How Greek Is Your Love

by Marjory McGinn

  He whistled. “Is that how she buys your silence?”

  “She trusts me. And she should, even though I’ve told you. Just don’t get blootered at lunch and get a case of loose lips. I’m warning you. And by the way, I’ve noticed you’re drinking a lot these days. I worry about that.”

  “Drinking too much, ha!” he scoffed. “I don’t think I ever drink nearly enough!”

  He rubbed his hands together with glee. “Well, I must say, this barbecue sounds a lot more interesting than hitherto. We’ve got an actress with the devil of all writing disasters, the mad aunty Thekla who, were she in a classic English novel would be locked up in the attic and the house blown up, and Myrto for rural colour and Aussie larrikinism. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  But, oh, we would end up having much more fun than all that!

  Chapter 16

  May contain dogs

  There was a fizz of excitement in the back garden of Villa Ambelia and the delightful aroma of roast lamb. We arrived at noon, carrying a cake in a beribboned box, as it was customary, Angus told me, to bring a dessert to a celebratory meal. I also had Zeffy on a lead as an experiment to see how he would behave at a gathering, though I had a pact with Angus that if he played up, one of us would take him straight back to the house. He was washed and brushed and unrecognisable from the rough sleeper I’d saved.

  Tables had been arranged in one long line, covered with crisp white tablecloths and set with plates and cutlery under three Italian-style sun umbrellas. There were already a few villagers huddled at the far end, whom I didn’t know well but recognised as people who frequented the Anastasi church and whom I often saw in the plateia. The barbecue for spit-roasting the lamb had been positioned near the kitchen on the lower floor that was part of a guest studio but useful for summer parties.

  One older guy in a baseball cap sat beside the barbecue on a rush-bottomed chair, tasked with basting the meat at regular intervals with oil and herbs. I recognised him as Adonis, an elder of the church. I left Zeffy with Angus and went into the kitchen, where two women were chopping up salad and preparing vegetables for lunch. Leonidas was also there, wearing an apron and waving a set of tongs. He didn’t see me come in, so I enjoyed the sight of this cheery domesticity.

  When he turned, he looked surprised.

  “Good morning, agapi mou,” he said, taking my cake and placing it on a kitchen bench top. He embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks. “And Christos Anesti too.” This is the common salutation in the hours, and even days, after the Easter Saturday service, meaning Christ is Risen. Leonidas stepped back a moment to look at me.

  “You look very beautiful, Bronte, in this dress. And the style is magnificent.” I liked the way his eyes caressed its lines for a moment too long.

  I never thought a dress could actually give a woman a glow but that was how I felt – glowing. There was just something about this dress. Because it had fifties’ glamour, curiously, it made me feel slightly removed from the ordinariness of my rural life. I felt as if I should have had a red Vespa parked outside so that I could leap on it later and scoot along the coast, with some Latin love song as the soundtrack. Despite the fifties allure, I wanted to appear cool because I hadn’t forgiven him yet for not fessing up about Phaedra the Tooth Fairy. Now, however, I was anything but, especially when he leaned in close, whispering, “It’s been too long since I’ve seen you, Bronte.” The teasing puff of hot breath in my ear made my back muscles twitch pleasantly –but it was short-lived.

  What a cheek! The absence between us was all his fault, I thought, as a peculiar vision of Phaedra assaulted me unbidden. Her in a white coat, with killer heels, clutching a dental drill. I knew what I’d like to do with her drill if I ever caught up with her, but mercifully she wasn’t around. And hopefully with it being near the end of the main Easter festivities I imagined she would sashay back to the UK soon enough. Root canals were calling! Once she was at a safer distance I could better face up to Leonidas and assess the damage.

  “I invited Eve Peregrine here today. I thought she might be lonely at her villa.”

  “Ah, the lady we reported missing at Kalamata police station,” he said sarcastically. Had anyone told the police to stop looking? I wondered. I’d already explained to Leonidas about Angus and me going down the Mani and finding her, but not all the pertinent details.

  “The Greeks will like having a famous actress and writer for lunch. No, not for lunch. For lunch we have the lamb.”

