Here Come the Girls (36 page)

‘Come inside,’ he said, his voice soft and low. ‘This is much different to the last time you were here, isn’t it? Probably the only thing in Tanos that is.’

Inside the house was a large open space – a sparkling white kitchen to the right, to the left cream sofas and thick rugs. A long table with eight chairs separated the two areas.

‘It’s lovely, Atho,’ said Olive.

‘I had it built for the family,’ he said. ‘Sit, sit.’ He reached for two glasses and a large jug on the worksurface and poured out two wines.

The family
. It was a large house so he obviously had married and had sons and daughters and one day grandchildren – if not already. It was stupid to think he had waited on ice for her to return.

‘Do you have a big family?’ Olive asked, taking a sip of the wine.

‘Just my son. One day this will be his, but I don’t think he will want it. He prefers to stay at the room in the Lemon Tree. You remember it?’ He smiled intently at her. The little room above the bar with the thickly plastered white walls and the tiny windows. And the very creaky bed.

‘So this is just for you,’ Olive tried not to blush, ‘. . . and your wife?’

Atho’s hand came out and stroked a stray strand of hair back which had fallen across Olive’s face.

‘My wife died two months after Atho was born. She was a lovely girl but she had problems with her heart. We did not know this until she died.’

‘Oh Atho, I’m so sorry.’ Olive took his hand into her own. It felt so big and manly and firm.

‘It was a long time ago,’ said Atho. ‘Now tell me about you.’

‘I’m married, no children,’ replied Olive.

‘You are happy?’

Olive’s lips manufactured themselves into a smile, but it was a very poor effort. Atho lifted her chin with his finger and he saw the unspoken sadness in her eyes.

‘We will eat and you will tell me about the past twenty years,’ he said. He stood and dashed around the kitchen gathering plates and food with celebrity-chef-like gusto. Olive smiled, properly this time. She remembered how he always moved with such energy and purpose, every gesture expansive. It was not only Greek blood that flowed through his veins, but Italian. His grandfather was one of the unfortunate soldiers of the Acqui Division slaughtered by the Nazis. His Greek grandmother, Ariadne, was pregnant with her daughter Maria-Grazia when he was killed in 1943. Ariadne gave her daughter the name of her lover’s mother in honour of him.

Atho threw a loaf of bread at Olive to catch and slice. He tore salad leaves into a bowl, splashed them with oil and garlic which he crushed under the heel of his hand then added to it sun-dried tomatoes from a pot. He crumbled goat’s cheese, sliced meat deftly with an ancient but deathly sharp knife. He squeezed fresh lemon over a bowl of shiny plump olives and delivered it to the table with a flourish.

Over that rustic, delicious lunch, they talked. Olive told him about her friends and the cruise and what she did for a living. And Atho told her how over the years he had bought up lots of property and was a man of means, and that his mother and father had retired to Fiskardo in the north of the island to be near to their daughter, but only when Atho Junior had grown up. He told her that he had not married again after his wife had died. He had not been an angel – there had been women, but no one with whom he wanted to share his bed for more than a night or two.

‘I thought that maybe God was telling me I was meant to be alone,’ he said, taking a sweet baklava and sweeping up some honey with it.

‘You sound less alone than I am,’ said Olive sadly. Atho stopped eating and poured more wine.

‘I wrote to your mayor to try and find you,’ he said. ‘I didn’t get a reply.’

‘Did you?’

‘Of course. He probably thought I was some crazy Greek after an English passport. Now tell me about your husband.’

Olive sighed. Where to begin? She hadn’t a clue, so Atho prompted her.

‘Does he look after you? Has he built you a nice house?’

‘We live with his mum.’

‘Does he work hard for you?’

‘Er . . . he has a sore back.’

‘Do you love him?’

Olive opened her mouth to answer and found that she couldn’t. To say ‘no’ would have been disloyal, unfair. But equally, neither could she say ‘yes’ to someone she had loved as she had loved Atho Petrakis. How could she compare the ‘love’ of her husband and his big hot-air promises to the love of a man with whom she had eaten picnics on the beach, made love in olive groves, kissed in the sea and sailed on the blue, blue waters of a magical lake? She had flowered in that one Cephalonian summer, quickened by the kisses of a man who knew that love was all about giving. Olive too knew all about ‘giving’; she had been hard-wired into caring for others from an early age, with her own wants and needs taking a rude second place. She didn’t know how to accept someone doing things for her without it feeling uncomfortable, without feeling that she wasn’t worthy of their efforts. With two people giving each other all they had, life could have been so good.

