was impulsive and imaginative where Georgi was calm and cautious. Olivia began to run after them, with the empty raffia bags flapping against her legs. The low mounds of wild sage and spiny burnet alternated with outcrops of bare limestone and she skipped from one safe footing to the next, unconsciously copying her sons.
The old houses in Megalo Chorio, the principal settlement on the island, were whitewashed cubes with door and window frames painted bright blue or green. They lined the harbour wall and the sides of the one street that led away from the sea. On the village outskirts, a few metres back from the sickle curve of the beach, was a row of new concrete boxes, half of them unfinished with thickets of rusty metal sprouting from the flat roofs. These were the apartments and studios rented by the tourists in summer, those who didn’t stay with the Georgiadises or in private houses or one of the two tavernas with rooms in the main street. The new buildings were an eyesore but Olivia had taught herself not to look at them. The tourists brought money to Halemni, they needed somewhere to sleep, so it was necessary to have such places.
The Georgiadis house stood at the back of the village, forming the short side of a rough cobbled square dominated by a huge fig tree. Across the square Taverna Irini faced a tiny church with a rounded blue dome. The fourth side was open and gave a wide view of the bay and water skittishly silvered by the sunlight. The house had originally belonged to the island’s potter, but the local craftsman had lost the competition against cheap imported plates and dishes, and had retired to the west side of the island. Xan and Olivia had bought the house and its outbuildings ten years before, when they decided to make their lives here where Xan had been born. Before that Olivia had travelled so far and for so long that she believed to settle in one place, with Xan, would be as close to heaven as she could ever come.
And in many ways the belief had been justified. She would have argued with anyone that every idyll must have a flaw, in order for it to be recognisably an idyll. Xan came along the street just as Olivia and the boys reached the front door. He was a big man, black-haired and black-eyed. He put his hands against the oak of the door lintel and made an arch of his body. The boys ran underneath, shouting with noisy competition.
The house was washed pale-blue, like a reflection of the early morning sky. It had two storeys with shuttered windows and small iron balconies at the upper ones. The rooms were small and not very convenient, but the outbuildings were ideal. Xan had converted them into a row of modest studios, and it was these that housed Olivia’s summer guests. They were English, like Olivia herself, mostly middle-aged or retired, and they came to Halemni to paint.
Olivia and Xan made a living out of the painting holidays, just, which put them in about the same financial position as everyone else on Halemni. And they had the winters to themselves, when the wind worried at the shutters and salt spray caked the harbour stones.
Olivia stooped and tried to pass the same way as the boys, but Xan caught her by the hips.
‘Hello, yia sou.’
They kissed briefly, smiling into each other’s mouths.
‘Everybody happy?’ Xan meant the guests up on the hill, peering across their easels at the view of the village and the coast of Turkey like smoke on the skyline. This fortnight’s guests had been a more than usually demanding group. They complained about the cold at night and about the mid-afternoon heat.
‘For five minutes, at least. Chris is up there.’
Tuition was provided by Christopher Cruickshank, a good teacher and a talented watercolourist in his own right. Olivia cooked and hosted evening parties, and led walks if anyone wanted to explore the island.
Xan’s contribution was largely his geniality. It was one of the reasons why the English couples came back year after year and recommended the Georgiadises to their friends. Xan took them on boat trips and grilled fish on a driftwood fire, and teased them about English weather and their native reticence, or anything else except their ability as painters. In the remainder of the time he fixed damaged ballcocks and repaired the generator, and did whatever other running repairs were needed.
Xan grinned. Nothing more needed to be said. It was the last day of the last booking and tomorrow the hydrofoil would take them all away.
‘Pappy, look. It’s a war,’ Georgi called.
Xan put his arm round his wife’s shoulders and they squeezed through the doorway together. The boys had perched at the big scrubbed table in the kitchen, knees and feet bundled up anyhow on the chairs, and were drawing on big sheets of coarse paper. Georgi’s picture was of aeroplanes looping and smashing in mid-air. Tiny men spilled out of them with triangular parachutes sprouting from their backs. Xan put his head on one side to study it. He thought how sturdy and alert and busy his sons were. This was all Olivia’s doing.
When he first met her she always had her eyes and her attention fixed on the next place. But then, to his amazement, when they fell in love she quickly agreed to come home with him to Halemni. She had fitted in here as easily as if she had been born in a house overlooking the bay. They married and the boys were born, and it was as if she had turned herself inside out, like a leather glove reversing to its silk lining, the wanderer turned into the anchor. Olivia became the best mother he could have imagined and the little household revolved around her steady sun.
‘Why did you give up your glamorous life to come and be poor with me on this rocky island?’ he used to ask her, when it still seemed remarkable to him. ‘Even if you had done enough travelling you could have gone back to England, to your family and your friends.’
It was true, Olivia acknowledged. Her parents were there, and all her friends from school and university, and a couple of sort-of boyfriends she hadn’t missed much while she was away. It was the ordinary network of a normal life and she had broken out of it in the first place because she didn’t want to be defined by it. Most particularly, she didn’t want to live like her mother and father had lived.
‘I came here with you because I loved you more than anything or anyone else in the world. I still do. And I stay here because I am so happy,’ she told him.
It was the truth. When she put her arms round Xan she felt how solid he was and rooted in his own ground like a great tree. By comparison England seemed a pale place, and her parents’ and friends’ lives defined by too many compromises to do with more money and less love.
‘Is that what bullets look like?’ Xan asked the boy. Dots and dashes like Morse code radiated from the wings and nose cones.
‘It’s light beams,’ Georgi said witheringly.
‘I see, okay, of course. The light fighters. What’s yours, Theo?’
Big stripes and thick crayon patches. ‘Heaven,’ he said. ‘For Christopher.’
Theo’s tongue stuck out between his teeth as he worked. He gave the painter’s name the full Greek pronunciation.
‘Lucky old Christo.’
‘They’ve been drawing all morning,’ Olivia said. She had unlatched herself reluctantly from Xan and was unpacking the baskets, smoothing sheets of tinfoil and replacing them in a drawer.
Nothing was wasted here. Halemni had only small pockets of fertile ground. Everything that the islanders couldn’t grow or make themselves came in by boat from nearby islands or the mainland. Every sheet of paper and tube of paint and square of sandwich wrapping that the Georgiadises used was counted, and not just because of the scarcity but because there was not enough money to permit waste. Like most of the islanders they lived by a rule
