take a look at the night beach. This represented a reemergence of her old rebelliousness, as the beach was two miles down a steep dark road. With great trepidation, wanting Hectors courage, we descended the heady gradient in the star-hung darkness. As Mandy went ahead, we tiptoed down the wrong track for an age, past goats tethered silently in the blackness; then, retracing our steps, we began the hour-long hike towards the ever-louder sound of the sea. We encountered rabid-sounding dogs howling viciously, concealed in the bushes; also blind-eyed peasants seemingly watching us from terraces. Sleeping in ditches were cars that looked abandoned, but were merely evidence of Greek parking. At last we started to kick up sand from the approach-road, the big ebony horizon flat before us, breakers softly sighing up the pebbles. We slumped in two low deckchairs and a tense silence developed. I had registered fear of the dogs on the road down, and I knew she was deeply contemptuous towards me because of this. Sitting there, in front of the great Ionian Sea, felt like the adventure two newly-lovers undertake before returning to their hotel for a night of arduous passion, or, even better, sex on the fine sand itself. But I knew such thoughts couldn’t be further from Mandy s mind. Remembering the black night of our honeymoon in Tarragona, I said, ‘Shall we go now?’

She paused for a moment before asking, ‘Are you happy?’

This question astounded me. Never in nearly three years had she made such an enquiry. I felt quickly depressed; low as I’d ever been, the negative energy crawling back into me from nowhere. We were in the final stages, and we both knew it. However, it had to be gone through, endured.

‘Yes and no,’ I eventually replied.

But she said nothing further on the matter. I knew by this that she wasn’t happy either. Instead she said: ‘Let’s go.’

Back in the hotel room, exhausted, we retired wordlessly to bed. This was the cue for us to have our first argument, I thought. The brief harmony of the airport and the nocturnal beach were gone. A pitch night was showing through the taverna-style windows, an ancient night like the ones Odysseus must have known as he lay in wait outside the gates to his old kingdom—black, many-starred, sealed.

‘You know we haven’t had sex for a year and a half,’ I said from my single bed in the cell-like silence. My appeal sounded inert, impotent—almost as if it expected derision, rebuttal, laughter. Single beds had been Mandy’s idea. Just lately she was openly scornful of anything carnal or bodily. Once upon a time she called her sexual feelings ‘being amorous’, and I used to love the quaint innocence of the phrase. Now, in the moonlit room, my voice suddenly loud and echoey from the marble, I lay winded on my blanket brandishing my useless, unwanted hard-on. It also occurred to me then that every hotel room in every hotel in the world had been the location for an act of fellatio. Well, this one wasn’t going to see any tonight, I thought.

‘I don’t like it any more,’ she said.

‘Why is that? You used to.’

Her voice came back from the other bed, small and clear: ‘I don’t know, it just grosses me out somehow.’ She rustled her sheets as if she were turning over to go to sleep.

I waited for a while before asking, ‘Is there someone else?’ I hated feeling like this: rejected from every failed initiation and curdled with jealousy. My tongue felt suddenly too big for my mouth, bathing, as it was, in a moat of saliva.

With a firm simplicity she said, ‘No. Now put it away and go to sleep. I want to get down to the beach as early as possible.’

Ah, the beach: her great mission. The getting of a suntan. For months before going away Mandy would always take a bottle of Ambre Solaire frying oil and a towel to the sunbed shop that annexed the local hairdresser’s. Here she would swap ribald tales with the three hard-faced peroxide blondes who cut hair and pumiced nails all day. Tanning was an obsession with Mandy. If she began to get pale, she would grab the non-existent extra inches around her tummy and exhibit them to me with real disgust. ‘Look at this. I look like a pasty
English
person.’ In fact, before her visits to the fast-tanning shop and its weird sisters she had even bought a sunbed on the never-never from one of her many catalogues. This was installed, like some monolith from a Second World War operating theatre, above our futon, so she could irradiate herself every day. I tried it a few times myself, and enjoyed the peaceful, amniotic slumber it gave you. The plunge back into cold reality when it clicked off at the end of its cycle was like a death.

So Mandy had to make the beach early. We stepped out onto the bougainvillea-hung terrace and contemplated the big purple mountains across the bay. The restorative light was a marvel. Descending the same cicada-singing roads as the previous night, the sound of Orthodox bells in the hot thick air, we marked our spot for a day of epic sun-worshipping. This, I gathered, was all Mandy wanted to do for a whole week. I flattened out my Rilke on the molten sun-recliner and gave in. Whatever she wanted, went.

The evenings were similarly predictable. We would hike out into nearby Argostoli, past tiny, elaborate Byzantine churches, and sit on low walls in the amber squares eating Greek breads and drinking bottled beers. Often, Mandy wore her ankle-length denim coat, which raised a lot of heat from the Cephalonian boys on their guttural mopeds. Her charms struck their sight with unmistakable force. But then, she always did get the looks, with her stacked heels and swagger, her sweep of sable hair glossy under the pinkening evening sky. Back at the hotel, with the chicory smell of kebabs and meat pizzas from the barbecue, the maître d’s teenage son wolf-whistled her as we entered in under the ivory arch.