My Map of You Page 32

From the moment Sandra’s twin sister burst colourfully on to Zakynthos that summer in 1984, Dennis noticed a change in his beloved girlfriend. Where she had been happy and carefree, she now seemed preoccupied and wary, almost as if she was waiting for something awful to happen. As far as Dennis was concerned, Jenny was loud, selfish and unnecessarily demanding of his girlfriend’s time. In fact, it seemed to him that Jenny did everything in her power to come between him and Sandra. She invited herself to dinner when it was just supposed to be the two of them, brought tourists she’d hooked up with back to their house for the night without even bothering to close the bedroom door most of the time, and then threw almighty tantrums whenever Sandra attempted a gentle reprimand.

  After a month of disturbed sleep and a crackling tension that hung around the house, Dennis was starting to find excuses to go home – he simply couldn’t relax when Jenny was in situ and, even when she wasn’t, he was afraid of what state she’d be in when she did crawl back.

  Sandra was the sweetest, kindest girl he’d ever known – it was a large part of the reason why he’d fallen so deeply in love with her – but her inability to recognise that her twin sister’s behaviour was out of control started to frustrate and then infuriate him. Sandra would argue that Jenny had taken the death of their parents harder than she had, and that she just needed time to settle down and feel like herself again, but Dennis thought privately that this precocious little thing knew exactly what she was doing when she deliberately pressed both his and Sandra’s buttons.

  It was August on the island and the busiest time of the year for his restaurant, but Dennis was finding it increasingly difficult to focus on work. Jenny would turn up at the beach just after she woke up around lunchtime and beg and plead with Sandra to take the rest of the day off and spend it with her. Although he never knew for sure, Dennis heard that the two girls were getting up to all sorts of trouble around the island – streaking naked down the hill from his house, skinny dipping, drinking beer all day then driving back on their mopeds with no helmets. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that the rumours were true, but the island community was a small one and the gossip spread fast. Dennis’ own sisters were beginning to question the suitability of the English girl who had charmed them just a few months before. They started to suggest to him that he would be much better off with a quiet, respectful Greek girl, one who wouldn’t embarrass him or the family. When he eventually cracked and told Sandra what they’d said, she tearfully told Jenny and the fiery twin drew battle lines between the two sets of sisters.

  Dennis, who was stranded hopelessly in the middle, simply took himself out on more fishing trips and started to stay at the restaurant until the early hours, working his methodic way through a bottle of whisky while he watched the moon cross the sky. The crack that had opened up between him and Sandra when Jenny first arrived soon began to feel like an enormous chasm, and he was starting to worry that they would never find their way back to each other.

  The thing that kept him going through it all was how much he loved Sandra. He had fallen hard and he wasn’t ready to give her up without a fight. And it was this, in the end, which convinced him to do something that would change all their lives for ever.

  33

  Holly had been gazing out across the sea as she listened to Dennis talk. His deep, accented voice had an almost hypnotic quality and she liked the way he paused every now and then to search his mind for the correct English word. He seemed to like telling stories, and Holly wondered if he had ever sat and read to her when she was a child.

  Now that he’d reached the part in the tale that was presumably the most difficult, however, his measured and gentle tone had ground to an uncomfortable halt. Holly saw that he was tapping his fingers on his broad, hairy thigh, the other hand stroking its way through his hair.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked tentatively, not wanting to ruin the calm mood that had settled between them.

  ‘My hands, they are bored. I have to give up the cigarettes and the beer.’ He shrugged, motioning to his chest. ‘It is hard, because my hands, they remember more than my head.’

  Holly could relate to what he was saying – now that she spent so much time sewing, her hands felt hugely redundant when they were sitting still in her lap as they were now. Getting up from the deckchair and clutching the rail on the edge of the boat for support, she walked steadily over to the cooler box and pulled out two bottles of water.

  ‘Here,’ she handed one over. ‘Not very exciting, but it might help.’

