It must be devastating for Maya, Cleo thought, to feel she’d dedicated her whole life to achieving a goal that in the end proved worthless, like building a castle on loose sand and watching it collapse.
Somehow, she needed to find new strength and fresh purpose. Otherwise, there was a danger she’d go under.
Cleo was planning to spend another afternoon by the pool, but Tash suggested they do the coastal walk to Chora Sfakion, which Mark had recommended on the first day.
‘We can get the ferry back to Porto Liakáda when we’ve had a look round. Henrietta mentioned there might be some traditional Cretan music in the village later. Some of the local guys play together on weekend nights.’
The prospect of a long walk after this morning’s activities was somewhat daunting, but Cleo didn’t want to miss out on the hike – or the promised views. ‘That sounds good,’ she said. She’d quite forgotten until now that it was Saturday. ‘But what about supper? We don’t want to miss it.’
‘They’ll keep some back for us if we’re late. Henrietta said Mark would leave plates for us in the kitchen.’
‘Fab!’ Cleo shuffled closer to Tash, who was sitting beside her at the table, and whispered in her ear, ‘Do you think it would be nice to invite Maya?’
Tash nodded. ‘Absolutely. Will you ask her?’
Maya had just finished eating when Cleo headed purposefully round to the other side of the table to speak to her. She’d deliberately waited till Lesley had risen and was well out of earshot.
When Cleo enquired how Maya had found the classes this morning, she put on her tough, standoffish mask again.
‘All right,’ she said with a sniff. ‘But I still think Ima doesn’t challenge us enough.’
As soon as Cleo mentioned the walk, however, Maya’s face unstiffened and her whole body seemed to relax.
‘Thank you for including me,’ she said. Were her eyes slightly damp? Perhaps Cleo was imagining it. ‘I’d love to come.’
Cleo felt quite young and skittish leaving Villa Ariadne behind and strolling down the mountain with her two new friends. The sun was warm but not too hot and they were all in shorts, T-shirts and trainers, clutching water bottles and with just a small bag each slung over their shoulders.
Tash had borrowed a map from Henrietta, but the route round the headland and along the cliff was quite obvious, if a little scary. They had to pick their way carefully round boulders and across the uneven, stony ground.
Meanwhile, the mighty sea smashed repeatedly against the rocks far below, roaring like thunder and spurting sprays of shattered glass high into the air.
After about half an hour, they stopped to let a small group of serious-looking hikers, with poles and rucksacks, pass by in the opposite direction. Other than that, however, they were alone.
They mostly walked in single file, except when the route widened enough for them to go two or three abreast.
‘I’ve booked a half-hour neck and shoulder massage with Anthea tomorrow afternoon,’ Cleo told Maya, making small talk when they were side by side. ‘Are you going to have any treatments?’
‘No,’ Maya replied. ‘At least, I haven’t given it any thought. It’s funny,’ she went on, after a short pause. ‘I used to have regular massages once a week, like clockwork. I even had my own dedicated massage room at home, with special lighting and a proper therapy bed and everything. Now, it’s filled with rubbish – mostly stuff from work that I’ll probably never look at again.
‘I also had a cleaner, an ironing lady, a gardener, a personal shopper, a secretary, a personal trainer, a nutritionist and a hair stylist. Imagine! I paid the hairdresser a fortune to be at my beck and call whenever I wanted.
‘At the time, I couldn’t imagine not having all these people running round doing things for me; now, I’ve got no one except my cleaner, who comes once a week for two hours, and I realise I didn’t need most of them at all.
‘These days, I go to the bog-standard hairdresser round the corner, and you know what? It’s absolutely fine. And I can manage the house and garden perfectly well on my own. I could have saved myself a fortune if I’d realised sooner. I thought having lots of staff was a status symbol, a sign of having made it, like driving a flash new car. But now I’ve stripped everything back and it’s just me, I realise I’m the same frightened little girl with low self-esteem I always was, seeking validation in all the wrong places. Pathetic, really.’
Cleo frowned. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. What’s done is done. Anyway, I imagine you did need lots of help when you were working crazy hours – and you could afford it. Now you’ve cut back. Period. It’s no good any of us constantly looking behind us, wishing we’d done things differently. We need to focus on the here and now and think about what we want going forwards. As my dad used to say, life isn’t a rehearsal. He’s dead now – and he was right.’
As soon as she’d finished her speech, Cleo clamped her mouth shut, thinking she’d done quite enough talking. She hoped she hadn’t sounded preachy, as if she thought she had everything sorted. Nothing could be further from the truth, and she certainly didn’t practise what she preached either.
Her companions didn’t seem to object to her words, however.
‘I so agree with you,’ Tash said fervently. ‘The past is over and I do try to focus on the future. I just wish I could stop getting these awful flashbacks of when my husband, Alfie, was ill and dying. They’re always dragging me back, keeping me stuck in the misery and fear.’
Cleo shuddered. ‘I don’t know how you survived during that period; it must have been so traumatic.’
Tash breathed in and out deeply. ‘If it wasn’t for Jamie, I’m not sure I would have. He depended on me. I had to keep going for his sake.’
The women were about two thirds of the way there now and were beginning to see the shops, restaurants and houses of Chora Sfakion more clearly. A giant ferry, like the one they’d taken to Porto Liakáda on the first day, pulled out of the port and chugged slowly past them.
