“Where’s Angelos? Doesn’t he help you to do that?”
“Oh, sure. He’s done most of it, but he’s been doing other chores too, like repairing my goat pen, building me a new shed for baby goats.”
“Okay, I can spare you a few hours some time,” I said, thinking that I’d probably be a hindrance rather than a help, as I was a novice at anything rural.
“I did you another favour too, Bronte,” she said, her eyes flickering towards the olive tree where the dog was tied. He’d been so strangely quiet I’d forgotten to look at him. I turned quickly and saw a skinny, shivering mutt.
“What the hell’s that?”
Myrto roared with laughter. “You don’ recognise him?”
The dog had lost half its coat and a good year in age at least. He looked like a puppy with his fur sheared back to about an inch. The hair was trimmed around his face so the white patch looked more visible, as well as the white crest on top, which was shorter now but spiked up again. Perhaps the dog had a touch of cockatoo in his veins as well as everything else.
“You did all that?”
“He was sore on my eyes, all that bladdy vromiko fur and the stink. I give him another bath too. See how clean he looks now.”
“That was so kind, Myrto,” I said, touched by the gesture, though I couldn’t understand why she’d gone to all that trouble. “The cut’s very good. You should start a dog-grooming business.”
She guffawed, slapping her palms on her thighs. “I was taught to shear some sheep once in Aussieland – one of many jobs, Bronte. I was good with a big pair of special scissors. Now the dog gets a new home, no trouble. He’s even a bit handsome, if you like dogs.”
The dog was pleased with himself and jumped around when I went to feed him a few treats. I rubbed the fur on his head. No ticks, no smell. The white patch on his face and the crest were proper white and stood out, making him look more comical than ever and seeming to accentuate one brown eye over the other. The gash above his brow was starting to heal up nicely.
Myrto was watching me. “And in case the rehome people don’ turn up today, maybe you can take him over your house, eh? And give Myrto a nice rest from dog-sitting.”
So, the shearing had been part of a strategy to make sure the dog was either picked up or moved to Villa Anemos until it was. I didn’t blame her, but it had an unintended consequence because when a young guy from Animal Angels finally arrived in a small white van in the late afternoon, I could hear all the refuge dogs inside yapping frantically, even from inside Villa Anemos. It was a mournful sound. Poor mutts! I managed to sprint out the door and round to Myrto’s just as the dog was being untied from the olive tree. That’s when I decided not to hand him over. I was keeping him.
Myrto slapped me on the shoulder as the van roared off. “I knew you do that. You are sucker for a cute critter. Okay, so now you’re taking the dog to Villa Anemos, yes?”
“Of course.”
She rubbed her hands together. It was a leathery crackle. As I led the dog out the front gate she shouted after me, “Chocolates all gone now, Bronte!”
“Already? Okay, I’ll get you more.”
I could hear her as I got to the road, talking loudly to the donkey, chastising him over something, filling his metal tin with water. I knew even if I’d not been able to take the dog, Myrto probably would have. Underneath the flinty carapace she was softer than the pack of chocolates she’d just devoured – and still weeks of Lent to go!
Angus raved for a while when I turned up with the dog.
“You can’t keep that clarty thing here,” he moaned. “Leonidas will go mad, unless, that is, you have the poor man wrapped round your pinkie now and he does all your bidding.”
“No, he won’t and no I don’t,” I said, in a snippy tone. But my mind was made up.
Angus frowned and gave the dog a visual inspection.
“The vet’s given him all his shots and he’s not clarty now. Myrto washed and trimmed him,” I said.
“Myrto?”
I nodded.
“Well, well. Who knew she had so many gifts? I suppose the dog’s not bad for a rural jakey,” Angus said, using the Scottish word for a down-and-out. Angus took delight in using his old Scottish expressions, as Scots do when they’re living overseas, as an emotional link back to the homeland. He tweaked the dog’s cockatoo crest into a funny point, which was to become a regular occurrence.
