by Polly Samson
‘Not only a boat. I hear a sports car as well. Magda’s here helping to set up the Lagoudera bar and she’s had a letter from Marianne. Apparently she’s nervous about driving all this way from Norway with such a tiny baby. I’ve no idea why Axel didn’t drive his silly car himself.’
‘Drink-driving, through the streets of Oslo on the night the child was born,’ Nancy says. ‘He’s had his licence taken away. Oh, that poor girl.’
Nancy helps herself from the retsina jug, gives Charmian a refill and settles herself more firmly in her chair. ‘I had an arrangement to meet Christos for the lobsters at the boatyard in Mandraki. I get a very good price from him. Anyway, I got there a bit early and wandered around. And there they were, the pair of them …’
‘Who?’ Charmian looks up from the cheese-grater.
‘Axel and the American girl – do pay attention, Charm. They were painting the Plimsoll line and the name of his boat in red paint. It’s called Ikarus, by the way.’
‘Predictable …’ Charmian snorts. ‘Go on.’
‘You might say I caught them red-handed. He was pressed up behind her, while she was trying to paint the lettering. I didn’t know what to do; I couldn’t just turn back because I’d arranged to meet Christos. Axel had his hands right up that girl’s shirt. He turned and nodded at me when I called, but left his hands where they were, even though the girl was clearly embarrassed and attempting to get away.’
Nancy is fanning herself with her hand. ‘I was furious. “Axel, what are you doing?” I actually shouted at him, it was quite involuntary.’
‘Oh, poor Marianne.’
Charmian fills me in while I take over with the cheese. ‘Marianne is Axel’s wife, possibly the sweetest young woman who ever lived. She and Axel came here from Norway, oh, more than two years ago now. They’re the only foreigners other than us to have bought our houses; he’s flush with readers in several languages though a bit Kerouac for my taste—’
Nancy interrupts Charmian’s lit-crit to hurry things along. ‘Marianne’s been in Oslo to give birth to their baby but she’s due back on Hydra any day now … Anyway there he was with his boat on the joists and me shouting at him. The girl didn’t turn around, she still had the paintbrush in her hand. I stood my ground. I said, “Axel. Are you getting the boat ready in time for your wife’s return with your son?” The girl was flinching. “Stop mauling me, Axel,” she said. Axel was cold with me. I said something else about Marianne, asked about the baby’s cough. He spun the girl around by the shoulders, the front of her shirt was streaked with red paint. She hid her face in her hands while he introduced her. “This is Patricia,” he said. “We are in love. What do you suggest, Nancy?”’
Charmian shakes her head. ‘I don’t think the island can cope with any more drama,’ she says.
After Nancy, in comes the young widow Zoe with Booli at her heels. Zoe is given onions to chop and an old hen to gut while the little boy follows Charmian to the courtyard to pick herbs. Zoe and I manage only a few words but do a lot of smiling at each other. She has about as much English as I do Greek.
‘Kartopoulo,’ Booli cries, licking his lips when he sees what’s for supper.
‘Chicken,’ I correct him, stooping to collect a fistful of oregano. ‘Thank you, good boy, Boo,’ and I get him to repeat ‘chicken’ as Charmian takes her sharpest knife to the shining globes of my aubergines, palest gold beneath their regal skins.
Martin bumbles in from school with a dead grasshopper in his pocket. Martin’s legs are ridiculously too long for his shorts, thin and prominently jointed so he looks like an insect himself. He hides his clever eyes behind a mop of streaky hair, stops only long enough to dump his books and tear a hunk from the loaf. He shares his father’s habits of sudden bursts of conversation and self-absorbed silences.
While Charmian cooks the meat sauce, she tells the sad story of Costas, who was drowned off the coast of Benghazi while sponge fishing. At her husband’s name Zoe crosses her hands at the bib of her apron.
‘Ugh, they had to cut his line because they couldn’t pull him out of the sludge. He wasn’t much older than your brother. And two other crew members crippled with the bends in the same season – that captain won’t be setting sail again …’
‘Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ George comes crashing down the ladder, rolling his sleeve to his elbow. ‘Bugger, missed my shot; why didn’t you remind me, Charm?’ He takes her pack of cigarettes from the table while she sets a pan of water to boil on a Primus, still talking to me.
