The Potter’s House
BY ROSIE THOMAS

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Random House

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2001

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © FEB 2014 ISBN: 9780007560547

Version: 2016-07-12

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

One

The first time I saw the woman who later ran off with my husband she was giving directions to two removals men. They were struggling to lift a sofa round an awkward bend in the communal stairs and I was waiting to pass.

There were two flats per floor in Dunollie Mansions and this was evidently the new owner of the one directly above ours. Old widowed Mrs Bobinski had lived up there for twenty years in a fug of simmering soup fumes and mothballs, and then she died in hospital after a very brief illness and her heirs put the flat up for sale. It was on the market for months, partly because mansion flats like ours were no longer fashionable, if they ever had been, but mostly because the two nephews were asking too much money for it. I had heard from the Frasers on the top floor that the place was finally sold, but no one had any idea who our new neighbour would be.

‘Some nice, unremarkable couple just like us,’ Graham Fraser cheerfully assumed.

‘And us,’ I added, more thoughtfully.

I stood to one side to let the woman and her puffing retinue pass by. She was walking upstairs backwards and would have collided with me if I hadn’t put out my hand to steer her away. She wheeled round at once.

‘God, sorry. Can’t even look where I’m going. Hang on a sec.’ The last words were called down to the two young men. The one on the lower end hitched his shoulder under the padded arm and stared up in sweaty disbelief.

‘Don’t worry about us. We’ve got all day, Col, haven’t we?’

Ignoring him, she introduced herself to me. ‘I’m Lisa Kirk. Just moving in, number seven.’

‘Let your end down, Col.’

‘Right you are.’

I told the woman my name and pointed to our door. She was younger by far than anyone else currently living in the flats. I would have put her age at twenty-three, although I learned later that she was actually twenty-seven. Fifteen years or so younger them me. She had fair hair with blonde streaks and a soft leather rucksack slung over one shoulder. Even her combat pants had obviously come from somewhere expensive and fashionable, well away from the firing line. She looked as if she ought to be moving into a loft in Clerkenwell or a pastel-fronted little place in Notting Hill, not a flat in a stuffy red-brick block in a Kensington backwater.

‘If you need a cup of sugar. Or maybe gin …’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ she answered and smiled. An attractive smile. ‘You come and have a drink with me when I’ve got the glasses unpacked. Tell me what I should do with the place.’

I flattened myself against the wall as Col and his counterpart hoisted the sofa again. They laboured past me, with Lisa Kirk leading the way. I went out to post my letters and to the greengrocer’s down the side street to buy vegetables for dinner, then walked slowly back into the building.

The shallow stairs and the bare landings in Dunollie Mansions were kept clean and swept, and blown light bulbs always promptly replaced by Derek the caretaker who lived in the basement. There was a mahogany table to the left of the front door above which communal notices were posted, about things like holiday refuse collection, temporary interruptions to the water supply or work on the old-fashioned but effective central heating system. There was a faint scent of Derek’s floor polish and an even fainter whiff of disinfectant, and occasionally the rattle of the lift door grille followed by the hum of the machinery. It was a quiet, unflashy place.

I always liked the two solid doors on each landing, facing each other at a slight angle on either side of the stairwell, and the ornate brass door furniture worn with polishing, and the diamond panes of leaded glass on either side of the central panel. The hallways within were dark and would have been claustrophobic if the ceilings were not so high, but the rooms opening off them were bright and well-proportioned, especially the corner drawing rooms with their bay windows looking in two directions. From the top flats there was a view of the dome of the Albert Hall and a landscape of rooftops and chimneys, but in summertime our windows, lower down, framed nothing but the leafy plane trees out in the street. When there was a breeze the leaf patterns moved on the floor and furniture. Even in winter the bare branches made a screen against the walls and windows across the wide street.

I liked the sense of enclosure. And the well-ordered, dull and unimaginative sheer safety of everything.

It was not a background against which you could, for example, imagine anyone running amok. No one could chop through the three-inch thickness of the front doors. The walls and floors were solid too, and no murmur of the outside world ever penetrated. We all lived there in our separate castles, friendly enough and with Derek to sweep up: the Frasers on the top floor, and Mark and Gerard the gay couple who lived opposite Mrs Bobinski’s, and Peter and me, and the rest. But separate. There were no children in the block. The flats weren’t quite big enough for families. It was a place for small dogs, like Mark’s and Gerard’s schnauzer, and childless regret, like mine.

It was a few days before I saw Lisa Kirk again. I told Peter about her that evening, when he came home from work. I remember him sitting in the armchair against the Chinese yellow wall of the drawing room, with a drink on the stool beside him. It was September, and the leaves of the plane trees were just beginning to brown and crisp around the margins.

‘How old?’ he asked and I told him – underestimating by about four years as it later turned out.

‘Oh, God. It will be techno music at all hours and impossible parties, and people running up and down the stairs. We should operate on a co-op system, like the Americans. Nobody admitted unless approved by the committee.’

Peter affected fogeyishness, sometimes. It was one of the ways he tried to look after me, by pretending to be staider and more reliable and conservative than he really was. It was one of those unspoken contracts that long-standing couples make, knowing their partner’s needs and histories. In fact, he was a tolerant man, with a remarkable capacity to overlook other people’s foibles and most of the irritations generated by them.

‘We’ll see,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say, and moved on to the other snippets of the day’s news. I wasn’t working, then, and it was sometimes difficult to think of anything at all to relate. Lisa Kirk’s arrival was a welcome new topic.

When I met her for the second time we were both coming in with Safeway carrier bags, at the end of a damp afternoon with the smell of autumn thick under the plane trees.

She rested her bags on the stairs beyond our front door and looked down at me.

‘Come up and have a cup of tea. Have you got time?’

A commodity in abundant supply, as it happened. I pushed my own shopping into our hallway and followed her up, curious to see and know more.

Old Mrs Bobinski’s decor was mostly still in place: Regency striped wallpaper with darker rectangles outlined in grime where murky pictures had once hung, fluted wooden pelmets, central light fittings hideous in gilt and smoked glass. Against this backdrop Lisa had partially arranged her modishly beaten-up brown leather sofa, CD tower and two tall glass urns filled with coiled snakes of twinkling little lights.

‘It’s all a bit of a tip.’ She sighed. ‘I haven’t had time to think, let alone get anything done to it. I needed to move quickly after I split with Baz. And I really liked this place. Lofts are a bit done-that and Dunollie Mansions is so …’

She eyed me, transparently wondering which word to use in order not to offend me. ‘… Neutral,’ she concluded. ‘You know. I reckoned you could do anything here, make it into anything you wanted, without it being a statement.’

‘Really?’

I felt a twitch of dismay. This refuge, my safe haven, was about to teeter out on to some cutting edge of style. I didn’t want it to be invaded or to have its sagging face lifted.

‘If I ever get time. Come in the kitchen, I’ll make us some tea.’

There was the same schizophrenia in there. A maplewood butcher’s block on wheels, an espresso machine and Philippe Starck knick-knacks disposed against Mrs Bobinski’s yellow Formica, and one of those American refrigerators with an ice dispenser in the front, finished in pillar-box red. This monster fitted into none of the available spaces and hummed in the corner of the room next to the door like a TARDIS waiting to dematerialise. I found myself touching the polished metal handle, wondering where I would end up if I stepped inside and let it take me along.

‘Are you hungry?’ Lisa was asking, watching my hand hovering. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot in there, I’m not much of a kitchen person really, it’s just that we bought it jointly and I didn’t want Baz to end up with it. He only used it to keep those little vodka or champagne bottles in, you know, from when everyone used to stand at parties drinking through straws. But I’ve just got some stuff from the supermarket if you’d like …’

‘No. I’m not hungry.’ I withdrew my hand. ‘But I would like a cup of tea.’

She went on chattering and rummaging in cupboards for cups and tea bags.

‘Raspberry? Lemon and ginger? Peppermint?’

Gooseberry and leek. Tamarillo. Artichoke leaf.

‘Or there’s some ordinary.’

‘Ordinary would be good, thanks.’

When she opened the door of the TARDIS to take out the milk, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of champagne and one of those pre-mixed packets of artful salad. We settled ourselves on a pair of steel-and-leather chairs at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Lisa lifted her cup, smiling at me again. She had grey eyes, neat features and lovely skin that seemed to have light shining through it like tissue paper stretched over a spotlight tube. I felt tired and colourless, and touched with envy. There was no point in envying youth, I reminded myself. It was a fact, vivid but perishable. You might as well be jealous of oranges.

‘Here’s to new neighbours,’ she said.

We drank to each other and then Lisa hitched her chin at our surroundings.

‘What do you think I should do with it?’

‘You could paint it all white.’

She gave this suggestion careful consideration, as if it was the most imaginative proposal she had ever heard.

‘Could do, yes.’ And then, with an abrupt switch of focus, ‘Are you married?’

I told her that I was and for how long, and that we had no children.

Lisa fixed her gaze on mine.

‘Do you mind not having children?’

‘I have learned to live with it.’

She stood up from the table and went to lean against one of the cupboards, and the TARDIS began a low humming as if preparing to relocate. When she moved, the curved wings of her shoulder blades shifted beneath her T-shirt and poignant knobs of bone showed under the skin at the nape of her neck. Her hair was pinned up today with a butterfly clip. She stood not quite looking at me, hesitating, and I waited for what she wanted to say. It was warm in the kitchen; Derek had this week fired up the big central heating boiler. We were snug in here. The heat and the hum of the refrigerator and the sense of enclosure that Dunollie Mansions always gave bred an impression of intimacy, as though Lisa and I were old friends who had momentarily lapsed into thoughtful silence.

‘I suppose that’s what you do. Learn to live with things, I mean. I wish I was any good at it. Can you learn?’

I shifted on my leather-and-steel perch. At once Lisa moved forward and poured more tea. She didn’t want me to leave yet, because she needed someone to talk to. I was a good choice, after all. I had gradually become someone who listened, rather than a creature who went out and did things.

I thought that Lisa Kirk was probably lonely. And that her loneliness might last as long as a nanosecond, before the next Baz came along.

‘Learn? I don’t know. It was just a lazy figure of speech. You accept what you are dealt, or you kick against it. The end result’s probably no different anyway.’

While she considered this Lisa groped on the floor beside her seat and found her handbag. She took out a packet of Silk Cut and lit one while I looked at the bag. It was made of chartreuse suede and shaped like a pineapple or maybe a hand grenade.

‘Like it? It’s my design. I make handbags, my own company. I’m opening a shop in Walton Street soon. We’re called Bag Shot.’

I had seen the name, possibly in a Vogue spread of witty accessories.

‘I do like it,’ I said truthfully. I was impressed. I would too readily have dismissed Lisa as merely a trust-fund babe or daddy’s girl, and now it turned out that she was a designer and a businesswoman.

She tipped the bag upside down and a heap of keys and lipsticks and ticket stubs fell out.

‘Here,’ she said and gave it to me.

I examined the cunning fastening of the hood and the bottle-green silk lining. The little golden label stitched to the inside said ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.

‘It’s beautiful. You can’t just give it to me.’

‘Yes I can, I want to. God. Anyway, we were saying about learning to live with things, only it’s without in my case. Baz was my business partner, you know, he was the one who knew about start-ups and leases and money, and I just drew pictures of bloody handbags and chose stuff to get them made up in. We lived together as well, obviously. Ever since I was twenty-one. Work and play, me and Baz. And then it fell apart, like a piece of machinery suddenly worn out. He met a woman at a party, I was yakking and drinking but all the time I was really just across the room, frozen, watching them fall for each other like they were in a movie. And then, once that had happened, it got really difficult to go on working together, and … so.’ She spread out her hand, taking in the kitchen and the red refrigerator and ourselves, sitting facing each other across the table.

