The Holiday (56 page)

‘A very small one. I don’t want my suit to be ruined by a flood of tears. It might shrink and that would never do.’ He hugged her tightly. ‘Okay, that’s enough emotion,’ he said, releasing her from his arms. ‘Too much and I will let the side down with you. Take good care of yourself, Izzy, and keep in touch. I want to know how you get on with your dreadful headmistress, what cunning revenge you have in store for her. Max and Laura are bullying me to visit them in England, so we will meet again quite soon, I’m sure. And, of course, next year you will come to Corfu again. No, don’t look so doubtful, Izzy, you will come again, I know you will. This place suits you. The island has its regular visitors who just can’t keep away. Mark my words, you will be one of them.’

She smiled extra hard at his words.

‘There, you see how brave you have become? What inner strength you have found here on holiday?’ He kissed her cheeks and then, ‘And lastly, this.’ He pressed his lips firmly to hers. ‘Be lucky, Izzy. Be happy.’

 

With her head leaning against the small window of the aeroplane, she watched the landscape beneath her. When the island had disappeared completely she felt a sharp tug on the thread that was holding her heart together. No more tears, she told herself sternly. Just accept that once again Chance has played its little game with you. Now you have happiness, now you don’t.

She slept through most of the flight, dreaming of the coming autumn term at school and discovering on her first day back that she had a child protege in the new intake: a small blond-haired boy who could knock Picasso into a Cubist cocked hat.

 

Home had never looked more dreary or unwelcoming. It had all the cheer of the Arctic tundra.

She had chosen this ground-floor flat after her split with Alan because she had thought it had such a warm, cosy feel to it, but now as she pushed open the front door and lugged her bag into the hall, then gathered up the mountain of mail from the mat, she thought it cursed with gloom. Nothing could have matched more appropriately the sense of desolation she had come home with. She was reminded of the abandoned house she and Mark had looked at in Old Perithia.

It’s the rain, she told herself, as she stood in the middle of the sitting room staring out through the window on to the communal lawn she shared with the rest of the residents of the converted house.

That and the grey sky.

And the sub-zero temperature of a typically English summer’s day.

It’s not the flat, she chided her flagging spirits. The flat is fine. It’s your home. Your only home, so you’d better get used to being in it again.

There, that was telling her.

To soften the lacklustre light from outside, she switched on two small lamps and set to with her unpacking.

Thanks to Laura insisting that anything that needed washing she throw into the machine yesterday morning, everything was clean and neatly folded, so it took her no time at all to put it away.

Dealing with the backlog of mail was rather different, however. It took her over an hour to sort it into piles: action needed sometime in the future, and action required first thing in the morning. There was one letter, though, that she had deliberately left till last. She had recognised the stark white envelope the moment she had seen it and had put it aside to be dealt with when she was feeling stronger. It was from school and could mean only one thing: she was being given a mealy-mouthed redundancy package.

A perfect and fitting end to her holiday.

She didn’t know whether she was disappointed or relieved when she opened the letter in bed that night and read that she hadn’t been given the elbow after all.

Amazingly, she had been promoted.

In real terms it wouldn’t amount to much. She would be working longer hours with greater responsibility and for not much more money.

Still, it would look good on her CV when she got round to looking for a new job.

Switching off the bedside lamp, she thought, Oh, well, business as usual, then. Nothing turns out the way I think it will.

When would she ever learn?

‘I have to go,’ Mark said, ‘you know I do. It’s time.’

‘But are you sure you’re ready?’

‘Come on, Theo, you were there when the doctor gave me the all-clear.’

Theo shook his head doubtfully. ‘To travel on your own, though ... Supposing you feel unwell? What if — ’

‘We could play the What-if game for ever and a day,’ cut in Mark. ‘No, like I say, I’m ready to go home.’ He picked up a small white pebble and hurled it into the sea. Too late he realised his mistake and winced at the pain. To his disgust he had been advised to wear a sling to restrict his arm movements and protect the damaged muscles in his chest and shoulder, but he had dispensed with it at the first opportunity, claiming he no longer needed it, that he didn’t want the fuss or bother of it. Nothing would make him admit otherwise that a punctured lung, even if it had made a full recovery, hurt like hell if he coughed or breathed too deeply. And if he moved too sharply, as he just had, his body declared pay-back time.