‘Sponge was the main industry here, a tough one but dying out.’
George is scratching at his arms. Charmian takes a glass syringe from a tin, fits it with a needle and drops it into the water. He lights a cigarette.
‘Sponge. You can’t get away from it. The death of it all,’ he says, narrowing his eyes at me through the smoke. ‘You smell it here in the street, from the factory. No bleach can wash away the stench, and I take it you’ve noticed how many crippled men we have?’
Charmian grasps his arm, grimaces. ‘Oh George, it’s like a pepper pot. I think this one had better be in your arse.’ I don’t know where to look. Surely I shouldn’t be here? Is George some sort of addict?
Booli and the dog are racing around with a paper kite Charmian has made from some string and a paper bag.
‘Hey, it’s like a bloody circus ground,’ George complains and Zoe claps her hands for Boo to play in the street.
‘And here’s our lovely Zoe, widowed at twenty-two, childless and without much hope of another match with half the blokes away at sea. A sailor boy sending money home is the way most of these families survive now,’ George tells me. ‘You larrikins who come for the sun have no idea how bloody hard it is for the people who live here. That daily grind of finding food and carrying water is not a bloody lifestyle choice for them,’ he says, helping himself to Charmian’s glass and draining it in one gulp.
‘Stop it, George,’ she says, lifting the hypodermic from the battered pan of boiling water with tongs. ‘Leave the poor girl alone.’
He’s still going on so it’s a relief when Martin comes bounding in. ‘Hey, what’s up, professor?’ George says and Charmian hisses, ‘Will you stop calling him that,’ as Martin urges us all to his room to view the grasshopper’s eye under his microscope.
Charmian is taking a small bottle from the icebox. ‘When I’ve done Dad’s shot,’ she says, filling the syringe.
George is still booming at me. ‘I, for one, thank the yachts and the film people! You’ll see if you stay: it gets hellish all summer long. But it’s a bloody good job people have started to come because the island will need to do something now synthetic sponges are taking over the entire industry …’ He’s unbuckling his belt. ‘I say hurrah for Sophia Loren!’ he cries as he drops his trousers, and I yelp.
‘Oh crikey, Erica! You must be wondering what the hell’s going on.’ I suspect Charmian of enjoying my confusion. ‘Streptomycin for his TB.’ She flashes the syringe. ‘I’ve become rather expert at doing this since he got back from the hospital in Athens.’
George leans over with his hands to the table. His shirt-tails are mercifully long enough to spare my blushes. His legs are gangly as a schoolboy’s – exactly like Martin’s, in fact. ‘Yes, better here than in Athens,’ he growls as Charmian approaches. ‘I need to be on the island to keep an eye on my wife.’
She raises her eyebrows and makes herself wicked in a sexy sort of a way, taps the syringe. ‘Darling, you may find this hurts.’
Martin rolls his eyes at me as she starts to recount Nancy’s story about Axel and the American girl. ‘Come on,’ he says, tugging my shirt. ‘It’s got compound eyes.’
By the time I head home the day is dissolving. The black sea is squiggled from mast lights, silvered with stars, spangled green and red from the harbour beacons. A bright gibbous moon rises from the mountains; the cicadas pour their love songs from the trees. The climb up Voulgaris Street from the port no longer
makes me out of breath; the moussaka is still hot from Charmian’s oven when I arrive home.
No one has lit the kerosene lamps though I can hear voices and people moving about upstairs. I plonk the dish on the table, call out, light a lamp. The room is exactly as I left it. Shadows leap from flowers that Jimmy and I picked on the mountain: yellow daisies and poppies in a green glazed jar. The table is laid with earthenware plates and half a ring of bread on a board, a dish of oil, two jugs of Kokineli and our copper beakers washed and ready to receive it.
Jimmy sneaks up on me while I’m filling a jug with water from the Qupi. He’s shirtless, smooth-chested, smelling of bed. The frenetic comings and goings at Charmian’s fall into a fold in time as, grabbing my lamp, he leads me back to the still-warm sheets.