‘I see,’ I said. We sat in silence for a minute.

‘Baz’s new girlfriend is pregnant.’

‘Oh. When did all this happen?’

‘They met four months ago.’

‘That was quick.’

‘It was, wasn’t it?’

I clasped and unclasped the lid of the bag. ‘You know, you’ll find someone else. More quickly than you think, probably. I’m sure everyone tells you that. And you can find a new business partner too although that may be a bit more difficult. The requirements are more stringent.’

She smiled at that.

‘Maybe I won’t find anyone, on the other hand. I feel pretty useless.’

I told her what she probably expected to hear, that you don’t get your stuff featured in Vogue or fix yourself up in mansion flats in Kensington at her age if you are anything less them talented and able. We drank some more tea and talked a little about how Baz and she had worked together, and then about the flat and her plans to transform it once, as she put it, the shop was able to run itself around the block. She showed me round the rest of it and I saw that her bed – as narrow as a child’s – was in the little second bedroom that Peter and I used as an occasional spare room, and in the main bedroom with its good light was her drawing board, with big cork panels pinned with scraps of fabric and sketches and pages torn from magazines resting against the walls alongside it.

I thought of our tidy rooms below, static and silent at this time of day, and the way this web of Lisa’s uncertainty and tentativeness and peering into the future was exactly superimposed on them, not just on Mrs Bobinski’s. It made me feel as stiff as our decor.

We returned to the kitchen. Lisa picked up the bag and put it into my hands.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She came with me to the front door and I looked through the diamond glass panels at the swimmy, distorted view of the hallway.

‘Would you like to have had children?’ she asked, with her hand on the latch.

I knew that she was only asking for whatever my answer might reflect on her own situation, on the baby her ex-lover was expecting that she believed should have been hers.

‘You’ll have a baby,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘You’ve got all the time in the world.’

‘But would you?’ she persisted, with the tactlessness of self-absorption.

I am used to deflecting these thoughts, but still I saw the pictures now, the queasy procession framed and frozen by the camera shutter, click, all the way back into history, click and click.

‘No.’

Her hand had dropped back to her side so I opened the door myself and stepped out into the hallway. We exchanged unspecific invitations to have a drink, or drop round for a kitchen supper. And then I went downstairs to the close air of our own flat where the supermarket carrier bags were waiting for me to attend to them.

Peter sat in his usual chair, with a whisky at his elbow. He had had a reasonable day, he said. Busy, and the Petersens people were a bunch of amateurs who couldn’t run a tap, let alone a software licensing programme, but nothing really to complain about.

‘And you?’

He looked across at me, arching his eyebrows behind the fine metal ovals of his spectacle rims. I told him about having tea with Lisa Kirk, and showed him the chartreuse hand grenade.

He examined it, inside and out.

‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? Do women really buy this sort of stuff?’

‘Yes, I think so. They probably pay about two hundred quid for it. She runs her own business and is about to open a shop.’

He puckered his lips in a soundless whistle, interested now. Peter was a management consultant, with expertise I couldn’t even guess at. He read and wrote reports in a language as impenetrable to me as Mandarin, and he too had a company, on the comfortable earnings from which we lived our sedate life in Dunollie Mansions. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ my mother said before we married, which was also not long before her early death from ovarian cancer. (My father and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)

Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.

‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’

I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.

At last Peter took my glass out of my hand and put it down, reaching past the intertwined boys to do so.

‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.

Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.

Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.

‘It isn’t far to my car.’

I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.

Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.

Over the first course I confessed what I believed it was only fair for him to know from the beginning. If, in fact, there was actually going to be anything further, if this start didn’t turn out also to be the ending. There had been a few evenings of that sort, lately.

‘I am afraid that I am mad. Known fact. Crazy. Completely barking.’

He chewed his food, reflecting briefly on this idiotic announcement.

‘I think I will be the judge of that,’ Peter Stafford answered.

I ate as much as I could of my steak and vegetables, without making much of a dent in the portion, and all the time I could think of nothing but how soon we might be able to go to bed together. When he was finally convinced that I wasn’t going to eat tarte Tatin or chocolate soufflé, Peter shepherded me back to the Jaguar and drove me to his flat in Bayswater.

We kissed for the first time under the overhead light in the hallway. In his sitting room, standing beside the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I reached around to the zip on the back of my dress and undid it. Slowly, I let the folds drop to the carpet. I was naked underneath except for my pants. He covered my breasts with his hands.

I kicked off one high-heeled shoe and then the other. Barefoot, I was closer to his height. He took my hand and led me into his bedroom, and closed the door behind us.

When he took off the last garment he knelt over me and looked.

‘Oh God, oh God,’ he breathed. After a beat of fear I realised that it was in pleasure and admiration, not dismay. I put my arms round his neck and pulled him down on top of me.

When we made love, Peter Stafford made me feel three-dimensional.

I forgot the jut of my hips and my overlong and protuberant spinal column, and the dull grate of bone. In his arms I became languorous and creamy and fat.

Afterwards he held me against him, warming me with his solid flesh.

‘Cary, Cary. Be still,’ he ordered and I knew that he didn’t mean just now, under the crisp covers of his bed, but in my life. No more spinning around and gobbling pills. No more talking nonsense or drinking or dementia.

‘I asked Cecil to bring me over to you,’ he said. Cecil was the photographer’s agent. ‘I didn’t think you would even speak to me, but I made him do it just the same.’

‘I would have come to you, if you hadn’t.’ Maybe I would have done, too.

That was a Thursday evening. I had a job the next day, but I called in sick. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing and my booker was astonished. Peter called his office too. We stayed in bed for the whole of Friday and for the weekend that followed it, except for when we got up to forage for something to eat and drink. I padded around wearing one of his shirts because I had nothing with me but my party dress and we fed each other cold chicken legs or buttered toast.

‘Good,’ he approved.

Another time when we were quietly lying together and watching raindrops on the window glass he asked, ‘Why did you say you were mad? Except for the job you do and the people you do it with you seem exceptionally sane to me.’

I fended him off. ‘No real reason. Drink, nerves, babble. Or I suppose that if someone were to look at you and then at me, they might put you in the sane category and me in the other. Just as a matter of relativity.’

‘Because of the way we look, relatively?’

Without his glasses Peter’s eyes were soft, with creases at the corners. His forehead and the faint lines hooking together his mouth and nose and the curve of his lips were already dear to me. I touched them, stroking the skin with the flat of my thumbs.

‘No. Nothing to do with that. It’s history.’

‘What history?’

‘Tell me yours first.’

He held me so that my chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened while he described his childhood. He was the middle one of three boys, children of a City solicitor and a career mother. They lived in a good house in Hampshire and the brothers played cricket in the garden and sailed dinghies, and went to a suitable public school and then on to appropriate universities.

‘Not very interesting, you see,’ Peter said.

‘It is to me. Where are your brothers now?’

He told me that they were both lawyers and both married, and made a joke about it being such a conservative family that his own minute deviations from this norm were regarded as acts of rebellion.

‘No wife, you mean?’

‘No law, no wife. But I have had a couple of girlfriends. I’m quite normal, you know.’

I did know already, but I wanted to know more about his background because he was so safe and rational, the living equivalent of the scent of clean laundry. Everything about Peter Stafford, past and present, was a magnet to me.

Probably after that we started to make love again and so his original question to me was forgotten. I avoided talking about my own history that time, although eventually, of course, I did confess it to him.

In any case, within three months Peter and I were married.

He asked me once or twice if I had seen our new neighbour again, and I told him no. Then I met Lisa parking her car as I was coming back from a walk in Hyde Park. We talked for a minute or two, and on impulse I asked her if she would like to come and have dinner with us the following week. To my surprise she accepted. She was lonelier than I had calculated and Baz had not yet been replaced.

Lisa rang the doorbell late, well after all the other guests had arrived. Peter answered the door and I heard him introducing himself and then Lisa’s laughing response before he shepherd her into the drawing room. She was wearing a short, slippery red dress with a little pink cardigan shrugged over it, and red suede shoes. Our guests collectively sat upright, our old friends Clive and Sally Marr and Mark and Gerard from upstairs, and the visiting American woman associate of Peter’s, and the young portrait painter and his girlfriend whom I had invited in an attempt to span the age gap between Lisa and the rest of us. Her arrival was like a shaft of daylight coming into the nighttime gathering.

I saw her looking around at the room that was identical in shape and size, and yet so different from hers.

‘Your flat is very smart,’ she said, after we had greeted each other.

‘Is it?’

‘Definitely.’

I introduced her to the others and as she moved around I saw that what she brought with her wasn’t exactly light, but warmth. Aside from her youth and her prettiness, she had genuine heat that thawed the formality of the occasion. Clive Marr unwound his long arms and legs from their self-protective embrace and shook her hand, and Jessy the American woman smilingly made room for her on the sofa. I hitched my black woollen sleeves round my wrists. I was glad that Lisa Kirk was entirely natural and at ease, and that she didn’t need her hostess’s protection. My hands were cold, so I went closer to the fire and warmed them.

The evening took off. Clive told a funny story I had never heard before about his days as a houseman under an autocratic consultant who thought his inveterate stutter was an affectation. ‘D-d-d-iverticulitis, Dr Marr?’ he mimicked, embedding his own impediment within the fearsome doctor’s voice with surgical precision.

Everyone laughed including Lisa, and Clive looked boyish with pleasure.

Dan Cruickshank the portrait painter gossiped indiscreetly about the royal princess who was currently sitting for him, and Mark and Gerard leaned forward greedily to catch the details. From across the room Peter smiled at me, his eyes creasing behind his glasses. I smiled back, buckling my mouth into a curve against a sense of alarm that I didn’t yet recognise.

We went into the next room to eat. The candles reflected tapering ovals of light off glass and polished wood. Lisa studied Peter’s pictures, a pair of splashy Hodgkins and a small Bacon. She had taken off her little pink cardigan and her shoulders were bare except for thin straps. Her skin was pale and the candlelight seemed to strike off it, breaking and intensifying into painterly slashes of green and peach and yellow so that I narrowed my eyes to make it recombine, wondering if I had already had too much to drink.

‘Lisa, would you like to sit here?’

Peter drew out the chair next to his. I took the other end of the table, between Gerard and Dan. The talk and laughter swelled and I sliced and spooned food on to plates and watched it disappear. After long years of conditioning myself, I didn’t any longer care much about eating. But I had plenty of time at my disposal to prepare meals like this one and cooking was still one of my pleasures.

At my end of the table Dan and Sally and Jessy were talking about portraiture. Peter had wanted Dan to paint me and we had met originally to talk about the project. I had hedged and demurred, because I didn’t want to sit and be scrutinised so closely, and in the end the idea had come to nothing. But we had remained friends with Dan and therefore also the current one of his series of girlfriends.

‘I would still like her to sit for me, but I don’t think I can persuade her,’ Dan was saying.

‘You should keep trying,’ Gerard advised.

Lisa had been deep in conversation with Peter. Her attentiveness to him made her seem taut as a stretched bow with the arrow in the notch and ready to fly. But now she turned her head. Our eyes met and locked.

‘It would be a wonderful picture. When I first saw Cary I was almost too afraid to speak to her.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked, in spite of myself.

‘Because of the way you look.’

There seemed to be a shift in air pressure, as in the seconds before the sound of an approaching tube train becomes audible. The way you look. When I was much younger I possessed an outlandish kind of beauty. I was six feet tall, with a smooth face that make-up artists could paint over with a hundred other faces. I used my appearance to earn money as a photographic model. But I was past forty now and what was left of my extreme looks had been for a long time more an affliction than a blessing because they were at odds with what I felt inside. It was like having always to wear a mask, only it was also a mask that age kept on distorting.

