His Penniless Beauty

Familiarity rushed through her. How many times had she and he sat together, talking about everything, anything, the flow of conversation easy, stimulating, engaging, enthralling? This was Nikos as she remembered him in those golden days she had spent with him, with time flashing by, his keen mind a foil to hers, his ready laugh, his easy smile—

Because it had never, never just been his incredible looks that had captivated her—it had been so much more. The sheer pleasure of his company, the ease, the companionship…

Emotion tugged at her—a poignancy she could not avert. She felt it running through her veins like a darting arrow. How much she had lost in losing him! How much!

Yet counterpointed to the sense of loss was for now, for this fleeting, brief time, a sense of something so precious that she felt it was like a jewel nestled in her palm. However fleeting this evening was, however illusory, that sense of bitterness was washed away, and the time now was real. However fleeting, she would be grateful for it, glad for it—drinking the sweet, heady wine that it offered her to the very last.

Outside, the evening had darkened into night, and the candle on the table threw its light on to the glass of the conservatory window, creating, as it did, a flickering parallel world. Sophie’s eyes drifted towards it, and she felt her emotions quicken again—they were there, she and Nikos, in that parallel world of light and shadow, illuminated together.

Together…

The word pierced in her heart and she felt its power. There in that shadow world there had been no separation. In that shadow world there was no bitter past. There, in the illusory reality of the candle-light, it was as if they had always been like this—as if the years of parting had never been. She felt her mind run on, seizing a present that could never be out of a past that never was.

If we had never parted that could be us, there, in that other existence! That could be the reality, and these four long bitter years could have been the sweetest of all!

For precious moments she let herself revel in the sweetness of the thought, the beguiling, wondrous fantasy that she and Nikos were simply here together, man and wife, come down to visit his beautiful abandoned house, to plan its restoration, to fill it once more with life and love, envisage it as a place for them to live in. She and him…a family…a happiness to last a lifetime….

She knew it was not real, could not be real, and yet in her mind it was. In her mind as she sat there, sipping at her wine, eating the delicious morsels of food, and gazing, oh, just gazing—and gazing and gazing—at the man so close to her, it was all the reality she craved. All the reality she yearned for. The other reality, the one she had been condemned to, which weighed and crushed and pulled her down, had slipped away. Now there was only this sweet, wondrous reality. And it was enough…

Waiters came to clear the table, presenting her with a dessert menu. She chose randomly, and something duly appeared, together with a glass of sweet, delicate Beaune de Venise, which she sipped as she spooned up the delicious concoction before her. Her mind was getting hazy, but she didn’t care. The outer world, her consciousness of it, seemed to be receding. A strange sense of dissociation drifted down on her. She found she could sit, sipping her sweet wine, and let Nikos’s voice wind about her as her eyes rested on him. It was strange, so strange, she found herself thinking bemusedly. How she could just sit here…gazing at him. Taking him in…all his male perfection…her eyes drifting over him…

Nikos—only Nikos…only ever Nikos in all the world for me…

Her heart was full with emotion, the jewel in her palm rich and rare and so, so precious…

‘Sophie?’

Her name sounded in the air, sibilant and questioning. Nikos was looking at her enquiringly, his chair half pushed back. The dining room was almost deserted, the candle burnt low. The couple in the glass had vanished.

Or had they?

She got to her feet, as Nikos did the same, and then he was there, ushering her out as they were bowed away by the waiter—the last diners to leave, she saw. And Nikos was at her side, falling in beside her, as they stepped through the open French windows into the garden beyond the conservatory restaurant. She felt his presence, his closeness. Felt the rightness of his place at her side.

This is where he should be—where I should be…

Like the couple in the glass. Together.

‘Are you cold?’ Nikos’s enquiry was solicitous as he walked beside her on the dimly lit path.

Sophie shook her head. She wasn’t cold. The wine in her veins and the soft summer night warmed her. So did the heat in her blood. Was her pulse heavier than it normally was? Or was she just more conscious of the beating of her heart?