by Mary Stewart
‘One of them. My cousin will arrive later. This is a lovely place, kyria.’
She smiled. Her mouth was thinned almost to liplessness, but not unpleasantly. In repose it did not seem set, but merely showed a kind of interminable and painful patience, a striving for mindlessness. ‘As for that, it is a small village, and a poor one; but my brother says that you know this, and that many people will come, only to be tranquil.’
‘Your – brother?’
‘He is the patron.’ She said this with a kind of pride. ‘Stratos Alexiakis is my brother. He was in England, in London, for many years, but last November he came home, and bought the hotel.’
‘Yes, I heard about it from Tony. It’s certainly very nice, and I hope he does well.’
I hoped the conventional words had concealed my surprise. So this was Sofia. She had the appearance of the poorest peasant in a poor country – but then, I thought, if she was helping her brother start up his hotel, no doubt she would wear her oldest clothes for the rough work. It occurred to me that if she had fallen heir to Tony’s cooking it hadn’t – as yet – done her much good.
‘Do you live in the hotel?’ I asked.
‘Oh, no,’ hastily, ‘I have a house, down the road a little, on the other side of the street. The first one.’
‘The one with the fig tree? I saw it. And the oven outside.’ I smiled. ‘Your garden was so lovely; you must be very proud of it. Your husband’s a fisherman, is he?’
‘No. He – we have a little land up the river. We have vines and lemons and tomatoes. It is hard work.’
I remembered the cottage, spotlessly clean, with its ranked flowers beside the fig tree. I thought of the hotel floors, which she had been scrubbing. Then of the fields, which no doubt she would till. No wonder she moved as if her body hurt her. ‘Have you many children?’
Her face seemed to shut. ‘No. Alas, no. God has not seen fit.’ A gesture to her breast, where a tiny silver ornament – a Greek cross, I thought – had swung loose on its chain while she was scrubbing. Encountering this, her hand closed over it quickly, an oddly protective movement, with something of fear in it. She thrust the cross quickly back into the breast of her frock, and began to gather her things together.
‘I must go. My husband will be home soon, and there is a meal to get.’
My own meal was a good one; lamb, which the Cretans call amnos – many of the classical terms still survive in the dialect – and green beans, and potatoes.
‘Sautées, my dear, in olive oil,’ said Tony, who served me. ‘Butter’s too scarce here, but I do assure you I made them go steady on the oil. Like them?’
‘Fine. But I like olive oil. And here, where it’s so to speak fresh from the cow, it’s terrific. You were right about the wine, King Minos, sec. I must remember that. It’s dryish for a Greek wine, isn’t it? – and the name is wonderfully Cretan!’
‘Bottled in Athens, dear, see?’
‘Oh, no, you shouldn’t have showed me that!’ I glanced up. ‘I met Mr Alexiakis’ sister upstairs.’
‘Sofia? Oh yes. She helps around,’ he said vaguely. ‘Now, will you have fruit for afters, or fromage, or what my dear friend Stratos calls “compost”?’
‘It depends rather on what that is.’
‘Between you and me, tinned fruit salad, dear. But don’t worry, we’ll really let ourselves go at dinner. The caique gets in today – oh, of course you know all about that.’
‘I’m not worrying, why should I? That was excellent. No, not an orange, thank you. May I have cheese?’
‘Sure. Here. The white one’s goat and the yellow one with holes is sheep, so take your pick . . . Excuse me one moment. Speak of angels.’
He twitched the coffee percolator aside from its flame, and went out of the dining-room, across the terrace into the sunlight of the street. A woman was waiting there, not beckoning to him, or making any sign, just waiting, with the patience of the poor. I recognized her; it was Stratos’ sister, Sofia.
If only one could stop doing those uncomfortable little addition-sums in one’s head . . . If only there was some way to switch off the mechanism . . . But the computer ticked on, unwanted, adding it all up, fraction by fraction. Tony and the ‘Englishman’. And now, Tony and Sofia. There had been a woman there, Mark had said. Sofia and her brother . . .