“I suppose he’ll play up somewhere along the line though and that will be it. He’s not Greek if he doesn’t bare his maverick soul,” he said.
I laughed. “Like you, Angus?”
When I first came to Greece, I’d only seen Angus a few times in the preceding decade. It was like reconnecting with a stranger, certainly not the more conventional Scottish father I’d grown up with. When we met up, he was sporting a ponytail, but not the usual kind of scruffy grey version that many older men have. Angus’s hair was one of his better features, thick and with only a streak of grey here and there, and yet I couldn’t quite get to grips with it. Thankfully he was persuaded to have it cut into the healthy bob he now wore.
Those 10 years were something that I still learnt about as time passed, and marvelled at, as if the father I thought I knew really had two personalities: one a level-headed teacher and married man, the other a well-disguised maverick soul that finally broke out when he left the confines of his reserved Scottish upbringing. He and the dog would therefore understand each other well.
Ah, the stray dog, in our lives now and in the house. Perhaps not one of my smarter ideas in a country with low tolerance for pets, but the minute Myrto had clipped him I saw the possibilities, and that he was mine as much as he would be anyone’s. The dog that saved me from the creep. Simple as that.
“He won’t play up, Angus, and anyway, now there are weirdos about, like the scooter creep, I think it’s a good idea to have a dog. Leonidas will see that. Well, he will in time.”
“Okay, pet, you’ve won me over on that score. So, he might as well stay.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, kissing him on the cheek.
I didn’t call him ‘Dad’ often. Since he left Scotland, I had called him Angus. Perhaps it had been my way of keeping him at a distance because of the hurt his odyssey had caused us all. Although we were close now, the name had stuck. But ‘Dad’ was always good when I was angling for special dispensation over something.
Angus tutted. It was that thing that Greeks do: saying nothing, but raising the eyebrows and shutting the eyes briefly. The gesture seemed to mean different things at different times, but often just conveyed a ‘no comment’.
I decided to call the dog Zefiros, Zeffy for short, because I’d been in the Zefiros kafeneio the day he turned up on the road. And there was comical symmetry in a dog named after a zephyr wind, living in Windy Villa.
I’d tell Leonidas about the dog when I saw him the following weekend. I wouldn’t be dissuaded from keeping him though. I had an instinct the dog was a good thing. He’d come along at the right time, on the road that day. Months from now I would understand that point a whole lot better.
Freelance work came in steadily, enough to support my independent life in Greece. It took the sting out of having left my job in Edinburgh as a feature writer at a time when I thought my career was at its peak, even with the sweetener of a redundancy payment. As far as freelancing in Greece went, Leonidas had been right: there were plenty of subjects to choose from in the crisis. And Greeks, I found, were refreshingly candid and generous people to interview, making me forget how petulant Brits could sometimes be, or at the very least how guarded – until a certain British actress turned best-selling author dropped onto my radar.
In April, I was emailed by the features editor at The Daily Messenger, a popular London tabloid with a huge circulation, for which I’d written a few small stories already about Greece. The editor had come across the curious fact that author Eve Peregrine had a holiday villa “near a place called Santova beach,
south of Kalamata”. Would I like to contact her agent and see if Peregrine was currently in Greece? If so, all that was required was a straightforward piece about her part-time life in Greece, her thoughts on the economic crisis, her new book and so forth. It wasn’t likely the features editor knew that Santova beach was just 10 minutes’ drive from Marathousa and it was too remarkable a co-incidence to pass up.
I emailed the agent, Sylvia Rainford, who told me that, luckily, Peregrine was in Greece for a few weeks, and promised to set up an interview in the coming days.
“Eve’s quite good about interviews but she tends not to like talking about the book she’s currently working on, I’m afraid. She’s superstitious, as most writers are. But you can try anyway. If she doesn’t want to talk about anything, I assure you you’ll definitely know about it,” Rainford said in her email.
