The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  Four times a day Asterios passes by on the Katomeli road and looks neither to the left nor the right, but all the same he spits on them, on the Golden Sun Studios, and on the house of old Pantelides, and on the villa of Spiros his son, who is not old and who according to Manoli Dimeros has big plans. Manoli too is a man with plans, and this is why he can scent them on the breath of others. Spiros Pantelides, he says, is angling to buy the olive groves of old Stavlakis, which stretch from the Panomeli road across the headland as far as the cove where Manoli’s grandfather built the Taverna Medusa. Katomeli will spread her tentacles, Manoli says; one day the villas and the studios will reach right around Panomeli headland and grasp the old village by the throat, and any man who tries to stop them will be a fool, and badly stung.

  At nights Manoli waits table at the Taverna, but in the mornings he works at his English, his business studies. The Medusa which is his inheritance will not be enough for him; instead, his dreams are of an ApartHotel on the crest of the headland, with a jetty for yachts, and mini-golf, and a diving school. For this he needs Stavlakis’ land, and for this he visits Pepargni Hospital, where the old boy is having a hip replacement, although no plastic joint or metal pin will ever make him fit enough to tend these rotten trees of his. There is no doubt that Stavlakis will sell, says Manoli – the only question is whether he will sell to a Dimeros, or a Pantelides.

  ‘Look what’s happened to Katomeli, Asterios,’ says Manoli. ‘Now it’s Panomeli’s turn to be up and coming, you’d be a fool to stand aside. You did it once, and see where it got you. At your age you and Androula should be thinking about a little nest-egg.’

  Asterios thinks of the nest egg he lost to Pantelides, a huge egg like an eagle’s, and rightly his.

  ‘I have a friend,’ says Manoli, ‘an English friend who knows how to build. Let him have a look at that meadow below your house, such a good aspect, and just sitting there doing nothing for you. Why grow thistles, Asterios, when you could be looking at 80,000 euros?’

  12

  Dusk is already falling when the horned bus sets her down at the Panomeli turning. The sky has deepened to cerulean and the first stars are out above the hill of Agia Stephanou.

  Once past the straggling suburb of studio apartments she becomes conscious of the winding road ahead, flanked by darkening olive groves, and wishes, too late, that she’d got off in Katomeli’s main square, where taxis queue in a rank beside the periptero. There has been a death in the vicinity, perhaps even a suspicious one, and here she is, strolling alone in the gloaming.

  The outline of the headland looms up on her left; there should be a junction fairly soon, whose right fork leads to Panomeli. It might be sensible to feel alarmed, even to act on it. Flag down a passing car, or make a dash for a farmhouse and beg for rescue. Only the thought of making an idiot of herself deters her.

  Focussing her mind on her quiet balcony and an ouzo with ice, she strides on manfully, shoulders back, wearing the thick skin women grow to cope with the night streets of North London. The road has little in common with the one she walked this morning. Darkness has stretched its distances. Bats scissor silently overhead, and spectral chickens scratch behind the hedges.

  She sees a torch beam ahead, advancing jerkily, and hears the phlegmy laugh of Mrs Gifford. Two cigarette ends bob, friendly as fireflies.

  The Giffords have been on the island for barely a week but already they’re Cretophiles: ardent consumers, not only of the sun, the food, the wine, but also of local handicrafts and culture. They sally forth on all the Flagstaff excursions, returning with rugs, crocheted tablecloths, pots shaped like cockerels, CDs of bouzouki music, ceramic coasters in the form of the Phaestos Disc. On the beach they ask her advice on archaeology, and star the sites on their map – the must-sees, the maybes.

  Startled to see her looming out of the twilight, the Giffords fuss protectively: they’re heading off to a fish taverna they stumbled on the other night while walking round the headland.

  ‘So we’re standing there on the sand,’ Glenys explains, ‘like a pair of wallies in our shorts and stuff.’

  ‘Well you don’t know, do you?’ Ken chips in, ‘It could have been a private party.’

  ‘Then the old mother spots us, and before you know it she’s dragged us in and plonked us down with the free wine and the glasses.’

  Glenys Gifford’s breath is gin-scented; she’s wearing something silky and cocktailish, with high-heeled silver slingbacks. ‘Why don’t you come along with us? The Greek dancers are brilliant.’