  ‘This story is very hard for me to tell,’ he said now, not taking his eyes off the horizon. ‘I have only told two people before – you are the third.’

  ‘Was Sandra one of them?’ Holly guessed, unscrewing the lid of her bottle as she sat back down.

  He nodded. ‘And Paloma, my wife. She also knows.’

  A few minutes passed while neither of them spoke, but Holly didn’t feel uncomfortable. On the contrary, ever since she’d landed back on the island, she’d felt an overwhelming sense of comfort. Being here now, on the boat with her father, made her chest swell with a happiness she couldn’t quite put a label on yet. They weren’t very far from the shore, but the white-stone beach behind them was deserted. Dennis had driven them up to the north-west corner of the island, where his boat was moored, in almost total silence, watching the road carefully and occasionally glancing over at Holly as if she was a precious cargo that he was afraid might crack on the bumpy roads.

  ‘Jennifer, your mother, she came to see me one night at the restaurant.’ He paused again, clearly struggling, but this time Holly remained silent.

  ‘She was crying and she told me that Sandra would not come away with her. She wanted to travel the world with her sister, but Sandra said she would not leave me. Jennifer wanted me to talk to her, to make her change her mind. She wanted me to admit that I did not really love Sandra and to let her go. She did not seem to believe that what we felt for each other was real. But I do not know why she was like this.’

  Upon hearing his words, Holly experienced feelings of both anger and pity towards her mother. She knew that Jenny had it in her to be selfish – she’d witnessed as much during her years of drinking – but she also remembered a woman with a kind heart. Why would her mum have wanted Sandra to be unhappy? She must have been so broken by the death of her parents that it infected her like a disease. Her fear of losing her sister, the only person she really had left that she cared about, must have been palpable. For the first time, Holly thought she might understand what motivated Jenny to destroy what Sandra and Dennis had found with each other. It wasn’t because she wanted Dennis, it was because she wanted to keep Sandra all to herself.

  ‘She was very jealous of what we were together, you understand?’ Dennis went on. ‘She found it very easy to meet men everywhere she went, but they would never stay. I think she felt, how you say it, worthless? She wanted to be loved like her sister was loved.’

  How sad, Holly thought now, that aside from a few years with Simon, her mother had never really been in a loving relationship. There had always been men, of course, but nobody who respected or cared for her. Perhaps because she didn’t really believe she deserved to be loved after what had happened that summer in Greece. With a pang Holly thought fleetingly of Rupert and all the love he’d wrapped her up in before she’d ruined everything.

  ‘At that time, I did not want Jennifer to stay in Zakynthos,’ Dennis continued. ‘We both wanted Sandra to ourselves, and I am sorry but I did not want to share. But I lied to Jennifer – I told her that I would talk to her sister and I told her that I would be happy if they went for holidays together.’

  ‘But you never did?’ Holly guessed.

  ‘No. I did tell Sandra what Jennifer had said, and it made her very angry. I had never seen her get so angry before, but I thought it was something she needed to know. Jennifer had been, how you say, walking with her boots all over her. I am sorry, but I thought that if they had a fight, Jenny woul
d go away again and I would get my beautiful girl back.’

  Holly, who knew very well that this was not what had transpired, took her eyes off the view and let them rest on her father’s face. She’d been slyly examining him all day, the shape of his mouth and the curve of his jaw, looking all the time for the genetic clues that linked them.

  ‘They did have a very big fight,’ he said, his voice growing quiet as he dug up the memory. ‘I think every person in the whole of Lithakia heard them. Jennifer shouted that Sandra had chosen me over her and there were many tears. I hated to see my girl so upset. I wanted her to be happy again, and I think it was all making me mad.’

  Holly could sense that he had reached a pivotal point in the story, because he shifted in his chair and took several, hurried glugs of water.

  ‘I was at the restaurant, like always,’ he said, keeping his voice steady. ‘Jennifer came again and waited until everyone was gone.’

