wall lost their wide-eyed summer expressions as shutters were nailed in place. The last of the holidaymakers were carried away on ferries and hydrofoils towards Rhodes, or distant Athens, and their flights to Munich or Stockholm or Gatwick. There was a collective sense of relief at the season’s end as the little community prepared to turn inwards.
Olivia was thinking about autumn and other things, as she made her way down the hill to her house. Her two boys were running ahead of her, their brown legs twinkling in the sunshine as they leapt the rocks. Olivia walked more slowly, with empty baskets in both hands. She had been to take cake and flasks of coffee to her guests who were at their easels in the shelter of a band of stunted trees near the top of the hill.
‘There’s Pappy!’
Georgi, the older child, balanced on a cone of rock and pointed. His brother Theo immediately ran up and pushed him sideways. Georgi toppled off and Theo leapt on to the rock pinnacle in his place.
‘I am the leader,’ he crowed.
‘Mummy, Mum, did you see what Theo did?’
The two of them spoke a mixture of Greek and English that Olivia and Xan always enjoyed. Xan’s Greek mother was less admiring.
‘They sound nothing like little Greek boys. They sound like nothing on earth,’ Meroula Georgiadis complained.
‘Take it in turns,’ Olivia told them automatically.
She dismissed the thought of her mother-in-law and watched her husband walking back along the harbour wall instead. He was looking over the turquoise water, past the moored caiques and the smoking tar barrel, but she could see the way the wind blew his hair into a crest, just as it did with Georgi’s. Her heart’s rhythm altered for a second or two as it always did when she caught sight of Xan after a separation, even if it had only lasted for an hour.
‘Come on, Theo,’ Georgi yelled, opting to ignore the rock dispute. He ran away downhill and his brother scrambled after him. Theo was only five, the younger by two and a half years, but he 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.’
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