Sitting beside him, Theo must have noticed him wince. He flashed Mark a look of impatience. ‘You see? I’m right, you are still in pain, you are not ready to go home yet. And with that dreadful haircut you look like a half-starved refugee. They’ll stop you at the airport, accuse you of being an illegal immigrant.’

With a rueful smile, Mark ran his left hand — the one that didn’t pull on his weakened muscles — through the stubble on his head. Three days ago, while still in Athens with Theo, he had acquired the mother of all haircuts. Fed up with looking in the mirror each morning and seeing the bare patch on his scalp where it had been stitched back together, he had decided to go for the buzz-cut look to even things out. He had walked into the nearest barber’s and had the lot as good as shaved off. When Theo had got back from work late that night, he had taken one look at him and dropped his jaw to the floor. ‘That, my friend, is going to take some getting used to!’

Just as Theo had said it would, the change of scene had been good for Mark. The sense of having been-there-done-that was not lost on him. It was, after all, in Athens, that he had stayed while getting his head together after he had left the rehab clinic and tried to decide what to do next with his life.

While Theo was at his office, an elegant, stately, refurbished town-house in a quiet square a short walk from his apartment, Mark had spent the mornings writing. But it hadn’t gone well. Slow and tortuous, it was like pulling teeth. Another change of environment and associated disruption to his routine hadn’t helped. In the afternoon he tried to rest, as he had been advised. When he couldn’t sleep, despite being so tired, he would tune out by flicking through the channels on Theo’s state-of-the-art television, but the sheer awfulness of Greek daytime viewing was in a class of its own and had had him riveted. Greek soaps, he had decided, were produced, directed and acted by comic geniuses, only they didn’t know it. There were more gasps of surprise, rivers of tears and shock-horror scenes in one half-hour slot than in a month’s worth of British and Aussie soaps combined. But it hadn’t induced sleep, and resorting to the old standby of Sky and CNN to help him nod off, he kept wondering why Theo bothered with such an expensive piece of kit when the home-grown programmes available to him were so bad. The answer was in the stash of videos and DVDs he found in an elegant cabinet in the corner of the marble-floored sitting room. Since his last visit to Theo in Athens, it was apparent his friend had developed a taste for his own little bit of Merry Olde England in the form of
Only Fools and Horses, Monty Python
and
Blackadder.
There was even a shelf dedicated to some of the BBC’s best costume drama over the last twenty years. It was an extraordinary hoard that made Mark smile and had him wondering if this was how his friend kept his English up to scratch.

In the evenings, when he had a resurgence of energy, he and Theo would go out for a meal. They went for walks too, strolling round Theo’s favourite areas of the city, invariably finishing up in the Pláka district and watching the world go by. They had had dinner with Theo’s parents several times and, as ever, Christiana Vlamakis had lavished an excess of concern on him.

‘Oh!’ she had cried, patting his arm when Theo told her the details of the shooting. ‘You are not a safe man to be around.’

He must have flinched when she had said this, as Theo had hurriedly gabbled something to her that was incomprehensible to his ears but which had the effect of making Christiana cluck around him for the rest of the evening.

‘It was a figure of speech my mother used,’ Theo said, during the drive back to his apartment that night. ‘I don’t want you brooding on those words of hers.’

‘She’s right, though, isn’t she?’

‘You know my view on that subject, so please do not bait me. I think you are mad to give any credence to such a tomfoolish theory.’

‘Credence to such
tomfoolery
is the expression, you want.’

‘Pah!’

It was the nearest they got to discussing Izzy. And, for that, Mark was grateful. There was nothing more to be said. She had gone back to England to get on with her life without him. That was the end of the story he had written for them.

