Page 3 of The Woman Who Said Yes

‘How come?’ I ask, intrigued.

‘He’s just…’ She pauses as if struggling to sum up the man in mere words. ‘Well, he’s very handsome but it’s not just that. That’s a tiny part of it. He just has this… air about him, you know? Like with certain actors, whenever they’re on screen you can’t take your eyes off them?’

I nod. ‘They just have that… thing.’

‘Exactly.’ She laughs and shakes her head, as if still processing the wonderment of it all. ‘And the weird thing is, wherever I was, he always seemed to be right there.’

‘Not that you’d been following him around the ship.’ Sam crooks a brow.

‘Honestly, I wasn’t! Anyway, I’d figured that he couldn’t possibly be on his own.’

‘You thought there must be a wife,’ I prompt her.

‘Oh, yeah. Of course.’

‘But there wasn’t.’ Sam catches my eye with a smile, and I’m filled with a particular kind of all-engulfing warmth. Because there’s nothing like being with these two, and it’s always been this way.

Almost forty years ago I’d left my tiny West Yorkshire village for London with a suitcase of clothes, my trusty hair crimpers and a small rucksack tightly packed with tinned prunes – gifted by Mum to ‘keep you regular, love’. As if the prime concern of moving to a vast, sprawling city where I knew not a soul wasn’t crime, loneliness or unscrupulous landlords, but constipation.

I’d found a suspiciously cheap bedsit with a shared bathroom, a badly sloping floor and a job at a knitwear store on Oxford Street. Mile upon mile of exorbitantly priced, brightly coloured sweaters: as working environments go, I know it doesn’t sound terrible. However, it was our duty to keep the stock neatly folded and these weren’t normal sweaters that sat obediently on shelves. No, these would wilfully rumple themselves up the moment our backs were turned – flinging out a sleeve, or partially flopping out of a cubbyhole as if preparing to hurl themselves to the floor.

For a single jumper to not be perfectly stacked was regarded as an outrage by our manager. And Sam and Eva and I were so bad at folding. At least, we never managed to achieve the impeccable standards required by Rita’s fascist regime. It was like when you think you can drive – at least, you’ve grasped the basics – but in the presence of a driving examiner, you mistake the windscreen wipers for the indicator and mount the kerb. So we weren’t exactly Rita’s star employees, even before Eva’s pummelled-arse exposure. ‘The Knitwits,’ she termed us, accompanied by fierce glares through chunky black-framed specs.

None of us really cared. I was just thrilled to be in London, working two jobs – I’d added in evening shifts at a bar, stuffing lime wedges into bottles of Corona – and having made these wonderful new friends. For Sam, at eighteen, the shop was a stopgap before embarking on a graphic design course. Eva had rolled up in London a couple of years before me, having left her sleepy little town on the west coast of Scotland, and found herself squatting with several others in a disused pub before finding a legitimate house share.

She seemed wild and fearless. I’d never met anyone quite like this rural girl who’d not merely embraced London, but thrown herself headlong at it. After her unceremonial sacking for snoozing in the stockroom (could anyone blame her for napping on piles of pillowy knitwear?) she’d waltzed off to assist a high-ranking fashion stylist. Yet somehow, our brief spell in that overheated store had bonded us forever. And here we are, in our favourite Greek restaurant: still the Knitwits on our WhatsApp. A little frayed perhaps, and at certain points each one of us has unravelled. But I know we’ll always be a tight little gang of three.

Tara, Niko’s daughter, was a toddler when we first discovered this place, tucked away down an unprepossessing side street. We got to know the family and witnessed Niko soldiering on as a widower after his wife died when Tara was in her teens. Now Tara has a gorgeous ten-year-old daughter and she and her dad are a tight little team. Happily, the decor hasn’t altered: dried flower bunches and macramé hangings still adorn the bumpy plaster walls. ‘Here you go, guys,’ she says warmly, crowding our table with plates of creamy tzatziki and golden feta pies drizzled with honey, plus fat green olives, blush-pink taramasalata and her father’s soft, delicious home-baked bread. We thank her and briefly catch up on family news.

When we’re alone again, Eva continues with her story. ‘I still didn’t know he’d come on the cruise on his own. We just started chatting on the walking tour, keeping it low-key. Because the guide’s commentary was still going on, you know? And we didn’t want to seem rude.’

‘God forbid.’ Sam pops an olive into his mouth.

‘Then Dom looked at me,’ she goes on, ‘and said, “Don’t fancy ditching this, do you? Just doing our own thing?” And I’d been thinking how nice it’d be to do that. To subtly detach ourselves from the group and sneak away…’

‘Those tours aren’t compulsory, are they?’ I ask.

‘No, they’re optional. Some people don’t even bother to leave the ship.’

‘Really? Wow,’ I marvel. Neither I, nor Sam, have ever experienced that kind of holiday. Eva hadn’t either. However, she’d just turned sixty when her late aunt’s generous cash gift had arrived. A complete surprise – with that thrilling stipulation that it must be used entirely for fun. In almost forty years, we’ve never known Eva to have any spare funds.

‘Let’s all go away,’ she’d announced at the time. However, that hadn’t seemed right to me and Sam.

‘We’ll do that another time,’ I said.

‘Yeah, this is for you, Eves,’ Sam insisted. ‘Why not do something you’d never do normally?’

‘Like a cruise?’ I suggested.

‘On my own?’ She wasn’t sure at first.

‘You’ve done plenty of trips by yourself,’ I reminded her. ‘And think how relaxing that would be.’ She’d been insanely busy with the celebrity she looks after, who takes all the credit for her widely admired style. So a Mediterranean cruise was booked.

‘It still felt naughty,’ Eva admits now, ‘as we peeled away from the group. But of course, no one even noticed.’ And soon, she goes on, she and Dom were meandering through narrow streets, away from the garish ceramics and Duomo tea towels and neon plastic figurines of Michelangelo’s David. Finally, reassured that they weren’t going to be spotted and frog-marched back to the group, they stepped into a little restaurant tucked away in a little side alley. ‘We ate grilled chicken and sautéed potatoes and drank wine,’ she enthuses. ‘The simplest food you could cook at home yourself. Well, some people could.’ She laughs, because she never cooks – not even when she has friends over. She buys in various meal components and assembles them and, quite rightly, never apologises for the fact.

‘So, tell us more,’ I prompt her. Eva munches on a sliver of feta pie, stretching out the tension. We never bother with mains here. Instead, we graze happily on a procession of starters, as they’re still called at Niko’s – the small plates concept having bypassed this little taverna.

‘He’s like no one I’ve ever met,’ she says. ‘That’s the only way I can put it.’