  A stray cloud had been drifting across the sky and chose that exact moment to briefly obscure the sun. The deck plunged into shadow and Holly shivered violently, immediately clasping her hands around her upper body. Dennis didn’t even seem to notice, lost as he was in a memory he rarely ventured into.

  ‘I was drunk, like I always was in those days,’ he said. ‘Jennifer was also drinking. She told me she was jealous of Sandra. She told me that she wanted me to love her as much as I loved Sandra. She didn’t understand why I did not feel this way.’

  Holly swallowed.

  ‘She followed me inside,’ he said, wincing slightly at the words. ‘I pushed her away but she came again and put her hands on me. She whispered to me that she wanted me and I …’

  There were tears on his cheeks now. Holly didn’t even trust herself to breathe.

  ‘I said to her that she could have me, just for one time, but she had to leave Zakynthos. She had to promise to go and leave Sandra behind. She promised that she would do as I asked, and even as she said it she was taking off her clothes. I was too weak to stop her. I should have … I do not know what I was thinking, you understand?’

  ‘What happened afterwards?’ Holly asked, trying to imagine how her mum must have felt when the alcohol and anger wore off and she had to face up to what she’d done. It must have been horrendous. She had to have regretted it with every fibre of her being, but once it had happened there was no going back.

  Dennis lifted his head from where it had been resting in his hands and looked across at Holly. For a minute he looked horribly distraught, but then he smiled.

  ‘For so many years, I wished that I could turn the clock back to change what I did on that night. But now I see you, and you are …’ he searched for the word, ‘magnificent.’

  Holly actually laughed at this, feeling the tension crumble a little.

  ‘It happened and the next day she went away. I thought she had left the island, as she promised, but she had not – she went to stay in the north with a man she had met and then she went to the mainland. Sandra was so worried, but I couldn’t say anything to make her feel better. It was a horrible time.’

  ‘When did she come back?’ Holly asked.

  ‘At Christmas time.’ He sighed deeply. ‘She had only just found out about … about you. She was very scared and she wanted her sister.’

  ‘Did she know?’

  ‘She did, I think.’ He nodded to himself. ‘She did not say anything to me. Of course, I knew that it could be me, but I told myself that it would be another man.’

  ‘Did she ever talk about, you know, giving me away for adoption?’ Holly asked now, remembering again the hurtful words Jenny had mumbled at her in their grotty kitchen that day.

  ‘Never.’ Dennis held her gaze. ‘She was scared, yes, but she wanted you as soon as she found out. I think you gave her a purpose in life. She was lost, and now she had a role to fulfill – she was going to be a mother.’

  Holly was ten years older now than her mum had been when she had her, and she couldn’t imagine being brave enough to have a baby. She felt another wave of sympathy for the young Jenny.

  ‘Being pregnant changed her totally,’ Dennis went on. ‘When she stopped with all the drinking and all the men, she was easier. She was quiet.’

  Holly liked the idea of having been created and nurtured on this beautiful island. Could it be possible that her body and her mind somehow knew that she was back where she was made? Was that the reason she felt so at peace here, even after everything that had happened?

  ‘It was a nice time to be waiting for a baby. Springtime here can be very wet, with very much rain, but it is better than the heat of the summer. She was at her very best at that time, Jennifer, and after you came she was even better.’

  Dennis smiled briefly at some private memory. It was odd to think that he had seen her as a newborn baby, and that he must have held her and talked to her. The fact that he could look at her and see a past she could not recollect made her feel suddenly vulnerable.

  ‘I think she was born to be a mother,’ he continued, causing Holly to gasp out loud in disagreement.

  ‘She was a natural,’ he assured her. ‘I know that things became difficult, but in the beginning she loved you so much. It was – how do you say – a fierce kind of love? Is that correct? She would hold on to you so tight that I was afraid she would break you.’

  Tears snaked down Holly’s cheeks and she wiped them away furiously.