  I laughed at his little joke. He turned and spoke to the two female helpers and must have told them about their famous guest. They both waved their chopping knives around, going, “Po, po, po!”, the Greek equivalent of ‘bloody hell’. Indeed!

  “I’ve brought Zeffy. He’s outside. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Leonidas wrinkled his brow.

  “He won’t be a bother. He’ll sleep most of the day, especially if he gets a little treat of lamb perhaps?” I crooned.

  “Okay, my love, but don’t let him go crazy in the garden. Not all Greeks like the recreational dogs.”

  I laughed. It sounded like ‘recreational drugs’. He gave me a quizzical look. No time to explain though.

  “Don’t worry, Zeffy will be fine,” I said, not knowing if that would be true. “By the way, can I help here?”

  “No, not in your lovely dress. No Bronte, you are to sit down and relax. We have everything taken care of. I have had a whole lamb roasting for hours and there are plenty of lemon potatoes in the oven too. I will bring you a drink very soon. How is Angus? Will he take a beer?”

  “Two or three, I should think,” I said, as I fluttered away.

  I sat down at the far end of the long table with Angus. Zeffy was lying under the table but I hooked the end loop of his lead under the leg of my chair, for added security. I’d already seen a few surly looks from a couple of villagers when we first walked in with the dog. No doubt some might see through Zeffy’s elegant make-over and rumble him for his former homelessness. It would confirm what most rural Greeks felt about foreigners: that when it came to animals, we were all barking mad.

  Not long afterwards Myrto arrived with Angelos. She was wearing a summery dress with long sleeves and a set of pearls, her hair loose. It had been cut in a kind of bob and had a light wave to it. She was wearing a small amount of make-up and looked good. You would never have known that ordinarily she spent her day pruning trees, sorting through cremated carob pods and assessing the virtues of edible weeds. It was miraculous.

  “You look nice,” I said as she sat beside me. I caught an aroma of herbs and something a little French with floral top notes.

  “There’s more to Myrto than you know, Bronte. I’m not always the raw prawn,” she said, mangling an Aussie expression.

  Angelos shook my hand firmly. “Christos Anesti,” he said. I smiled at how handsome he looked when scrubbed and clean, without a flatbed truck to load. He was wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt. He was disturbingly like Leonidas but without the intensity and the boomerang ex-girlfriend, and he would have greatly accessorised my fantasy Vespa on the trip along the coast in other circumstances. While I daydreamed, he wandered off to talk to Leonidas, which was just as well.

  I’d almost forgotten that Eve was coming to this lunch, and how could I really? She was slightly late, as befits a thespian. By the time she arrived, knocking on the side gate, and was led into the garden by Leonidas, everyone was seated at the long table with drinks, eating meze, appetisers. Leonidas arched his brows at me as she sat down, slightly hot and breathless. It was a mark of her sensitivity perhaps that she hadn’t chosen to wear one of the many other fifties’ dresses she had, similar to mine. Her dress was glamorous all the same: a sixties’ knee-length, white clingy sleeveless dress with fuchsia-coloured beads. It had a scoop neck showing a modest amount of cleavage and she wore a fuchsia chiffon wrap around her shoulders. With her blonde hair loosely curled and hanging round her shoulders she looked like an edible con
fection.

  Leonidas introduced her loudly to everyone, thinking the villagers would be suitably impressed. They all turned and stared appreciatively – the men, particularly, and the women just so they could spin it later into some kind of rural gossip.

  Eve sat on one side of me, Myrto on the other, and Angus beside her. Having the two women in close proximity seemed bizarre, as they were so completely different. The elegant ‘celebrity’ and the farming goddess who eschewed anything close to haute couture in favour of horta-couture while she worked in her compound. In her inimitable fashion, however, it was Myrto who was more at ease, chatting to Eve, wanting to know: Who was she? Why was she here? How famous? On TV? How much did they pay her? But Eve seemed just as curious about Myrto and her strange English/Aussie patois. Before long, I feared, Myrto would be baptised with a glamour gown of her own.

