Bound to You (4 page)

I ignored his half-attempt at humour. ‘What, so you mean you wouldn’t even
try
to study in the day so that we could spend time together in the evening?’

‘It’s going to be very hard, this PhD, Nichi. I need to feel that I can study whenever suits me.’

So this wasn’t just about his parents. This was about Christos’s life with me and the fact that somehow he saw me as a distraction or a burden, possibly both.

And then another thing dawned on me. ‘But what am I going to do? Where will I live if you move out?’ How was I ever going to be able to afford to live in London without cohabiting with Christos?

‘My sister says someone at her work place has a room going spare from September. We can call for you.’

What?! So this had already been thoroughly discussed among his entire family? Any other time I would have been livid. But right now, I was just too upset that Christos was effectively abandoning me.

‘OK,’ I replied, tears blurring my vision. ‘I just can’t believe you told me, rather than asking me about it.’

‘Look, it’s going to be fine. There’s ages yet until we have to sort things out. Anyway, I might not even do the PhD. Let’s just wait and see.’

The next few weeks dragged as though June were on loop. I started my job at the hospital and Christos continued at the shipping company, all the while making provisional arrangements for the autumn. The early summer sun seemed to shine just to spite me. We tried not to talk about the housing situation and distracted ourselves with games of badminton, cinema trips and weekend excursions to the coast and picturesque towns and villages; basically anywhere we could play at being blithe tourists in our own increasingly strained lives.

‘Christos,’ I asked one afternoon, as we were reading the Sunday papers at a pub on the South Bank, ‘do you want to go and see the Frida Kahlo exhibition this week? It’s our last chance before the show closes.’

Christos frowned over the top of the family section. ‘I don’t think I can this week, Nichi
mou
. I’ve got to help Frankie and his girlfriend move into their new flat tomorrow. I’ll be working late on Tuesday. And then Layla is coming to town on Wednesday until the weekend.’

Layla was Christos’s ex-girlfriend, one of the sweetest-natured people I had ever met and naturally beautiful in a very Mediterranean way, with delectable curves and a dense cloud of dark, waving hair. We had become friends on my last trip to Greece. Christos and Layla had known each other for years and had had a very brief relationship when he was in the army. But it felt like dating a cousin, he told me, and they had reverted to being friends again soon after.

I was so preoccupied by the PhD debacle that I had forgotten that she was due in town but I cheered up at the thought of it. Layla was something of a confidante. We messaged via Facebook, me in stilted Greek, her in fluent chatty English. I would occasionally relate trivial disagreements I’d had with Christos, while she sympathised. Finally I could get a second opinion on Christos’s announcement that he was moving out, maybe even get her to have a word with him for me. Gina or Rachel would always listen, but the fact that Layla was both Greek and an old friend of Christos made her better placed to offer some real insight on what I still considered to be his completely out-of-character decision.

‘Why don’t you ask someone from your new job to go with you to the exhibition, Nichi
mou
?’

Now I frowned. ‘Because I don’t know anyone well enough to ask yet, Christos. And it’s not very English to ask your workmates to art galleries. Only to the pub.’

‘There’s really nobody? What about the other girl that types with you? You need more friends in London, you know, Nichi,’ Christos continued. ‘I mean, when I start the PhD . . .’

He trailed off. He’d mentioned the forbidden issue. Neither of us wanted to get into a discussion about this again on a Sunday.

‘Yeah OK, I might, I’ll see,’ I said, taking charge of the conversation.

The next morning I took my place among London’s commuters and went to work. In a hospital, everything and nothing is an emergency, and Monday mornings as a medical PA always highlighted that contradiction.

While I had the weekends off, the surgeons I served would nearly always have been called in. Dumped on my desk would be piles of patient notes and half a dozen Dictaphone tapes containing urgent letters for typing. Sometimes, by the time I came to typing them up, overnight complications meant the patient in question had already passed away. I relied on the surgeon to remember that when he or she came to sign, and for them to instruct me to shred the letter. But once I’d had to p.p. a batch and erroneously sent one to the bereaved family. I was absolutely horrified when I found out. Journalism was going to be easy by comparison.

