I must admit I didn’t know her very well at all. I remember her as a very beautiful and shy young woman, with an air of glamour, which was a rarer quality back in 1979 than it is now. She had a heavy fringe and long dark hair and wore beads. She reminded me of the singer Nana Mouskouri, but without the glasses. Her father had emigrated from Greece as a young man just after the war. Apparently she had never been to Greece, but she seemed the epitome of Mediterranean sophistication to my provincial land-locked brain. And she did miss the food she had known growing up amid the Greek community in London – the first time I’d ever heard the word ‘halloumi’ in my life was out of her mouth. She always ate a lot of fruit. For instance, she would produce these elegantly crafted pineapple slices – not chunks – from her lunch box and that always impressed me. I once walked past her door while she was singing ‘Rainy Days And Mondays’ and the class were all open-mouthed in awe. Her voice was on a par with Karen Carpenter (another singer from Triassic times). The kind of voice that seems to still the air and time itself.
Anyway, one evening close to the Christmas holidays I had stayed late at school, adding tinsel to a display on trigonometry, and – on the hunt for more staples – I found her at her desk. She was sitting there, picking at her nails.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ I said, intrusively, as though she was a pupil rather than a colleague, ‘you’ll chip them.’ I liked her nails. They were a warm-hued terracotta. But I felt immediately bad for saying that, especially when I saw her thousand-yard stare. I was tactless, socially. Always had been.
‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Please, don’t be,’ she said, suddenly looking at me and offering the most strained of smiles.
‘Are you all right?’
It was then that she poured her heart out. She had been off school for a week, which I had barely noticed. She was having a crisis. She hated Christmas. Her now-vanished fiancé had proposed to her on Christmas Eve the year before. Being a relatively new arrival to the area, she didn’t have any family. So I told her she could have Christmas Day with me.
And that is what happened. She came around and we watched the Queen’s speech, Goldfinger, and Blondie on Top of the Pops singing ‘Sunday Girl’. It was then Christina said she wanted to sing in front of crowds. We drank several bottles of Blue Nun, which was never the best mood stabiliser, and I apologised for the lack of pineapples. We talked late into the night.
She was feeling entirely unable to cope with things. A feeling I know more now than I did then. She was struggling with teaching, wondering if she was in the wrong career. I told her everyone at Hollybrook felt like that. At one point she mentioned Ibiza. We were on the very edge of a new decade and the Spanish package holiday boom was going strong and she’d heard of a new hotel over there looking for singers and musicians.
I was intrigued. I found her to be a mystery, and I probably asked her too many questions. It is a maths teacher trait. The value of the unknown variable must always be found.
‘I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.’
Those probably weren’t her exact words. But they capture it. And she said, ‘I know it doesn’t make any sense. I am Greek, not Spanish. There are enough Greek islands. I should go to one of them. Because I can speak the language. Kind of. And I don’t know any Spanish and I really think it is good to know the language if you live somewhere.’
‘You could learn Spanish. You should do it if you want to. You should.’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’
And then I said something very un-me. I said: ‘Not everything has to make sense.’
She had a fire in her eyes at the prospect of getting a job over there, so I told her to go for it if she wanted to, and not to worry about what people thought. I am pretty sure that’s what I said, because I remember giving her a necklace I’d had since I was a child – and on the pendant was St Christopher, patron saint of travellers. I was a lapsed Catholic and associated it too much with my upbringing but had never been able to throw it away. Giving it to Christina felt right.
‘He’ll protect you,’ I said.
‘Thank you, Grace. Thank you for helping me. With this decision.’
She sang ‘Blackbird’ at one point. She sang it solo first. Very unfestive but very beautiful. There was a bittersweet quality to her singing that made me cry. She tried to teach me. ‘You just need to become the song. Be inside it. Forget that you exist. It’s the easiest Beatles song to sing,’ she reassured me. ‘Well, after “Yesterday”. And “Yellow Submarine”.’
It turned out it wasn’t an easy song at all to sing. But we’d had enough wine not to care.
She explained her love of music to me.
‘It makes the world bigger,’ she said, eyes glossed with alcohol-infused sentiment. ‘I feel like I am trapped in a box sometimes and when I am playing piano or singing, I break out of that box for a while. Music to me is like a friend that comes in just when you need it. A bit like you, Grace.’
Anyway, we went for a walk. One of those cold Christmas walks where you smile at every stranger you pass. Well, you certainly did back then. And that was it. There really wasn’t much more to it than that. She went back to school for a few months and then she was gone. She never came around to my place again. We did speak in the staff room, although she seemed a little embarrassed in front of me. I didn’t understand it. How this lovely, talented person who wanted to sing in front of crowds was embarrassed about needing some company at Christmas. And one day – possibly the last time I saw her – she came up to me in the car park and said quietly, with tears glazing her eyes: ‘Thank you. You know, for Christmas…’
Just that. I can’t emphasise enough how much of a nothing I had thought it to be. That was all I did. Gave a person a place to be on Christmas Day decades ago.
And then, decades later, out of the blue, I get this letter. And it told me that Christina had died and that she had given me her house in Spain for ‘an act of kindness long ago’. It also made clear I could sell the house, or rent it out, if moving there was too ‘impractical’.
It was a surprise, to say the least. And one that left me feeling like I had lost more than I had gained. A friend I never really had from a time that felt like a distant dream. I had no plan to move there. As you get older, patterns become harder to break. And you don’t want them to break. My pattern had been broken various times in the past. When I retired. When my husband keeled over in his greenhouse. Even losing our dog, Bernard, had thrown me off balance. And, of course, when Daniel got hit by a Royal Mail lorry while riding his bike.
And nowadays, while I was craving the old married pattern I’d once found too much, a new pattern had formed. Feed the birds each morning. Food delivery on Monday. A morning voluntary stint at the British Heart Foundation charity shop on Friday. Cemetery on Sunday. And eternal guilt and grief and emptiness. There were only the most minor fluctuations. I had settled into the pattern called Increasingly Elderly and I had not really thought about it.
But that was all about to change.
An Ongoing Situation
‘Sorry if this is too direct,’ I told the solicitor. ‘But how did she die?’
‘I thought you knew,’ she said. Mrs Una Kemp. A voice like it had only just come out of the fridge and needed time to soften.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It stated that she had died, in the letter, but it didn’t say how. So I would like to know how she died, if possible.’
‘She died at sea…’
This wasn’t, I realised, a direct answer.
‘I’m sorry. How did she die?’
A crackle of breath on the line. ‘Oh. That is an ongoing situation.’
Ongoing situation.
‘Sorry. In what sense?’
‘In the sense that the Spanish authorities are still looking into the precise circumstances in which she died. They are very thorough. The only thing that we know for certain, the only thing that we have been told, is that she died at sea.’
It only occurred to me a good five minutes after the conversation had ended that this ambiguity seemed rather peculiar. Why were the facts so mysterious? According to the solicitor, her will had been recently changed to include me as a beneficiary. This, combined with the general bizarreness of it being left to me, filled my mind with questions.