  Ingrid looks doubtfully at her own rolled up combats, her lightweight hill boots, but Ken dismisses her objections.

  ‘You’re fine, love, don’t worry about it,’ he says, claiming the torch from his wife and lighting the way for the ladies.

  The left fork of the road descends through the olive groves until the lights of Katomeli appear again through the trees as distant reflections in the bay. The torch beam illuminates a sign nailed lopsidedly to a tree trunk: Taverna Medusa, with a cartoon of a drunken octopus. There’s a narrow insect-ridden path, and then the rear of a concrete building, strip-lights, kitchen clatter. The path squeezes like a poor relation round the side of the house and emerges on an aristocrat of terraces, where tables are arranged around a stone-flagged dancefloor which, if smaller than the theatral area of the Palace of King Minos, has the same aura of intent. Fairy lights are looped between the tamarisk trees. Beyond a low stone wall a cool moon is rising over the water.

  Madame greets the Giffords as if they were oikoyenia, her own long-lost relations. Grey braids snake girlishly round her head, and her broad face is as wrinkled as a walnut. Flapping her hands in apology for the oppressive heat, she ushers them to a table by the wall.

  ‘Kala?’ she barks, gold fillings gleaming in her triumphant smile. When she opens her palms to the sky the faintest breath of wind rises, as if summoned, from the sea.

  ‘Poli kala,’ Ingrid agrees.

  ‘Efkaristo, efkaristo,’ chorus the Giffords.

  Although half the tables are already occupied, no one is eating yet. People are still at the ouzo stage, nibbling at olives, at wedges of cucumber.

  Glenys nudges Ingrid. ‘There they are! Isn’t she gorgeous?’

  The dancers are sitting at a small side table beside the glass door to the interior – an almond-eyed girl of eighteen or so, a boy who could be her brother, and a burly, handsome older man: the paterfamilias, if looks are anything to go by. They’re sipping red wine, quietly observing the guests who are thronging in now from a car park hidden in the trees. The two men wear white shirts with red sashes, and baggy vrakes tucked into white stockings. The girl’s headgear – a black scarf bandaged tightly over a high cone of hair – resembles the Phrygian cap Ingrid’s seen on some of the later sealstones. And certainly she has a look of the East, with her parchment-white skin and black eyes which tilt like those of the bare-breasted beauties on the frescoes; unlike them, though, she hides her body under a high-necked blouse and full embroidered skirt.

  Ken Gifford sighs with pleasure, settling in. His big red arms are planted on the table and his sunburned face beams goodwill to all and sundry, raising a chorus of yassous and kalisperas from the neighbouring diners: an extended family whose conversation slides fluently from Greek to German and back again. Black heads and flaxen gold.

  The Giffords, she learns, run a builders’ merchants in Solihull. Started by Ken’s father in the 50s, it’s now a sizeable concern. Glenys tells her proudly that Ken can turn his hand to just about anything – tiling, roofing, bricklaying, plumbing in jacuzzis.

  Ingrid can believe it. She imagines a house like a hacienda, with stuccoed walls and marble steps and terracotta arches. A house with the wow factor.

  ‘I’m for the seafood platter, girls, how about you?’ Ken raises a casual finger to the waiter, as if he had been coming here for years. ‘Yassou Manoli!’

  Balancing a tray of drinks, the man nods and detours towards them.
After the gracious greetings he frowns intently at Ken.

  ‘We will speak later? As you see, I have much work now.’

  ‘Right you are,’ says Ken.

  ‘You like to have ouzo?’ Manoli is already swerving away. ‘I will bring some.’

  Glenys is watching Ken curiously. ‘What’re you up to now?’

  Ken hums a few pensive bars of Mamma mia, and lifts a finger to his lips. ‘All will be revealed,’ he promises, with a broad wink at Ingrid

  Desperate for her ouzo, she smiles back dutifully. Not just a clubbable man, then, but a man who loves surprises. She likes the way he and Glenys touch and tease one another; 30 years of marriage haven’t neutered them, which, after the dire dynamic of the Wilson-Wilsons, comes as a relief. Neither one defers to the other, and as far as she can make out the easy-going Glenys doesn’t have a controlling bone in her body.