  During a quiet moment Eve leaned towards me and whispered, “By the way, Bronte, I know I’ve already said it but you look divine in that dress and you’ve put a bit more make-up on. It suits you.” She winked.

  Eve was a complex creature. Although she claimed not to be particularly sociable, and admitted she could be difficult and thorny – as I’d seen myself – at this Easter lunch she was nothing but affable and charming. Or was it an act? I couldn’t decide but I began to like her more and more, especially now I knew her whole story.

  Angelos, who had been standing with some of the villagers at the other end of the table, was drinking a beer. I noticed he was surreptitiously watching Eve quietly over the top of his glass, as entranced by her as everyone else. I imagined he hadn’t a clue about her age, and today she looked about 40 – not such a big difference in their ages on this occasion.

  “Come now, paidia, have some more appetisers,” said Leonidas, striding out of the kitchen and placing a large platter of barbecued octopus and stuffed vine leaves on the table. I saw Eve’s eyelids flutter slightly in his direction before he turned back to the kitchen.

  “Leonidas is just the way you described him, Bronte. Lucky, lucky you!” she stage-whispered in my ear. “And the young man over there is one of his relatives? I see a stunning resemblance,” she said, her eyes flitting towards Angelos.

  “His nephew.”

  “Pity he’s so young,” she said, biting into a small tentacle of octopus.

  Good job he was, I thought to myself, smiling.

  The men at the other end of the table were in very good spirits with a few glasses of wine or ouzo under their belts already. Every now and then they clashed glasses together and chorused, “Yeia mas!” To our health!

  But where was Thekla? No-one mentioned her and as the clock ticked on, I wondered if God had smiled on me and she’d been called away on some errand, some weed-picking convention, some scorpion-detainment project, an AA group for embroidery addicts. Everything felt perfect: a warm day, the air full of the aroma of spit-roasted lamb, the table full of loud happy chatter.

  At one point Eve and I found ourselves cut off from a gust of Greek conversation around us.

  “Thank you so much for inviting me here today, Bronte. Better than staying at home alone, fighting with a typewriter,” Eve said with a wry smile, sipping wine.

  “Do you know many people in this region?” I asked.

  “I know a few people in Kalamata: artsy people, some actors and musicians I’ve been introduced to over the years. Very nice, actually.”

  “Greek?”

  “Some of them, yes. I meet up now and then for a drink, a meal, but I’m not especially close to anyone. As I keep saying, I’m a hermit when I’m here.”

  Looking at her today, as lovely as she was, I had trouble understanding why.

  “Has there not been a Greek guy on the horizon, I mean since you’ve had your house here?”

  “Now and then there’s been a discreet dalliance,” she said, her eyes sliding unconsciously in the direction of Angelos, which was an interesting slip.

  “But I’ve never had the urge to get really serious with someone who’s language I don’t speak much of, or whose culture is still a mystery to me – mostly.”

  “I know what you mean. It’s challenging,” I said.

  “I admire you, Bronte, for following your heart and going beyond your comfort zone with a different culture and way of life.”

  “That’s kind, Eve, but sometimes I must seem like a cliché – falling for a Greek after only a few weeks and then walking away from my former life.”

  She tipped her head to the side in a gesture of sympathy. “As I see it, you’re obviously very much in love, and I don’t blame you. And I suppose that’s the key; to have the passion and commitment to make it work.”

  “I am in love, but can you learn to love the country and the culture as much as the man?” I said, glancing at the others around me, conscious I was becoming too candid. Possibly the wine was kicking in. I was a person who expected frankness in my interview subjects, not the other way round. She didn’t answer, or perhaps she thought it was just a rhetorical piece of musing. Yet it was anything but.

  “Before I forget, Bronte, can I thank you again for listening to my story the other day. It was so good to talk about it, you can’t imagine,” she said.

  I looked over at Angus, who had been chatting with Myrto, about what I couldn’t imagine. He seemed to be lugging into our chatter. His mouth twitched at the side, usually a precursor to a cheeky quip, but he stayed silent. I thought how nice he looked that day, his hair shiny and neat, his skin tanned and fresh for someone who’d just a few months ago been on the threshold of a heart attack. If only Polly had been here too!

