At sixty-seven I took my first trip abroad and promised myself I'd say yes to everything for one week. On the last evening the waiter greeted the man I'd fallen for by name — a restaurant he'd told me he had never been to — and then he took a phone call and did not come back for fifteen minutes.
PART 1 — THE COURTYARD
For sixty-seven years I took the safe one.
I have never lived more than eleven miles from the house I was born in. I have never been on an aeroplane before last year. I have never once booked anything simply because I wanted to.
Arthur and I were married for forty-one years. He was a quantity surveyor and he was a careful man and I was a careful woman and we were extremely happy, and I want that said at the front because people assume a story like this must start with a bad marriage.
He died four years ago in the March.
After that my world got smaller in a way I did not notice at the time. I stopped driving at night. I stopped going to the Thursday thing. By the third year I had a route through the week that never took me past anywhere unexpected.
I want to describe that properly, because "her world got smaller" is a phrase that sounds like sadness and it was not sadness. It was efficiency.
Monday the big shop. Tuesday the churchyard. Wednesday Frankie's for tea. Thursday nothing. Friday the library and the chemist, in that order, because they are on the same side of the road.
Four years of that and I was not unhappy. That is the thing nobody believes. I slept well. I read a great deal. I was perfectly content in the way a person is content when they have stopped asking.
The two things I did stop doing, I stopped without deciding.
The first was driving after dark, which went in the second winter because of a dazzle on a wet road one night on the bypass, and which I told nobody about, and which within about four months had turned into not going anywhere after five o'clock between October and March.
The second was the Thursday group. Arthur and I had gone for nine years. I went twice after he died and both times somebody was kind to me in the doorway and I could not do it a third time.
And here is the part I did not see until much later.
Every single one of those was a safe choice, and I had been making safe choices since I was nineteen, and what widowhood actually did was not change me. It removed the last person who had ever talked me into anything.
Arthur booked things. That was his job in that marriage for forty-one years. He booked and I objected and then I went and had a lovely time and said so.
I have never once in my life been the one who booked.
Then one afternoon my daughter was in my kitchen and she said:
"Mum. When was the last time you did something just because it made you happy?"
I could not answer her.
That night I sat with a laptop on my knees for about two hours and then I booked a flight to Sarveglia, which is a place I had seen in a photograph in a dentist's waiting room in 2011 and had thought about perhaps forty times since.
Before I got on that plane I made myself one promise.
For seven days I would say yes to everything.
Yes to food I could not identify. Yes to boats. Yes to strangers. Yes.
On the second day I was standing in a street in Portavella with a map the wrong way up when I walked into somebody.
He laughed and said, "First time on the island?"
His name was Osian Brandt. He was seventy. He had lost his wife six years before and he was funny in a way that did not require you to do anything.
We had coffee that afternoon. Breakfast the next morning. A ferry to Ceona the day after that, and I ate an octopus and did not hate it.
For the first time in four years I forgot to check what time it was.
One evening we sat on a wall by the water and he said, "I'm very glad you said yes."
And I said, "So am I."
By the end of that week I could not think about the flight home without something going wrong in my chest.
On my last evening he took me to a small place on the harbour in Portavella called Casa Verrine.
"I've got one more surprise for you," he said in the taxi.
And when we came in, the waiter came straight over and said, warmly, "Mr. Brandt. Lovely to see you again."
Again.
Osian had told me two days earlier that he had never eaten there and had been meaning to try it for a year.
I had about four seconds to decide what to do with that, and before I got anywhere his phone went and he looked at the screen and stood up.
"I'll be one minute. I'm sorry."
Ten minutes. Then fifteen.
I sat at that table with two menus and a basket of bread and I got colder and colder, and at eighteen minutes I got up and said I was going to find the ladies.
The way to it goes past the kitchen door, and past that there is an arch into a small courtyard with two crates and a light over it.
He was out there with his back to me.
And he was saying, "—no, she's eaten properly every day, I've made sure of it."
I stopped walking.
"She has. She's been swimming twice." A pause. "Frankie, listen—"
My daughter's name.
I took one more step and stood in the dark by that arch and listened to the rest of it.
PART 2 — THE PASSPORT FORM
I need to go back about a year, to a Sunday lunch, because that is where the whole of this actually starts.
It was Arthur's brother's seventieth. Twenty-five of us at a long table in a function room at a hotel on the ring road.
I had filled in a passport application that week.
First one of my life. Sixty-six years old and I had never needed one, and I had got the form from the post office and done it at my own kitchen table over two evenings, and I had it in my handbag because I was going to ask my nephew about the photograph.
