Of course, my dear. That must have been horrid.
Horrid meant nothing as a word, but her voice was faint, I had been right, it would have been too much to ask this woman, who was older than she seemed, to look at Christopher’s body. I was now the one to feel contrition, I had invoked Christopher’s body in order to avert confrontation, this was despicable. Isabella cleared her throat and withdrew her hand, a cue for me to remove my own hand, which I did.
Mark is useful in these situations, any man would do better than a woman—this is Greece, after all. They’re terribly sexist.
She had become solicitous, even maternal. My evident distress, she presumed at the memory of Christopher’s body, had in some way reassured her, as if it were a relief not to dwell on her own turbulent emotions.
We both loved him, she said. That will always be something that we share, no matter what happens.
This was a very personal thing to say, but she was not looking at me as she said it, she was looking over my shoulder, as if watching someone approach. I turned—I thought it might be Mark, or perhaps the waiter—but the terrace was empty, she was staring at nothing. She then turned back to the water, still wearing the same abstracted expression she had worn when proclaiming our shared love for Christopher, as if it were the expression she considered appropriate for talking about love, love and Christopher.
We will need to decide what to do with the body.
I did not want to use the word body and yet I did not know what else to say—it would have been morbid to refer to the corpse as Christopher, it was assuredly not Christopher, but instead an object of decaying flesh and bone, an object of no small horror, it. And yet there was a coarseness to my statement that I did not like, if there had been euphemisms at my disposal I would have happily used them, all of them, as many as required. Isabella nodded.
It—she accepted this dehumanizing word, she reverted to it as I had—will be sent back to London, of course. I cannot imagine cremating Christopher here, much less burying him, what would be the purpose? This is not a place that had any particular meaning to him. He just happened to be here when he was killed. I have no intention of ever returning to this place.
We will need to go to the police station. There will be some formalities.
She frowned.
I think we should send Mark. He can deal with that. Like I said, the Greeks are terribly sexist.
At that moment, Mark finally appeared on the terrace. He was a large and rather impressive man, who took care of his appearance, even now he was dressed like a typical Englishman abroad, in light-colored linens and a straw hat, as if he were mainly on holiday and incidentally collecting the body of his son. Only upon closer examination—as he made his way across the terrace and toward our table—did the grief become visible in his face, and I had a vision of Mark, moving through their apartment in Eaton Square, mechanically packing his bag for a visit he could not have imagined, much less foreseen, one day earlier.
The practicalities of the task would have been a comfort to him, I knew Mark well enough to say that. He would have checked the temperature in Gerolimenas on his computer, he wouldn’t have known the place offhand, he would have had to look it up on a map. Then, he would have taken out his suitcase and placed it on the bed before picking out his shirts and trousers and jackets, enough for as long as a week, because he did not know, at that point, exactly what awaited him in Greece.
Despite Mark’s generally patient nature, I thought the difference in their manner of grieving might easily open up a chasm between the couple, I could imagine his response to Isabella’s grief, he might have thought or even said to himself, Anyone would think from her behavior that Christopher was her child alone. And his mind might have returned to an old and lingering doubt: there was no particular likeness between Mark and Christopher, who looked entirely like Isabella, as if he had sprung from her womb without interference from any third party.