Seven
The problem of what to do about Marianne rumbles on for days among the foreign community. Fresh sightings of Axel and Patricia are brought to Katsikas to be picked over. Friends come and pour their concern into glasses at Charmian’s table, douse their forebodings with ouzo. Nancy wants to write to her in Oslo, Charmian favours staying well away.
The Canadian poet is upstairs on the terrace tapping away at his green Olivetti.
‘That housekeeper is very loyal to the first Mrs Ghikas so Leonard dropping the name of Nikos’s new fiancée when he introduced himself was unfortunate to say the least.’ Charmian is warming to the latest island scandal which concerns the new poet’s housing. ‘Barbara Rothschild had better watch out for Mrs Danvers when she marries him.’
News of Leonard’s rejection from the great painter’s grand house has ricocheted from wall to well. George is writing Nikos Ghikas a letter. A door slammed in the young man’s face, but worse than rude. ‘We don’t want any more Jews here’ was what the housekeeper said. Was the island harbouring a Nazi? George is railing; not much of his monologue is making it on to the page.
By the time I run into him Leonard is nicely settled over his typewriter, his shirtsleeves rolled, a Greek cigarette burning between his fingers.
I’ve been shooed up here to the terrace with an offering of watermelon. He’s set himself up facing out to sea and stops typing when he hears me, stands silhouetted against a blazing blue sky.
His back and shoulders remain hunched from the worktable. ‘Please, I didn’t want to interrupt you,’ I say. It feels awkward, being alone with him. He’s removed his sunglasses and I get the sense he’s looking at me as though the bowl of cut fruit is suggestive. I’m young enough to find this sort of consideration from a grown man with stubble and hairy arms mortifying. I know I’m blushing as red as the watermelon I’m thrusting towards him. For want of something to say I tell him I’m shocked about what happened to him at Ghikas’s house. The sun spikes his eyes with green so they are the same khaki as his shirt.
‘Well, you know I put a curse on the place?’ and, though he chuckles as he says it, his face darkens.
He has everything he needs. A divan, a chair, his typewriter and a workbench set up with a view to the port. The sun is strong enough to make him squint as he takes the bowl of melon and places it on a low wall within reach of his work.
Pots of rose geranium and basil sweeten the air. Written pages flutter their corners to a breeze. A loop of amber komboloi beads and a pottery pomegranate prevent them from flying away. He reaches for his sunglasses, tips me a salute as he returns to his typewriter. He seems to be blackening a significant number of pages, certainly more than either Charmian or George.
The days grow longer and the sun stronger, enough that Janey gets badly burned while sunbathing on the terrace. Naked, naturally. Now she’s pink all over like strawberry ice cream, a moaning calamine ghost. I buy cartons of sun cream from the pharmacy and become helpless beneath Jimmy’s hands as he rubs it in. He’s already tanned enough to switch to olive oil. We arrange some foam mattresses and cushions, beyond the painting tables and easels, where our terrace meets bare red and gold rock. A few straggly olive branches are strung with our clothing; flowering thyme and white star of Bethlehem spring from fissures in the hillside. Jimmy sketches the rocks and the roots, fills a few pages of his notebook. There is only the most flirtatious of breezes to stir the perfume of spruce and donkey shit and flowering herb. I lie propped on my elbows with the sun on my back while Henry Miller heavies my eyelids. Jimmy reaches across me for wine. The mountain shimmers. Poppies blush. I want to snap my whole being around him, like some sort of carnivorous plant that his fingers brush up against.
Jimmy and I make a good team in the beginning. We get everything done before lunch so most days are like this one, languid and free as the water that gently bobs the boats below our nest on the hillside. We’ve been up and down the steps three times already, from the vegetable boat and the market, the bakery and the butcher. We earn our siesta.
I’m first out of bed every morning, up with the Orthros bells. I’m usually first to sleep at night too because Jimmy and my brother and the girls stay up late drinking and playing poker on the terrace with Trudy and the other American students. The guardian at the art school is, by all accounts, a gorgon so they are regularly locked out for not making her curfew and have to doss here.
There’s no electricity to run a fridge. Every second morning I fetch our block of ice from the foot of the steps where it has been deposited by Spiros and his mules. The others sleep right through the bells and the donkeys and the workmen hammering; if left to them our ice would be a puddle so it’s as well I’m a lark.
