I took a deep breath to give the ground time to swallow me but it didn’t, so I had to turn round and face him. ‘Hi, Alex.’ How I managed to get the words out I didn’t know.
The broad-backed man, clearly not realising the importance of his role, had wandered off and there, in his place stood my husband. He looked as stunned as I felt.
‘Beth. It’s really you.’ He bent forward as if to kiss me, so I offered him my cheek, but his head tilted the same way as mine and we ended up banging noses. His second attempt landed on my cheek while my lips ended up hitting his ear. So much for the cool, calm, independent new Beth I’d been determined to show him before turning on my heel – me walking away from him without a backward glance. ‘You look amazing!’
So did he, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself,’ I heard myself paraphrase. ‘Your hair’s shorter.’
‘I couldn’t handle it trailing round my neck in the humidity here,’ he replied. ‘Me trelathike – it was driving me nuts. It’s not like Greece. The heat here is wet. You should feel how sticky it can get, even at this time of the year …’ He trailed off as he seemed to realise the inappropriateness of his words.
‘Yes,’ I said with a calmness that belied the churning in my stomach. ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’
‘Alex!’ Before he could dig himself out of that, one of the men he’d been talking to called him. ‘Who’s this?’ The friend came sauntering down towards us, smiling. He was wearing a pink shirt and little frameless glasses and looked kind. Before Alex could say a word, his friend put out his hand for me to shake. ‘Hi, I’m Steve.’ He looked at me far more approvingly than I was used to. ‘And you are?’
‘This is Beth,’ Alex jumped in. ‘My wife,’ he added, as if that fact had only just occurred to him.
‘Oh my God! Hi, Beth,’ Steve, now kissed me on both cheeks – a lot less clumsily than my husband had, I noticed. But then Steve had never married me and then dumped me by phone from a departing aeroplane. He had no reason at all to be nervous about what I was suddenly doing here. ‘We’ve all been wondering when you were going to show up. Come on up and meet everyone.’ And he put his hand on the small of my back to lead me up the steps.
I caught a glimpse of Alex’s face as I turned to go in the direction I was being led. What did his expression say? Surprised? Scared? Confused? Was it very mean-spirited of me that his discomfort gave me a warm Ready Brek glow?
This had already gone so far off my imagined scenario I mentally tore up the script and let Steve steer me through the lobby and on towards what looked like a bar straight ahead. I could feel Alex keeping up close behind. Was he worried I was going to embarrass him? We passed the doorman, who wished us a good evening, and on in to what was indeed a huge bar, its long wall of windows overlooking the marina. We veered right, past a DJ desk with a tiny, Asian female DJ in headphones, nodding along to the music. There was a bar counter ahead, but we turned left and went through a door and outside, onto the terrace.
I wasn’t overdressed and I wasn’t underdressed. There were so many different styles – and a lot more flesh on display than I would have expected in a Muslim country. This was obviously the place to party.
We were swallowed up into a large, colourful, noisy gathering at the far end of the terrace. Everyone was talking, drinking, and laughing. Some of them were moving in time with the music in a ‘sort of liking the rhythm but it being too early to actually start dancing’ way, and there were ice buckets with bottles of white wine and fizz dotted around the tall tables.
‘Hey! Everybody!’ Steve shouted over the music. Those closest to him turned and waved their glasses at him. ‘This is Alex’s wife,’ he shouted a bit louder. ‘This is Beth, Alex’s wife.’
The notion that in any normal circumstances it should have been Alex introducing me to his work colleagues flashed through my mind, but normal this was not. I’d landed both Alex and myself in some surreal kind of improvisation with a large cast of extras and this Steve was doing a great job. Maybe he was just that kind of guy. He could be Alex’s boss, and therefore felt it was his duty to introduce me. And introduce me he did. In the space of what was probably a couple of minutes I must have met and been given the names of about twenty or thirty people, of whom there was definitely a Sarah and a Zara, because they each made a point of telling me that they weren’t the other one. I was pretty sure that there’d been a Mark and a Mike, too, but apart from them, all the names had fallen into that big lucky dip barrel where names always ended up when you were introduced to too many new people at once. Then whenever you had to speak to one of them again you’d dip your hand in, pull one out, and hope it turned out to be the right one.
