Under a Croatian Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

and One Things to Do Before You Die’ kind of books, and on my way home I’d sometimes have a browse, but after a hard day at the office they only served as a rather depressing reminder that yet another day had gone by and I still hadn’t climbed Mont Blanc, gambled in Las Vegas, swum with a shark, hang-glided over the Himalayas or dated Liz Hurley.
    Ivana had begun to tell me I sounded like Victor Meldrew.
    After a few false starts, I sold the company to an old competitor in the business – a Mr Scaglione from Detroit, a manof great flair, vision and energy – and within two months everything had gone off to America. That done, I started to learn Croatian and threw myself into the move.
    It was around that time that I started to have my first nagging doubts. Was island life really going to work for me? Would I find enough to do? I had some projects in mind – a restaurant, a delicatessen, a boat charter business, house renovation – but, if they didn’t succeed, would I feel frustrated? If all there was to do was lie in the sun sipping chilled wine, would I turn to drink in the time-honoured manner of white men in far-off stations or take to whisky and leering at local talent, like that failed Colonial Police Chief in the Graham Greene novel?
    There were a lot of things I was going to miss, particularly our two children, and also my friends and my cricket. I told myself that these were the kinds of worries to be expected by anyone remoulding their entire existence, but it still didn’t stop the worries having the same 3 a.m. wake-up effect on me as letters from the Inland Revenue. Sometimes in the middle of the night, plagued by thoughts of being the only outsider in a close-knit island community, I’d slip out of bed to sit at my desk looking at pictures and maps of the island and tell myself for the umpteenth time that we really
had
made the right decision.
    For Ivana, I wasn’t so worried. Whereas I’ve never been able to shake off an innate hesitance to befriend complete strangers, she’s the kind who collects new best friends wherever she goes. Anyway, she’d be living in the land of her forefathers, and I’d seen how similar her features were to those we met on the convoys. With her straight dark hair, almond eyes, olive-shaped face and gymnast’s figure, she could have been anyone’s sister. So much so that, despite the ethnic diversity of London, no one had ever taken her for English in our thirty years together. (Although that might have had something to do with her exoticway of dressing, her expansive way of gesturing and her habit of approaching everything with enthusiasm, fury or implacable feminine logic.) But life had been rich with colour and our marriage had prospered.
    Nonetheless, I could see that even she was beginning to worry about giving up all that our metropolitan life had to offer – Planet Organic, Harvey Nichols, Zara, her girlfriends, bridge clubs, fitness clubs, yoga clubs, book clubs, dental hygienists, theatres, exhibitions; not to mention dry-cleaning, 24-hour shopping, fashion magazines, sliced bread, full cream milk, oven ready food and all those other terrific little inventions that make the world such a jolly place to live in.
     
    Most of our friends and family had the bizarrest notions of how we were going to live. Some asked if malaria pills were needed, and just before Christmas my brother rang to ask if I’d like the new survival book that had just come out.
    ‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘I’m not going out there for adventure. I’m after a quiet life these days.’
    ‘You don’t fool me, A. If you were asked what you wanted to do most of all in the world, I bet it’d be something like winning a DSO leading a squadron of Marines into Tobruk or something equally daftly Biggles-like.’
    ‘You’ve just never got over me getting the Frensham Pond Boy Scout of the Year badge instead of you.’
    The next week, someone gave me a book entitled
Living on an Untamed