I got it out at that table. Not as an announcement. I said something about how I was thinking about going somewhere, and I had it in my hand.
Frankie reached over and took it out of my hand.
She unfolded it, looked at it for about two seconds, folded it again, and put it under her own place mat.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
"Give me that. Mum, you've never been further than the coast. Somebody would have to go with you. Now put it away and eat."
The table went quiet.
Twenty-five people. My brother-in-law at the head of it. Two of my oldest friends. My own grandson, who is twenty-two and who told me eleven months later that he had wanted to say something and had not been able to think what.
Nobody said one word.
And I said, "Yes, all right," and passed somebody the potatoes.
I want to be very careful about how I write about my daughter, because she is not a villain and because she is going to read this, and she has read every draft.
Frankie is thirty-nine. She was in that house when her father died and she was the one who dealt with the undertaker because I could not, and she has rung me every single day since, and there has not been one day in four years when she did not.
She was not being cruel at that table. That is the part that took me a year to understand and the part that makes it worse rather than better.
She was frightened.
She had watched her mother stop driving at night and stop going out on Thursdays, and she had decided somewhere in the second year that I was becoming something she needed to hold up, and she had been holding for two years, and she was extremely tired.
And in the December she said the thing she had been thinking for two years out loud at a table of twenty-five, in one sentence, with my passport form under her place mat.
Somebody would have to go with you.
I got the form back the next morning. She dropped it round and she said sorry and she meant it and she made me a coffee.
I sent it off on the Monday.
PART 3 — SEVEN DAYS
I want to put the week down before I put the courtyard down, because the courtyard has a way of eating everything in front of it and the week was real.
I flew on a Saturday. I did not sleep the night before and I was at that airport three and a half hours early and I cried in the toilets twice, both times out of sheer fright, and then I got on an aeroplane at sixty-seven years old and did not mention any of that to anybody.
Sunday I walked about eleven miles and got sunburnt and ate at a place with plastic chairs because I could not work out how to get into anywhere else.
Monday I met Osian.
Tuesday we went round the old town and he showed me a doorway with a date on it from 1611 and I put my hand on it.
Wednesday was the ferry to Ceona. There is a beach there that you get to down a hundred and eleven steps and I did all of them and had to sit at the bottom for a while, and he sat with me and did not make a thing of it.
I swam. First time in about nineteen years. I had not brought a costume and I bought one in a shop for the equivalent of about eleven pounds and it was a terrible colour.
Thursday I said yes to a boat with eleven other people on it and was sick over the side and laughed about it.
Friday we did almost nothing. We sat outside a bar for four hours and he talked about his wife, Ineke, who died in the November of 2019, and I talked about Arthur, and neither of us tried to make it not sad.
That is the conversation I would keep if I could only keep one.
He asked me what Arthur had been like and I said careful, and he said that was not a small word, and I said no, it is not.
And he said, "Ineke used to say I was the opposite of careful and it was going to kill us both." Then he said, "She was right about the first part."
Saturday was the last evening.
I need to say one more thing about that week before the rest.
It was not that he was charming, because he was, and charm is cheap and I have been sixty-seven years old long enough to know it.
It was that he asked one more question than he needed to.
Every time. About the church I had mentioned, about my knee, about what I had actually done for forty years, which is that I was a medical secretary for a group practice from 1979 to 2016 and nobody had asked me about that in about six years.
That is the thing I said yes to. Not a boat.
PART 4 — WHAT HE WAS SAYING
Here is the whole of what I heard standing in the dark by that arch, and I heard nearly all of it because he was on that phone for eleven more minutes.
There is a company. It operates on that island and on two others and it is completely legitimate and it has a website.
What it does is provide a local companion for older people travelling alone. Somebody who meets you, shows you the town, makes sure you eat, makes sure you get back to your hotel, and reports to the family at the end of each day.
It is not a dating service and it is not a care service. It is somewhere in between and it exists because an enormous number of adult children cannot sleep when their mother gets on a plane.
Frankie had booked it in the January. Three hundred and ninety euros for seven days.
She gave them my flight, my hotel, my itinerary for the first two mornings, and a paragraph about what I liked.
And on the Monday a seventy-year-old man was standing on a corner in Portavella at half past ten in the morning waiting for a woman with an upside-down map.
That is what I understood in the first ninety seconds and I had to put my hand on the wall.
What I heard in the next nine minutes is the rest of it, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.
He was resigning.