I went online and did some research on Peregrine. She’d started out in the 1980s as an actress with a few low-budget films under her belt, and then in the 1990s had picked up some leading roles on TV, particularly as a tough but sexy detective in a popular drama series, which became her best-known role, for which she was still remembered. While she was beautiful and certainly smart, with no shortage of men in her life it would seem, she’d never married and was currently without a partner. Despite her cop shop drama, she’d never been considered a great actress and other more illustrious roles weren’t immediately forthcoming when the series ended.
This may have accounted for her switching careers and to everyone’s surprise penning best-selling romance novels instead, with exotic settings, though not including Greece so far. I had only read one of her books, set in Mallorca. I gathered, however, that all her books were fairly similar, featuring strong, opinionated female professionals, often fractious, who seemed to find themselves engulfed in dramas often of their own making with generally dashing but foolhardy heroes, who tended to make things much worse before they got better, depending on how you looked at things. The books were oddly old-fashioned in style but witty too, kind of Vanity Fair meets Bridget Jones. Millions of women seemed to crave them. Her latest book was always hotly anticipated and she’d already made buckets of money.
I tracked down some of her previous interviews online that showed she was not unlike some of her heroines: flinty at times and given to spitting the dummy if she didn’t get her way. Mostly it was a harmless performance but once she famously had a spirited strop with a reporter in the beer garden of a village pub before hurling his tape-recorder into a nearby water feature, which turned into a diverting fracas involving the landlord and other customers, and the ugly incident was reported in one of the red-top newspapers. There were fewer antics though in recent years. Her wealth and popularity as a writer had given her a certain cachet and confidence, no doubt. All the same, I would watch my step – and not bother with a tape-recorder.
Chapter 5
From write to wrong
Eve Peregrine’s house was called Villa Kaliopi, which seemed appropriate, as Kaliopi was one of the nine Greek muses. A nod to Peregrine’s creative efforts, no doubt. The villa was predictably white with blue shutters and a stout blue door, but almost hidden behind a fringe of lemon trees and gardenia bushes. I had passed it many times in Angus’s car but never really took much notice, being similar to many holiday homes in southern Greece. I arrived right on time at 5pm, an acceptable hour for meeting people after the siesta period.
At 51, Peregrine was still as attractive as she’d been in her acting heyday, with striking high cheekbones and full lips, her wavy, strawberry blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her slightly husky voice had lost none of its appeal but without the hint of estuary English she’d assumed for her early TV cop role. She smiled when she ushered me in, though it had a hint of regal reserve about it that I’d expected. Perhaps this was the stance she assumed first up to cool any possible journalistic shenanigans. As if! From my trawl through the clippings, I’d already seen the shenanigans were all hers.
Inside the villa, the author had created a stylish space, with gleaming white walls and cool marble floors, all very expensively done. She led me through the sitting room to the front balcony, sheltered from the sun’s glare by a striped awning. It had a similar view to Villa Anemos but at closer quarters to the gulf. You could see fishermen casting nets from the back of their blue caiques and small groups of bathers out in the gulf. Peregrine made tea and brought it on a tray with some cake.
“I have to say, I was surprised when my agent told me a local British journalist was coming from Marathousa, of all places. And you live there now?”
I nodded.
“What brought you here?” she asked.
I kept the explanation brief. It’s always unsettling when the journalist is interviewed first, especially by a possibly thorny interviewee like Peregrine.
“What about you?” I countered, taking out my notebook and flicking to a fresh page.
She told me she’d come to one of the Greek islands for the first time at 20, had fallen in love with the place, and then a young local Greek. Nothing as clichéd as a waiter, but a singer in a local folk band. It had obviously rooted her youthful enthusiasm for the country, even when the relationship fizzled. Finally, she had bought her own Grecian hideaway seven years ago for summer breaks.