I ate my cheese doggedly, trying to ignore the unwanted answers that the computer kept shoving in front of me. Much better concentrate on the cheese, and there was some wine left, and the coffee, which was to follow, smelt delicious; café français, no doubt Tony would call it . . . Here, the computer ticked up a fleeting memory of Mark, dirty, unshaven, hagridden, swallowing indifferent thermos coffee, and choking down dry biscuits. I stamped fiercely on the switch, expunged the memory, and turned my attention back to Tony, graceful and immaculate, standing easily in the sun, listening to Sofia.
She had put one of those flattened claws on his arm, almost as if in pleading. Her coif was drawn up now, shadowing half her face, and at that distance I could not see her expression, but her attitude was one of urgency and distress. Tony seemed to be reassuring her, and he patted the hand on his arm before he withdrew it. Then he said something cheerfully dismissive, and turned away.
As he turned, I dropped my gaze to the table, pushing my cheese plate aside. I had seen the look on Sofia’s face as Tony turned and left her. It was distress, and she was weeping; but there was also, unmistakably, fear.
‘Café français, dear?’ said Tony.
Not even the computer – aided by two cups of coffee – could have kept me awake after lunch. I carried my second cup out to the garden, and there, alone with the drowsy sound of bees, and the tranquil lapping of the sea, I slept.
It was no more than a cat-nap, a doze of half an hour or so, but it must have been deep and relaxing, for, on waking, I found that I had none of the hangover feeling that one sometimes gets from sleeping in the afternoon. I felt fresh and wide awake, and full of a sense of pleasant anticipation which resolved itself into the knowledge that Frances would soon be here. Frances, who would know just what to do . . .
I didn’t pursue this thought; didn’t even acknowledge it. I sat up, drank the glassful of water – tepid now – that had been served with my coffee, and dutifully set about writing a postcard to Jane, my Athens room mate. That Jane would be very surprised to get it was another of the things I didn’t acknowledge; I merely told myself that I wanted a walk, and that the card would be a good excuse for a quiet little stroll down as far as the village post office. I certainly did not stop to consider why I should need the excuse, or why, indeed, I should want a walk, after the amount of exercise I had already had that day. Jane (I said to myself, writing busily) would be delighted to hear from me.
The message that was to arouse all this astonished delight ran as follows: ‘Arrived here today; lovely and peaceful. Frances due here this afternoon. She’ll be thrilled when she sees the flowers, and will spend pounds on film. Hotel seems good. Am hoping it will be warm enough to swim. Love, Nicola.’
I wrote this artless missive very clearly, then took it into the lobby. Tony was there, sitting behind the table, with his feet up, reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
‘Don’t get up,’ I said hastily. ‘I just wondered if you had stamps. Just one, for a local postcard; one drach.’
He swung his feet down, and fished below the table to pull open a cluttered drawer.
‘Sure. One at one drach, did you say?’ The long fingers leafed through three or four sad-looking sheets of postage stamps. ‘Here we are. Only two left, you’re lucky.’
‘Thanks. Oh, are there any at five? I might as well get them now, for airmail to England.’
‘I’ll see. Five . . . How nice that one’s very first tourist knows all the ropes. I can never remember that sort of thing – I’d make the lousiest information clerk ever. Railway time-tables simply panic me, you’ve no idea.’
‘Then you’ve come to the right place.
D’you mean,’ I asked innocently, ‘that you’ve never written home once, since you came to Greece?’
‘My dear, I couldn’t shake the dust of the dear old Vicarage off my feet fast enough. No, I’m sorry, we’ve no fives, only twos and fours. Are you in a hurry, because I can easily get some for you?’
‘Don’t trouble, thanks, I’d like to go out anyway, to explore. Oh look, I’m sorry, I can’t even pay you for this one now, I’ve left my purse upstairs. I’ll be down in a minute.’
‘Don’t worry about that. We’ll put it on the bill. Double for the trouble, and don’t mention it.’
‘No, I’ll need it anyway, to get the stamps in the village. And I must get my dark specs.’
I left the postcard lying on the desk, and went upstairs to my room. When I got back, I could swear the card had not been moved, not even a millimetre.
