‘Did you want to tell me something?’ She felt pity for the wreck before her, but it was unclear why she had been summoned.
‘Yes. Could you close the blinds, please?’ he said, as though that was the reason for requesting her presence. He squinted at the intense sunshine flooding in through the window and she lowered the grey venetian blinds, throwing the room into stripes of shade.
‘And what did you mean, Nina’s gone?’
‘She’s gone. Or at least, gone to her mother’s house. I think she spoke to Jeb. Anyway, she finally understood I’m a fiend. Should have gone years ago.’ He sounded resigned and Daphne assumed he was exaggerating.
When she returned from the window to his bedside, there was a change in his manner. ‘So you’re going to Aegina?’
‘Yes.’
‘On the boat?’
‘Yes?’ She wondered briefly whether he was all there or whether he might have sustained some brain damage after his heart failed.
‘So I need your help with something. Please don’t refuse me right off. Listen and see if you can grant me a final wish, even if it doesn’t make sense.’ He had apparently come back to life and was definitely not brain damaged. ‘You know I’m dying? Nothing can keep the cancer at bay. The next thing is probably organ failure. There’s not long left, whatever happens now.’
‘Mm.’ Daphne felt anxious.
‘Daff, I’ve realised things, I…’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. ‘Look. Look at me here, wired up like an experimental monkey in a lab. It’s humiliating. I don’t want to bloody die like this. I can’t do it, splayed out on a fucking hospital bed. I must get out. I’m desperate. And you’re the only person.’
She couldn’t understand what he was asking her to do. ‘Are you saying I should take you away from the hospital so you can die somewhere else? I can’t help you do that. That’s impossible.’
‘No. No. Of course not.’ He calmed his voice so it was soothing. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. I just need to get some different air, to see that the real world is still out there. That’s all. You could do this last thing for me – grant a dying man his final wish.’ He smiled coaxingly. ‘Just let me get to the sea. Give me the smell of freedom. Take me with you and Libby on the boat so I can breathe in the salt air of the Aegean. I don’t want anything more. Let me have a last trip and I’ll be content. Then I’ll be a good boy and do whatever the doctors order. Scout’s honour.’
‘I don’t know, Ralph.’
‘The thing is, at this stage in the game, I have a new perspective on so much. Maybe you can’t imagine, but it looks different when you know you’ll soon be gone. You start to think about eternity, how to bid farewell to the world.’
She shook her head. Ralph said, ‘You can’t understand, darling Daphne. It’s all much worse than you think.’ She assumed he was talking about his health and didn’t ask him to explain. ‘You know, I always think about you when times get rough. You give me strength.’ He reached out hesitantly and touched her hair, then quickly retracted, as if wary of what physical contact might imply. His hand was slack-skinned and almost grey in colour, with a purple bruise. ‘When I was in the hospital in London, when I was having treatments, I felt you were there with me.’
She didn’t want to hear all this. He was overloading her with weights she’d thrown away.
‘All right,’ he said, evidently noticing her unease. ‘So how about this? You take me with you to the boat. I come over to the island and I don’t even get off. What is it? An hour or so? Nothing! Afterwards, I’ll come straight back to Piraeus.’ Daphne opened her mouth to speak but he raised a hand and continued. ‘We’ve been through so much together, Daff – terrible things as well as all the wonderful stuff. But you probably have no idea of what you’ve meant to me, how you’ve kept me going through my treatments – like a guardian angel, smiling and laughing close by.’ He looked straight into her eyes. ‘You’re the only person in the world who is free-spirited enough to understand why I need to feel liberated once more, to be part of the elements, sprayed with sea salt for the last time. Do you remember that John Ireland song?’ In a low, husky voice that cracked, he sang a couple of lines of ‘I Must Go Down to the Seas Again’.
She stared at him, fascinated by the power of a dying man’s desires and torn between the attraction of abetting the grand gesture, the daunting practicalities of transporting a terminally ill patient on to a ferry, and the knowledge that she should have nothing more to do with him. There was something seductive about the idea of a last time; last meals prepared for the condemned prisoner or words of wisdom whispered on the deathbed.
‘Let me leave behind this bone-tinted, white city and see your island, with its warm, beautiful colours – those ochre walls and terracotta tiles,’ he said. ‘You see, I’ve never forgotten.’ She shook her head, trying not to reveal how tempted she felt. Without formulating it in her mind, this plot recreated an after-echo of the clandestine excitements of her youth. It was wrong and it was almost irresistible.
‘No, Ralph. I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I mean, how would we even get you there? What about all this?’ She gestured at the medical paraphernalia connecting him to machines and drips. Ralph didn’t reply. Instead, with incongruous vigour, he swung himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling pallid and spindly from his hospital gown, as he tore the tape from his hand and pulled out the cannula. He ripped off the patches stuck to his chest and a shrill bleeping made them both start, but he flicked at various switches, quickly solving the problem by yanking a plug from the mains.
‘You can’t do this,’ she said more urgently. ‘I’m not getting dragged into this madness. Sorry, but I’m going to go now.’ She put a hand on his arm, said, ‘Goodbye, Ralph,’ and left the room.
She and Libby sped back towards the port in another taxi, past crumbling, pre-war stone buildings, shiny glass business blocks and the roadside flea market where vendors had laid out pitifully meagre offerings on blankets – a few mismatched cups or some crumpled clothes.
‘I always think of your grandpa Ed in Piraeus,’ said Daphne, trying not to think about Ralph. ‘You know it’s where he met your grandmother Ellie. He was so good at describing the vibrancy mixed in with poverty. Oedipus Blues was an extraordinary book. I hope you’ll read it soon. And really, the place hasn’t changed that much.’ That wasn’t quite true, thought Daphne, when they arrived at the embarkation gate and saw several groups of Middle Eastern people, probably Syrians.
‘I came down here with Dad in the summer,’ said Libby. ‘We were handing out baby carriers and nappies and stuff when people got off the boat with nothing.’
The refugees were sitting in family groups that included both the elderly and the very young. They looked nice, Daphne thought, if dazed. And they were dressed with remarkable respectability given what they had been through.
The boat to Aegina was due to leave in twenty minutes and she sat on a bench and sent Libby to buy tickets from the kiosk. Gulls wheeled in the blue expanse above, their yelps recreating the soundtrack to so many previous sea journeys: childhood holidays with her parents; yacht trips with Constantine; the work expeditions with Libby. And of course, there was the time she and Ralph had sat on just such a bench as this, almost forty years before.
A distracted crewman took their tickets and they clattered up the metal steps to the main deck of the Agios Nektarios, occupying several orange plastic seats and tipping their faces towards a benevolent, autumnal sun. It was only a few minutes before the ferry was due to leave, when Libby said, ‘Oh my God!’ Daphne followed Libby’s horrified stare. Ralph was staggering up the last few steps towards their deck, helped by a young man, who held his arm. He was grimacing with effort and pain.