Ariadne and Hebe asked Arthur Templeton Brown for Sunday lunch after church. He was frailer now and unsteady on his pins. With his shepherd’s crook, his wispy white hair halfway down his neck, he looked like an Old Testament prophet. They had sherry on the veranda, looking out over the olive garden, which he always admired.
‘It’ll soon be the harvest,’ he said. ‘Caro and I loved to help with the shaking down. Nothing like a first pressing of oil. During the war they used to hide the amphoras in the caves but it only worked for a time.’
His mind often drifted back to the old days when he was caught in the battle for Crete. He blamed the defeat on defences being in the wrong place and no one expecting the descent of German paratroopers. Nevertheless the poor buggers hadn’t known what had hit them when they’d landed to be hacked to pieces by mountain Cretans. Then he would recount many of his exploits as an escapee. Hebe would hear him out while Ariadne saw to the chicken in lemon sauce and vegetables.
‘What did you think of our first rehearsal? It wasn’t a bad turnout.’ Ariadne was fishing.
‘’Fraid I didn’t catch much of it. I hope we’ll be singing the old carols,’ Arthur replied. ‘I can’t stand all that modern stuff Father Dennis likes to punish us with.’
Arthur was old-school C of E. He liked the Book of Common Prayer and sermons lasting minutes, not hours. He always wore a wrinkled linen jacket, a Panama hat and his regimental tie, but lived in shorts, showing off his nut-brown legs. He had been a good friend to Ariadne and Hebe when they first arrived. His wife would often invite them to drinks in their little cube-like stone villa on the main street with its apricot-coloured walls.
He assumed, like everyone else, that she and Hebe were old teaching chums, and Ariadne had gone to great lengths to let the village assume this was so. Their sleeping arrangements were a private matter. They were not out and proud. She often referred to Hebe as a distant cousin, which was not true, but stopped most people snooping.
Now Ariadne remembered the two men who lived out of the village in a bijou villa, Phil and Greg, and wondered if she could recruit them. ‘Do you know the lads on the hill?’ she asked Arthur.
‘The nancy boys? ’Fraid not.’
‘I was hoping they might join us. We need more younger voices.’
‘You’ve taken on a brave task, harnessing a bunch of raw recruits. Take my hat off to you, but don’t expect miracles,’ Arthur said.
‘If we get the right balance of voices, you’ll be surprised at the result. Look at Gareth Malone.’
‘My dear, he could take his pick. You’re stuck with a lot of old codgers like me, croaking out the notes. Don’t set your sights too high.’
She was making a mental list of choir members, especially the men: Arthur, Simon, Clive, the vicar, Duke, possibly Peter, the director of the Elodie Durrante Retreat Foundation, and perhaps Gary from the Bunker, if Simon could persuade him.
Sopranos were in plentiful supply, altos not so many, but one good tenor, who could hold high notes, and a few decent basses would pull it all together. An orchestra of voices was what she was aiming for. She wanted to surprise the village with their discipline and harmony, and for that she must have youth as well as experience.
After Arthur had left, she paced her sunlit garden with its cacti and yuccas. The last of the plumbago and the oleander flowers were fading, but the scent of rosemary and thyme soothed her. ‘Why do you keep doing this to yourself?’ she whispered. ‘Isn’t one big failure enough?’
Word on the Street was set back from the main thoroughfare, but close enough for billboards to guide book-lovers towards it. It had been Ariadne’s dream for years to leave teaching and open a decent bookshop, stocking new and second-hand books. A great deal of browsing in Foyles and other shops on London’s Tottenham Court Road had given her an insight into what might be required. Hebe would carry on teaching until the shop could support them both. The search for suitable premises took years of abortive trips to buildings all over the country but when she found the wonderful little Georgian house with two bow windows in Manford, she knew her dream had come true.
Manford was a busy working town outside Leeds, a commuter dormitory with supermarkets and independent businesses that, she felt sure, could support a bookshop. There were no rivals, except an antiquarian book specialist. There was a two-storey flat above the premises, in need of repair. Hebe thought it suitable and promptly applied for a post in classics at the new girls’ high school. Ariadne and Hebe did their homework with care, budgeting, rents, promotion, internal decoration, shelving. They took advice from booksellers and joined the trade association, but most of her father’s legacy disappeared during those first crucial months. Ariadne named the shop Word on the Street, and the launch was a great success, with all the local shopkeepers as guests.
It was sheer luck that Elodie Durrante was on a book tour in the north to promote her new bestseller. Her publishers provided lots of publicity material, and press coverage ensured that queues of loyal fans lined the street to have their books signed. Ariadne was daunted by the tall, striking woman who swanned in. Her hands were covered with exotic rings and her bright scarlet hair was wound into a dramatic coil on top of her head, like a cottage loaf. She was charm itself and signed away, with words of encouragement to Ariadne and Hebe, before she was swept off by her publicist to her next appointment.