I smiled at Tony.
‘I suppose this town does have a post office?’
‘It does indeed, but I won’t insult you by directing you, dear. Agios Georgios isn’t exactly complicated. Once down the main street and straight into the sea. Have a lovely walk.’ And he subsided into Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
I picked up my postcard and went out into the street.
‘Street,’ of course, is a misleading word for the dusty gap between Agios Georgios’ straggling houses. Outside the hotel was a wide space of trodden, stony dust where hens scratched, and small, brown, half-naked children played under a pistachio tree. The two cottages nearest the hotel were pretty in their fresh whitewash, each with a vine for shade, and with a low white wall fencing the tiny yard where the vine grew. Sofia’s house stood by itself at the other side of the street. This was a little bigger than the others, and meticulously kept. A fig tree – that most shapely of trees – grew near the door, its shadow throwing a vivid pattern against the brilliant white wall. The little garden was crammed with flowers; snapdragons, lilies, carnations, mallows – all the spired and scented profusion of the English summer, growing here, as rank as wild-flowers, in the Cretan April. Against the outer wall of the house was a primitive fireplace whose blackened pots stood on trivets of a design so old that it was as familiar as the skin of one’s hands. A vine-covered wall at the back did its best to hide a cluttered yard where I saw the beehive shape of a baking oven.
I walked slowly downhill. All seemed innocent and quiet in the afternoon heat. Here was the church, very small, snow-white, with a Reckitt’s-blue dome, perched on a little knoll with its back to the cliffs. In front of it some loving hand had made a pavement of sea-pebbles, blue and terracotta and slate-grey, hammered down in patterns into the iron ground. Beyond it, the street sloped more steeply towards the sea, and here, though every house had a pot or two of flowers outside, the place looked barer, and there had been very little use of paint or whitewash. It was as if the richness of the flowery hills had faded and died, dwindling down to starve in the sea-bare poverty of the harbour.
And here was the post office. It was, also, the only shop the village boasted; a dark cave of a place, with double doors open to the street, beaten earth floor, and sacks of produce standing everywhere – beans, maize, and pasta, along with huge square tins swimming with oily looking pilchards. On the counter were earthenware bowls of black olives, a stack of cheeses, and a big, old-fashioned pair of scales. Shelves, crowded with jars and tins, sported (it seemed incongruously) the familiar labels of everyday advertising. Beside the door, casually supporting a stack of brushes, was the letter-box, painted the dark post-office blue. And, on the wall opposite the doorway, the telephone, in the very middle of the shop. You threaded your way between the sacks to get to it.
The shop was, obviously, the meeting place of the village women. Four of them were there now, talking over the weighing of some flour. As I entered, a little hesitantly, conversation stopped abruptly, and they stared; then good manners reasserted themselves, and they looked away, talking more quietly, but not, I noticed, about the foreigner; their conversation – about some sick child – was taken up where it had ceased. But all made way for me, and the shopkeeper put down the flour-scoop and said inquiringly: ‘Miss?’
‘These ladies—’ I said, with a gesture meaning that I could not take their turn.
But I had to in the end, defeated by their inflexible courtesy: ‘I only came for some stamps, please. Six at five drachs, if you will be so good.’
Behind me I heard the stir and whisper: ‘She speaks Greek! Listen, did you hear? English, and she speaks Greek . . . Hush, you ill-mannered one! Silence!’
I smiled at them, and made some remark about their village, and was, on the instant, the centre of a delighted group. Why did I come to such a place? It was so small, so poor, why did I not stay in Heraklion, where there with big hotels, like Athens or London? Did I live in London? Was I married? Ah, but there was a man? No? Ah, well, one could not always be fortunate, but soon, soon, if God willed . . .
I laughed, and answered as best I could, and asked, in my turn, as many questions as I dared. Did they not get many strangers, then, in Agios Georgios? Many English? Oh, yes, Tony, of course, but I meant visitors like myself, foreigners . . . The Danish gentleman, yes, I had heard of him, but nobody else? No? Ah, well, now that the hotel was getting under way, and so efficiently, no doubt there would soon be many visitors, Americans too, and Agios Georgios would prosper. Mr Alexiakis was making a good job of it, wasn’t he? And his sister was helping him? Yes, Sofia, I had met her; I believed she lived in the pretty house at the top of the village, opposite the hotel . . . ?