This Monday though, there was nothing on my desk but my own filing and a copy of the
Lancet
medical journal. A long day lay ahead. I remembered what Christos had said about trying to make some more friends, but I was feeling too fretful about our ongoing stand-off over living arrangements, and the prospect felt daunting. The women I worked with were nice enough but they were either utterly absorbed with their partners or their hectic single-girl social lives.

That evening, Christos and I set off to meet Layla for dinner in one of those tired-looking Lebanese restaurants on Edgware Road. Layla had texted Christos to say she was running fifteen minutes late, so I suggested that we sit outside and smoke until she arrived.

Christos asked the waiter for a hookah and two glasses of tap water. He blew on the hookah’s coals and took the first long inhalation, forcing the water to bubble up. Refracted through the blue marbled glass, it reminded me of the waves that frothed around the double kayak we had taken out in Greece last summer. We planned to take the canoe out again when I joined Christos there in August, which was fast approaching.

I had been thinking about how I was going to broach the subject of Christos’s living arrangements, the details of which I still had no idea about. Emboldened by the fact that Layla would soon be here to distract us if we got into a fight, I dared to ask him if he’d made any further arrangements.

‘Well, I haven’t found a flat. But I think I’ve found a flatmate.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. It looks as though I’ll be living with Markos.’

With Markos? With that irresponsible, Peter Pan, party-boy advertiser? The guy that spent as much money on champagne as he did on designer furniture?

‘With Markos? Are you kidding me? If your parents wouldn’t let you live with me then they certainly aren’t going to let you live with Markos!’

‘Well, it was their suggestion actually,’ Christos replied quietly.

‘But WHY?’ If I’d been angry when Christos announced he was moving out, I was apoplectic now.

‘Because we went to school together. Because they know him.’

‘But they know me!’

Christos sighed, looked wan with desperation. ‘I know they do, Nichi
mou
.’ He took my hand across the table.

‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ I announced, and hurried inside. I didn’t want to cry, I wanted to compose myself before Layla arrived. I wanted us all to have a nice evening.

I scrutinised myself in the mirror. Indignation did not suit me; it made my cheeks look even puffier. My eyes were molten with unshed tears. I dabbed gingerly along my lash line with a corner of toilet roll to avoid smudging my eyeliner. There was a flush from the other cubicle. Out came Layla.

‘Nichi
mou
, how are you,
kali
?’

Layla embraced me and covered my face with kisses. She was casually dressed in jeans, and a scoop-neck T-shirt, her hair swept up in a messy knot, caramel skin gleaming under the flattering bathroom light.

‘I’m well, Layla. Well, no, actually, I’m
etsi-getsi
.’ That was Greek for so-so and Layla touched my arm in affection and laughed.

‘You learnt
etsi-getsi
! You’re adorable! Why, Nichi
mou
, what’s wrong?’

I hadn’t planned on telling Layla like this, but better than spilling it in front of Christos and potentially starting another argument in the restaurant. So out came the story, out came my woes and fears and anger. Layla listened intently, smiling. Even when I told her about Markos, she carried on smiling.

‘Can’t you have a word with him, Layla? Make him understand why I’m so upset that he would let his parents effectively make a decision about our life together?’

Layla’s smile began to shrink. ‘I’m not taking his side, Nichi, but maybe he has a point about the stress of studying and not wanting that to affect your relationship. When I started my Masters I argued with Constantine all the time.’ Constantine was Layla’s boyfriend. They were still together after seven years of studying and living across the continent from one another. ‘I can totally understand where you’re coming from, but it is a cultural thing, unfortunately. Christos is rebellious, but knowing him, he must have thought about this long and hard.’

My throat tightened again. Oh God, Layla not you too. I couldn’t believe she was citing culture clash as the problem here. Wasn’t she effectively saying that I was Christos’s way of rebelling against his family? That to do the right thing by them meant rejecting me?

