The Girl Below(113)

Her tone was light, almost mischievous, but my conscience was heavy, and I braced for an accusation.

“Last night, Caleb asked me a strange question,” she began. “He wanted to know if I’d ever ‘shagged’ some bloke in the bath. He said it was at a costume party, back in the eighties, at your parents’ flat.” She paused. “For someone who wasn’t even born yet, he seemed to know a lot about it.”

It was a chance to come clean—about one thing at least—and I took it. “That was my fault. I told him about something I saw that night.”

Pippa was no less amused, but she had started to blush. “What on earth were you doing? Looking through the bloody keyhole?”

I coughed through my embarrassment, pretending a piece of baklava had lodged in my throat.

Pippa studied me for a moment, and then took a sharp inhale of breath. “Oh dear God,” she said. “You didn’t think, all this time, that I was bonking your father, did you?”

“No,” I said, horrified that she had guessed the truth. “Absolutely not!”

“Good, because I never would have crossed that line.” She laughed, high and tinkling, and for a moment, her green eyes flashed eighteen again. “Though I crossed all the others,” she added.

With relief, I laughed too, and then we fell into an easy silence, broken only by the occasional clinking of ouzo glasses and a frenzied rattling of dice. It was the first time in a long, long while that my mind had been comfortably blank.

“You know, if you wanted to, you could stay here until the end of the summer,” Pippa said. “There’s plenty of space at Elena’s—so long as you don’t mind sleeping in the crypt—and you might even get work at Soteris’s taverna.”

Her mention of the coming months caught me off guard, for the present had been so consuming that I hadn’t given any thought to what I’d do next. The idea of going back to London, to an endless, fruitless job hunt was abhorrent, but so was the thought of returning so soon to New Zealand—even though I’d worked out that it was my hang-ups, not the country, that had pushed me to the edge.

In the absence of a long-term plan, spending what was left of the summer on a Greek island with a family that wasn’t my family, but who’d nonetheless made room for me, was about the most idyllic situation I could think of. I was sure that by the end of it, I would have an idea of what to do. “Thank you,” I said at last. “That’s a very kind offer.”

When our baklava had been reduced to a few sticky crumbs, we ambled toward the taverna, where Peggy’s wake had quadrupled in size and was spilling out in waves across the cobblestoned piazza. Around the impromptu band, a group of men and women had gathered in a circle, and were clapping wildly in time to the music. Some distance from the mayhem, Pippa hesitated, and I thought perhaps she didn’t want to get any closer, that the balalaikas were wigging her out, but then the crowds parted a little, and she ran forward eagerly to get a closer look at what everyone was going so crazy over. In front of the band, a traditional Greek dance was under way: a line of women at the back and in front of them a line of men with their arms around each other. The music they were dancing to was repetitive and getting faster, building up a head of steam. At the center of the male line were Harold and Ari, kicking up their heels in manic imitation of the locals they were arm in arm with, their pink, shiny faces creased with unbridled joy. With something like a whoop of delight, Pippa dashed forward to link arms with her husband and brother, and before I could talk myself out of it, I followed her into the fray.