She raised her head from her phone and looked across at Kostas, sitting at a table. His friend – Stathis, she had found out he was called – was helping keep everyone in order as well as talking to the reporters that had turned up. If she had felt embarrassed about the one-night stand before, she felt even more embarrassed now having met his latest hook-up. Beautiful. Much younger than her. But she shouldn’t be surprised. Shewasn’tsurprised. He was a very good-looking, athletic young guy. Why wouldn’t he be wanting all the fun at his disposal? And she had already chalked it up to experience until… that moment last night when he had wound her towards him with her handbag strap. It had given her shivers in all the hottest of ways.
‘So, do you think you and Dad will get back together?’
Saffron’s question made Faye cough, and she put her phone on the table and reached for her bottle of water. ‘Saffron, what on earth do you mean?’ She glugged some fluid down quickly. ‘We’re divorced.’
‘I know,’ Saffron said. ‘But, you know, people do that and then they, you know, reconsider.’
Faye looked at her daughter now. Was she really serious? And, if she was, where had this thought come from? There was only one person she could think of who liked to stir the pot. Matthew’s mother.
‘Saff, has Nan been talking about this?’
Saffron was a little too quick to shake her head. ‘No.’
‘Saff.’
‘OK, well, maybe she said something about Dad not being good on his own and not having moved on and that when you get to a certain age different things hold more importance and no one knows real loneliness until you catch yourself talking to the plants that you bought on a solo trip to the garden centre.’
Bloody garden centres! What was it with them? She took a deep breath, knowing that her daughter worried about both her parents far more than someone her age definitely should.
‘Saff, I’m not lonely,’ Faye said softly. ‘And your dad’s never really been the kind of person to not be doing something. He always did something when we were married, with his friends. If he wasn’t playing golf he was working, or if he wasn’t working he was, I don’t know, lining up awful TV shows for us to watch, and you said he’s on Bumble now.’
‘Yes, but I don’t think he wants to be. And, I think, if you gave him another chance then he might?—’
‘Saff, I gave him more chances than any person really deserved.’ Her love for Matthew, her need to make the marriage a success, her resolute values that Saffron needed to have two parents in a committed relationship together had held her together through the first affair, but the second… the second killed every feeling she had ever had, obliterated every good memory for a time.
‘I just think,’ Saffron began again, ‘that if Dimitria sells the hotel then… what will you do without it? Because work is everything to you and?—’
Faye looked at Saffron in shock. ‘Has Dimitria said something to you?’
‘About what?’ Saffron asked.
‘You just said if she sells the hotel. Why would you think she would sell the hotel?’ Had Faye herself let something slip?
‘No, I… might have… overheard you talking,’ Saffron said nervously, pulling at a tendril of her hair. ‘And, I mean, it’s not really a huge surprise. She’s quite old and that’s what people do, isn’t it? Retire or something so they have more time to do things they enjoy more than working. Unless they really enjoy working. Like you.’
Now she could feel a headache coming on. The potential sale of the hotel, the loss of her job and her home and apparently Matthew’s mother trying to orchestrate a reunion and get Saffron involved. There was only one thing she could do now to get some focus back. Take control.
‘OK everyone!’ she called to the packed conference room. ‘I will need the room back in fifteen minutes so let’s get our last photos and signatures.’
‘What’s happening here in fifteen minutes?’ Saffron asked, taking another sip of her frappe.
‘The curtain comes down on this circus,’ Faye said, pushing her chair underneath the table. ‘And, Saff, I don’t know what Nan’s been filling your head with in Wales but your dad and I getting back together is about as likely as there being noStrictlyscandal this year.’ She took a breath. ‘Sorry.’
32
Faye took a sip of her water and looked up from her paperwork, gazing over the hotel gardens towards Saffron, floating belly-up in the pool. It was the late afternoon – hot but with a welcome breeze scudding the sea – and most of her guests took this time to go back to their rooms and nap or refresh for the evening. Faye liked this time of day. It was quieter, even in the height of the season, and it was when she felt she claimed the island back for herself a tiny bit.
She watched a butterfly with black stripes dance from shrub to shrub at the edge of the gardens and contemplated again what Saffron had said about a reconciliation with Matthew. It was a ludicrous suggestion, obviously an unfounded older woman’s wishful thinking in that marriage-is-for-life-no-matter-what-the-circumstances kind of way. But Matthew’s mother’s opinion shouldn’t be held up to Saffron like a controversial relationship advertising banner. Saffron had understood the separation and subsequent divorce, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been hurt by it. Perhaps she needed to say something to Matthew. Although Matthew had always taken his mother’s side in everything.
She looked back at her studies. Dolphins. This was one of the things most visitors wouldn’t know about living on an island. The beautiful creatures they pointed at and videoed, if they were lucky enough to see them from a boat, needed to be protected and cared for. She was going to be a volunteer, but right now, it was a case of difficult timing. But, then again, when was there ever a right time?
‘You are taking an exam? You are wishing to become a doctor of hotels?’
Kostas. Faye looked up to see him standing right by her. Linen shorts, linen shirt, that scent of something expensive on his skin. The way her body reacted it could possibly be some kind of pheromone cologne. She needed to shut that down.
‘If you need something for your room I’m sure Katerina can arrange it for you.’ She dropped her eyes back to her paperwork.
‘Katerina’s parents invited me for dinner actually,’ Kostas said, pulling up the chair next to hers. ‘I signed six basketball jerseys for their family alone.’
