Until she met Xan Georgiadis, when everything changed.
‘Anyway, Mum, I’m glad you’ve had some sun at last even if the garden’s parched. And have you heard from Max?’
Max was Olivia’s brother, younger by two years. As children they had been allies within the controlled zone of their family life, and he was still closer to her than anyone else in the world except her husband and children. But Max lived in Sydney now with his wife and daughters, and regular telephone calls were too expensive for Olivia. She relied on her mother for weekly news and waited eagerly for Max’s less frequent calls to Halemni. You should get e-mail, her brother had told her, but he might as well have suggested getting a Learjet.
There were voices across the little courtyard that separated the studios from the main house. The guests were back.
‘Mum, I’ve got to go. They need lunch. Yes, I will. And you too. Speak next week.’
‘How is she?’ Xan asked absently. There was the long table to be laid for lunch outside, and food to be placed on it. Meroula was part of the fabric of their everyday lives but Maddie was remote, more of a concept than a real presence. Olivia felt guilty about this, but there was no solution to it.
‘She’s fine.’
Christopher Cruickshank put his head round the door. ‘We’re back.’ He had a thin face almost bisected by a hank of fine hair. When he was painting he wore the hair pushed back under a decomposing straw hat.
Olivia was already taking the big tray of spinach pie out of the oven.
‘Welcome,’ Xan laughed.
‘Is everything ready for tonight?’ Christopher asked. There was a kid to be spit-roasted, the centrepiece of the last night’s party.
‘I think so,’ Olivia said, running through in her mind what needed to be done. ‘You will light the fire in good time?’ She asked Xan this question every two weeks throughout the summer season.
‘I will.’
There was no moon that night and the sky held only a faint afterglow that made it seem a blue-black hollow ball pitted with stars. The sea was black and calm for late in the season. Inky wavelets slapped the harbour wall and whispered into the shingle on the village beach. Xan had hung lanterns in the branches of a tamarisk tree, and there were candles all down the long table under the avli, the pergola with its vine shading. The kid had been roasted and carved and eaten, and the fire of driftwood had shrunk to a powdery crimson core, and now the English voices were louder and less careful.
Olivia looked down the table. The double line of faces was reddened by the sun and wine. It was always a good moment, when the inhibitions finally broke up. It was just a shame that it almost always took until the very last night. These people had chosen to spend their precious holidays here and they had brought their paintings and sketches to be admired and commented upon, and so given oblique insights into their lives. They stirred a wash of affection in her and she knew that she would miss them all through the winter. She would look forward to the first rash of floppy sunhats in the sharp early summer sunshine.
And it was always like this, she remembered. It could have been any of the years since they had begun here. Each season’s beginning and end made her feel the same, eagerly anticipatory or affectionate and pleasurably melancholy.
This was the tissue of happiness, she thought. Phases repeated themselves, and accretions of memory and pleasure built up, and you could dip down through the layers and examine them, like tree rings or sandstone deposits. The awareness of permanence on Halemni weighted her limbs, making her feel dizzy and voluptuous with satisfaction. She loved their life here and the people she shared it with. Looking down the table again, she even loved knife-faced Christine Darby and her pompous husband, who had complained about the beds and the food, and Christopher’s eccentric teaching methods.
Xan moved into the lantern light beside her, removing empty wine bottles and putting a full bottle of Metaxas in their place.
‘None for you,’ he teased with his mouth close to her hair, meaning that he could see she had drunk enough.
‘Oh, go on. Just one. You never know what it might lead to, if you’re lucky,’ she whispered back.
Later there was dancing. Christopher played the guitar and the English couples swayed and jigged under the branches of the tree, and then draped arms over one another’s shoulders and pointed their toes in a wobbly imitation of Xan, at the end of the line, when he led the Greek dance. He was a supple, stately dancer and the guests looked like a row of jerky puppets as they tried to follow his steps.
Olivia was like the maypole in the middle with two ribbons twisting around her.
‘I can’t,’ she protested. ‘My legs don’t work at this time of night.’
‘Legs like yours don’t need to,’ Brian Darby murmured in the knowledge that his wife was out of earshot.
And at the same moment at the far end of the line it was Mrs Darby who spotted the bear-like man shambling at the rim of the lantern light. She crooked her elbow gaily to indicate that he should join in.
At once he lurched towards her and locked both arms round her neck to stop himself from falling flat on his face. As soon as she got the full blast of his breath Mrs Darby changed her mind about the invitation to dance. She tried to shake him off and pull herself away, but the line of dancers reeled the two of them along like fish on a hook. All the other guests thought it was a joke and shouted encouragement, then hooted with laughter as their legs tangled. The man pressed his stubbled face closer, trying for a kiss, and the woman screamed. A little bullet of shock discharged itself into the atmosphere.
Xan had already disentangled himself from the staggering bodies. He ran to pull the man off.
‘Oh, bollocks,’ Christopher muttered and flicked his cigarette past the tamarisk tree before going to help.
‘Yannis, Yannis,’ Xan shouted.
Christine Darby was pinned on her back by an inert body. Her arms and legs flailed helplessly. Xan hauled the man up by his shirt, exposing a thick mahogany-brown torso matted with black hair. The man muttered thickly as Christopher added his efforts to Xan’s. Together they propped him back on his feet while Mrs Darby gave a series of thin shrieks.
Olivia knelt over her.
‘It’s all right. He won’t hurt you, he’s just drunk.’
Brian Darby came out of the knot of onlookers, only a second or two belatedly, with his fists jerking like a wound-up toy. He took a cocky swing at the mumbling Yannis and missed the side of his head, and Yannis made a surprisingly swift counter-swing that did not miss. There was a soft smack as his massive hand connected with the other man’s nose. Darby fell like a sack into the arms of two other guests as Xan and Christopher pinned Yannis’s arms behind his back. Xan put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Olivia swung from Mrs Darby to the woman’s husband, who had been lowered by his supporters into the nearest chair. The man’s nose was bleeding. A carmine stream ran down his chin and dripped on his mint-green Lacoste shirt. She caught the flow with the nearest screwed-up paper napkin and tipped his head back. His mouth flapped open and shut as he gasped like a landed codfish.
‘Here,’ she called over her shoulder to Christine who was now vertical again. ‘Hold this while I get some ice.’
Out of the shadows across the square a little posse of men came running to Xan’s whistle. They man-handled Yannis’s now unprotesting bulk out of the light and towed it away.
Xan wiped the flat of his hands down the sides of his jeans and dropped his shoulders.
‘Okay, everyone. Drama over now. Let me see how it seems, Brian.’