Sofia tutted.
‘It’s ridiculous to blame Tony’s death on a few fry-ups. It would have been a hugely complicated picture that led to his heart giving out.’
‘Deep down, I know that, and Dan does too. But he’s hurting. He was so close to his dad. He needs someone to blame. I didn’t even tell him about coming here to Greece. His sister knows of course. So, he can phone her if he’s bothered.’
‘Of course, he’s bothered about where you are in the world.’
Maddie shrugged her shoulders.
‘Don’t know, don’t care.’
Sofia held her friend’s hand again.
‘You know that’s not true.’
A change of subject was sorely needed. Sofia pointed at a three-masted sailing ship anchored out at sea. People were diving and jumping off the sides into the azure water.
‘That’s so gorgeous. We ought to think about going out on one. It looks like fun. Let’s move to the sunloungers and just have a lazy afternoon by the pool. We’ve got to wait for madam to wake up anyway.’
Maddie let herself be led away. She reached back for the plate at the last moment.
‘Let’s order more coffee. There’s no point wasting these last few bits.’
Maddie flopped down on the nearest sunlounger. She’d let part of the truth out, and it felt good. It was only a drop in the ocean of her shame and sadness, but it was enough for now.
Chapter Five
Charlotte crept out of her room before dawn the next morning and shut the door carefully behind her. She’d already been awake for a couple of hours, but she couldn’t stay still a moment longer. She’d had way too much sleep the previous day after decorating the bedroom floor, leaving her friends on their own until well into the afternoon. The burst of heat that came over her when she remembered Sofia’s shocked face after she’d vomited and Maddie’s soft hands pushing her naked into the shower, halted her in her tracks for a moment, until it passed.
The garden on the level below the hotel’s swimming pool was somewhere she could go and sit and not disturb anyone. She had a torch on her phone, and a bottle of water, and she would wait for the sun to rise. The air was already warm, and as she brushed by the pink and white oleander bushes, they released a delicate scent which told her their flowers were getting ready to open themselves up once the sun touched their petals.
The stone seat she chose was decorated with the same grey and white pebbles in star shapes as the pathways, but the padded cushion on top was a tiny touch of comfort.
Not that she deserved it. She was as shocked as Sofia that she’d let herself get in such a state. Her dreams afterwards had been full of tables groaning with food and wine, with red-faced women drinking straight from bottles and lying in stupors on the ground. A bit like Hogarth’s scenes of London’s gin drinkers, women careless with their babies, but instead of being in black and white, these were full colour. She often found herself dreaming in well-known paintings, which would sound incredibly pretentious if she said it out loud. Maddie would be on her in a flash.
She probably worried a bit too much about what other people thought, full stop. For the past thirty years, her life had run along the same tram lines– Charlotte the artist, wife and mother– lines that she was terrified to move out of, lest she get hit by a passing car.
A month ago, a great big car had strayed inside the lines of her tidy life and knocked her off her feet, but she wasn’t ready to inspect her internal injuries quite yet, let alone announce them to the world. She smiled at her own fanciful images.
Maybe she should buy some paper and pencils and try and draw her pain. She deliberately hadn’t brought any art materials in her case like she usually would, as she couldn’t face trying and failing yet again.
As a well-known artist, she’d once been asked to judge a local competition for migraine sufferers painting how it felt while they were in the grip of one. Never having had a migraine, she’d been astonished by the ferocity of pictures of heads split in two and one of a dagger going into an oversized eye. There were lots of stars and kaleidoscopes as well as half views to represent one eye not working.
It had given her an understanding of what it must feel like, more than any words ever could. The winner had been a portrait of a woman lying in bed in total darkness, with just a sliver of light penetrating through a gap in the curtains and illuminating her face twisted in agony.
Her sudden inability to paint after all these years was hard for other people to understand. She’d been about to try and explain it to her friends the other evening, but she wasn’t sure what she’d have said without revealing everything, which she was nowhere near ready to do.
Most people assumed that she could just set up her easel, like she was in an office, and paint away on a nine-to-five basis. Maybe it worked like that for some artists, but not for her. She needed to feel inspired before she could start a new painting. She didn’t work to commission, to someone else’s wishes; it had to come from within. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, inside her right now.
The images of that fateful night, of planning to surprise Doug at work, flooded her mind yet again. She’d been the one who got the surprise all right. Charlotte closed her eyes to chase the pictures away.
When she opened them again, the sun was just peeping over the edge of the sea, turning the sky around it a pale orange, which deepened into tangerine as the minutes ticked by. The glow it cast on the water was truly magical, and with her painter’s eye, she started counting all the variations of blue and orange she could see.
A sound behind her caught her attention and she turned to see a door opening at the bottom of the hotel, one of the rooms with only a view of the courtyard, which she assumed were staff accommodation as she’d seen buckets and mops piled up outside. From her vantage point, she had a clear view of the man who emerged into the early morning light. She bit back a gaspwhen she realised it was none other than the hot priest from the monastery. And standing in the doorway waving and blowing a kiss was Dimitris, who she’d been told by Sofia was the hotel owner’s son, as well as being the pool boy.
At the last moment, the priest turned back and planted a kiss on Dimitris’s lips before he walked away, up the steps at the side of the hotel, and out of sight. It was a curiously intimate moment to witness. Charlotte hunkered down further into the bench and just prayed that neither of them had seen her.
When she sat up straight again, Dimitris was standing at her side. She covered her mouth with her hand to stop the scream. He put his finger to his lips and indicated at the bench.
