rope that has anchored us to the buoy. He hauls in the dripping length of it.
‘I’ll take you home.’
‘Home,’ I think and the notion was nothing to do with the white-skinned hotel. It’s somewhere else, somewhere I can’t yet locate. The sky has grown steadily darker and a few raindrops pock the water, but I hardly notice. Outside the confines of the bay there is just enough wind to stiffen the sail. We sit quietly and the coastline slides backwards until the beach hotels come into view.
We reach the jetty and he brings the boat alongside, passing a double length of rope through an iron ring to make us fast.
‘Thank you,’ I say uncertainly. The questions I dismissed earlier sound again. Who? Why?
Andreas says, ‘We will see each other again, but it won’t be another day like today.’
Why? Again, but I don’t ask the question aloud. I already know that there will be no answer, not now, no answer that would qualify as such. Maybe he is about to go away. Maybe there are other considerations that I don’t yet understand.
‘I had a very happy day, today.’
Already in my mind it is set aside, marked out with a memory. With the rhythm of Andreas’s company I have stopped thinking about Peter. There has been a whole chain of hours during which I have been completely happy and unmarked.
On the jetty, looking out at the brown hummocks of the Greek islands and the backdrop of pewter sky, Andreas briefly puts his arms round me and holds me close.
‘So did I,’ he says.
Then he kisses my forehead and lets me go.
I stand watching the boat slip away, but he has put his straw hat on and there is no glimpse of his face.
I am in my hotel room again. A handful of days separate me from the hours I spent with Andreas, but the effect of our strange encounter has stayed with me. I have been content with my own company, not needing to block myself out with reading or barbiturate-heavy sleep. My memories of Peter and our life together have been tender and untainted by bitterness. I am awake and anticipatory, and there is no weight on my back. I have walked on the beach and through the streets of Branc, looking at the people who live here and making up stories for myself about their lives. People have looked at me in return, nodding and smiling – casual greetings, just the way that ordinary people acknowledge each other. And I have not minded or shied away from the scrutiny. I feel that I have the freedom of myself.
Maybe this is normal, maybe this is the happiness of normality.
Maybe I have never known it since before my eighth birthday.
I can’t sleep.
The clock at my bedside tells me that it is a little after one a.m. The close, thundery weather has lasted for three days now, since I went sailing with Andreas. A storm would clear the air, but it never comes, and the nights are long and airless. I find that I don’t mind the absence of sleep, now, whereas only last week I would have obliterated myself with sleeping pills.
I slide out of bed and put on a pair of loose trousers, a thin shirt. I step noiselessly out of my room and walk down the hotel corridor, past the numbered and nameless doors, across the deserted lobby where the night porter is dozing in a chair behind the reception desk. Outside in the garden there is the faintest breath of wind and I pursue it down the steps on to the beach. The sand grates cool and pleasant under my bare feet. The sea is black, the sky starless. I walk for a couple of minutes, to the water’s edge and a step beyond, soaking my feet and ankles and the hems of my trouser legs. Then I pace along to the jetty where Andreas moored the boat. I walk to the end and sit down. I hook my fingers in the iron ring and dangle my legs over the edge.
There is stillness and silence except for the restless water.
I look back at the darkened town. There are few holidaymakers left, the bars and clubs are mostly closed for the season. It is as if everyone in the world is asleep.
I sit and wait.
‘It’s too hot,’ Theo complained.
His grandmother held him on her lap and stroked his hair, murmuring a stream of Greek baby talk. It wasn’t particularly hot now that it was dark, but the thundery air was oppressive. Olivia moved between the sink and the table, stepping around the chair where Meroula sat. She knew that her mother-in-law was watching her over the child’s head and she tried to shake off both the awareness and the irritation that went with it. She didn’t want Meroula sitting here in her kitchen. The older woman judged the way that Olivia ran her household and cared for her children, and always found the methods deficient, pursing her mouth so the creases ran out from it like slanting chisel marks. Olivia had no choice in the matter, however. Meroula took it as a Greek mother’s right to place herself at the centre of her son’s household and Xan tacitly concurred.
‘When I was a little girl, Granny used to put Max and me to bed every night at seven o’clock,’ Olivia said, although no one was listening.
They shared a room, when they were very small, just as Georgi and Theo did now. Olivia would lie under the blankets and make up stories about runaway princesses and jungles and lost treasure. The stories had more exotic ingredients than narrative drive, she remembered. She had been very good at making up the cast list but rarely got beyond it into any action. Even so, Max would lie with his thumb in his mouth, watching her with enthralled eyes as she rambled on. She would get carried away with descriptions of the princess’s golden hair and long pink dresses, and when she finally looked again to see how riveted he was, he would have fallen into sleep as suddenly as if he had dropped down a well. In the morning he would apparently still be lying in the same position, thumb in his mouth. Time to get up, Olivia would tell him, and he would open his eyes immediately, ready to scramble up and do what she told him in their games.
She could remember exactly how the house felt on those early evenings and mornings. It was quiet, as if nothing would ever change there, and yet there was an underlying sense that with just a single flick everything could alter frighteningly for ever.
‘I’m too hot,’ Theo repeated.
‘He has a fever,’ Meroula said to her.
‘Let him get down and go and lie down in his own bed.’
‘On his own, the poor child?’
Meroula wore a wide grey skirt with folds that allowed her to sit with her legs planted apart. She had thick lisle stockings, the colour of dried clay, and a dark cardigan with lapels and military buttons that stretched across her chest. She didn’t always wear the same clothes, but she gave the impression that this was her unvarying uniform.
‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Georgi said from the other side of the table, without looking up from his drawing. ‘I want to see Pappy when he comes in.’
‘Of course he does,’ Meroula said triumphantly.
Olivia was preparing squid for Xan’s evening meal, slicing off the heads and pulling out the entrails and the ink sac, and then dropping the torsos into a dish of oil and tomato juice. Squid stuffed with rice and onions was one of Xan’s favourite dinners. The boys had already eaten
