was none of that paper they used the insides of cardboard cartons. They considered themselves rich in other things.
Xan sat down at the table. Olivia went into the stone larder that led off the kitchen and brought out a bowl of tomatoes, a chunk of goat’s cheese and a dish of yoghurt and put them on the table. Xan stretched a lazy arm and took a loaf of bread out of a basket near the big old sink. Olivia baked their bread and grew the tomatoes in her vegetable garden behind the house. The goat’s cheese came from a farmer inland and the oil from their neighbour Yannis who had the island’s best and biggest olive grove.
‘Put your drawings away now,’ Xan told his sons. ‘And pull your chairs straight.’ He broke off a hunk of bread and bit hungrily at it as he passed the remainder to the table. Like his own father, Xan believed in do as I say, not do as I do. The boys did as they were told, lining their seats up opposite their parents’ places and turning their faces to the food. They had the same straight noses and thick eyebrows as their father.
Olivia sliced bread and handed the bowls, and for a minute there was silence as her men ate. Before her marriage she would not have considered it but it came to her naturally, now, to look after their needs first. She smiled to herself, thinking that some of Meroula’s ways had rubbed off on her. Xan saw the smile. She caught him looking at her over the boys’ heads and the heat that flashed between them made her fidget on her seat and push the hair away from her damp cheeks.
The children were given bowls of yoghurt with a spoonful of honey dribbled in the centre. Theo stirred his into a sepia whirlpool, while Georgi dipped his spoon carefully into the glistening puddle and ate it with slow, sucking noises before licking up the plain outskirts.
It didn’t take long to eat the meal and no one made any comment about it. The food was what they ate almost every midday. As soon as the boys had finished they squirmed on their chairs until Xan nodded them permission to go and they ran outside. At once Olivia was on her feet, clearing the plates and storing the leftovers. Xan went to the stove to heat a pot of thick coffee. This was his job.
‘Who was there?’ Olivia asked.
‘Yannis,’ Xan’s fingers made a little tilting gesture next to his mouth. Yannis liked to start early on the raki, and lately did not stop until the day’s end. Olivia lifted one shoulder in a shrug of exasperation, mostly on behalf of Yannis’s wife.
‘There’ was the kafeneion down on the harbour, where Xan had just been. It was a dingy place with no tablecloths or taped music or candles in bottles, and deliberately so because these things attracted the tourists. It was where the island men gathered to talk and play backgammon, in the late mornings after the fishing and before the afternoon’s full heat, in the golden in-between seasons of spring and autumn. In high summer the village and the beaches belonged to the invaders and in the winter everyone kept more to their houses.
‘No one else?’
Megalo Chorio was a small community and the Georgiadises knew everyone. The small details of who had been where and what they had said were common currency, handed on like folk remedies. Xan mentioned a couple of names and Olivia nodded as she worked. They didn’t need to enlarge on anything for each other. She manhandled a metal pie dish into the big oven and slammed the door on it, standing up with her face slightly flushed from the blast of heat.
‘Coffee here,’ Xan said. They rested their buttocks against the scrubbed table, heads level and thighs just touching, and gratefully drank. Apart from in bed, they did not have many minutes alone together.
A thin line of sunlight striped the floor and Olivia watched it as it thickened. The window faced west and this signal of the sun meant that the afternoon had begun and the guests would be back soon for their late lunch. After a morning’s painting they were ready for food and siestas. She sighed as she put her cup aside and Xan tipped his chin against her shoulder.
‘One more day,’ he said.
‘Come on. I don’t think of it like that.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Well. Maybe at the very end of the season I do. But I’ll be looking forward to them again by the time May comes around.’
It was true. This was the rhythm they lived by and she was happy with it, because of its regularity and simplicity. When she was travelling there had been no such rhythms.
The telephone rang. Xan made an impatient noise and reached out but Olivia beat him to it. She tried to field the business calls from the booking agents in England and from guests, because Xan could be abrupt and if there were messages to be passed on he often forgot them. In any case, she knew who this caller was. Olivia’s mother usually rang on Friday afternoons, when her husband had gone upstairs with the newspaper after lunch.
‘Mum? Hello. Yes, of course I’m here. Yes, we’re all fine. Busy, you know, but it is the last day of the season. And you? How is he?’
‘He’ was Olivia’s father. All the time she was growing up he had been a dangerously unpredictable figure, someone to be propitiated by her mother and herself. Now that she was an adult and the two of them were old, the roles were almost reversed. Denis had become the propitiator and Maddie the one who was impatient. Olivia hunched her shoulder to hold the receiver at her ear, listening to her mother’s news of the week.
She was used to this compact exchange. For twelve years between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-three Olivia had moved from place to place, taking photographs and selling them to travel magazines and picture libraries whenever she could, and doing casual jobs when she could not. She kept in touch with people by means of postcards and occasional calls, and she was happy enough with this arm’s-length contact.
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