My only intention in coming here tonight had been to have a dignified skirmish with my husband before flouncing away with both the utmost dignity and the last word. Pushing him into the water had been floating around as an optional extra. This, however, I hadn’t envisioned, and I decided I knew just how Alice must have felt after falling down the rabbit hole. And judging by the look on Alex’s face he was feeling pretty much the same. I could almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
A few minutes later, I was talking to Sarah and Zara – who had both complimented my dress – sipping the glass of Prosecco which Steve had put in my hand, when Alex came up behind me and slipped an arm round my shoulder. My traitorous stomach did a flip. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention and my concentration on Zara’s description of the fabulous dress she was having made for some ball she was going to completely disintegrated.
‘Ella na horepsoume – come and dance with me,’ he said in my ear. I didn’t know the song, but it sounded suitable for slow dancing, and my outrageously disloyal heart did a little flutter at the thought that he wanted to hold me. My head, on the other hand, warned me that he just wanted to get me away from his friends in case I said or did something to embarrass him.
‘Ahh, that’s so sweet,’ Sarah and Zara chorused as Alex took me in his arms, a few steps away from them, and we swayed together to the music.
‘Mou elipse toso poli, Beth – I’ve missed you so much,’ he said, his lips even closer to my ear this time.
‘That’ll explain all the phone calls, texts, and emails you kept bombarding me with,’ I whispered ever so sweetly. ‘I thought I was going to have to take out a restraining order.’
‘Oh, Beth. I was so stupid. As soon as I arrived here I knew I’d made a mistake. But I knew how angry you would be so I thought I’d wait and give you time to calm down …’
‘What, with that explosive temper of mine!’ I stopped pretending to move to the music and looked him in the face. ‘And how many months were you thinking of giving me to “calm down”?’
‘I kept thinking, tomorrow I’ll call Beth, tomorrow I’ll send an email. Then tomorrow came and I didn’t know if you would want to speak to me.’ He looked soulfully at me with those big, dark chocolate eyes, reminding me of Rex, which was dangerous territory. ‘The more time went by, the more I thought I must have left it too late …’
‘But you didn’t think it was worth giving it a go?’ I clamped down on my softening heart. ‘One phone call?’
‘I should have called you, I know I should, but I thought you’d still be angry and you’d tell me to get lost. I’m so glad you came, Beth.’ His eyes met mine again and my heart cranked up the flutter to a skippety-skip beat of its own, while my head told it to stop being so stupid. Did it need reminding of what he’d done to me? The position he’d carelessly left me in? So am I, my stupid heart wanted to say, but my head wouldn’t let it. All the times I’d played this scene in my head – what I’d say, what he’d say, whether he’d slink away from me, or yell and shout, whether I’d give him hell, or crumple in tears, I’d never imagined this. Here we were, what felt like only minutes from the moment I clapped eyes on him, more or less dancing in each other’s arms, surrounded by his new friends, as if the last few months were nothing.
‘I can’t believe you came all this way to find me,’ he murmured. ‘Come home with me, Beth, you don’t need to go back to London.’
‘I haven’t been in London.’ He wanted me to stay? What? He thought it was all going to be that easy? He made the mess, I cleaned it up and now everything was all right again?
‘Pou piges? Where did you go?’
‘I stayed in Wintertown.’
‘But we let go of our apartment there.’ He looked puzzled. ‘You gave up your job there. I thought you would go back to London and stay with your mother while you looked for a new job.’
‘I got my job back at Sitting Pretty.’ Ha! He hadn’t been expecting that!
‘Where did you stay? How did you afford the rent?’
‘Oh, I took up squatting in empty houses, it’s remarkably easy if you know when people are going to be away!’ He hadn’t been expecting that, either.
‘Oh, I’ve missed that English sense of humour of yours.’ He pulled me to him and wrapped his arms around me.
Just wait until I told him about my new job. Would he think that was another example of my English sense of humour? Alex had made no secret of the fact that he saw my time at Sitting Pretty as just a little job to keep me out of mischief and in pin money while he went out and earned the real stuff. I couldn’t wait to tell him all about my new career with Halliday’s Vacation Club.