Page 34 of Old Girls Go Greek
‘Oh, me too!’ I felt unreasonably pleased when he said that. Almost as though we were kindred spirits.
‘—and I’m afraid I like to mow the lawn into precise stripes.’
‘I can’t do that; I tend to be more fluid in my mowing. I tried to mow my name into it once. The M for Meg was okay, but I had trouble with the E and the G. I did the little line on the G with a pair of kitchen scissors in the end.’
He’d laughed, throwing back his head at this. ‘You’re crazy.’
Funny; Malcolm had said much the same thing the day we separated and I had cut his new tie – which he had admitted quite proudly had been a present from his new lady friend – in half with the same scissors. But somehow this time it sounded different. As though being crazy might be a good thing. That someone like me, who laughed at silly things, who worried about the world, who cared about relative strangers and who suddenly wanted to live an interesting life again, was actually not a bad person after all.
‘I think I am sometimes,’ I’d said, ‘and much good has it done me.’
‘You’ve done me good,’ he’d said. ‘I haven’t laughed so much for a very long time as I have this evening.’
And he bent and gently kissed my cheek, and I honestly thought I might explode with the shock. And considering how muchpaelleraI had eaten, that would not have been a pretty sight.
10
Still in a bit of a daze and with a rather foolish grin on my face, I got back to my room and opened the doors onto my balcony. Looking across at Anita’s, I was not surprised to see Beryl, and Effie sitting there with her in the dusk, a bottle of wine between them and the table lit with a candle lantern. When they saw me, Effie immediately stood up and shouted across.
‘You’re back! Did you have a nice time? What did you have to eat? Come and tell us all about it!’
From the racket she was making I would not have been surprised if other people in the street joined us, but bowing to the inevitable, I kicked off my lovely new shoes – one of which was now definitely a different colour from the other one – and put on my slippers. By the time I opened my door, Anita was already standing in the hallway, and she beckoned me into her room with some impatient hand waving.
‘So? Tell us all about it,’ she said, pressing a mug of wine into my hand and encouraging me to sit down at the table. There wasn’t much room because it was only meant for two people, and Anita had found two other chairs from somewhere, so it was a bit cramped and the four of us banged knees for a bit until we were all settled.
I told them all about my evening, my meal and eventually about my accident with the gravel, the zebra-print kitten heels and the utter shame of being hauled to my feet by fellow diners.
Predictably – having ascertained I wasn’t injured and nor had I crushed some other unsuspecting passer-by – they found this very amusing.
‘What did he say? Was he embarrassed too? If that had happened to me when I was with Hector, he would probably have walked off, left me to pay the bill and not spoken to me for days afterwards,’ Effie said with a kindly glance.
‘I can absolutely sympathise,’ Beryl said, shaking her head, ‘but the great thing is that by the time you get to our age, just about everybody has done things that are equally as daft or even more embarrassing. I did worse than that in Portofino back in the late seventies. I was staying with the son of a gorgeous Italian Contessa at her villa on the lake, and I was flirting up a storm with him. I went to sit on the little wall at the end of his garden with the hope that I could lean back and look sultry and sexy and also get some information out of him?—’
Anita leaned forward, her eyes wide. ‘Goodness me, what sort of information?’
‘Oh, the usual things. Interdepartmental government plotting, bribes, nothing really earthshattering. Anyway, I leaned back a bit too far and down I went. Into the water. Yves St Laurent dress, cocktail glass and everything. And even though it was June, it was frightfully cold. And the thing I was most upset about was Ernesto had just poured me an absolutely divine pear martini. Such a pity. But to be fair, his staff were so efficient about the whole thing. They fished me out quick as you like. Italians are so good about that, and spit spot, I was out and dried off and had a new drink in my hand in no time.’
‘Oh my word, you had a St Laurent dress?’ Effie breathed, impressed.
‘I did,’ Beryl said dreamily. ‘Don’t you remember it? Ernesto had bought it for my birthday. It was so beautiful. It was black with an emerald-green sash and huge purple sleeves. It sounds a bit odd describing it now, but I thought I was the cat’s miaou. It was ruined, of course, which is a shame because it would be worth a fortune now. I was very fond of Ernesto; we spent a weekend in Venice and he was the only man who ever got me out of my clothes with just words.’
‘Wow,’ Anita said. ‘Was he very romantic?’
‘Not really. He just told me he’d seen a spider go down the back of my dress. Anyway, less about me and more about the handsome Will. So, what happened next?’
I tried to remember, drawing a little comfort from Beryl’s story, which I had to agree was far worse than mine.
‘I just emptied all the gravel out of my shoes and limped off to the loo. And when I got back, he didn’t mention it again.’
Effie sighed with pleasure. ‘How marvellous. Sometimes that’s all we need, isn’t it? For someone to do nothing. Tonotmention it. To ignore the daft things we might do or say.’
Anita topped up our wine glasses, emptying the bottle. It did cross my mind that we all seemed to be drinking an awful lot. Normally weeks could pass without me having any alcohol. And maybe this had been the reason I’d fallen over in the first place? I made a mental note of this and decided I would cut back from now on, otherwise I might well be going home with a tan and cirrhosis as well.
‘And?’ she said. ‘And?What then?’
‘We had coffee and Metaxa, which I have to say I am getting quite a taste for, and then he paid the bill and we walked home.’
There was a moment of silence when all three of them looked at me with meaningful glances, and I could feel myself blushing.