‘I remember that you talked quite a lot, in fact,’ I said, recalling the confidences about Baz and his new girlfriend and the pregnancy.

There was that change in air pressure again, a movement of the atmosphere that made you suck in a breath to reinflate your lungs. In the sudden silence that was broken only by the clink of cutlery I realised that the new atmospheric component was hostility. It had replaced the oxygen.

Lisa and I were still looking at each other, the glance twisting between us like razor wire. Peter sat in his place at the head of our table, his eyes still mild behind his glasses, maybe unaware of the arrow pointed at him. But I think he did feel the tension of the bowstring. This was about him. Lisa Kirk believed that she had spotted Baz’s replacement.

‘Oh yes, once I knew you,’ Lisa said softly.

My body went stiff. That this child should think she knew me on the basis of a couple of encounters, when I had devoted so much and so many years of effort to concealing everything. Everyone in the room, it seemed, immediately began talking very loudly about the first thing that came into their heads.

Mark adjusted the already perfect folds of his turned-back shirt cuffs. He had smooth wrists, lightly tanned from the latest trip to Kerala. And then he reached out to touch Lisa’s handbag that was lying next to her plate.

‘I read somewhere that women’s bags actually represent an intimate portion of their anatomy. Do you think there’s any truth in that, Lisa?’

Dear Mark, kind and vicious in the same breath. Tonight’s little bag was in the shape of a pink satin heart, sequinned and beaded, and certainly quite anatomical if you chose to look at it that way.

‘If it is true, I’m in the right business, aren’t I?’ She smiled. ‘Even if it is only a representation. Dealing in a commodity that is so constant and yet so sought after.’

Lisa was utterly self-possessed. I had the sudden certainty that nothing would deflect her and nothing would disconcert her. She wore her youth and sureness and desirability like armour plating.

Peter’s American associate was giggling at this risqué turn in the conversation, and Lisa lifted up the bag and gave it to her to examine.

‘What do you think, Jessy?’

‘It’s certainly pretty enough.’

‘Thank you.’

I slid out of my chair and began to collect up the plates from my end of the table, moving very deliberately and with a smile nailed to my face.

The evening came to an end eventually. Lisa rested her fingers gently and briefly on my forearm as she kissed me goodnight and then gave exactly the same attention to Peter.

When Peter and I were left on our own we stacked the plates in the kitchen, blew out the candles, retreated to our bedroom as we had done so many times before. I lay very still in our bed and he put his arms round me, which made me conscious of how brittle I felt.

I wasn’t ageing well, I thought. Now that I no longer had it, I wanted my weird beauty back again. I wasn’t a model, I had failed to become an actress – which had been my subsequent intention. Another strange choice for a woman who doesn’t like to be looked at. Much uneventful time had elapsed and I didn’t know what I was any longer. Except that I was Peter Stafford’s wife and a resident of Dunollie Mansions, for now.

‘Catherine, what’s wrong?’

He doesn’t often call me by my full name.

‘Nothing. Did you enjoy the evening?’

He shifted a little on his hip, considering, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my face.

‘Yes. I think it went quite well. Clive was in good form.’

Tenderness towards him spread beneath my breast-bone like heartburn. Peter always considered his judgements, and tried to be fair and objective. How had we lived together for so long and been so different, in our chalk and cheese way?

Lying in the dark I found myself thinking of the night we met and fell in love, standing under the ribs of a spiral staircase while a procession of models went up and down past our heads. Lisa Kirk told me about watching her Baz falling in love at a party in just the same way and I was sure I had witnessed the same flash of lightning tonight, between Lisa and my husband, even though I didn’t think they had exchanged a word in private or even an unwitnessed glance. The three scenes made a bright little triptych in my mind’s eye.

I moved an inch closer to Peter and kissed his closed mouth. At the same time I lifted and crooked my upper knee. One of those signals that long-time couples read so well. He put his hand over my ribcage and splayed the fingers over the bones, as if he was fingering piano keys.

‘I love you,’ I told him, which was the truth.

‘And I you,’ he answered politely. ‘And I worry about you.’

I didn’t press him to explain the dimensions of his anxiety. ‘What did you think of Lisa Kirk?’

‘I liked her.’

‘I thought you would.’

I exhaled and his fingers moved again.

We made love, a little awkwardly, as if there were a sheet between us.

After that, it was only a matter of time.

Two

Every day of each season on the island of Halemni had its own perfection, but to Olivia Georgiadis autumn was the best time of all.

The heat of summer was contained in the brazen midday, while the chill mornings and evenings gave a taste of the coming winter. There was a smell of woodsmoke and burning pitch as the fishermen overhauled the boats, and the houses and tavernas around the harbour 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.’

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 of frugality so entrenched that they rarely even noticed it. The children drew on the backs of the guests’ discarded sketches and when there 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 be spit-roasted, the centrepiece of the last night’s party.

‘I think so,’ Olivia said, running through in her mind what needed to be done. ‘You will light the fire in good time?’ She asked Xan this question every two weeks throughout the summer season.

‘I will.’

There was no moon that night and the sky held only a faint afterglow that made it seem a blue-black hollow ball pitted with stars. The sea was black and calm for late in the season. Inky wavelets slapped the harbour wall and whispered into the shingle on the village beach. Xan had hung lanterns in the branches of a tamarisk tree, and there were candles all down the long table under the avli, the pergola with its vine shading. The kid had been roasted and carved and eaten, and the fire of driftwood had shrunk to a powdery crimson core, and now the English voices were louder and less careful.

Olivia looked down the table. The double line of faces was reddened by the sun and wine. It was always a good moment, when the inhibitions finally broke up. It was just a shame that it almost always took until the very last night. These people had chosen to spend their precious holidays here and they had brought their paintings and sketches to be admired and commented upon, and so given oblique insights into their lives. They stirred a wash of affection in her and she knew that she would miss them all through the winter. She would look forward to the first rash of floppy sunhats in the sharp early summer sunshine.

And it was always like this, she remembered. It could have been any of the years since they had begun here. Each season’s beginning and end made her feel the same, eagerly anticipatory or affectionate and pleasurably melancholy.

This was the tissue of happiness, she thought. Phases repeated themselves, and accretions of memory and pleasure built up, and you could dip down through the layers and examine them, like tree rings or sandstone deposits. The awareness of permanence on Halemni weighted her limbs, making her feel dizzy and voluptuous with satisfaction. She loved their life here and the people she shared it with. Looking down the table again, she even loved knife-faced Christine Darby and her pompous husband, who had complained about the beds and the food, and Christopher’s eccentric teaching methods.

Xan moved into the lantern light beside her, removing empty wine bottles and putting a full bottle of Metaxas in their place.

‘None for you,’ he teased with his mouth close to her hair, meaning that he could see she had drunk enough.

‘Oh, go on. Just one. You never know what it might lead to, if you’re lucky,’ she whispered back.

Later there was dancing. Christopher played the guitar and the English couples swayed and jigged under the branches of the tree, and then draped arms over one another’s shoulders and pointed their toes in a wobbly imitation of Xan, at the end of the line, when he led the Greek dance. He was a supple, stately dancer and the guests looked like a row of jerky puppets as they tried to follow his steps.

Olivia was like the maypole in the middle with two ribbons twisting around her.

‘I can’t,’ she protested. ‘My legs don’t work at this time of night.’

‘Legs like yours don’t need to,’ Brian Darby murmured in the knowledge that his wife was out of earshot.

And at the same moment at the far end of the line it was Mrs Darby who spotted the bear-like man shambling at the rim of the lantern light. She crooked her elbow gaily to indicate that he should join in.

At once he lurched towards her and locked both arms round her neck to stop himself from falling flat on his face. As soon as she got the full blast of his breath Mrs Darby changed her mind about the invitation to dance. She tried to shake him off and pull herself away, but the line of dancers reeled the two of them along like fish on a hook. All the other guests thought it was a joke and shouted encouragement, then hooted with laughter as their legs tangled. The man pressed his stubbled face closer, trying for a kiss, and the woman screamed. A little bullet of shock discharged itself into the atmosphere.

Xan had already disentangled himself from the staggering bodies. He ran to pull the man off.

‘Oh, bollocks,’ Christopher muttered and flicked his cigarette past the tamarisk tree before going to help.

‘Yannis, Yannis,’ Xan shouted.

Christine Darby was pinned on her back by an inert body. Her arms and legs flailed helplessly. Xan hauled the man up by his shirt, exposing a thick mahogany-brown torso matted with black hair. The man muttered thickly as Christopher added his efforts to Xan’s. Together they propped him back on his feet while Mrs Darby gave a series of thin shrieks.

Olivia knelt over her.

‘It’s all right. He won’t hurt you, he’s just drunk.’

Brian Darby came out of the knot of onlookers, only a second or two belatedly, with his fists jerking like a wound-up toy. He took a cocky swing at the mumbling Yannis and missed the side of his head, and Yannis made a surprisingly swift counter-swing that did not miss. There was a soft smack as his massive hand connected with the other man’s nose. Darby fell like a sack into the arms of two other guests as Xan and Christopher pinned Yannis’s arms behind his back. Xan put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Olivia swung from Mrs Darby to the woman’s husband, who had been lowered by his supporters into the nearest chair. The man’s nose was bleeding. A carmine stream ran down his chin and dripped on his mint-green Lacoste shirt. She caught the flow with the nearest screwed-up paper napkin and tipped his head back. His mouth flapped open and shut as he gasped like a landed codfish.

‘Here,’ she called over her shoulder to Christine who was now vertical again. ‘Hold this while I get some ice.’

Out of the shadows across the square a little posse of men came running to Xan’s whistle. They man-handled Yannis’s now unprotesting bulk out of the light and towed it away.

Xan wiped the flat of his hands down the sides of his jeans and dropped his shoulders.

‘Okay, everyone. Drama over now. Let me see how it seems, Brian.’

Olivia came back with ice cubes from the kitchen fridge.

‘Bloody well assaulted me,’ Mr Darby puffed. His nose, when Olivia manipulated it, appeared not to be broken. ‘I want to report him.’

‘Of course you do, I understand that. I’m so sorry this happened. But he’s been drinking, you know. Yannis and his wife have been friends of mine for many years, they have had some troubles …’

Xan was soothing. His big warm hands turned the man’s chin from side to side as he explored for signs of further damage. Olivia put her arm round Christine’s shoulders. The other guests murmured in a circle, telling each other exactly what had happened, enjoying the excitement. Darby had not been an especially well-liked group member.

Christopher had followed the village men and their cargo but he slipped back now and gave Xan a tranquil nod. Evidently Yannis had been made safe for the night.

‘I want to call the police.’

Xan pressed the ice pack over the bridge of the man’s nose.

Mrs Darby seemed fully recovered. She squeezed Olivia’s hand and let go of it, then peered down into the upturned dish of her husband’s face, with no sign of appetite.

‘You punched him first, in fact.’

‘He assaulted you. What should I do, shake hands with him?’

‘I don’t think he meant to …’

‘I’m certain he didn’t,’ Xan said. ‘He’s the gentlest of men, normally.’

Brian pushed aside the ice pack and forged to his feet. The bleeding had stopped, but there was a rusty patch on his chin and a crust in the groove beneath his nose.

‘I know what’s right,’ he bellowed. ‘Whose side are you all on?’

Xan and Olivia were shoulder to shoulder, with Christopher under the tamarisk branches a yard away. At the same moment two of the men who had led Yannis away rematerialised at the outer rim of the lantern light. The men looked around. ‘I see. Stick together, you island people, don’t you? Suppose you have to, in a place this size. Marry each other’s sisters. Or your own.’

‘Brian …’

He cut his wife short. ‘I’m going to wash my face, then I’m going to bed.’