  ‘Sandra loved you almost as much as Jennifer did. It was not long before she told me that she wanted to have a baby too. It was fast,’ he admitted, ‘but I was very happy that she saw her future with me and relieved that my secret was still hidden. I let myself believe that it had all been a bad dream and that I could forget it ever happened. We started to try right away, and the summer arrived and passed by.’

  Holly, who had read Sandra’s letter to her mother so many times that she could now recite it by heart, already knew how this part of the story ended. Dennis and Sandra had spent many years trying to start their own family, but fate had cruelly stepped in and drawn a line through their plans. She was at last beginning to understand exactly why Sandra had been unable to forgive Jenny in the end. How hard it must have been to fail over and over at the one thing that had come so easily to your twin sister, and then to discover that the one man you wanted that baby with was the very same one who had given it to her. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, Holly shivered with discomfort.

  ‘When did she tell you?’ she asked, staring not at Dennis but at a spot of peeling blue paint on the deck. This part was going to be difficult for both of them.

  ‘It was the day you were going to turn five,’ he began, rubbing a nervous hand through his greying hair. ‘Sandra was trying to be happy, but she was so tired of the disappointment of not having a child. I was sure that it would happen one day, but she was starting to give up. The sparkle that she had in her eyes was starting to fade. She wanted you to know your father, she said to Jennifer that it was important, that their own father had been important.’

  ‘Did they fight?’ Holly guessed, but Dennis shook his head.

  ‘Not at the start. Jennifer had become more patient and quiet since you were born, and she was just shaking her head and laughing. We had guessed that your father must be Greek because of the way you looked, but your mother always said that she did not know for sure. I should have known. Maybe I did, but I did not want to admit it to myself.

  ‘Later that day, after you had your party at the beach and had gone to bed, Sandra was drinking. She never drank very much, but this night it was a lot. She started to cry and get angry with me. Jennifer, she came to see if everything was okay.’

  Holly tried to picture the three of them, all so young and hiding their various secrets from one another. She knew then that her mother had never planned for the truth to come out – she had wanted to keep Holly all to herself and stay in Greece.

  ‘Sandra, she started shouting at me that I was not a real man, that if I was, then
I would have given her a baby. I felt that her words were true and we were both crying and shouting.’

  He was wincing at the words and Holly stretched over a timid arm and squeezed his wrist. ‘It’s okay,’ she told him. ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘She started hitting me on my chest,’ he grunted, touching his chest with both hands as if to demonstrate. ‘She was so angry with me. I am ashamed to say this, but I was angry with her too. I was angry that she would accuse me of not being a real man.’

  He paused again to regain his composure, and Holly made herself concentrate on a point in the middle distance.

  ‘It was a very bad fight. When Jenny came, she tried to get in the middle, but there was a lot of screaming. It got very hot and then your mother … She shouted that it wasn’t my fault, that I was not the problem with the baby.’

  Putting himself back in that horrible scene had clearly made Dennis feel uncomfortable, because he was now hugging himself tightly with both hands, his upper body slumped forward in his seat and deep frown lines appearing like freshly dug trenches on his forehead.

  ‘Sandra stopped screaming afterwards, but I remember that the quiet was much more frightening. She wanted to know how her sister knew this about me. She knew what the answer was going to be, but she still made Jennifer say the words. Even when I heard her say that I was your father, forgive me, but I could not believe it. I was sure she was playing a trick on her sister, that it was just a plan to punish her, as she had done before in the past.’

  ‘Did you love my mother?’ Holly blurted. The question had come from nowhere and she immediately tried to take it back, but Dennis held up his hand to silence her.

  ‘As a sister, at times yes – she was not a bad person – but never as I did Sandra. I did not want to be with Jenny. I was perhaps still young and selfish – I wanted to have a family with the woman that I loved, not her sister. I’m sorry,’ he added, ‘but I want to tell you the truth of how it was.’

  ‘I wonder if she loved you,’ Holly said, but Dennis was shaking his head again.