  Hen-pecked men infuriate Ingrid, but not as much as controlling women. Women, like her mother, who take a perverse pride in their expertise. After the abortion she’d made what Ingrid assumed to be a last-ditch attempt at intimacy. The village had been snowed in that week; all the trains were suspended, and with the A9 closed off there was no escape to Edinburgh. Although it was only 4 in the afternoon her mother was already on her second gin, and gaining confidence with every gulp. Firelight glinted on the crystal tumbler which rested briefly on the arm of her chair before rising again, eager as a bee, to hover at her scarlet lips.

  All men are selfish, Ingrid. You have to learn to handle them. It’s quite a knack, believe you me.

  As if it was a mother’s duty to inculcate the rules of female realpolitik, as if Ingrid wasn’t perfectly well aware that Greta couldn’t handle a boiled egg by that time, never mind a man. Now, in old age, Greta Laurie née Henderson seemed to have found her natural element. In Buncranna House – cream-stuccoed amid spreading lawns, with a view over effulgent rhododendrons to the seaweed-swagged shore of the Firth – Greta was waited on hand and foot, and lived a life that was at last free of all responsibility.

  After Ingrid’s father died – an event that seemed to have remarkably little impact on Greta – she had gone into the Home without protest. He’d been looking peaky all winter, Elsa told Ingrid; she’d been concerned about him. He’d taken on a locum to cover the home visits, so that he could devote more time to caring for Greta; characteristically, he had brushed off Elsa’s offers of help. He’d keeled over one day in the middle of morning Surgery. A massive heart attack. He’d never said a word to her about any warning symptoms, although, as a doctor, he must have been aware of them.

  She has an image of her mother at the funeral: the blonde hair that had never greyed, but instead had moved through increments of platinum to pure white, coiffed and curled for the occasion. She sat in a wheelchair, a tartan rug tucked across her knees. (She could perfectly well have walked, Ingrid was sure, if she’d bothered to practise with the hated wheelie. If you think I’m going to fall on my face in front of all these folks, she said, and that was the end of it.)

  Queenly in cultured pearls, she accepted condolences from what looked like the entire population of the village – in which Dr Laurie had been held in high esteem, if not exactly in affection.

  Elsa – heroically, Ingrid thought – had offered to take Greta in, but with her sister hardly out of earshot Greta vetoed the very notion.

  She’d drive me mad, her with her great big feet and her golf-clubs, she snapped, although in Ingrid’s honest opinion Elsa was the one who’d be driven mad by the arrangement.

  Pitlochry, where Elsa was living at the time, was the final stumbling block.

  What would I want to be stuck up there for? Greta demanded, although Ingrid couldn’t see why being stuck in posh Pitlochry was a worse fate than being stuck in dreary Dunelg. At an age when sibling rivalry should have faded into oblivion, Greta’s blue eyes burned with scorn.

  Never could get herself a man, that’s Elsa’s trouble!

  The seafood arrives on a mound of sodden rice, ringed with french fries and the obligatory slices of cucumber. The wine waiter – a younger, frostier version of Manoli – proposes a pricey foreign Chardonnay. Since it’s clear that the affable Ken will agree to absolutely anything, Ingrid asks if they have, perhaps, a house wine, a wine from the locality.

  ‘Ne, veveos,’ the waiter says curtly, for she has disobeyed the unspoken diktat that the man of the party will do the ordering. When he returns with a carafe of ochre wine Ken tastes it and nods his approval. He pushes a napkin towards Ingrid.

  ‘Write it down for me, will you? How you ask for it.’

  In block capitals, she transliterates. MIPOS ECHETE TO DIKOSAS KRASI.

  Ken reads it back with surprising fluency, and she commends him. ‘You’ve definitely got an ear!’

  Glenys groans. ‘Oh my Lord, don’t encourage him. He’ll be dragging a barrel home on the plane next!’

  On the horizon the tiny lights of a night ferry slide north towards the Cyclades. Bullfrogs are tuning up their bass section in an invisible ditch. Suddenly a spot comes on, and, without announcement, the dancers move to the centre of the floor.