After he had gone Christine said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She looked embarrassed and unhappy.

‘It was Yannis’s fault. But he meant no harm, I can promise you.’

She followed her husband, out of sight around the blue wall of the house to the studios.

Xan picked up the brandy bottle. ‘I’m so sorry about all that. Would anyone like another drink?’

But it was clear that the party was over. Olivia glanced up at the shutters of her sons’ room. If either of them had been woken by the raised voices, they might be afraid.

‘I’m just going to see …’ She whispered to Xan.

The room was faintly barred with light that came through the cracks in the shutters. It was scented with skin and damp, sweaty heads. Georgi was sleeping on his back with one arm flung above his head but Theo’s bed was empty.

The bedsheets were rumpled, still slightly warm. She knelt on the splintery floorboards and looked under the bed, but there were only a few clumps of dust and a plastic toy soldier. The one cupboard was empty except for clothes and toys. She whirled round, soundlessly for Georgi’s sake. The window was open but the shutters were securely latched behind it. Outside in the corridor there was darkness and only the light from downstairs throwing a dim glow that just reached the top of the stairs. The door to her bedroom stood ajar; the white bedcover was stretched smooth, the curtain that hung across an alcove to make a wardrobe revealed nothing but clothes when she drew it aside. Theo was not in here either.

Olivia fled to the last door on the upper floor.

The door stood open. This was a little boxroom, with one tiny window looking away from the sea. It had been Olivia’s darkroom, or that was the original idea when she and Xan had first bought the house. But she took very few photographs now: there was too little spare time. It was used mostly as storage space for art supplies. She stepped into the thick darkness and immediately she knew that Theo was here.

Carefully she knelt down and stretched out her hand. Her fingers connected with a warm curve of pyjamaed body. She gave a sharp exhalation of relief and patted him, quickly exploring the small shape. He was fast asleep, curled up on the floor between the door and the wall. He had been sleepwalking again, had found their bed empty and had wandered on in search of his mother and father.

Olivia crouched down, breathing unarticulated snatches of gratitude and relief. She scooped the child into her arms and held him against her, one hand cupping the back of his head. Then she trod back to his bedroom and laid him down under the covers. She sat for a few minutes on the floor beside the bed, listening to his easy sleep and breathing in the smell of him. A yard away Georgi gave a small sigh and turned over. They were fast asleep, both of them. She stood up and hovered for a minute longer. Theo had always been a light sleeper, troubled by nightmares that were the dark side of his vivid imagination. He didn’t yet have the words to express his ideas and the frustration came out as tantrums or clashes with his brother, or in his sleepwalking. She didn’t know why this frightened her so much.

Max and she had been the same, she was thinking, only she had been the volatile one and Max had obediently followed where she led. He climbed the garden walls after her and dug burrows to hide in, and stole penny sweets from the corner shop under her direction. They made their own world of hierarchies and escape routes, clothing them from the dressing-up box and living outside what they didn’t yet understand to be their parents’ compromises.

It was the better way round, the way her own children were. The older, more circumspect one restrained the younger one just enough for safety, but was lit up by his anarchy. Olivia bent down and kissed each of them again, made warm and heavy by the absolute weight of her love for them. A sense that she was too fortunate, that she couldn’t hope for this perfection to continue, scraped at the margin of her mind. She pushed it away from her, out of the room and into the darkness where the sea rubbed over the shingle beach. She closed the door of the bedroom and went downstairs again.

Outside under the tamarisk tree the candle lanterns had been blown out and the fire spread into a grey mat of ashes. The trestle table had been cleared of the last cups and glasses and the white cloth bundled into a ball. Xan and Christopher had moved quickly. There was no sign of any of the guests. She picked the cloth up in her arms and went inside with it.

The two men were in the kitchen. Xan was scraping and stacking plates, and Christopher was cradling a brandy glass against his thin chest and leaning against the stone side of the old bread oven.

‘Theo’s been sleepwalking again. I found him asleep on the floor in the darkroom.’

Xan came to her and took the ball of tablecloth out of her arms. He threw it into the corner and put his arms on her shoulders.

‘Is he all right?’

‘I put him back into his bed. He seems all right, he never woke up, but I’m worried about him. Why does he keep doing this?’

It was perhaps the sixth time in three months.

Xan said, ‘Children do it. You worry too much.’

Christopher drained the two fingers of brandy left in his glass and put it down amidst the clutter of dirty crockery on the wooden drainer.

‘I’ll be off. I’ll be up in the morning to wave them off, of course.’

‘Goodnight, Chris. Thanks for your help.’

‘Nothing to it. Pity Yannis didn’t sock him a bit harder.’

When they were alone Xan put his arms round her again. ‘Let’s leave this. Come to bed.’

Olivia rested her forehead against his. They were the same height.

‘Yes.’

They had no curtains anywhere in the house and in their own bedroom they left the shutters open at night. They had to get up early and it was easy to wake up with the light creeping across the room. Olivia lay with her husband’s arms round her and her chin in the hollow of his shoulder. It was the best moment of the day, this, when they exchanged their last thoughts, the words becoming disconnected as they drifted towards sleep.

‘It must be worse than being dead,’ Xan breathed.

‘What?’

‘To live in a marriage like that. Those people, the Darbys. They look at each other as if they wish they were.’

‘You can’t tell. You can only guess what other people are like inside their marriages. You only know your own.’

‘You can tell,’ he insisted, stubborn as his mother.

‘It doesn’t matter. Why are we talking about the bloody Darbys? This is all that matters. I’m worried about Theo.’

‘Don’t be. He only walks in his sleep, like children do. I don’t know why you worry so much.’

Olivia tilted in his arms, looking into the room’s blackness and at the faintly paler suggestion of the window.

‘Maybe because I’m happy. Because I am afraid to lose it.’

However hard she tried to banish it there seemed to be a whisper of threat here in the room with them, a whisper that was nothing to do with the problem of Meroula or the worry about money or guests or the business.

Xan laughed. It was a sound deep in his chest and she felt the vibration as he pulled her closer. He didn’t share her fears.

‘You were once so brave. My lone traveller, afraid of nothing in the world.’

He often teased her about this, that she had come to Halemni to be a wife and mother after having seen everything there was to see and done everything else there was to do.

‘It isn’t fear, exactly. I don’t want anything to change and yet the boys change all the time, and I suppose anxiety comes out of that.’

‘You can’t stop change,’ he murmured. Xan was sleepy, but he still ran his hand over the curve of her ribs, into the hollow of her waist and up the swell of her hips. Olivia breathed out and lay back. It was late and they had to be up very early, but it made no difference when he wanted her, as he did now. It hadn’t changed since the first time he saw her and wanted her, in Bangkok by the monsoon-swollen river. She was a thin, crop-haired, pale giantess then, all dangling legs and arms, among the tiny smooth Thais.

‘Don’t worry, I love you,’ he muttered as his hand slid between her thighs.

Christopher Cruickshank had walked down to the beach. He sat on the shingle now, smoking a last cigarette with his back to the lapping water. The beach beds had all been taken into storage for the winter.

Only one or two lights showed in the tiers of houses. Left to itself, Megalo Chorio went to bed early. The tip of his cigarette glowed as Christopher gazed upwards. Immediately above the Georgiadises’ house was the dark hump of the little hill where he had taken the guests for their last morning’s painting. Beyond and behind that was a paler glimmer against the black sky. This was the limestone cliff, crowned by a ruined castle of the Knights of St John, that dominated Halemni bay and the beach and the harbour. And perched in the saddle of hillside that rose up to the bluff were outlines too square to be natural rock forms. Although they were all but invisible in the darkness, Christopher knew the shapes and the scenery so well that his mind’s eye supplied the image as clearly as if it had been bathed in sunshine. These were the ruined houses of Arhea Chorio, the old village. It had been abandoned a generation ago, when families moved down to the coast away from the hill farms to the tavernas and beach stands. Now the roofless houses disintegrated slowly into the heaps of stone from which they had been built.

Christopher liked the old village. When he had a free afternoon he would climb up there to spend an hour reading or sketching among the stones, with only the lizards and an occasional basking snake for company. Very few of the summer tourists ever bothered to make the hot scramble up there and for weeks at a time he was the only visitor. Now, as he smoked, he kept his eyes fixed on the ruins, or the view of them that his inner eye supplied. He felt an uneasiness at his back, coming off the water like a winter fog, and it was more comfortable to look up the hill at the old houses.

When he had finished his cigarette he threw the butt over his shoulder into the sea. He played with the idea of smoking another, but he was cold and the invisible fog breathed around him. He scrambled to his feet instead and crunched up the shingle. He rented a room in the main street and his bed was waiting for him.

It had been a long day, the end of a long season. He would stay on Halemni maybe another week, or two weeks, and then he would head north again for the winter.

Three

I am in Turkey, sitting on the sea coast and staring westwards.

I have almost forgotten why I am here, if there ever was a particular reason for coming. It doesn’t matter anyway. One place is much like another for the time being.

This is a skeleton of a hotel, pasted over with white concrete skin so that it looks smooth but brittle. There are big blind windows and flimsy balconies like pouches under a drunkard’s eyes.

I sleep as much as I can, in my hotel bedroom, behind closed curtains. And when I can no longer sleep I sit on the balcony under the shade of a parasol. Even though it is late in the season I don’t like the sun to touch my skin and my pale eyes water in so much harsh white light. I keep my sunglasses in place and try to read, and the time slowly passes.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when Dunollie Mansions stopped feeling like a refuge and became instead a place that I wanted to get away from. It was probably not very long after the dinner when Peter met Lisa Kirk for the first time.

He was busy in the weeks immediately after that night, working on a job that demanded longer hours and even more concentration than usual. He stayed late at the office, and seemed tired and distracted when he did come home. I should have interpreted the signs at once and spoken out about them, but the potential for that kind of conversation seemed already lost. Instead I tried hard to be less demanding, as if that might win his approval again. I embarked on some redecoration in the flat, and discussed colours and finishes with the painters. I went out looking for fabrics and spent time putting together colour boards for Peter’s approval.

‘Very nice,’ he said, pressing the rim of his glasses against the bridge of his nose with the tip of his finger, an indication of stress that I had learned to recognise long ago.

‘You like the green, then?’

‘Yes, if you do.’

I didn’t care about the green and I knew that he didn’t either.

Once or twice I had a cup of tea upstairs with Lisa in her flat.

There was no reason to refuse her invitations, nothing I could have identified except the thin squeak of hostility between us, and I was ready to think that that might be a product of my imagination, the murmur of my own madness. Peter apparently didn’t hear the sound, although he always had done so up until now and been able to take the right reassuring steps. He was too busy, or maybe he was simply tired of listening out for it.

Lisa didn’t choose to come again to my flat, Peter’s and mine, although I always invited her. We went upstairs instead.

Each time I saw her she seemed younger and warmer and more bursting with life. There were signs that she was making a home of Dunollie Mansions, but they were fairly limited ones – an armchair of steel and cowhide stood in the living room, with its paper and corrugated wrapping only partly removed; a patch of wall in the dark hallway had been experimentally striped with different paint colours.

‘What do you think?’ Lisa waved a hand as we passed on the way to the kitchen.

‘Pink?’

‘You’re right. Too sugary. Much.’ And then a sigh. ‘I’ll never have time to get this place together.’

We drank tea, sitting next to the big red refrigerator.

‘What’s happening about Baz and the girlfriend?’

She shrugged. ‘Idyll of delight, I suppose. I don’t care. Fuck ’em.’

Fuck my husband.

Was she doing it then, or did that come later?

There is someone at the door. Room service, with some meal I have ordered and will not eat.