‘I know the way Greek parents can come across,’ she continued, ‘they’re bloody annoying and ridiculously protective, but what can you do?’

So that was it. Layla didn’t really understand either. Or if she did, her answer was effectively ‘deal with it’. This was my problem. Christos was going to move out and I would have to deal with it.

Layla could see the raw hurt in my face. ‘He loves you, Nichi
mou
.’

‘Then why is he leaving me?’ I felt like screaming. The idea that this might be about more than Christos’s family, that it might be something he himself wanted, was too agonising to contemplate.

There was now just one more month before Christos moved out. At the end of July he would be flying back to Greece for the summer, mainly to help at the garage, and then I would join him at the end of August for a holiday in Greece on the island of Rhodes, where his family were originally from and still had a home. We were both working so much there was little time for us to do anything together beyond having dinner and watching TV.

And we were having less sex than we’d ever had, generally only three times a week. That might sound like plenty to many people, but as time-rich students we had made love once or twice a day, every day. This had continued even after moving to London together. I couldn’t tell whether the diminished activity was because we were just finally both working full-time and city-fatigued, or because something was shifting between us.

Christos loved to analyse our relationship. ‘How are we doing, Nichi
mou
, do we think? Is our relationship going well? Do you have any complaints with me? How can I improve myself?’ He would ask this in a pretend therapist fashion, often when I was reading the newspaper, and he was polishing our shoes or folding the laundry. But I couldn’t remember him asking the question in recent weeks. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to answer it if he had.

When Christos left for Greece, I cried. I cried because it was the last time he would leave our home together to go back to his. I stood by the bay window and watched him walk towards the tube station, rucksack strapped across his straight strong shoulders, suitcase in tow. He turned back to wave at me. He was crying a little too.

Three weeks of dreary job and slightly tense late-night phone calls to Christos later and I was finally bound for Greece. Waiting in the airport lounge for my flight, I began to feel more at ease than I had done in weeks. I was dressed in low-rise, white linen trousers that hugged my bottom in a way Christos loved (he had urged me to buy them, after all), a green lace-trimmed top with a plunging neckline, and the shoes that Christos had brought me back from his recent trip to Athens. Around my neck was a knotted pearl and silver necklace that Christos had also given me. It nestled in my cleavage suggestively. As I waited for my flight to be called, I stroked it meditatively, as if it were a rosary.

Then Christos rang. ‘We’re all ready for you, Nichi
mou
. I’ve washed the car, Mimi has made up your bed, and Tolkien has even had a bath in your honour.’ Mimi was the cleaning lady, Tolkien the family cat. ‘Are you ready for it, little Egg?’

I was. I couldn’t wait to be back with Christos. There was no one like him, and no one better for me.

As the plane touched down in Greece, my heart heaved with relief. I liked to think that my parents named me Nicola because they somehow knew I was destined to spend time in the land of its origin. I had been taught that my name meant ‘leader of the people’, which, given my bossy nature, made a lot of sense. But the first time I met Christos’s father he called me ‘Niki – the goddess of victory!’ My real victory, I felt, was in having harpooned Christos. The same Christos that was now waiting for me at the airport.

The double doors of the arrival gate parted and there he was, clad in khaki pants and a white patterned T-shirt, running a nervous hand through his black curls. His skin was now the colour of burnt toffee, shading his muscular body into sharper definition, the sleeves of his T-shirt straining against his deep, bronzed biceps. He flashed me a devoted smile from across the barriers. Christos
mou
.

Christos couldn’t wait for me to file out after the other passengers and instead bounded towards me, lifted me up in his arms and swirled me about. In England, witnesses to such a nauseating romantic display would have scowled and tutted, but in Greece, people smiled and nodded in approval. There was something about Christos that could make clichéd romantic gestures seem as though he had invented them.

Christos took my case in one hand and steered me protectively out of the arrivals lounge into the breath-binding heat. Greece was infernal in high summer, but meeting that temperature for the first time again made my skin prickle with delight.