A Handful of Pebbles (17 page)

The two glasses of wine before they were seated also helped. To tell him over the entr
ée seemed a bit rushed, so she decided to broach the subject over the dessert. But when the profiteroles came, her words became tangled in her mind and it was natural to decide that the after-dinner brandy would loosen her tongue.

The brandies came and so did the box, long and gilded. Laurence slid it across to her with a card that said
Happy Nineteenth Birthday
. It was not so much the pearls that stopped her words, but rather the effort Laurence had put into the evening. It would have been so callous to fling the box back and say something like, ‘Actually this is not working for me.’ So she went along with the play and agreed to meet him the next day, resolving to give him back the gift and break it off cleanly.

‘You are in love with Neville?’ Sarah asks, returning to the present.

‘
Like a crazy teenager,’ Liz sniffs through her tears. ‘There’s karma for you.’ She attempts a laugh. ‘But don’t you love Laurence after all these years? I mean, just a bit?’

‘
To be honest, Liz I am not sure what I feel for him. I never think about it, we never talk about
us
. I just live.’

‘
Well he’s not Neville. Does he still buy all your clothes for you?’ Liz’s giggle is soft, sympathetic. Sarah finds no reply.

The following day Laurence asked her to meet him after work, in the airport foyer. When she arrived, an air hostess said he was running late and she took Sarah through to the staff room. As she walked into the crowded room, the chatter stopped and all eyes turned on her. The sudden attention was too much and she spun on her heels to leave, only to encounter Laurence in the doorway. Before she had time to say a word, he dropped to one knee and held out a small, square box containing the biggest diamond ring she had ever seen. What could she say in front of all those people with all those champagne bottles popping?

She twists the ring on her finger as she breaks her stare, thinking of all decisions Laurence has made from that day till the present. ‘You know, I am not sure I have made any decisions since,’ Sarah wants to say ‘since Torin died,’ but she cannot hang her whole life from that point, she has to take responsibility somewhere. She starts her sentence again. ‘Actually, I am not sure I have really had the courage to make my own decisions—ever.’ It felt overly dramatic, but just in that moment, all she could see was her mum making all her decisions for her till she ran away with Torin. Then Torin made them, then Liz, and now Laurence. Even her boys make all the decisions that affect her. She just goes along to keep the peace.

‘
I just go along with everyone and keep the peace,’ she summarises her thoughts.

‘
It’s why we all love you, Sarah.’ Liz sips her coffee.

‘
It’s sleepwalking through life,’ Sarah says.

Neville returns with fresh bread for Liz’s breakfast.

‘
I’d better go.’ Sarah stands; it might be a good time to leave Liz to confront Neville. ‘Laurence will be wanting his lunch soon.’ She makes her excuses.

‘
See you,’ Liz says, lacing her second coffee with
Metaxa
.

Sarah avoids Neville
’s demonstrative goodbyes and hurries off down the drive and into the shade of the olive trees. Dry twigs snap underfoot; branches catch at her hair.

‘
Poor Liz.’ Her words are a sigh. ‘No kids, no holidays, no nothing, and now a breaking heart.’

‘
Who has a breaking heart?’

Coming to an abrupt halt
, she looks around for the source of the voice. ‘Oh, you made me jump,’ Sarah says. The camouflaged goats rustle in the surrounding bushes and Nicolaos is leaning against a tree. ‘How do you decide when to be in this field and when to be in the one over there?’ She points in the vague direction of Helena’s house.

‘
I wake up and toss a coin.’

‘
Do you? Do you really?’

‘
No.’ He pushes off from the tree with his shoulder to lean on his crook instead. ‘I just see which I fancy on the day.’ He chuckles. ‘So who is broken-hearted?’

‘
Oh, just an unexpected turn of events for someone I know.’ Sarah keeps it vague.

‘
Not you, then?’

‘
No, I have a loving husband and two boys I adore. I have more than I deserve.’ As she speaks, Sarah cannot meet his eye.

‘
Don’t say that. Life might hear you and give you less.’ Nicolaos’s voice has a serious edge even though he is smiling.

‘
I don’t think life hears anyone.’ Now she looks at him.

‘
Don’t you? It seems to me that it listens carefully.’ He takes a breath. ‘Back in Oz, I had two friends, each running day-fishing businesses. One sat back in his cockpit of his boat and looked up at the blue sky, drank his martini, and said ‘I have more than I deserve.’ The other friend said, "Wow, look what I’ve got," took photos of his boat, shared it online, printed fliers, and pinned them around town. At the end of the year, the guy who thought he had more than he deserved had a big notice on his boat saying it was for sale. Not enough clients to keep him going.’