The waiter is the one who always comes, day or night. He never seems to go off duty. When he takes the trays away he looks under the dish covers and sees that I have barely touched the food, and he sighs in reproach. He is very young, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen.

He puts the latest tray down on the low table, and makes a big show of displaying the food and unfurling the napkin for me.

‘Is good,’ he cajoles, ‘is very nice.’

I smile at him.

‘It looks delicious.’

‘I close the blinds?’

The light is fading over the sea. The sky is mushroom pink and the water is the same colour as the inside of an oyster shell.

‘No, leave them open. I like to look at the night.’

‘You need something else maybe?’

He hovers protectively and I am touched by his concern for me.

‘No, thank you.’

We wish each other goodnight.

The plan, if it was ever as conscious as that on my part, was for Selina and me to take this holiday together, a late-season two weeks on the Turkish coast in a pretty resort called Branc. Selina is an expert on hotels and she promises me that this one is good – Swiss-owned and run, but with a proper local feel to it.

‘The pool will be clean, the food close enough to authentic but without poisoning you.’

‘Why Turkey, Selina?’

She shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s fashionable. I’ve been everywhere else.’

Selina is currently between husbands. She has had three, or maybe four. I have known her since our modelling days and we have always kept in touch. It was her idea for us to make the trip.

‘Two women on their own, darling? Free and independent? We will have a fine time. You get out of London and you’ll feel better, believe me.’

I agreed that we should go. It was autumn again in London, the time last year that Lisa Kirk arrived, and she and Peter had now been living together for five months. I had started to wonder how much longer it would be before she was pregnant. The child Peter had always wanted.

I didn’t look forward to the holiday with much enthusiasm. When I thought about it at all I imagined it would be like the holidays my mother and I took together, after my father left us and went off to the Steps and Halves. Two women consoling each other, solicitous about sun cream and making sure that the other was comfortable, but still locked inside themselves with separate, clamorous voices in their ears. Maybe my mother would put it differently, if she were here, but I can still see the white triangle of her face and the misery in her eyes. Nothing I did ever rubbed it out for long. Of course not.

I probably do Selina a major injustice. We might well have had a wild time together, sitting on bar stools and drinking lurid cocktails, and then tripping off to discos to enjoy the startled attentions of the local Lotharios, in the absence of any younger prey, like a pair of giraffes displaced from the herd and yapped around by hyenas. The comparison would have drawn one of Selina’s yelps of laughter, before she flicked her lighter to another Marlboro.

In any case, she developed appendicitis four days before we were due to leave. I could have cancelled, but I had somehow got used to the idea of going to Turkey. I was even relieved at the thought of being able to do it alone, and not to have to keep up the pretence of being cheerful and energetic.

And so here I am.

I think about Peter, of course.

I prefer to remember the early days, when we were first married, when he used to drive us off to the country for weekends. We would go to little hotels in Suffolk or Devon, and lie in bed late and then take unambitious walks before coming back for tea, and drinks, and dinner. He was always trying to make me eat, and my evasions became a joke and then a kind of game between us.

‘Scone, darling? With some home-made jam and clotted cream?’

‘Just the cucumber, out of the sandwich, thank you.’

Peter belonged to the National Trust, for God’s sake. Not even my mother was a member. I thought this was funny and delightful, and if we didn’t go for a walk we would look up some local great house or ruined castle in the book and drive in the Jaguar to see it. I remember the smell of warm leather seats and brake fluid.

All of this felt very adult and secure, after the way I had been living – on and off planes, in and out of clothes and studios and hotel bedrooms, with men around me and in me whom I didn’t like or trust. Whereas I loved Peter and I trusted him absolutely, and he had the knack of making me feel loved in return. His love balanced out my guilt: it didn’t take it away, nothing could do that, it just counterweighted it and allowed me to function while still carrying the old burden around with me.

Peter had a conventional exterior, which he enjoyed cultivating, and inside this there was a quirky and clever man unlike anyone I had ever met before. I adored his cleverness, and the way he could weigh up people and problems quickly, and act on his observations and deductions. He was decisive where I was tentative, and generous where I was suspicious.

He was also the most sensuous man I had ever known. He loved food and fine wine and beautiful old cars, and pictures and made-to-measure suits and sex. He was the best lover. In bed, as I noticed the very first time, when he took off the shields of his spectacles there was the different soft face of an alternative, exotic Peter who belonged to me alone. I liked to smooth away the creases hooking his mouth with my thumbs. The stroking stretched the thin skin of his lips into a secret smile.

The food on the tray has gone cold. I prod at it a little, then cover the plates up again and slide the whole lot outside the door.

The sky is dark now. I stand at the window and look out at the line of lamps that line the hotel garden, and their broken reflection in the sea. After three days of gazing at it I am familiar with the view. The beach, with a row of beach beds and yellow mattresses under jaunty yellow parasols, now furled for the night, lies just beyond the garden wall. There is the water and a rim of tarnished silver where it meets the sand. Across the water are the donkey-brown humps of some nameless islands in the Greek Dodecanese. Nameless to me, that is – I asked my waiter their names, by sign language, and he rattled off something unintelligible with a dismissive shrug. There is no love lost between these people and the Greeks.

I am surprised by how close the islands lie to the Turkish mainland. Selina would probably have known. Selina would have maps and guidebooks, whereas I, of course, do not. That would be Peter’s role.

Always, I come back to him and how crippled I seem to be without him. And it is exactly because of this infirmity that he is no longer here. At some point – it must have been one day, maybe even one hour, or during the course of one single conversation – the fine balance tipped again, this time coming down against me. My needs from him became greater than his pleasure in me. I was too much to look after. Or maybe we just knew each other too well and the function buttons became worn with too much pressing so the connections didn’t work properly. Is that what always happens, with long-term partnerships?

Whatever you like. I don’t know.

I can’t go on feeling crippled by Peter’s absence or by the things that happened long before I met him, that much I do know after my days alone in this white hotel.

It ought to be possible to rub out history. To start again with a clean piece of paper, to write on it with a fresh and optimistic hand. That’s what I am doing here – making sense of what has happened and needing to work out what shape my life will take from now on. Selina’s absence means that I have to face the definitions and decisions alone and therefore properly.

So I have come out of my room. It is the fourth day and I have ventured down to the beach. With the full complement of yellow beach towels and robes and tubes of cream and magazines and paperback novels, of course. I have arranged all this and myself under a parasol, and I am flipping through Vogue when a shadow falls across the sand beside me. I look up to see my waiter, with a tray balanced on his shoulder. His shabby black shoes look incongruous so close to the lazy waves.

‘Madam, you come to the sun. I am happy. I bring you water and Italian coffee.’

There is a bottle of mineral water, and a cappuccino complete with chocolate powder.

‘Thank you.’

We smile at each other and he carefully arranges the drinks on the little table under the parasol.

‘What is your name?’ I ask him and he flushes a little. His skin is downy, hardly darkened with hair except on his top lip. He is probably even younger than I estimated.

‘Jim,’ he says. With a hard ‘J’ sound that sounds quite un-Turkish.

‘Like Jules et Jim?’ I ask fatuously.

‘I am not sure. But is a good name.’

‘Very good,’ I agree. Jim begins to back away, with the tray hanging flat by his side, and then hesitates. ‘An Inglis man is here. In Branc. Maybe you go for a boat ride?’

I must look desperate, or desperately miserable, or both. However, an English man is the last thing I am looking for.

Very firmly I say, ‘Thank you for thinking of it, but I don’t want to meet anyone here. No one at all, Jim.’ And I put the magazine up in front of my face to shut out the threat.

‘Okay. Good morning,’ he says and crunches away up the sand to the garden wall. I know I have been rude and that he is offended.

When I was first married I thought I might become an actress. Because of the way I looked then and some of the people I knew, I was given small – tiny – roles in a couple of films, but I wasn’t any good at it. And if I wound up hating the scrutiny of the photographer’s lens, I hated the film cameras even more. After a year or so I stopped trying and it was a relief. I didn’t have to earn money, because Peter provided for us both. I didn’t have to do anything except be married to Peter and have a family.

I have always had an ambivalent attitude to my body. Its length and skinniness enabled me to earn a living, but I hated the way people stared. I knew that they were only looking at it, and not into me in order to judge what they saw within, but the knowledge didn’t lessen my discomfort.

Peter used to say that they were looking because I was beautiful and I should be glad.

‘Plenty of women’, he said, ‘would change places with you.’

Up until then, at least, the legs and arms and breasts and backside had done what I wanted them to do. They moved for the camera and showed off whatever garment I was being paid to parade.

But I couldn’t get pregnant.

Not properly pregnant, so the baby stayed inside and grew. I had two miscarriages, very quickly, but the doctors were still optimistic and reassuring.

‘Don’t worry, it happens. You’ll have your family soon.’

Peter took me home and fed me and held me in his arms at night.

Then there was an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured one of the Fallopian tubes. This time there was anxiety. My chances of conceiving were diminished by fifty per cent. I was too thin, they told me, I was anxious and tense and probably depressed. All these things counted against us in our efforts to have a baby. I must relax.

Peter took me away on holiday, to Italy.

Soon I was pregnant yet again and it seemed that this time it might take. I got to four months and we told our friends and dared a celebration. But I miscarried again, in hospital, a sixteen-week boy. It was the last time. The last time I was even able to conceive.

I did hate my body after that, with a cold anger that made me want to mutilate myself. I needed a scapegoat and I turned my womb into one. This reaction was explicable, even logical, to myself and other people, and I used it as an acceptable shorthand.

I do not now believe, however, that my damned body was the real culprit.

It was myself, wherever that reality might be lodged and whatever form it might take. I think I never really wanted a baby because I was afraid of what might happen if I did have one. I was afraid of history, and tragedy.

This is our baby, we love him, he dies, it’s my fault.

That was the reasoning and so every time my body conceived, my mind poisoned it. Out the potential big tragedy came in a wash of blood, only another small tragedy as yet. Not even named.

If you think that’s crazy – believe me, so do I.

‘I will be the judge of that,’ Peter said mildly on the night we met, when I told him that I was mad. And he chose to bring in a verdict of sanity.

It was a strange mistake, for a clever and perceptive man who is usually so accurate in his judgements.

When it became obvious that we were not going to have children, I lodged myself in Dunollie Mansions like a hermit crab in its shell. I loved the screen of summer leaves and filigree winter twigs across the windows. I loved the thick walls and floors, and the almost dreamlike sense of seclusion, and the way Derek soft-footedly took care of the building. I liked the other quiet, discreet couples and the safety of the solid doors. There was no shock or violence or mayhem here, nor could I ever imagine anything of the sort disturbing our calm routines. I became a recluse.

We still gave dinner parties, of course, and went out to dinners in return, and to the opera and weekends in the country and on holidays, but I became an emotional solitary. Peter and I continued to look after each other and no doubt loved each other, but the woman he had taken home from the photographer’s party ceased to exist.

Obliterated by history.

Then came Lisa Kirk, with her red TARDIS and trendy furniture and the full heat of youth, smarting from Baz’s rejection and wishing for the baby she thought should have been hers. She saw in Peter Stafford exactly what I had seen myself, all those years before.

As I say, it was therefore only a matter of time.

Until Christmas, I reckon, give or take a week or two. I never quite got to the bottom of how it began. When I put the question to Peter he answered, shamefacedly, ‘We met for a drink, that’s all. She wanted some business advice.’

‘Where did you meet for a drink? How did it happen? Did she call you at the office and suggest this assignation?’

‘Cary, does it matter? Why do you need to know?’

‘Because I do,’ I snapped. But he wouldn’t tell me and in fact I didn’t need to know. This is how things unravel, that’s all. It’s nothing unusual. I had even watched my mother go through it, when my father ran off with Lesley.

