bushes and clumps of wild sage, up the steep goat path to the abandoned old village, and made herself at home in it. The stepping stones of the narrow streets were broken and tilted, with the spear-shaped leaves of arum and wild hyacinth pushing up between them.
The last few families had left in the Sixties, driven out by the lack of water and the hardness of life, retreating down to the coast to join the rest of their dwindling community. This was before the great money tide of tourism washed over the islands. The young men no longer wanted a back-breaking existence spent farming their family’s hillside terraces with donkeys and their bare hands, and the young women refused to marry into such a life. The little stone houses were roofless, door and window holes gaping, home to the goats and a few snakes and lizards.
Olivia wandered through the ruins with her camera.
Each house had its own atmosphere. In some the bare earth smelled sour and the loose stones rattled underfoot. In others the bread oven beside the ruined hearth still felt almost warm and she could imagine the smell of baking on the air. The twisted trunk of an old rose bush leaned at an angle against one door, blue paint daubs marked family ownership on another. But the Halemni families would never come back to Arhea Chorio. The only inhabitants were ghosts. Sometimes Olivia could feel people, walking up the street to the ruined church to answer the silent bell.
‘I can’t live with your mother any longer,’ Olivia said to Xan when spring had properly arrived and the hillsides were a picture of flowers.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Vangelis is going to sell us his house. Bit by bit, as we raise the money. It’s more expensive than buying it outright, but beggars can’t be choosers. Let’s go and look at it.’
They walked up to the potter’s house. It was dirty and barely weatherproof, and full of the twisted remains of aborted pots, but Olivia and Xan knew immediately that they could make a home in it. They moved into one room, with plastic sheeting nailed across the window frame and fruit boxes for furniture. But the days were long and hot now, and they were happy to work all the hours that came.
‘You can’t live in that house together. You are not married. Do you know what people will think?’
Xan still laughed. ‘I am not worried what one hundred and fifty people think on one small island. What if we were doing something wicked that the whole world might disapprove of? Which would make you more ashamed?’
‘You should not make your mother ashamed at all.’
Xan laid the heavy flagstones in the kitchen, with the help of his friends Stefanos and Yannis. It was back-breaking work. At the end of one day he sat on the terrace with Olivia under a velvet midnight sky.
‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘I will take that as a yes.’
They were married in September, a Greek Orthodox ceremony in the church across the square from their house. Olivia spent the week beforehand staying in the house of Stefanos’s married sister, and every night of that week Xan and his bachelor friends came and brought her presents, and took away the women’s offerings of cakes and wine before embarking on a night of drinking.
‘It’s the Halemniot custom, always before a wedding,’ Xan protested blearily in the mornings.
‘What am I supposed to do meanwhile?’
‘Work on your wedding clothes. Prepare the bed linen. You are marrying a Greek man.’
‘God help me.’
‘God has got nothing to do with it,’ Xan said. He pulled her into the windowless storage room off Stefanos’s sister’s kitchen and rapidly made love to her against a sack of bread flour.
Olivia’s parents and brother and three of her old friends from university came out for the wedding. Polly and Celia sat on the beach in holiday bikinis and Jack rubbed sun cream between their shoulder blades, and flipped through their magazines while they went swimming.
‘I can’t believe how lucky you are, coming to live in this heavenly place.’ Polly sighed.
‘And with Xan,’ Jack added enviously.
Celia was the married one, with small children whom she had left behind with her husband. She worried about them, and telephoned mornings and evenings from the public phone at the harbour.
‘Won’t you miss home?’ she asked.
‘Darling,’ Jack protested. ‘Olivia has hardly been home in ten years. Why should she start missing it now?’
‘Well, you know what I mean. This is coming to live somewhere for good, starting a family. Putting down proper roots.’
‘I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be, root and branch,’ Olivia said.
‘I’ll drink to that.’ Polly smiled. They all raised their glasses to her in an affectionate toast.
Max liked Halemni as soon as he came ashore from the ferry. On her last day of being a single woman, Olivia took him for a walk up the hill behind the potter’s house. She loved showing him the best view of the sea and the clear view of the Turkish coast from the rock ridge. They sat down on a stone outcrop with the sun hot on their shoulders and Olivia leaned comfortably back against her brother’s knees. After working on Vangelis’s house all through the long Greek summer Olivia was almost as brown as Xan.
‘I’m so glad you came,’ she told Max as he pulled at the ends of her salt-dried and sun-bleached mop of hair.
‘You think I’d miss this? Look at this hair. Jack will despair of you,’ he teased. ‘I thought brides were supposed to spend days beforehand getting crimped and painted.’
‘It’s not like that on Halemni. Who would care?’
‘I’m glad you’re going to be married,’ Max said. ‘It will suit you.’
‘I never thought I would be. It seemed so unlikely, ending up doing the same as Mum.’
Max laughed derisively. ‘The same? I don’t think so. And you aren’t just marrying Xan, are you, and settling down to a mortgage and a routine? You are marrying this beautiful place and a life as unlike Mum’s as it could possibly be.’
Olivia nodded. Her head felt as if it couldn’t contain so much happiness.
‘Exactly. I knew you would understand about the island. The others don’t, not really. We always understood each other, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, we did.’
They had been a company of two, all through their childhood and teens. When she left university and set out with her rucksack and a camera it was Max whom Olivia felt guilty about leaving behind, not their parents. It wasn’t many years before Max left England too, in her wake. He had recently come to rest in Sydney.
Now that the two of them were adults they sometimes talked about the uncomfortable marriage that their parents had endured. Its quality was monotony cut with menace,
