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his father’s side.
    ‘Go round when?’
    ‘Now. We’re only half an hour away. Giagia was complaining that you’re nearly due back home already and she hasn’t seen you.’
    I was puzzled. ‘But she knows she’ll see me on Sunday. We always have the last lunch before I go home with her and Papous.’
    ‘Come on, Nichi. They’re old, they want to see their family.’
    ‘Christos, do we have to have dinner with them? I’m getting a migraine. I’m so tired. I don’t feel well. Look at what I’m wearing.’ I had thrown a cheap, creased sundress over my bikini as we had left, and hadn’t bothered to wash my hair after swimming. ‘I can’t go round like this. It’s disrespectful!’
    ‘It’s more disrespectful if we don’t go when they are expecting us.’
    ‘But they didn’t ask! They told us. You told me!’
    He was glowering. ‘You’re being unreasonable. It’s no trouble to go round to theirs for dinner, especially not when you’re starving. Think about them for once.’
    Christos just didn’t get it. This wasn’t about dinner, it was about decisions being made for me. Again. Last night I had been torn between total commitment to make our relationship work and terror that it might not. But now I felt defiant. What was the point putting the effort in when there was no compromise here?
    I couldn’t carry on feeling this stifled. Christos had never treated me as a submissive wife-in-waiting and I wasn’t about to start now. When I got back to London, I decided, I would be fully utilising my newfound freedom. I loved Christos like nothing else but maybe it was time to build a more independent life for myself. Maybe this was all going to turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
    I just couldn’t quite feel how yet.

CHAPTER 7
    In the passport queue at Heathrow, I started to shiver. It was already autumn in London. I reached around for my denim jacket, which was knotted around the strap of my bag. It was still damp. All the way back from Greece, I had sobbed into it, sat with it wrapped about my face like a widow’s veil. After my emotional parting from Christos, I had wanted to be left alone to cry in peace, and I knew the genial Greek flight attendants would be distressed for me, and only try to offer comfort, comfort that nobody, not even Christos, could bring.
    Now, back in Britain, I was feeling fractionally better. Well, perhaps not better, but resolute. I had cried myself into calm and was ready to face the flat again. Originally we had intended to move out at the end of August but there was no way I could move all of our stuff alone, so we had kept it on for a few more weeks. Christos’s friend Markos had, in the meantime, bought an apartment in the Docklands. That would be Christos’s new home. And my new residence? A room in a shared flat south of the river, where I knew neither the neighbourhood, nor the other tenant.
    Back at our flat, I flung my jacket, bag and suitcase on the floor, lay down on the bed and started playing out the last few days’ events in my mind.
    Dinner with the grandparents had been bearable in the end. Christos’s parents and his cousin had also joined us, which saved me from being the sole target of Giagia Georgia’s inquisition.
    The next morning, Christos and I took a trip to the village where his mother was born.
    ‘There’s a small local festival on today,’ he told me, ‘and the main church will have been decorated by the villagers. It’ll be very pretty. I know how you love to get your Orthodox fix, Egg!’
    Mama’s village was a two-and-a-half-hour drive away from the house and not on any map. I hoped Christos knew the way. In the night, the air conditioning had broken down and neither of us got a decent night’s sleep. ‘Are you sure you want to drive when you’re so tired, Christos
mou
?’
    ‘Yes of course. We need to get out of the house.’
    ‘But we could just check into a hotel if we wanted to do that! Remember? Like that time in