It was quite early in the new year, this year that has now turned to October, and Peter and I were driving over to Fulham to have Sunday lunch with our friends Clive and Sally. It was one of those colourless London winter days when the sky and the river and even the buildings lack definition, and everything seems looming, as at the onset of seasickness. My handbag was at my feet, in the carpeted footwell of the current old car: an Alvis, silver-grey. Although Peter has now replaced it with a new BMW 5-series, no doubt at Lisa’s instigation.

I looked down for the handbag, intending to blow my nose or swallow a headache pill or something, and I saw a fragment under the seat mounting. Peter’s cars are always so impeccably looked after, it surprised me to see a piece of litter that might have been a sweet wrapper. I picked it up and looked down at it lying in the palm of my hand. Peter was occupied with the traffic at South Kensington.

What I had found was a little golden label, reading ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.

Like a business card, but more eloquent. I put it in my pocket and said nothing.

The signs had been there for some time and now I was able to read them.

I began a horrible regime of espionage. Whenever Peter was working late, or when he telephoned to say he had an unexpected meeting or a new client to see, I would slip up the well-swept shallow stairs to Lisa’s door. I would ring the bell and then tap on the thick swimmy glass but – funnily enough – she was never at home either.

On the evenings when Peter did come home I would listen. I had never been able to hear Mrs Bobinski moving around, but then I had never tried to. Now I could suddenly hear the faint creak of floorboards, the vibrating bass of her music, the click of a door closing. Lisa at home.

‘What’s wrong?’ Peter asked.

I know, but I’m not ready to let you know that I know. That’s what’s wrong.

I’m on the beach again, another day. The sea is very flat, aluminium-coloured under a high, hazy sky. There is no breath of wind. A sailing boat crosses the mouth of the bay, the masts bare and the engines drumming. A shadow falls across my book.

A tall man with a white shirt and loose trousers, and creased Moroccan slippers with squashed pointed toes. I can see a narrow crescent of suntanned foot, between the leather slipper and where the cuff of his trousers dips over the heel.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a copy of The Times here. Finished with it. Would you like it?’

Inglis man.

He holds out the folded paper and I am so surprised that I take it.

‘Thank you.’

‘Nice to know what’s going on in the world,’ he says. And then he moves on, diagonally across the sand to the margin of the silver water, where wet sand makes a khaki ribbon. I watch him walk along the water’s edge, into the distance. The paper had bled a smudge of newsprint on to my palm and fingertips.

In the end it wasn’t Peter I confronted. One evening when he was sitting in his armchair reading a report I left the flat and went upstairs to knock on Lisa’s door.

She had the grace to look startled and apprehension dawned in her wide eyes.

‘May I come in?’

She held the door wider and I marched inside. In the kitchen, with a yoghurt pot with a spoon stuck in it on the table – I felt that I was interrupting a child’s tea – I turned on her.

‘What are you doing with my husband?’

There are a dozen possible responses to a question like that. Innocence, affront, evasion, denial.

To her credit, Lisa only nodded quietly. After a moment’s thought she said, ‘Just what you imagine, I suppose.’

‘What does this mean?’

She pursed her lips and mournfully widened her eyes even further, a risible expression that was her attempt at high seriousness.

‘That we are in love with each other.’

I gaped at her for an instant, silenced by this mouthful of garbage. I remembered what she had said at the dinner weeks ago – oh yes, once I knew you – and how the airy assumption had infuriated me. But that was nothing compared with the ballooning rage I felt now.

What did this airhead know about love and what right did she have to claim Peter’s?

With one arm I swept the yoghurt pot and its spoon and assorted bits of crockery off the table. With one foot I kicked the red door of the TARDIS so that it shuddered. If Peter had been in our kitchen below he would surely have heard it. When I could speak I yelled at her, ‘Don’t talk such fucking crap. Don’t say another word.’

There was a mess of spilled yoghurt and broken crockery on the floor. But Lisa kept her eyes on me, and there was at last real shock and proper concern in her face.

I’ll teach you about feelings, you china doll.

‘You don’t know anything. You’ll never know anything about me or Peter. You are to leave him alone. To leave us alone. Do you understand?’

For extra emphasis I kicked the refrigerator again. There was a tiny dent in the lower corner of the door and my toes hurt.

‘Cary …’

Even in this absurd and undignified situation I could see how lovely she was with the light shining through her thin skin and the smooth flesh of her arms. Her thin fingers curled round the back of one of her uncomfortable chairs. Maybe she was contemplating how to lift it and bring it down on my head. Only she couldn’t have reached high enough.

‘Leave us alone,’ I repeated, with the anger starting to ooze out of me. I felt like a crumpled paper bag.

‘It’s too late for that.’

There was the confidence again, bred out of youth and arrogance. I wasn’t going to win. History decreed it.

What to do now?

‘I don’t care. It isn’t too late,’ I lied.

‘God, look. I love him and he loves me.’ Her words rang true now, suddenly, reality unleashed by my fury. Lisa Kirk wouldn’t let go. This wasn’t some monochrome Baz at issue; this was important to her.

But we weren’t just two alley cats fighting over a fish head, either. There was a third person involved in this. It was Peter who would determine what happened, of course. Briefly I felt the warmth of his familiarity around me, a security blanket. All would be well, because he had always made it well.

‘We’ll see,’ I said. I turned round and walked out of the kitchen, closed Lisa’s front door behind me and ran back down the stairs to our flat.

Peter was still reading. He hadn’t even noticed that I had gone.

I said nothing to him, not a word. I cooked supper and we ate together and watched the ten o’clock news. There was silence from upstairs. By being normal, I thought, maybe I could make everything normal. That shows how irrational I was.

There is a little covered souk at the centre of Branc.

I am lingering by one of the stalls, breathing in the scents of cumin and cinnamon. There are fat hessian sacks spilling out a dozen different spices and herbs, and heaps of glossy dates and dried figs. The stallholder is a fat man in a vast white shirt with a little striped waistcoat pinched around his shoulders. I am biting into the date he has passed to me to sample when a voice says, ‘I’ve got another Times, but not with me. I can drop it into the hotel later. If you would like, of course.’

Inglis man, again.

I turn round and we look at each other. He is wearing a loose shirt, pale trousers and the leather slippers. He looks ordinary, unremarkable, but familiar. He fits in here in the souk – unlike me – but I find that I can imagine him equally at home on a cricket pitch in Hampshire or in a restaurant in London.

‘Hello?’ he prompts. I have been staring at him.

‘I’m sorry. Thank you, that’s kind.’

‘Are you all right?’

The pretence seems more trouble than it’s worth. I say very softly, on an expiring breath, ‘No.’

‘No. Would you like to come and drink some coffee with me?’

Whatever my intentions might have been I find that I am following him. We duck out briefly into the white sunlight and cross a square to some tables under canvas parasols.

And then we are sitting facing each other, with a tent of shade cutting us off from the heat and brightness. Little cups of Turkish coffee arrive, with glasses of cool water and a dish of almond kernels. I pick up a nut and bite it in half, examining the marks made by my teeth in the white flesh. Then I sip at the thick, sweet coffee and gaze across the square to a mosque and the needle points of the minarets. I realise with a shock that softens my spine that I am at ease in the man’s company, am not talking or laughing or fending off. I am just sitting, enjoying the shade and the view and the faint grittiness of the coffee on my tongue.

‘I have a boat,’ the man says, before I even know his name.

And I have agreed to go for a sail in his boat, still before I even know his name.

It didn’t take long for Peter to hear about my visit to Lisa. He came home early the next day, wearing an expression I had never seen before. A guarded look, edged with defiance.

‘Is it true?’ I asked him, once he had taken off his coat and put his briefcase down on the chair in the hallway.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Although I did. ‘Are you in love with her?’

He spread his hands, a gesture of expiring patience that brought the first dart of dislike out of me.

‘No. Yes, I suppose so. I didn’t go looking for it. These things just happen.’

Like getting hit by a bus, I suppose. You are just standing there, minding your own business, when adultery comes along and runs you over. Although, when I thought about it, having Lisa Kirk set her sights on you must be not unlike being ploughed over by a bus. The dislike intensified and it made me want to cry. The idea of disliking Peter was so outlandish.

After that there was a predictable series of ugly events and confrontations.

I wept, Peter retreated, Lisa widened her eyes. Instead of a calm backwater, Dunollie Mansions became a place full of gusts of misery and disbelief.

In the end, after weeks of grief and entreaty, Peter moved out and into a flat in Baron’s Court. Lisa drifted there with him and I stayed put. It was as if my husband and his new lover had climbed into the red TARDIS, pulled the door shut behind them and dematerialised. Some time later Selina had the idea that the two of us might go on a Turkish holiday together.

And now I am going on a boat trip. It is another unseasonably hot day, although the sky is hazed with a layer of thin cloud. The white sky slides into a pearl-grey sea with no line of separation. There is a small boat waiting at the jetty near the corner of the bay, as Inglis man told me there would be, and as I plod towards it I can see the man lying on the roof of the tiny cabin, straw hat tilted over his eyes and ankles crossed, apparently asleep. His hearing must be supernaturally good, however, because I am still a way off and treading quietly over the rocks when in one fluid movement he sits up and raises his arm in greeting.

He takes my hand and helps me down into the cockpit. There are cushions on the seats and the space is shaded by an awning, and I sit down with relief to be partly out of the brooding heat. Through the cabin door I can see a neat area with narrow bunks separated by a folding table.

‘No wind,’ the man says, hunching his shoulders.

‘No.’

‘I don’t like moving under engine power, but I think we shall have to. Maybe we’ll pick up a breeze outside the bay.’

I look down into the water, which is so clear that I can see the rocks ten feet beneath the surface as if they were lying under plate glass, and then up into the colourless sky.

‘Maybe,’ I agree. I don’t mind whether we find a breeze or not, or whatever else may be going to happen. I’m happy to be here, rocked by the water and with the shipshape little wooden cockpit around me.

The man starts up the engine and a drift of blue smoke rises from the stern. He jumps on to the jetty and releases the bow rope, and as the prow swings outwards in a slow arc he unties the stern and leaps back to join me and the boat. A minute later we are heading out to sea. In companionable silence we watch the water, and my white hotel and its companions as they fall away behind us.

‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.

He tilts his head sideways and looks at me. None of his features is distinctive, nor is the composite they make, yet the suggestion of familiarity comes back again. I know that I don’t know him, but I feel easy in his company.

‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’

‘Andreas,’ he says. He makes a small adjustment to the tiller to bring us round parallel to the shore.

‘There,’ he says with satisfaction. And then, gesturing to the tiller, ‘Do you mind, just for a moment?’

I slide across and take his place as he moves forward. He runs up a sail and at once the wind fills it. Water drums under the hull and a wake churns behind us and I tighten my grasp on the tiller. I lift my head to look at the masthead, and the wind and our quickening speed make me smile. When Andreas moves back again I start to move out of his place but he makes a sign to indicate that I should stay put.

‘I can’t sail.’

‘You are sailing.’

And he is right, I am. Pleasure swells in me until I feel as taut as the white sail. We seem to skim over the water. I watch the coastline and the villages that run down into the bays like clusters of sugar cubes shaken in the fold of a napkin. The scenery is calm rather than beautiful, painted in shades of aquamarine and sepia. Andreas points out the places and tells me their names.

‘Do you live here?’ I ask.

‘Some of the time.’

After a while we pass a massive outcrop of rock, where cormorants shuffle against the sky. Immediately behind the rock, hidden by it except from an oblique angle, there is a tongue of sand between two steep rock cliffs.

‘That’s where we are going.’

‘It looks beautiful.’

He helps me to bring the boat round. In the shallows the water is brilliant turquoise. There are fish in synchronised shoals, flicking their shadows over the sand. Andreas lowers the sail and makes his boat fast to a small buoy.