“I bought this villa because of all the places I’d seen in Greece, I thought this part of the mainland seemed more authentic. I thought of buying a place up in Marathousa originally, but I didn’t want to get caught up in the faff of village life and there were the British expats. Quite a few of them, I think. I didn’t want that either, you see,” she said, wrinkling her nose in mild disdain.
I didn’t bother to tell her she needn’t have worried about the expats. They were quite benign. And they seemed to have no idea they had a celebrity in their midst. Not yet, anyway. I started to move her through my list of questions. She was more gracious than I’d expected from the cuttings. But perhaps it was an act. On the surface she seemed confident, but the more we spoke, the more her nervy mannerisms emerged. Her hands were restless and toyed around with the cup on its saucer at sporadic intervals. She also played with her ponytail of blonde hair a lot, twisting it about in her hand. I asked for her thoughts on the economic crisis and she had plenty to say on the subject.
She concluded by saying, “However, I’m no expert on economics, and the fine details of the Greek debt and the bailout often confuse me. It’s certainly a scarier time to be in Greece and at the very least Greeks now seem quite depressed and that’s not in the national character, as you know. But I have to admit the thing I love most about this part of Greece at least, it’s a perfect place to relax and write, away from the distractions of London, where I have an apartment. No-one bothers you here. And the Greeks haven’t a clue who I am, despite two of my books being translated into Greek.”
“Maybe you need to actually set a book in Greece,” I suggested.
“Yes, perhaps I should,” she replied, with a sharp up-thrust of her neat chin. She fidgeted some more, twisting her cup on the saucer, and poured more tea from a seemingly endless pot, probably wondering how to move the subject off books, having stumbled onto it herself. But along with her millions of readers, I wanted to know what to expect from the hotly anticipated new book.
“Can you tell me anything about the plot of your new novel, at least where it’s set?”
She didn’t answer but abruptly got up from her chair with a sigh and leaned on the balcony railing as if someone had just called her from afar. She looked towards Kalamata at the head of the gulf, with its crystalline spread of white apartment blocks. She muttered something about an ‘incomparable view, don’t you think?’ I’ve always hated it when interviewees, especially celebrities, make a nervy grab at walking round the room at a certain point in an interview as if they’re about to leg it. But Peregrine was obviously not quite at that point because as quickly as she’d stood up, she sat down again, and I casually repeated the que
stion.
“Well … I’m still writing the new book, as it happens. It’s set in Scotland this time, which you might appreciate, being Scottish … but you know, I hate discussing a book I’m working on. It never seems right and I’m terribly superstitious,” she said, her cheeks showing a pink bloom of irritation. The agent was right on the money with this work-in-progress phobia.
“I agree. It must be awkward,” I offered. “And the industry’s bitchy, I imagine. But your agent says the book’s due out this summer, yes?”
“Well, it’s nowhere near finished, so that looks unlikely. It’s closer to an autumn release, I think.” She gave me a kind of warning look, as if that was the end of that, but I decided to push on.
“Well, I do know what working to a deadline’s like. It’s okay with a feature, but a book, well that’s another matter.” I hadn’t a clue what a book deadline would be like. Murder probably! But I had an instinct already that something wasn’t quite right with this writer’s anticipated opus, or with her state of mind probably. Her fingers were playing with her rings now, twisting them about. I was beginning to feel tired just watching her.
“Might we do the photos now,” she said forcibly, as if to finally draw a line under the questioning. Or else!
“Yes, if you like,” I said, thinking the interview would be good enough for a light feature but something more about the book would have been better and probably what the Daily Messenger would want.
I set up a few shots on the balcony with the gulf behind, which were perfect. And then in the sitting room, her seated on a white sofa with an array of Greek prints on the wall behind. It was very telling that she seemed to visibly relax once the interview was out of the way. Her shoulders dropped slightly and the rings were given a reprieve. She even offered me more tea but I declined.
“Might you prefer a glass of wine? I have a nice cold malagousia here.”
How Greek Is Your Love Page 4