On the Christmas before the credit crunch exploded in our faces, my mother-in-law bought me a spectacular vanity case. A leather studded Versace with enough capacity for ten litres of age-defying products.
The following Easter she bought me a course of Botox. Clearly the ten litres had not been enough.
Bridgette was the sort of person who gaveth with the one hand and tooketh away with the other. Still desperately clinging to the notion I might conceive after four failed IVF attempts, she somehow conflated looking-younger with fertile eggs.
Behind my back she worked on Andrew to leave me for a younger woman and have a second go at gene proliferation. Who could blame her? I was only thirty-two but my ovaries were at least two hundred. Andrew was ten years older than me and needed to get a move on, or else he’d be mistaken for a grandfather on sports days.
How ironic that he’d selected a younger model to settle down with after screwing just about everyone his age in Greater London and the Counties, only to discover the younger model was a dud. It irked Bridgette beyond belief. I knew this because whenever I came into the kitchen and interrupted them over the Aga they’d both go silent.
Andrew leaving me was something I secretly feared myself although I never dared raise it. We didn’t share our insecurities.
Politics.
Economics.
The couple next door.
They were all up for grabs, but never our anxieties, our hopes and fears for the future. Especially not my ovaries. That would have been ‘dreadfully middle class’. Instead I tried to compensate by being the most pleasing wife in Chelsea. As long as other men desired me, Andrew would want me too. Vast quantities of money were dedicated to this end. I cooked haute cuisine, kept an immaculate house and dressed in a style that said effortlessly-classy-yet-sexy.
Glossy well-cut hair.
Plumped breasts.
Flawless skin.
On the night we left for Greece I packed enough sun cream to smear around the stratosphere three times and block out solar radiation for a year. I had no intention of returning from our little Hellenic adventure looking like a sultana.
Of all the places to buy a second property, a deserted goat-infested island in the Cyclades was not one I would have earmarked. What was wrong with Brittany where the weather was as shit as England and you had less chance of dying from skin cancer?
But after nine years of marriage, the penny was finally starting to drop that choice didn’t come in to it with Andrew. You simply got swept along on the tsunami of his enthusiasm, and woke up a few months later feeling resentful and irrelevant. His was the footprint in life we followed. He carried me on his back so that I needn’t get my feet dirty and leave any footprints at all.
The Greek adventure was partly prompted by the social circle we moved in. Andrew’s ex-Marlborough crowd were a well-heeled mob, the descendants of lords and ladies and cotton barons. Andrew was the son of an accountant. My dad owned a hardware store. That was before a multinational chain muscled its way into town and bankrupted him. That was before he developed depression, then cancer, then died and left me and my mum to fend for ourselves.
Our Chelsea crowd lived the high life. Yachts, summers in Saint Tropez, winters in Cloisters. The mandatory second home in Majorca, Ibiza, the Dordogne, with six bedrooms furnished by Jasper Conran. Andrew had been lamenting the second-home-shaped-hole in our lives for some time, but the playgrounds of the jet set were simply beyond our reach.
That’s when he came upon the epiphany of an island house in the Cyclades. The Marlborough set might do sumptuous, extravagant, opulent – but we could do interesting, quirky, surprising. Greece was going bankrupt and Andrew said a fire sale was imminent. In the spring of 2011 you could already buy a four-bedroom house with a sea view for half a million euros in Naxos.
Unfortunately we didn’t have half a million euros so we had to look further afield. Two stomach-churning ferry journeys later he came upon Iraklia, a tiny island with a permanent population of a hundred and fifty that swelled to a few thousand during the summer. He’d been there on a business trip and came back waxing lyrical about the balmy evenings, the delicious honey and the fragrant herb-covered hills. After he found it described in the Lonely Planet Guide as ‘a sleeping Aegean gem’, our fate was sealed.
Three months later I was stuck in Iraklia in temperatures of thirty degrees with my face falling off. The only fragrance I could smell was goat.
It’s the metalloproteinases that ruin the collagen in your skin. Under normal conditions they’re there to assist and repair, but excessive sun can make them spiral out of control. The UV also creates free radicals, which break the collagen down and leave it unable to regenerate itself. None of our Chelsea set went into the sun anymore after Nicole Kidman made it fashionable to go around looking like Nosferatu. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me. We responded to our fear of aging (thus death) by going around looking like cadavers. I added luminosity to my corpselike appearance by applying a thick layer of Piz Buin factor fifty each morning on Iraklia and swaddling myself in scarves and shawls. Locals frequently mistook me for the mummified body of Agios Ioannis and ran off screaming as I approached. Not flattering I know, but rather a mummy than a prune.
Iraklia was an unusual little place. A couple of dusty mountains poking out the Aegean with only two villages and three small beaches.
One cash machine.
One doctor.
One extortionate supermarket.
That was soon to change though because what most people didn’t know was that Iraklia was on its way to becoming a major tourist destination. This privileged information came from the hallowed corridors of Brussels itself. As EU Commissioner for European Development, Andrew was responsible for doling out the pot of money set aside for promoting economic growth in underperforming areas of the union. Iraklia was a pet project of his and he knew exactly how much had been allocated for infrastructure schemes. As we drove around the island he proudly pointed out the manifestations of this benevolence – a school, a desalination turbine, a new road - as if he personally was the munificent St Nicholas that had given over his own savings to bestow such generosity upon the island.
More irksome were the stock phrases he reserved for dignitaries like Ajax Galitsis, his local fixer.
‘Education is self-perpetuating’ was for when we passed a half-built school on the way to Panagia.
‘Water’s the source of all life’ was reserved for sun-downer cruises past the desalination turbine.
His favourite place to stop for an oration was in front of the oversized EU sign at the top of the new beach road that had been blasted through the mountains to Merihas bay.
‘Tourists