‘Welcome to my bay.’

I am hot, now that we are motionless again, and the water looks enticing. I pull off the shirt that covers my swimming costume and stand up too quickly so the boat rocks wildly. Andreas puts his hand out to steady me and I cling on to his bare forearm, laughing. My own hand looks chalky against his suntanned skin.

‘Dive,’ he says and I look over the side into the water. Deep enough. We link hands and I scramble up on to the seat feeling the rough canvas of the cushions under the balls of my feet. The boat is still rocking and we are both laughing now. He puts his hands on my shoulders to steady me while I rise on to my toes and arrow my arms in front of me. Andreas’s touch is friendly, even brotherly, with no whisper of sex in it. He is protecting me and teasing at the same time. I feel a pang of loss with Peter at the centre of it, because he was my lover and I miss him so acutely.

‘Dive,’ Andreas repeats and to get away from the memory of Peter I launch myself from the boat. There is a smack and sizzle of water and I stretch, letting the momentum of the dive drive me down as far as the rippled sand. Then I am rising again and the cool water strips away the roughness of the last months and it is as if I am clean and smooth and in one piece again. When I break the surface in a dazzle of light, I notice that the sky’s white haze has receded and the sun is shining. Andreas surfaces next to me and shakes a glitter of drops from his hair. We swim together to the beach and then sit in the shallows, sun-warmed, looking out to the little boat and the slice of open sea beyond the mouth of the bay.

‘My favourite place,’ he says lightly.

‘I can see why.’

Later Andreas straps a knife to his ankle and takes a netting bag for a swim around the rocks while I lie in the sun. When he comes back the bag is full of black spiny globes.

‘Lunch.’

We sit under the boat’s awning.

There is coarse brown bread and a dish of tomatoes. Andreas cups the sea urchins one by one in his hand and twists the point of the knife into the underside. He piles them in front of me and I spoon the orange pulpy contents greedily into my mouth. The taste is pure sea and iodine.

When we have finished eating I lie on the cabin roof, letting the sun unpin me, and Andreas puts a tiny coffeepot on the blue flame of a gas cylinder. He brings me a little tin cupful and three figs, and I gnaw the fruit off ragged slices of skin while the juice runs down my chin.

‘This is wonderful.’

‘Good.’

‘But I don’t know anything about you.’ I smile.

He takes the last fig from me and neatly quarters it with the knife. ‘What do you want to know?’

I try to frame the questions – how old are you, where do you come from, what do you know and what are you doing here – but then the points of reference fade. There is nothing I need to ask because it is enough just to be here.

Andreas splits the flower-shape of fig segments apart, two for him and two for me. I look into his face and it is like looking into my own. As familiar as that.

‘Have you eaten enough?’

I nod.

‘Come ashore.’

There is shade under the east-facing cliff. We lie on the sand, facing each other, heads propped on our hands.

‘What are you going to do next?’ he asks quietly. It is as if he already knows about Peter. It is a relief not to have to fill in what has already happened, but to make an attempt at sketching out the future instead.

‘I won’t go back to London. I’d like to live somewhere different, where all those rocks of history don’t weigh me down any more.’

‘You could do that.’

‘I could do anything’ I start to say it with an ironic shrug, but looking into Andreas’s face the words come out with me believing them. ‘I’ll start living, instead of hiding. You know, something happened to me a long time ago – no, not happened, I did something and it changed everything that came afterwards, for me and everyone around me. I’d like to be the person I might have been, if … if that thing had never happened.’

His hand uncurls and he touches my mouth.

‘Shh. You can be, if that’s what you really want,’ he says.

And what he says is right. The certainty is soothing and I stretch myself out in the sand, suddenly drowsy.

‘I could sleep,’ I murmur.

Andreas yawns. ‘And me, too.’

We lie down side by side and I fall asleep with Andreas’s heartbeat and the ripple of water in my head.

That was how the day was. There was nothing complicated or buried or even unspoken about it; we were just easy in one another’s company as if we were old friends.

When I wake up the sky has clouded again with the morning’s thin white cover. There is only a hollow in the sand beside me and I sit up, panicky and still fogged with daytime sleep. Then I see Andreas in the cockpit of the boat and he lifts his hand to beckon me. The water feels chill as I wade in and unwillingly strike out. He helps me over the side and I wrap myself in my shirt.

‘The weather is changing,’ he says. Under the colourless sky the land looks bleak and the water is cloudy. It’s airlessly hot now, but a breath of fear makes me shiver.

‘What’s happening?’ I shake my head, trying to clear the sleep out of it.

Andreas is busy with the 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.

Four

‘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 their sausages and beans.

‘Mother? You will stay and have some food with us?’

Meroula still lived in the house where her husband had died not long after Theo’s birth. But in the winter, when there were no guests and tourists to keep her away, she spent plenty of time with her son and his family. She inclined her head now, her expression managing to convey that this would be a duty rather than a pleasure, but still a duty that she intended to perform.

‘That’s good,’ Olivia said.

From the window over the sink she could see a corner of the square and the Taverna Irini. The owners had retreated to Rhodes for the winter; the windows of the bar were lined on the inside with newspaper, already yellowing, and the door was padlocked. The islanders preferred to use the place on the harbour.

The only light showing was in a blue wooden kiosk next to the taverna. Inside his square metre of shelter, stacked with cigarettes and chewing gum and lottery tickets, Manolis was dozing with his cheek on his folded arms on top of a pile of photo magazines. Manolis had a tiny head and a huge body, invariably encased in the same pair of greasy trousers that revealed a slice of woollen underclothing through the fly opening. Georgi said that his head wasn’t big enough to hold a proper brain and it was true that Manolis was simple. But he was able to sell cigarettes and calculate the right change from a thousand-drachma note, and he kept the kiosk open all hours of the day and half of the night, summer and winter, because the only other place he had to go was a curtained alcove in his mother’s tiny house right over the harbour. Sometimes Manolis sat in the sun on a bench near his kiosk, but the approach of a customer sent him rolling back into the blue box. As Olivia watched now, his head bobbed up.

The customer was Xan. He pointed to something, pocketed what Manolis gave him, handed over money in exchange.

Olivia was smiling, her hands unfurling under the dirty sink water.

‘Pappy’s coming.’

Theo sprang out of Meroula’s arms and Georgi threw his crayon aside.

‘Pappy!’

Meroula sat upright and smoothed her grey skirt across her lap, as if she was about to see her lover. Olivia had noticed this often enough before and it both irritated and touched her. Xan was everything to his mother; there was no corner of her life that he did not irradiate.

Xan said when she tried to talk to him about it, ‘It’s the way it is, it’s not unusual. But you are the one I am married to.’

She would put her hands on either side of his face and kiss him on the mouth.

‘Don’t you forget it.’

He came in, bulky and smelling of smoke and bar. His arms were held stiffly in front of him with the fists clenched so he marched like a robot. The boys ran at him and battered themselves against his legs.

‘Left or right?’ Xan demanded.

‘Left,’ Theo yelled and Georgi countered, ‘Right.’

Theo amended his choice at once. ‘Right!’

Ignoring their responses, Xan dropped a plastic bubble into each pair of cupped hands. Inside were a block of bright pink bubblegum and a plastic toy that demanded construction from four puzzle pieces. The boys stuck the gum into their mouths and dropped to their knees to put the toys together. Georgi’s was a yellow car, Theo’s a red man.

The first time she saw him, Olivia remembered, Xan had been handing out sweets to Bangkok street children with just the same robot movements. The children were milling around his knees, pushing and shouting for his attention, and his arms were outstretched above a thicket of grasping fingers. It was the end of the monsoon and the swollen, khaki-coloured river behind them carried a mat of floating weeds and branches. Olivia lifted her old Leica to frame the shot and Xan turned to look straight into the lens, through the tunnel of her eye and into her head. He emptied his bag of sweets into the waiting hands and came to her.

‘It’s a straight trade,’ he said and took an Instamatic out of the pocket in his shirt. He held it horizontally and made as if to take the picture.

‘If I were you,’ Olivia pointed out, I’d frame it vertically.’ He did as she suggested and clicked the shutter. They were standing in a sea of children now, all clamouring for more presents.

‘Nice. Thanks. You know about photography, do you?’

‘It’s my job. I sell my photographs.’

‘Is that so? You want to come for a beer?’

That was how she lived, in those days. She took flights, she drifted through foreign cities and rode buses up remote mountain passes. She took pictures in Soweto and Havana and Bogotá, and on Caribbean beaches and in the canyons of midtown Manhattan. Some of these she sold, to picture libraries and agencies and magazines. She owned little more than she could carry, and the tide of travellers and backpackers that flowed around the world was the current she swam in. She had drunk beer with hundreds of strangers and some of them had become friends. Some, even lovers.

‘Yes, a quick one.’

When they were sitting under an awning beside the river Olivia began with the question that always followed the exchange of names. ‘Where are you heading?’

Xan said, ‘Home.’

The intense pleasure in the way he said it, the way he anticipated the prospect as if he was starving and about to be fed, filled her with a wash of melancholy. It wasn’t homesickness – England and her parents’ present house in the country, where she had never even lived, was hardly home any more. Yet she could feel the pull of home through Xan Georgiadis, the idea and significance and safety of a place rather than her own reality, like a thread passing straight through her innards. She felt a longing to be connected to a place again after so many years of wandering.

Over the rim of her glass she watched him, thinking how good-looking he was. There was an unfamiliar knocking in her chest. Don’t get too excited, she tried to warn herself. But already it was too late for warnings. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Greece.’

Xan had lived for five years in Melbourne. He had been working in his second cousin’s building company, putting up cheap houses for immigrant communities on the city outskirts, and he was brawny from carrying and deeply suntanned, and an Australian twang overlaid his Greek pronunciations. But now, he said, his parents needed him at home. His father was getting old and his mother missed him.

‘It’s one of the islands, in the Dodecanese. You should just see it. It’s paradise.’

Olivia had been to most of the world’s paradise destinations, but she could easily believe that with Xan Georgiadis in it this one would outstrip them all.

‘You are going up to bed right now. You can bring the toys with you,’ Xan said.

The boys kissed Meroula and Olivia, and padded after their father. They always did as he told them.

‘See, they are their father’s children,’ Meroula said with a broad smile of satisfaction. Olivia tucked the last of the stuffing into the last of the squid and slid the dish into the oven before her mother-in-law could tell her that Xan really preferred meat to fish. She could hear the thuds and scuffles of the boys romping with Xan overhead. Meroula nodded and smiled.

When he came back from settling the children they sat down to eat, with Xan at the head of the table and his wife and mother on either side of him. They had a dish of olives with bread and oil, and then the squid. Xan had been playing cards in the taverna and watching a football game on the television that hung over the bar, and he had come home hungry. Meroula ate a substantial plateful too, but with an expression of forbearance. She looked at Xan’s plate every minute or two, to check that he had enough. The room was quiet except for the clink of cutlery. If Meroula had not been there, Xan and Olivia would have chatted and maybe even drunk some wine. These empty, out-of-season evenings when the children were asleep were among the best of their times on Halemni.

Olivia contented herself with looking around the room as she ate.

There were candles burning on one of the stone shelves and a row of books on another. There were logs stacked in a basket next to the stone hearth, but the fire was unlit – this luxury was reserved for the coldest evenings, or for the times when the island’s power supply failed. Two comfortable old armchairs sat on either side of the fire, with cupboards for the boys’ toys and games beside them. There was a bread oven at the side of the fireplace, but Olivia baked in the new gas oven that occupied the far end of the room together with all the cupboards and equipment for cooking for a dozen guests at a time. The big oak table filled the centre of the space, and windows on one side looked from the front of the house to the square and the sea in the distance. On the opposite side a row of doors opened on to the shaded terrace and the slope of hillside behind the village. In summer this was where life was lived.