‘
Right, and the other guy was doing such a booming trade, he bought his friend’s boat and had twice the trade the following year,’ Sarah finishes the obvious ending to his story for him.

‘
Ah so you know them, then?’ Nicolaos says dryly and puts one hand in his pocket. Sarah hears the clicking of beads.

‘
But that is not "life listening." That is the result of one person making an effort and the other not.’ Sarah starts to walk again, a pause between each step. The shepherd falls in by her side.

‘
Really? Is it? I have a friend, and this one is for real, who is a psychotherapist. She said, when she felt the number of clients she had was dropping, that she would begin to take action. The first few times she had to go as far as advertising in two different places to gain more clients but, she said, as time passed, she had to do less and less when the numbers dropped off until finally, all she had to do was think the thoughts, have the intention of doing something, and her phone would start ringing.’

‘
But surely that is just the experience of becoming established?’ Sarah asks.

‘
Oh is it? You know what we call a "thought" is a connection that goes between a synapse and a neurone. A transfer of energy.’ He stops to pull a grass and chews the end a little before continuing. ‘Everything is energy, isn’t it?’ It sounds like a genuine question, but he does not wait for a reply. ‘That’s what they say. Everything we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Each is made of different wavelengths of energy vibrating at different frequencies. They say our brain picks up these frequencies and interprets them into what we perceive to be our physical reality.’ He stops to look around himself, as if putting into practice the words he is speaking. ‘Same for the goats, I guess. Their brains interpret a set of vibrations and call it a leaf, a thing to taste and chew. We perceive the things around us as physical or solid, but if we break them down to their smallest particles, they’re all just energy.’ The track has narrowed and he walks in front, his crook across his shoulders, his arms hung over either end.

‘
So I reckon every time we think a thought, we send out that thought’s specific vibration. If a thought makes us feel good, if it’s a positive thought, it is vibrating at a particular frequency. If a thought makes us feel bad, a negative thought, it’s vibrating at a different frequency. My guess is positive will attract positive.’ He turns to face her, letting go of his crook with one hand so it rests only on one shoulder. ‘Like happy, carefree, confident people attract positive things.’ He turns to look at the view, chooses a spot, and sits down.

Sarah thinks of Juliet and Stella as she lowers herself carefully onto a flat stone a small distance away from him. She watches a beetle navigating its way across the twig-strewn path, avoiding her feet. She says nothing,waits for him to continue.

‘I think,’ Nicolaos says after a pause, ‘the more focus you give to a thought, the more thoughts of the same wavelength or vibration, whichever you want to call it, will join it and it grows, it becomes stronger, more stable, more able to attract other, equal frequencies. That’s why my psychotherapist friend needed to advertise the first time but after a while needed only to think.’ He throws a pebble at the feet of a nearby goat. It jumps and frolics away.

‘
Perhaps the more attention we pay to a subject, the easier it becomes to think about it, and then, of course, we see more evidence in our worlds supporting our thoughts about it. Like if we think the world is a terrible place, we spend a lot of time watching the disasters on the news and reading negative, thrill-seeking papers and spend hours talking to the friends we have chosen because they also think the world is a cesspit, then more stories that support this view will literally find us. If someone is like this, then when they meet someone who thinks the world is a wonderful place, I am sure they will have a choice set of words to describe this annoyingly positive person. Dreamer, delusional, unrealistic optimist. Negative words, because this person will grate on them.’

He stops talking and becomes very still.

Sarah has read versions of what he is saying before, heard lunchtime gurus on daytime television spouting this sort of stuff, but it feels different out here in this sleepy, warm country under the dappled shade of the olive trees. When she is happy back on the Isle of Man, it’s true, she attracts positive people. But sometimes her thoughts, of their own accord, become so dark, she ventures nowhere and meets no one. It’s not like she has a choice.

‘
It is a very hopeful doctrine,’ she finally says.

‘
Hope is the life force.’ Without looking at his face, she hears his smile as she continues to gaze at the view. ‘Without hope, we would be dead.’

‘
Very dramatic,’ Sarah scoffs.

The goats munch
. A car in the distance grates its gears.

‘
When I still lived with my wife, she had her room and I had mine.’ Nicolaos speaks quietly, as if not wanting to break the peace that has settled over them. Sarah looks up at the sky through the olive branches: endless blue. How lovely to be able to feel assured that every day will be endless blue. Nicolaos clears his throat. ‘I would hear laughter through the walls as she spoke on the phone to her friends. It grew lonely, so I started watching a lot of television with headphones on. Have you ever done that?’