He was telling my daughter that he had written to the company that afternoon, that he had ended his arrangement effective immediately, and that he would not be taking the fee for the week.
She was arguing with him. I could hear her voice, not the words.
And he said, "Frankie. I am not going to sit in a restaurant with your mother tonight and send you a report about it afterward. I'd rather never see her again."
Then, after a bit: "Because I'm going to tell her. That's the surprise. I've been trying to tell her since Wednesday and I have been a coward about it."
And then he said the sentence I have written down and kept.
He said, "She has said yes to everything for six days and every single one of those was hers. Not one of them was mine. I want you to understand that before I go back in there."
I went back to that table and sat down and drank a whole glass of water.
He came back four minutes later and he was grey.
He sat down and he said, "I have to tell you something and you're going to want to leave."
And I said, "I know. I heard you."
We were in that restaurant for three hours.
He told me the rest himself and he did not soften any of it. Eleven previous clients over four years. Casa Verrine on the last night every time, because the owner does a set menu and it is easy. Mr. Brandt, lovely to see you again.
He told me the corner and the time and the fact that he had been given a note about my husband so that he would not tread on it.
I asked him one question, which was whether the ferry to Ceona had been on the itinerary.
And he said no. He said the itinerary finished on Wednesday morning, and that from Wednesday lunchtime nobody had been paying him for anything, and that he had rung the company on the Thursday to say he was finishing with the placement and had been talked out of it and had spent two days being ashamed of himself.
I asked him a second question, which was harder.
I asked him whether he would have told me if the waiter had not said his name.
He thought about that for a long time. Long enough that I nearly said something to help him out of it, and I am glad I did not.
Then he said, "I'd like to say yes. I think it's about seventy percent yes."
That is the answer that kept me in that chair. If he had said of course I would have got my coat.
Then I said the thing I had been assembling since the courtyard.
I said, "I'm not angry that a stranger was paid to be kind to me. I've been a medical secretary for thirty-seven years and I have watched a great many people be paid to be kind and most of them meant it."
I said, "I'm angry because I made myself a promise on an aeroplane and I've spent a week believing I kept it."
And Osian Brandt put both hands flat on that tablecloth and said, "Beryl. You did keep it."
He said, "I stood on a corner. That's all anybody arranged. A man on a corner. Everything after that was a woman with an upside-down map deciding to have a coffee with him, and then a boat, and then a hundred and eleven steps."
Then he said, "I've done this eleven times. Four of them wouldn't get in a taxi with me."
That is not a romantic thing to say and it is the reason I believed him.
PART 5 — SAYING YES
I flew home on the Sunday and I did not speak to my daughter for six days.
That is the longest we have gone since her father died and it was the worst week of the last four years, worse than Sarveglia by a distance, because the week in Sarveglia had been marvellous and only turned out to be complicated afterward.
When we did talk it was at her kitchen table and it took about four hours and we both said things.
She said she had booked it because she had not slept properly for three weeks after I told her and because she could not say don't go again after what she had said at that lunch.
She said, "I thought I was doing the opposite of stopping you."
And I said that was true and that it was still a thing done to me and not with me, and that she had had three months to tell me and had chosen a corner in a foreign country instead.
She has apologised properly. Once, at length, and not again since, which is the correct number.
What she has not done is take it back, and I would not want her to. She still thinks it was a reasonable thing to do and I still think it was not, and we have agreed that this is where we are.
Osian and I write. Actual letters, because he is seventy and does not like a screen, and because it turns out I like a letter.
I went back in the April. Eleven days, my own booking, my own hotel, and I told Frankie I was going and did not ask her anything.
He met me at that airport and I want to record that I was frightened in the car and that the first forty minutes were awful and that by the evening they were not.
We are not married and we are not going to be. He has a life on that island and I have a granddaughter here, and we have eleven or twelve days at a time, three times a year, and both of us are old enough to know precisely what that is worth.
In the September I went to Vasterhelm on my own. Nobody arranged anything. I did not tell anybody until I was there.
You've never been further than the coast. Somebody would have to go with you.
Frankie said that to me at a table of twenty-five people with my first passport form under her place mat, and she said it out of love, and she meant every word, and twenty-five people heard it and looked at their plates.
She was right, in a way she did not intend.
Somebody did go with me.
And then on the Wednesday, at the bottom of a hundred and eleven steps, in a swimming costume that cost me eleven pounds and was a terrible colour, that stopped being what was happening.
May you like
The rest of that week was mine. He said so on a telephone in a courtyard when he thought I was sitting at a table with a basket of bread, which is the only reason I know it is true.
THE END
