Anthony's former lover

Anthony's former lover is an absent, unnamed character whose failure to meet Anthony Brown at Kalamata Airport becomes the emotional rupture behind his solitary journey. The book gives no direct account of her reasons or her own understanding of the relationship. Instead, she emerges through the traces she leaves and Anthony's changing account of what happened: first a hoped-for reunion, then silence, and finally a story about her that he cannot verify.

Identity and Narrative Visibility

The opening postal thread offers a possible connection to her identity. Ellie Thomas receives postcards from Greece addressed to S. Ibbotson, a name she assumes belongs to a former tenant, and initially treats the cards as stray mail. They arrive signed only with an A, while their recipient remains absent from the flat's life. The initials suggest Sarah Ibbotson, but the opening does not establish that the addressee is the same person Anthony later waits for. The narrative's structure makes the uncertainty important: the reader encounters a person through correspondence before learning of the failed meeting, while the woman herself never speaks in the evidence presented here.

That absence limits what can be stated about her. The book does not explain what prevented her from travelling, whether she received Anthony's calls, or what she believed would happen between them. Even the message that she could not come reaches him indirectly. The distinction between what happened and what Anthony can know remains central to her portrayal.

The Missed Meeting

Anthony went to Kalamata Airport expecting to meet her. When she did not appear, he stayed in the arrivals area for twenty-four hours, telling himself she might be on the next plane or delayed. The airport's ordinary activity continued around his vigil: a cleaner swept near where he slept and brought him spinach pie, while the cleaner described the airport's jobs as a family business. These details mark the contrast between Anthony's private expectation and the practical kindness of people who did not know why he was waiting.

The following morning, with no further charter flights from the United Kingdom expected in mid-September, Anthony left the arrivals area. Her phone did not answer. A message then appeared on his phone saying that she could not make it, and he believed she had asked a friend to send it. He called the number repeatedly but received no reply. The account gives no explanation beyond the message; it does not establish whether the failure to meet was planned, sudden, or unavoidable. For Anthony, however, the brevity of the communication offered no resolution to the hours of waiting.

Silence and Aftermath

Anthony did not return directly to Athens. Unable to face retracing the road he had travelled in anticipation, he drove without a clear destination and stopped when he reached the sea near Methoni. In the days that followed, he sat looking towards the Ionian Sea and withdrew from ordinary routines. The couple who ran his lodging left food for him and replaced the flowers in his room as they wilted. Their quiet care contrasts with the absent communication from the person he had come to meet; the account records their kindness, but does not suggest that it repaired the loss.

His broken phone became a material sign of the severance. Unable to bear repeatedly seeing its blank screen, Anthony threw it into the sea. The act forced him to accept that he would no longer hear from her through that device, and that he had also cut himself off from the wider world. The narrative thus makes her absence consequential beyond the failed rendezvous: it alters his movement through Greece and turns a journey begun in expectation into solitary travel.

Anthony's Later Interpretation

While in Nafplio, Anthony hears the story of Savina, who fled her wedding and whose former fiancé later killed members of her family. The story prompts him to consider his own response to rejection. He explicitly distinguishes his anger from the violence of the jilted man in the tale, describing himself as too weighed down by sorrow to act violently. The comparison does not make the two relationships equivalent; it gives Anthony a narrative through which to measure what he feels and what he will not do.

Anthony then speculates that his former lover had another partner and that she could not bear to be alone. He presents this as his assumption, not as information confirmed by her or another witness. His words reveal the movement of his own thinking: uncertainty about why she failed to arrive hardens into a judgment about her character. Since she has no answering voice in the account, readers cannot test that judgment against her intentions.

Narrative Role

The former lover matters chiefly through the gap between the relationship Anthony anticipated and the silence he encounters. Her absence initiates the book's shift from a shared plan to a solitary journey, while the postcard motif places questions of address, recognition, and unanswered communication around that loss. The narrative does not resolve why she failed to appear or what became of her. Instead, it leaves her partly unknown, showing how Anthony's need for an explanation fills the space where her own account is missing.