She does so. It’s sharp and dizzyingly strong. ‘You’re kidding me, right?Snakebite? Guinness and cider?’
‘I thought you’d like a blast from the past.’
‘God, I haven’t tasted this since forever.’ She sips. ‘It’s not bad, actually.’
‘Said to be a guaranteed knicker-dropper, back in the day.’
‘Yes, we girls were well aware of that.’ Eve grins, and a small black-and-tan dachshund races across the floor and starts to bark at her. ‘Oxana hated dachshunds,’ she says. ‘It was one of her things. Her many mad things.’
‘Who’s Oxana?’ Jack asks.
Eve sits stock-still for a moment, drink in hand. ‘I didn’t tell you?’
‘Er… no. You didn’t.’
‘She was my partner. Until very recently.’
‘Ah.’
‘I should have said.’ She carefully puts down the glass. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything, Eve.’
‘No, you… You should know.’
‘You said you left your husband for someone else. That was Oxana?’
‘Yes. It was.’
‘And that ended recently.’
She nods.
‘Painfully?’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I’m moving on. So many new things. Philippa and her witchcraft, meeting you again after all these years…’
‘And drinking snakebite.’
‘Drinking snakebite most of all. But thank you for the recital. I loved it, and it really helped me.’
‘Helped you?’
‘It reminded me who I am. Where I came from.’
Well, that was embarrassing. It’s not true that I thought I’d told him about Oxana. I mentioned her by mistake. She was on my mind and I spoke without thinking. Not that there’s anything wrong with him knowing about her. She’s just a name; he’s never going to meet her. But in the last few days I’ve had this uneasy sense of the barriers between my different lives dissolving. Of the past and present bleeding into each other.
I didn’t want to bring my life with Oxana here. I wanted to leave it, and her, behind me. But coming here has taught me that you can’t ever really start again. You can push the past away as forcefully as you like; it still catches up with you. Youcan wake up in any amount of new places, but it’s still you gazing back at yourself from the mirror.
Where’s Oxana now? In danger? She must be getting closer to the moment when she has to break cover and risk everything. I’m afraid that our breakup will be on her mind, distracting her from her already dangerous task. I know that we’re over, and that she’s a world away, but I’m still terrified for her, and this stops me from seeing Jack clearly. Seeing him for the decent, patient and yes, sexy guy that he is. He’s tough – I’m under no illusion as to what soldiering in Afghanistan was like, and the brutality of those deployments didn’t break him, even if it fractured him – but he still sees so much beauty in the world around him, he’s kind to those frankly unprepossessing kids, and he seems, God knows why, to care about me. Is it time to let go of the past? Is it time to move on?
31
In the launch, heading into the port of Kytheria, Oxana senses that Emir is watching her, and she lets her face go blank. She’s sitting between Defne and the crew member who’s steering the boat. Opposite her, Buse’s head is tilted back, her eyes are closed, and her blonde hair is streaming behind her in the warm evening breeze. She addresses intermittent comments to Defne, but studiously ignores Emir, while at the same time clearly being acutely conscious of him.