  “Have you thought any more about what to do?” I asked Eve.

  She sighed heavily and lowered her voice. “Not really. I did take your point about having a go myself, with the writing, but I don’t hold out much hope.”

  Might as well boil a stone, as the villagers would say.

  Leonidas announced that the lamb would be ready soon. He was looking hot now, walking to and fro, serving food and drinks with no-one to help him, apart from the two women, who seemed tireless. I admired his dedication to being host and chef and making the afternoon a success. Everything was going well, even Zeffy had remained quiet under the table, though I suspected the smell of roast lamb was driving him crazy.

  In a lull just before we were ready to start lunch properly, we saw the garden gate open slowly and Thekla appeared in a fitted black dress, her hair big and slightly more blonded; expensive gold earrings and a string of pearls. She looked like one of the mythical Greek Sirens, wrinkled and pensioned-off now, though living comfortably, and only her towering hair nudging a memory of how women can crash ships and drown sailors if they have a mind to. In short, she looked like trouble – and trouble wasn’t far behind. As she held the gate open, the next person to step into the garden was Phaedra, the Tooth Fairy!

  Chapter 17

  Easter was never this hot

  I heard someone at the table gasp. Perhaps it was me. Everyone turned to look at Phaedra, some with a modicum of confusion, one or two with amusement. Obviously, everyone in the village knew the whole story of Leonidas and Phaedra, their engagement once, their split and the arrival of the foreigner interloper.

  Leonidas was still in his apron, holding barbecue tongs. I had hoped he might have looked mildly shocked or surprised but his face was a picture of calm. Only his eyes were just slightly narrowed in concentration. This was no doubt the ‘medical stare’ sworn to along with the Hippocratic Oath, with which a doctor could deal with all kinds of mayhem. I only saw his eyes flicker briefly in my direction, once.

  Myrto hissed, “Panayia mou!”

  Angus stared at Phaedra, then tapped my shoulder and leaned towards me behind Myrto’s back. “Here’s another clusterfuck about to happen, pet,” he whispered.

  Eve looked around in confusion. “Am I missing something?” she said quietly.

  “The older woman is Thekla, Leonidas’s aunt, and the other is
Phaedra, Leo’s ex-girlfriend, the woman I told you about.”

  “He invited her here, today?”

  I shrugged. “Could be.”

  I thought of the irony of my chat with Eve moments earlier about following one’s heart and love overcoming cultural challenges. I wondered how love would get around this damnable intrusion.

  Phaedra was dressed in tight white trousers, well cut, and a turquoise silk top, cut low with a hint of a lacy kind of bra underneath; a clutch of pearls at her neck. Very chic and sexy. Her straight black hair shimmered like midnight as she walked into the garden. Thekla led the way and as she passed she fixed me with her evil button eyes. Just for a second but they burnt into my soul. Leonidas dashed calmly into damage limitation and kissed them both briefly on the cheek. He spoke to them in Greek. All very affable-sounding. He sat the pair in the middle of the long table, far enough away.

  With the initial shock of seeing Phaedra, I had the urge to get up and leave, but good sense prevailed. It would hardly look cool to leg it in a huff, not in this glorious dress. Thekla had a look of entitlement, head up, smoothing a wisp of hair behind one of her big fleshy ears. I laughed, more of a nervous cackle. Angus nudged me with his elbow and gave me a warning look. But the cackle couldn’t be silenced yet. I was remembering the story Myrto had told me about the scorpion landing on Thekla’s head during an olive harvest. I had a vision in my mind then of Thekla with a scorpion’s nest in her big hairdo, and running about in fiery circles. How could I get hold of a scorpion before the lunch was out? The thought had already hit me. It was probably Thekla who engineered this Easter surprise all by herself. A piece of spite ramped up by seeing Angelos and me in Myrto’s field. Well, that’s what I preferred to believe, otherwise it was Leo’s idea. That was another kind of scorpion’s nest.

  Myrto leaned towards me and said in a hoarse whisper, “Leonidas lining up all the sheilas now, eh?”