I stretch my eyes across the gulf towards the mountains of Troezen. Beauty rises up to greet me. The sea lies waiting, the port promises drama, the rocks clang with bells from the island’s many churches. I stand at the top of the steps and drink it all in. The hills flame with yellow flowers, the mountains are tipped with rose gold, every whitewashed wall shines crystalline with quartz. Leafy vines drape the white tunnel of steps. An arched door is garlanded by ripening apricots; wild flowers sprout from cracks in every tumbledown wall and ruin. A woman shakes a rug from a doorway and even the dust glitters.
I cart our block of ice back up to the house, stopping only to make way for a jingling train of donkeys and to talk to various cats sprawling in familiar patches of sunlight along the twisting steps. My favourite black cat has hidden her kittens among clumps of rosemary in the rubbled terrace of the crumbling house below ours. I push the branches aside and talk to her as they suckle and her semi-precious eyes shine.
The early morning is mine and I’m glad of it. Back home, I bumble about in my vest and shorts, tipping water from the icebox into a bucket to swab the floor, pushing the new block into place. I boil coffee on the Primus and sing to myself as I start clearing away last night’s dinner things, carefully observing our systems for the conservation of water.
As I’ve said, Hydra is dry apart from a handful of wells, but it’s not difficult to clean a whole kitchen with one bowl if you do things in the right order of greasiness, and there is a certain satisfaction to it. I start with the glass of the lanterns, bring them to a shine with a lemon wrapped in a wet cloth the way Charmian showed me, trim the wicks while I’m at it. It’s Jimmy’s turn to cook so I sort through some dry beans and leave them to soak. There will be fresh vegetables if we get down to the market in time, and we can probably all do with a bit of meat of some kind.
The black mother cat comes to the door for scraps. I treat us both to a creamy swirl from a can of evaporated NouNou, mine in my first coffee of the day, hers in a saucer, and lean against the door jamb to drink it. Across the ridge comes Fotis the shepherd and his donkey, on its back the milk cans glinting in the sun as the donkey’s little feet pick a careful path down the mountain. It’s a jolly-looking donkey, its bridle decorated with blue beads and a tassel swinging from an evil-eye amulet at its brow. Fotis ambles behind, his usual sack and shovel at the ready, but this morning his waistcoat is unpatched and he sports a nosegay of mountain hyacinths in his buttonhole. It’s a feast day of some kind; that’
s what all the bells of the island have been trying to tell me. Several cats skulk a perfectly measured foot-kicking distance from Fotis as he pours milk into my jug. He has terracotta pots of sheep’s yoghurt in one of his panniers so I am especially glad I waylaid him before he reached the market.
The skin of the yoghurt yields slightly to the edge of my spoon, thick and delicious with a dollop of honey from Mikhailis Christopolous’s bees, a whole comb in a big jar on our windowsill, shining with the amber light of a local man’s approval.
Jimmy’s day starts later than mine but no less picturesquely. He comes yawning and stretching from our room. He wears only a small yellow towel, wrapped at his hips. He knows I watch him and pulls a few Mr Universe poses as he bends to the pump handle. It takes around half an hour to get the day’s water from our cistern and up to the tank and it goes with a satisfying slosh and a thump. Jimmy’s arms work like pistons, his shoulder blades stand proud of the slender curve of his back. It’s this harmony of proportion that gives him the easy tumble and turn of an acrobat, and a surprising strength. He stops for a moment to rake back his hair, catches a drop of sweat on the tip of his tongue. Before he bends once again to the pump he flashes at me with the towel.
Soon enough the smell of frying fills our kitchen. A dozen eggs spit in the iron pan that Bobby tilts over the charcoal. For the moment we’ve all given up on the kerosene stove that took off Edie’s eyelashes. Janey squeals from the privy. Someone has blocked it again. Edie shimmies about in one of Bobby’s striped shirts, making a pot of tisane with leaves from the mountain. They’re all talking about last night’s poker, about the American boys who are either flukes or cheats and, gripping their heads, cursing the mastika they downed while I lay dreaming.