Yet, as he sat here on the beach in Ayios Nikólaos with Theo towelling himself off after his swim, and recalling the many times he had enjoyed Izzy’s company in this same spot, he didn’t try to kid himself that he was better off without her. He knew very well that having Izzy in his life was infinitely better than not having her in it. But that was a luxury of thought he would not allow himself to dwell on. She was better off without him. Safer, too.

He knew Theo would disagree with him, which was why there was no point in discussing it with his friend, but he was convinced that he wasn’t destined to live a normal life. The happy-ever-after scenario that others enjoyed would always elude him.

 

Two days later, his return to England went as smoothly as he could have hoped for, apart from Theo making a fuss at the airport and insisting that he be helped on to the plane and met at the other end. ‘You are not to lift that heavy luggage. You must lose that appalling pride of yours and ask for help.’

‘Sure you wouldn’t prefer me to be pushed about in a wheelchair?’

Theo had slapped his forehead with his hands. ‘Now, why had I not thought of that?’

‘No, Theo,
don’t!’

‘Okay, I’ll let it go for fear of you turning nasty. Now prepare yourself, I am about to thoroughly embarrass and annoy you.’

Which he did, embracing Mark and smacking two great big kisses on either side of his face.

While listening to the lunchtime news on the radio and waiting for the kettle to boil, Mark realised that it was one of those rare moments since his return, three days ago, when the phone wasn’t ringing and he had the house to himself.

Once word had gone round the village that he was home, everybody wanted to come and see him. The shooting had found its way into a number of the British papers, including the local rag, the
Whitby Gazette.
Coming so soon after the near-drowning accident it must have been a story too good to pass up. As a consequence, there was a fascination on the part of those he knew, even vaguely, to hear the grisly details straight from the horse’s mouth.

Deirdre had been the first to call round, bringing with her a Victoria sponge cake, some gingerbread and scones, a pot of home-made lemon curd and a cheese and onion quiche. ‘Well, pet,’ she had said, settling the stack of Tupperware boxes on the worktop, removing her shoes and stepping into her slippers, ‘you’ve been having a time and a half of it, haven’t you?’

Lionel Bridges had been next to pay him a visit, followed swiftly by Dale, who brought with him his latest girlfriend: a raven-haired oddity, who also worked part-time at the Dracula Experience in Whitby. They told him they were moving in together, renting a tiny terraced house called Karma Cottage. He had had to stop himself smiling at the thought of them ever having children: they’d be straight out of the Addams Family! The rest of the writers’ group soon made an appearance, and it was as well that Deirdre had been so thoughtful and kind as everyone who called on him with offers of help — did he need a lift to the hospital, the doctor‘s, or the supermarket? — was hungry. And while they happily tucked into the cakes and scones they took it in turns to ask him the questions that were burning holes in their tongues. Lionel — always a man for detail — had been straight off the starting block, wanting to know what sort of gun had been used. Mark had had to admit that he didn’t know. ‘Sorry, Lionel,’ he had said, ‘not my instrument of death. Wouldn’t know a Bren gun from a tommy-gun.’ It was true. He had never used them in his novels; he preferred his killers to be more ingenious. For some peculiar reason he had the idea that there was something horribly prosaic about a life being ended by a mere bullet.

But now that the initial interest in him had been satiated, he was being allowed time on his own. With the exception of the nightly phone calls from Theo and the early-morning ones from his family, he had been left, at last, to catch some much-needed breath.

He made himself a mug of tea and took it up to the first floor, to his study, which stretched from the front of the house to the back. He had chosen this room to work in because it had such great views: out across the cliff edge and the boundless sea, or to the rolling hills of the north Yorkshire moors. Sitting in his sea captain’s chair — another of his self-deprecating sick jokes — he put his feet on his desk and sipped his tea thoughtfully. He had been looking forward to this moment, hoping that the familiar would ground him. He let his eyes roam the neatly organised shelves at either side of the chimney-breast where a potted history of his life could be put together from the books, records and CDs he had collected over the years.