  At the outset the music is stately, restrained. Poised on one leg, the older man is a tree or a pillar winds or earthquakes might topple. His arms are branches, his hands fluttering like birds’ wings, then flattening into beaks. His chest is drawn up, his level gaze challenges the audience. When the long leaning moment ends, the fingers snap, and the strong stockinged legs weave sideways as he skips easily into double-time and back again to match the changes in tempo.

  The boy and girl are egging the older man on, and the audience joins in, clapping in time, crying opa! opa! at the high immaculate kicks.

  When the dance ends in an uproar of applause Glenys rolls her eyes at Ingrid. Sweat shines in the sunburned crevice between her breasts

  ‘Talk about refreshing the parts other blokes don’t reach!’ she hisses.

  Ingrid agrees entirely. Virile isn’t the word for it.

  ‘Hey, steady on, girls!’ says Ken in a pantomime of alarm, and it crosses her mind that what she’s providing here is the audience, the necessary third term. Ingrid the obliging singleton. For a moment she wonders ungenerously if the private Giffords sparkle quite as brightly as the public pair.

  The boy and girl begin haltingly. Evidently it’s a courtship dance, gawky and tremulous, as if they can no more surrender to the music – Turkish-inspired, mournful – than they can surrender to each other. Maybe the affair will end badly, in loss or punishment or rejection. Can the swain be trusted with the girl’s innocence? Will he seduce and abandon her without a thought, or, through his mastery of the figures of the dance, prove beyond doubt his strength, his honour, his timi?

  Ingrid sees old Madame shuffling out of the door, a small wicker basket held in front of her, a smile breaking on her face like a good omen. As the music shifts into a celebratory key, handfuls of rose-petals plucked from the basket are tossed into the air, to float down on the heads and shoulders of the young couple.

  ‘All’s well that ends well, eh?’ says Ken. Napkin tucked in at his neck, he’s attacking a chunk of octopus, flesh-pink and pimpled with suckers. He gestures towards her empty plate. ‘Eat up, lass. Don’t go all anorexic on us.’

  She serves herself with prawns and gingerly with soggy rice, pondering the contrast between the strait-laced gestures of the girl – the arms kept pinioned at her sides, the high prim neckline, and the hair too, banned and hidden – and the rampant, thrusting moves of the older man, until a burst of laughter erupts from the tables.

  The young dancers have press-ganged someone from the audience, whisking him indoors, and now he reappears between them, supported by a stick: a mock-grandfather with hair greyed by a dusting of kitchen flour, his back bent double with arthritis, his legs bowed and pathetically wobbling.

  The music begins gradually, easing into the old boy. She distinctly sees it enter the arches of his feet and
flow upwards. Accelerating, it unlocks the rickety knees, straightens out the curve of the spine; the pigeon chest swells up with it until the man’s linen jacket is stretched taut across his ribcage, held by a single button. Music is the medicine, dance the syringe that delivers it.

  Ingrid feels the tears rise in her throat. If she’d known her father was ill, if she’d been there, would his gait have quickened, his grip grown firmer on his walking stick, his chest swelled to contain a heart grown young again, and elastic?

  ‘Get a load of the dancing policeman,’ says Ken. ‘Isn’t that our Sergeant Yiannis?’

  ‘It never is!’ Glenys protests, peering.

  ‘None other,’ Ken insists. ‘Bit of a suave git, isn’t he?’

  Ingrid recognises him now, the narrow face, the diligent dark eyes, the deep lines which slant from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth. The stick, redundant now, is hurled away contemptuously, and the rejuvenation is complete: he’s skipping about, frisking like a young goat in a deafening chorus of bravos. A donkey brays in a nearby field, adding its voice to the applause.

  She knows she is staring, the trance of the music heightening rather than blurring her senses, the imperative of the bouzouki line which never breaks but ripples along insistently like water. At the table where the Sergeant was sitting she glimpses Gaylene, the Head Rep., with a balding Greek whose chest, tanned almost black, wears a mat of wiry white hairs. A younger couple with gel-sculpted hair cry Ela, ela Yianni! A little girl stands on her chair, steadied by a small, auburn-haired woman in a burgundy dress. The woman is sharp-chinned, muscular, attractive. His wife and child? Ingrid feels an unsettling pang of jealousy.