Sarah shakes her head, she is not that keen on television.

‘With the sound going straight into your head, you are sucked into the unreal world completely.’ He looks at his feet and pushes a stone with his heel so he can stretch his leg out. ‘I watched cops and robbers, gangsters, thrill-seeking stuff. Grim stuff because my thoughts were grim, I thought I would never be happy again. But I would get cross at the characters getting into the cars with a gun against their heads or not fighting to stop themselves going into a room where they know the person who wants to kill them sits or walking calmly in front of the firing squad, you know the sort of thing. At that point in these films, I would call it unrealistic and change channels. But then it came to me—as long as the trigger of the gun against his head was not being pulled, there was hope; as long as they were walking into the room and not being carried in as a corpse, there was hope. As long as the soldiers had the butts of their rifles on the floor and not with the barrels pointed at their heads, the people in the firing line had hope. Hope that they would be rescued, hope that their adversaries would change their minds, hope that they had misinterpreted the situation and that their lives were not threatened at all. It all boils down to hope. People continue on, even doing what their enemy asks of them, as long as they have hope. So that is why I say without hope we are dead.’

‘
Did it help?’ Sarah says. ‘At the time, with your wife, I mean?’

His chuckle is dry and short.
‘I invited her to sit and talk with me the day after I had these thoughts, but she refused as usual, saying we had been over and over everything and nothing was going to change, that it would just end in an argument. But eventually, I got her to agree and instead of picking over the bones of the past and inviting a conference on what was whose fault, I started with hope.’

Sarah listens intently
. As the goats close in on them, she picks up a pebble and throws it at the big one’s feet. It starts and all the herd run a few paces away. The munching grows quieter.

‘
I asked her what would make her happy. She said moving back to Greece. Obviously, we both had jobs in Oz, and we had no income in Greece, so it looked impossible. So I said, ‘I will go first, clean up the house, create an income, and you can follow when you are ready. I can still see her face as she turned to look at me. For the first time in years, she looked me right in the eyes.’ Sarah finds she, too, is looking in his eyes. They are a deep brown, soft.

As he meets her gaze, his eyes speak of kindness and humour.
‘And in her eyes, I could see hope, not just for her to come to Greece but for us as well, as man and wife. So I came back to Greece with hope in my heart. I came alive.’

Sarah does not take her eyes from his.
‘So you sending her the divorce papers the other day was the end of hope?’

‘
Only briefly.’ He breaks their stare and slaps his knees before rubbing his palm on his trousers. ‘For life to make sense, it must have meaning. We talked about this the other day, yes?’ He stops rubbing and looks out across the plain. ‘Well, for many years, I tried to make my wife my meaning, but she was a difficult, hard woman. When I was young, when she was young, that was exciting, but as the years went by, it became a source of misery. It is hard to make a source of misery your meaning. So when I moved here, so far away from her, I had to find another meaning.’

‘
I thought you said you woke up each morning and decided what sort of meaning you were going to give the day?’ Sarah gently teases.

‘
I did and I do, but I have big and small meanings now. My big meaning is to make the world a better place. My middle-sized meaning is to produce a better herd each year so I can make the world’s best goat cheese, and my small meaning is to do something each day to make myself happy.’

‘
And that’s enough?’ Sarah asks.

‘
Live your life’s choices to extremes, do everything to the best of your ability, and take pride in what you achieve and then, whatever you choose is enough.’ It sounds like an often-spoken mantra.

Sarah turns his words over in her mind. Laurence achieves. He just changed who he flies for with a massive increase in pay and everyday
, he successfully achieves the transporting of hundreds of people to their destination. The boys both achieve, daily. Even Liz achieved something, keeping Neville’s mum comfortable all these years. Apart from cooking, what does she achieve on a daily level? What has she achieved this year, or last year, or even the last five years? She has achieved nothing since the boys left home.

The weight in her chest has returned
. She squints her eyes against the sunlight. If she is honest, her perfect little life, in her perfect house highlighted with ritual dinners with Laurence at quality restaurants every Saturday he is home, is not enough.

She gasps at the ingratitude of her thought, the guilt. If she looks at her life, her life with Laurence, her life with the boys, her life since Torin, all of it, there is only one person who is responsible. She pulls in and bites on her bottom lip
. There is a rushing sound in her ears and watery film covers her eyes. It is easier to sleepwalk through life.

‘
You okay?’ Nicolaos asks.