But on Sofia, we stuck. Beyond swiftly exchanged glances – kindly enough, I thought – and murmurs of ‘Ah, yes, poor Sofia, it was lucky for her that such a brother had come home to look after her,’ the women said nothing more, and the conversation died, to be ignited again by one of them, young and pretty, with a child clinging to her hand, and an air of assurance, inviting me to her house. The others, who seemed only to have waited for her lead, pressed eagerly forward with similar invitations. How long was I to be in Agios Georgios? I would come and see them, yes, and bring my cousin, too. Which house? The one by the harbour wall – the one above the bakery – behind the church . . . it was no matter, (this with laughter), I had only to walk in, there was no house in Agios Georgios where I would not be welcome, so young and pretty, and speaking such good Greek . . .
Laughingly promising, but temporarily parrying all the charming invitations, I finally escaped, not much the wiser about Georgi’s phantom Englishman, but having learned what I had come for, and more as well.
First, the telephone was out. Even without my promise to Mark, there was no chance, whatever happened, of getting in touch with authority, either the Embassy, or even Heraklion, by telephone. The one in the hotel, impossible. The one in the post office, open to the day in what amounted to the Ladies’ Clubroom – in English or in Greek, it couldn’t even be tried. We were on our own.
I found that, without conscious direction, I had reached the tiny harbour. A sea wall, and a little curved pier, held the water clear and still as a tear in the flower cup. Someone had scrawled cyprus for greece along the harbour wall, and someone else had tried to scratch it out. A man was beating an octopus; some family would eat well tonight. Two boats lay at anchor, one white, with vermilion canvas furled along her beautiful spars, the other blue, with the name Eros along her bows. On Eros a youth was working, coiling down a rope. He was wiry and quick-moving, and wore a green sweatshirt and blue denim trousers tucked into short gumboots. It was the lad who had been watching the backgammon players. He eyed me curiously, but did not interrupt his work.
I stood there a moment or two longer, conscious of eyes watching me from the dark doorway of every house, where the women sat. I thought: if only Lambis’ boat would come in now, sailing quietly in from the east, with them all on board; Lambis at the engine, and Mark steering, and Colin in the bows, with a fishing line, laughing . . .
I turned sharply away from t
he shining stretch of the empty sea, and, the terms of my self-deceit forgotten, brought my mind back with a jerk to my problem, the other thing that I had discovered in the village shop – that there was, in fact, no house in Agios Georgios which could have anything to hide. Colin Langley was not here. Nothing could be served by my prying further in a village where every woman must know all her neighbours’ affairs. Any answer to the mystery was only to be found at the hotel.
Or – and here I started to walk slowly back up the street, conscious of the eyes that watched me from the dark doorways – or at Sofia’s cottage.
There might, in fact, be one house in Agios Georgios at which I was not welcome.
Well, there was nothing like trying. And if the husband was still at home, over his meal, then I should be quite interested to meet him, too.
I wondered if he favoured Cretan dress.
9
She seem’d an ancient maid, well-skill’d to cull
The snowy fleece, and wind the twisted wool
POPE: The Iliad of Homer
She was sitting just inside the door of her cottage, spinning. In all my months in Greece, I had never quite got used to the pleasure of watching the peasant women at this primitive task. The soft, furry mass of white wool on the distaff, the brown fingers pulling it out like candy floss to loop across the front of the black dress, the whirling ball of woollen thread on the spindle – these made a pattern that it would have been hard not to appreciate.
She had not looked up at my approach; the trunk of the fig tree must have hidden the movement from her. I paused for a moment, just beyond its shade, to watch her. In the deep shadow where she sat, the lines of trouble could no longer be seen: her face showed the smooth planes of youth, while even the ugly hands, caught in the fluid movements of her task, had taken on a kind of beauty.