Atho’s voice was heartbreakingly tender as he asked her, ‘Olive, why did you leave me? I thought we were happy.’

‘I was. That was the problem – I was too happy.’

‘How can you be “too happy”?’ His fists were clenched on the table.

Olive shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I’ve asked myself this so many times, you know,’ she said. ‘Coming here was only ever meant to be one summer – for me. One summer when I knew my parents were well and I could get away. I never expected to fall in love with life so much here. I never expected to fall in love with you.’

‘So you did love me?’

‘Oh GOD, you’re joking!’ Olive laughed, but there was a spray of tears in that laughter too. ‘I thought . . . I thought that girls like me didn’t leave their families and move to Greece.
Shirley Valentine
was a story, a dream, it wasn’t what happened in reality.’

It sounded so weak and pathetic, but that’s exactly how it had been. Olive’s mum had been in her mid-forties when she had given birth to her, her father nearly sixty, and with her dad in poor health, her mother had relied on her far too much. And they hadn’t exactly been the type to encourage their daughter to spread her wings.

‘And so who looks after you now, Olive?’

It was such a simple question, but wounding in its aim. People like Olive did the caring, they weren’t cared for.

Atho reached across the table, took Olive’s hand gently and tugged her to her feet. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’

He led her out of the back door of the villa and swept his hand across the sight there. Olive gasped as her eyes focused on pots and pots of white roses.

‘They don’t grow well in the ground, but here in the pots, they bloom. Year after year they get bigger and stronger with more scent. Yorkshire roses. I planted them to remind me always of you.’

‘No, you didn’t,’ scoffed Olive. But Atho had never been a man with a line in false seduction. He didn’t need to. He only had to look at Olive and her knickers fell off. ‘Did you?’

‘Althea, my wife, she was a sweet girl,’ said Atho, as he wove his fingers into Olive’s. ‘We would have been content to live together if she had survived. But my heart never beat as strong for anyone as it did for you.’

Olive wanted to laugh a little. As if she could inspire
that
sort of passion! But she looked up at this big strong man and saw the truth in his eyes.

Atho stroked her hair. His fingers came to it and left it as if he wanted to touch her, but felt it was wrong. But after twenty years and a crap marriage, Olive wasn’t so sure she could hold herself back from all she had missed.

‘I want to kiss you, Olive,’ he said, his lips dangerously close to hers. She could taste the honey on his lips from the baklava he had just eaten.

‘Atho . . .’ His lips landed hard on hers and she didn’t want to push him away. So she didn’t. She savoured the fierceness of his kiss like a woman who was trying to cram twenty years’ worth of all she had missed into a few seconds.

‘I don’t think you have been kissed for a long time, Olive,’ he said in hushed tones, his chest panting with desire.

‘I haven’t been kissed like that since you last kissed me,’ said Olive, and meant it. She had been so stupid. She had presumed her passion for Atho was a freak flame, a huge explosion then it would die out and leave her cold and alone in a strange country. So she had chosen instead a small flame that was too weak to warm her. And all the while the huge flame had kept burning and living – and hoping.

‘What time do you need to go back to the ship?’ asked Atho, his lips now on Olive’s neck.

‘I’ve got to be back on board for h...haaalf past four. At the latest.’

‘I will make sure you are safe on your ship,’ he said, pushing Olive against the tree of her namesake. ‘I want to make love to you.’

Olive gasped.

‘But I won’t.’

Olive gasped even harder.

‘You will come back to me this time, Olive. I will make sure of that.’ His lips brushed against her collarbone, the black stubble quickening every erogenous zone within a five-mile radius. ‘My God, you will be begging to come back to me.’

Atho Petrakis kept his promise and did not make love to Olive. His hard groin pressed into her as he kissed her against the olive tree and made it perfectly plain that he could have taken her at any moment – and been ready. His fingers undid one single button on her shirt, then his tongue dipped into the space it uncovered and no further. He kissed her till her lips were swollen, her neck raw, her legs barely strong enough to support her. Her nerves were screaming for him to finish what he had started when his thumb made a single fleeting brush across her nipple – then he rang his son, told him to send a taxi for his friend and he buttoned Olive’s shirt up again as they waited for it to arrive. Annoyingly, it took only a few minutes before they heard a car horn toot its arrival.