It was an impressive start to what they hoped would be a lifetime of bookselling. The first year had seen them in profit, but Ariadne had not taken into consideration what the abolition of the Net Book Agreement would mean.
Now there was no longer a fixed retail price for each book. Within months discount wars were breaking out between rival chains and, worse still, supermarkets could sell mass-market fiction almost at cost, slashing their prices in special offers, prices that Ariadne could no longer compete with.
The impact was immediate. Customers would browse her paperback selection and then disappear to buy elsewhere. They battled on with author events and children’s reading competitions. The second-hand section did well enough, until charity shops got in on the act to undercut them.
Unsold stock went back to be pulped. Ariadne slimmed her range, turned away publishers’ reps, who were pushing new releases on them. Holidays became a thing of the past – those wonderful excursions to the Greek islands or Spain. Hebe continued teaching, but was unhappy in her new school. Everything was going wrong, and if they didn’t find another source of income, Word on the Street would fall silent.
‘If only we’d known what lay ahead,’ Ariadne moaned as, one by one, they saw other bookshops closing or turning into cheap remainder outlets, selling old stock.
‘You weren’t to know,’ Hebe said, trying to comfort her, but the fizz had gone out of Ariadne’s dream.
Some days she sold only greeting cards and wrapping paper. And the accounts files did not lie: they were making losses on all fronts. The business was failing. Ariadne felt so helpless and angry. Sleepless, she paced the shop floor, trying to conjure new schemes to brighten the window display – perhaps they could offer coffee and cake. Fear was making her sweat as her bank balance slipped into the red. She seemed to have a permanent cold, sniffing and wheezing, and was so tired that she didn’t eat. Hebe pestered her to see a doctor but ‘I’m fine,’ she countered.
‘No, you are not. This bloody business is making you ill. It’s not your fault that the whole trade has changed. It’s just about bad timing, so stop beating yourself up.’
‘It’s all right for you to talk. You have a salary coming in.’
‘And a job I hate. The discipline in that school is disgraceful.’ Hebe paused. ‘What a pair of dolts we are. You know that old adage when things go wrong? “You can lump it, change it or leave.”’
‘Leave?’ Ariadne was horrified.
‘What else is there to do? Do you want go bankrupt? At least we own the building. I say we sell up and move to pastures new.’
‘Like where?’ Ariadne sat down, demoralised. Sensible old Hebe was surprising her.
‘We’ll find some sun. I’m sick of rain and grey skies. We could go abroad, rent somewhere and start a new life.’
‘Have you gone crackers? With what, may I ask? Brass tacks?’
‘I have my savings and a pension. You’ll have one soon. It could be a great adventure living in a foreign country.’
‘You’re crazy. Where would we go?’
‘Greece, of course! Where else? We love the islands. We can sort out our affairs, cut the losses, gather our resources and vamoose!’ She laughed.
‘Are you being serious?’ Hebe was behaving most oddly.
‘Yes, I am. You tried, it didn’t come off as we hoped, so we dust ourselves down and start all over again. We’ve plenty of years to come yet. Let’s stop being sober citizens and just scarper into the sun.’
‘If only.’ Ariadne sighed.
‘If only, my arse. What have we got to lose now?’
Ariadne couldn’t take it all in. Emigrate? Leave England behind? Hebe was offering a lifeline, crazy as it was. ‘Could we really make it happen?’
‘Just you watch me,’ Hebe replied.
For the first time in months Ariadne smiled.
*
That moment of madness passed, but the dream did not. It took time to sell the building in a recession, to sort out their finances, to pack up a lifetime of belongings, to find out how to live abroad and not make another mess of things, but they did it, and it was Hebe who organised a half-load of furniture to be shipped to Crete. It was Hebe who sorted out their first rental and found the island of Santaniki, after contacting a friend who’d holidayed there and recommended a good agency to help them with the legalities.
Only then did they discover it was the very island where Elodie Durrante had made her home. When Ariadne wrote to her, reminding her of her visit and their meeting, asking only for advice, the dear woman emailed back, inviting them to stay in her guest lodge until they had sorted themselves out.
It was eighteen months before they packed the old Volkswagen and headed from Hull to Zeebrugge, onwards through Switzerland and Italy to the port of Ancona, then boarded the ferry to Athens. Six days’ driving saw them on the night boat to Crete.
Only then did Ariadne pinch herself. ‘We’ve burnt our bridges now,’ she said, as they hung over the ship’s rail, watching Athens fade from view.
‘Nonsense,’ Hebe replied, holding out a glass. ‘We’re beginning a new life.’
*
As Ariadne was washing up after Sunday lunch, she found herself weeping. Hebe had been so confident and determined then. She had made this new life happen, but now her dear friend, her partner in life, was slower, hesitant, clumsy and oh-so-forgetful. Perhaps she was just getting old. Any other explanation was too scary to contemplate. Perhaps she was just being fanciful and was too full of wine and lunch to think straight, and yet…