He picked off the fattest white rose and kissed it before he handed it to Olive. He smoothed down her hair because it was wilder than a haystack in a tumble-dryer and kissed her – fleetingly this time – on her throbbing lips. He smiled knowingly into her eyes which were as green as the olives he grew, shining with the light that only a woman who was desired and loved gave out.

‘Now you will return,’ he said. ‘We have twenty years to make up for. I can wait a few more weeks. Olive, you are a woman who needs to be loved and I know you still love me. Come back to me this time and stay and flower in my care like my white roses.’

As she waved goodbye to him, Olive was shivering from the strength of her reignited feelings. How could they still be there after all this time, dormant, waiting? She had not expected that at all. Atho Petrakis had known exactly what he was doing by not making love to her and merely flicking drops of water at her newly awakened thirst. Olive’s brain was scrambled by the time the taxi reached the port.

Chapter 55

Ven, Roz and Frankie were thrown into panic when the Tannoy call sounded.

‘Would a Mrs Olive Hardcastle of cabin C160 please contact Reception.’

‘That means she hasn’t come back on board!’ said Roz, bursting into Frankie’s cabin, with Ven at her heels.

‘Oh hell!’

‘I knew we shouldn’t have left her,’ said Roz, who had been saying every hour something to the effect of ‘I’m not sure we should have let her go. It’s been twenty years since she’s seen Captain Corelli. He’s probably a fat old sweaty bloke constantly pissed on ouzo now with twelve kids and a kebab van.’

Frankie dived for her handbag. ‘Has anyone rung her mobile?’

‘Tried it and it’s switched off,’ said Ven.

‘Oh buggeration. What do we do?’

Their panic was further compounded by Roz’s observation that the ship was pushing away from the portside. ‘We’re setting off!’ she shrieked.

‘I’m off to Reception!’ yelled Ven, bombing out of the door and behind her, in quick pursuit, were the others. They took the stairs like Charlie’s Angels chasing a felon. There was a queue waiting for assistance.

‘This is no time to be British,’ said Ven, preparing to muscle in on a pensioner questioning her interim room statement. She had just got to the ‘excuse me’ part when Roz pulled her back. Because there, above them on the gallery of the next floor, they could see Olive looking at a carousel of books outside the Emporium. She was standing next to the huge wall sculpture which stretched up through three floors of the beautiful mermaid ‘Mermaidia’ and – but for the size – looking like her twin. Both women had long, flowing pale hair and a dreamy, beatific look on their faces. As if they’d just had one hell of a shag, thought Frankie to herself.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Ven asked, when they caught up with her. ‘We’ve been worried sick. We thought you hadn’t got back.’ She patted her heart, trying to persuade it to slow to a nice steady rhythm.

‘Chillax,’ said Olive, beaming. ‘What’s the matter with you all?’

‘They’ve been calling you on the Tannoy!’

‘Oh, my card didn’t register correctly that I was on board. I just went to Reception to tell them I was here – end of.’

‘We thought you’d done a
Shirley Valentine
,’ said Roz.

‘As if!’ said Olive, who was the most unlikely person ever to have done one of those.

‘Did you see Charlie Cairoli and his mandolin then?’ asked Ven, allowing herself to destress a bit now that all was well.

‘Was it in tune?’ added Roz.

‘Bang and Olufsen quality,’ grinned Olive. She was about to elaborate when she remembered this was Roz she was talking to so she bit back on any extra-marital detail. ‘Yes, he was there and made me lunch and we talked. I had a lovely afternoon. What did you lot do?’

‘Well, we had some free time during the trip so we moseyed around some shops, went for some nosebag and ice cream then came back here and vegged out in the sun,’ said Ven, still not fully recovered yet from thinking that the ship was sailing off without Olive. ‘Well, Frankie and I did. Roz hit the gym.’

‘I am getting
so
fat,’ said Roz, patting her tummy and feeling a hint of a wobble. ‘Belly dancing tomorrow. That’ll burn off a few more calories.’