Xan had built almost everything and laid the limestone flags of the floor. The doors of all the cupboards were painted with squares and diamonds and lozenges of brilliant colour, turquoise and saffron and tangerine and crimson – this was Christopher’s work – and every spare piece of wall was covered with pictures by guests, the boys and Christopher, and with Olivia’s photographs. There was no television, but there was a CD player and a radio. It had taken a long time to create it all on limited resources but it was a warm and comfortable place now, lit with the candles and low lamps.

‘Have you had enough to eat, Mother? Xan?’

‘Give him that last spoonful.’

Xan pushed over his plate.

‘There’s some fruit. We’ve got figs,’ Olivia suggested.

Meroula shook her head. ‘No fruit. Thank you.’

‘I will make some coffee when I’ve finished,’ Xan said with his mouth full.

‘Let me do it for you,’ Meroula responded.

Olivia let her. She was remembering what it had been like when she first came to Halemni. She had known Xan for only a few weeks, the time that it had taken for them to make their way slowly back to Europe and to know that they wanted to stay together. The last stage of the journey had been on a ferry out of Rhodes harbour. The hot, smoky bar and passenger lounge seemed to be full of weather-beaten men who knew Xan, and greeted him with full-on embraces and streams of questions. But after a brief talk with each of them during which he introduced Olivia as my girl, Xan preferred to stand the whole way, four hours of sailing, on the upper deck. Olivia leaned on the rail beside him, watching the curl of foam from the ship’s bows and the cliffs and rocky uplands of the other islands, her hand tucked under his arm and the thought in her mind that she was giving up everything she had known in her life so far to follow Xan Georgiadis back home.

The idea created a hollow and pleasurable sense of the irrevocable in the pit of her stomach. The travelling was over. Whatever this place waiting over the horizon turned out be like, it was where she would stay because it was where Xan belonged.

‘There it is.’

She followed the line of his pointing finger. A blue-grey smudge on the November horizon of the Aegean.

Forty minutes later the ferry made a complicated reverse manoeuvre in the bay of Halemni and brought the ship’s stern up against a stone jetty. Olivia stood beside Xan in the ship’s bowels as the massive steel door was lowered to reveal a widening rectangle of scenery. A rim of frosty blue sky. Rocky hillsides, brown and grey, and the whitewashed houses in a semicircle above the harbour. A narrow strip of shingle beach fringed with tamarisk trees and an expanse of pale-grey sea. It took a closer scrutiny for Olivia to notice the ruins of a castle on the highest rock cliff, and a more geometric composition of rock and stone clinging to the slopes beneath it. There were windows that looked like dark eyes.

‘The castle of Agrosikia, built by the Knights of St John, and Arhea Chorio, the old village,’ Xan said.

The steel door clanged into the horizontal against the jetty, and sailors and harbour men made the massive ropes fast. The little knot of people Xan and Olivia had been waiting with moved forward in a sudden surge and a couple of trucks nudged out of the hold.

‘There they are,’ Xan said. ‘My parents.’

Olivia saw them. A stout woman with a square body and a square face under a wedge of iron-grey hair, and a much smaller, thin and colourless man with a cigarette cupped in his fingers. With all her belongings in one pack on her back, she followed Xan off the ship and into her life on Halemni.

When Xan introduced Olivia, Meroula’s eyes travelled from her dusty boots to the top of her head. She was almost a foot shorter than Olivia, even when she drew herself up to her full height as she did now. The only son had come home at last, but instead of choosing to marry a Greek girl he had brought this outlandish creature with him. Nikos Georgiadis’s friendly handshake hardly compensated for the chilliness of Meroula’s greeting.

For the first weeks they lived with Meroula and Nikos, sleeping in the bedroom next to the parents’ and eating every meal with them. Olivia learned quickly, putting Greek words and then sentences together, and always deferring to Meroula in everything. To her initial surprise even this didn’t win Xan’s mother’s approval, but then she realised that nothing she did ever would win it because Meroula was her outright rival for Xan’s love and attention. Xan himself ducked out of the conflict.

He spent his days fishing with his boyhood friends or working, when the weather allowed it, on the new buildings for summer tourists that were inching their way upwards on the margins of Megalo Chorio. To keep out of Meroula’s way, Olivia spent her days exploring the island. In time she came to know every piece of it, from the sandy bays on the southern side to the wild rocks and remote inlets on the north and eastern flanks. It was ten miles from west to east and, at the narrowest point, a mile and a half from north to south. She walked and climbed, and sat on rocks and simply looked, and fell in love for the second time.

The weather changed with snapshot speed, from still clear days to wild storms followed by insistent rain, and then changed back again. The sea could take on every colour from almost black to pearl to turquoise, and the bare hillsides darkened with rain and then softened again under the afternoon sun.

Meroula said, ‘You will have to marry, Alexander. You cannot go on living in my house like man and wife without the blessing of the church.’

Xan laughed. ‘We will marry when we are ready, Mother. If you don’t want Olivia and me to live together here I’ll clear out and move in with Stefanos. Would you rather that?’

‘You cannot live anywhere on Halemni but with your own mother and father.’

‘Well, there is your answer.’ Xan winked at Olivia, Meroula gave her a black look.

Christmas came and went. January brought the first of the wild flowers in sheltered places. Olivia discovered clumps of tiny white wild cyclamen and blue anemones, and found the furry rosettes of mandrakes with their central boss of flowers like flattened eggs in a bird’s nest. She climbed between the wire-netting 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, Olivia diagnosed, once she was old enough. Every table mat and duster and saucepan lid had its proper place in her mother’s domestic order, there was a rigid programme of what was cleaned when and what was to be eaten on which day. Nothing was ever allowed to vary, but Maddie seemed always to be tensely waiting. When she was young Olivia never wanted to come too close to what the element of menace consisted of, although it shifted around the arguments that she and Max overheard when they were lying in bed, and her father’s absences.

He came home, always, in the end, but there was an unspoken fear that some day he might not.

It had felt like the essence of freedom to Olivia to move out of their house and go as she pleased, and it was a freedom she had never dreamed of giving up, until now.

‘Be happy,’ Max ordered.

‘I think I can promise that,’ Olivia murmured, dreamily resting her head against her brother’s knees.

‘Where’s Jack and the girls?’ he asked after a while.

‘Giving each other facials, I think.’

‘Of course.’

They rolled on the brown turf, laughing as they had done when they were children.

For the wedding Olivia’s mother wore a pink suit and her father a linen jacket and a spotted silk tie. Denis and Maddie looked tall and pale and formal, and quite bewildered among the fishermen and carpenters and goat men.

When she came out of the church in the wake of the priest in his black chimney hat, as Xan’s wife, she stopped and kissed both her parents.

‘That’s my girl,’ Denis said and she knew that he was pleased for her. Maddie had tears smudging her mascara and Olivia brushed them away with the tips of her fingers. Meroula was standing there too and Olivia gave her mother-in-law a kiss on each cheek. She wanted to say something about being a daughter rather than a son stealer, but she couldn’t muster the Greek words.

Just as well, she thought afterwards. Meroula had no time for sentiment. She was as sentimental as a mousetrap.

The newlyweds gave a party on their terrace, under the newly planted vine. Everyone on the island who could get away from their summer work came, and the tavernas and restaurants operated for the night with a skeleton staff. Celia and Polly and Jack danced with the goat men, and her father got drunk and made a long speech interspersed with the classical Greek he remembered from school, to the bafflement of the entire company.

Xan and Olivia went to bed that night in their room still furnished with fruit boxes.

‘Will your mother be happy now?’ she asked.

She felt him smiling against her hair, his breath warming her scalp. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Why?’

‘There must be sons.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

That was ten years ago. In that time they had built a business together, and they had had Georgi and Theo.

Meroula put down her empty coffee cup.

‘I will walk back home with you, Mother,’ Xan said, as he always did. Olivia kissed her and Meroula submitted to the embrace.

‘Goodnight Olivia. I am grateful for the food.’

‘And we are thankful for our family.’

It was a traditional island exchange after hospitality given and received. Sometimes Olivia had to grit her teeth around the utterance more than at others.

While Xan was out Olivia finished drying up the supper dishes and put them away in the cupboard. She blew out the candles and went outside to stand on the terrace. The wind was blowing from the wrong direction. Usually at this time of night she could hear the sea, but now she caught a sound from the opposite side, a goat bell from the herd that roamed the hill. She stood for a minute, listening. The goats should be in their shelter now, not restlessly moving. It must be the thunder in the air.

Upstairs the boys were asleep in their beds. Theo’s arms and legs were flung out at angles and he held the red man firmly in one fist. Olivia kissed them both. In her own room she sat tiredly on the bed and peeled off her socks. It had been a long day.

Xan came in and closed the door.

When they were lying down together she asked, ‘What time is it?’

‘Half past eleven.’

‘Did you hear the wind?’

‘Yes. Are you sleepy?’

‘I thought I was. But now I’m not.’

‘That’s good.’

It was an hour before they finally fell asleep, at half past midnight.

Five

In the darkness I am still clinging to my bed of rock.

I can see Peter’s face and Lisa Kirk’s smile, and Andreas, and my mother and a falling statue.

Again and again, over and over, the statue’s stone arc cutting through a blue afternoon, and the terror that came after merges with the terror of this moment.

The jetty no longer exists. Even through a hanging pall of dust that thickens the darkness I can see that much. Everything has been transformed. The line of hotels along the beach front has been mashed into drunken, sloping relics. The brittle white façade of my hotel has fallen into creases with stark vertical pillars rising out of it. The corner that had once been my room is completely gone. The tall lights along the sea wall have been snapped like matchsticks and the sand in front is a greedy swirl of water.

I stagger to my feet like a drunken creature.

The jetty foundations are big, jagged boulders and I begin to scramble over them. All I can think is that I must get to the hotel. My belongings are all there, my clothes and my money and passport. Without these coverings and shreds of paper I am nothing, I am invisible.

Get to the hotel. Only a few yards away, but an interminable distance. Blocked by rubble and sea water. I must get to the hotel.

Somewhere ahead of me a woman starts wailing, a long, ululating sound of pure desolation.

Get to the hotel. People will need help.

I hear a booming noise behind me. I turn my head, a split second and out of the corner of my eye I glimpse a towering wall of water. The crest of it with an ugly lacing of foam is far higher than my head and it is racing at me, too fast to evade, even if there were anywhere to run to.

I fling up my arms to cover my head. The wave smashes into me, and my ears and eyes and lungs fill up with water. I fall and the force of the wave sweeps me away like a dead thing, arms and legs useless as I am churned in a soup of stones and sand.

The next thing I know I am lying head down, my torso twisted so I can’t breathe or cough to expel the water from my lungs.

Move. But I am pinned by rocks and the notion flutters in my weary mind: stay still. Let go and then rest.

I gather a knot of strength from somewhere within myself and strike out against the rocks. Somehow I break free of the weight and the sky steadies overhead. I can see stars, pinpricks in the dark-blue span. I am lying among boulders in what was once the garden of my hotel, where the huge wave that followed the earthquake has disgorged me.

It is no longer a garden. Tables and broken beach beds and the snapped stalks of parasols lie in a reeking jumble with sand and mud and a wreckage of fencing and pedalos and torn-up trees. Among the debris, close to my face, is a woman’s body. I can’t see her head, but from the angle of her hips and her stillness I know that she is dead.

I lie with one side of my face in the mud, shivering with fear and cold, and the beginnings of comprehension.

The earthquake must have been massive and devastating. It has not just happened in my head or in the immediate envelope of space surrounding me. The line of hotels is destroyed, the whole of Branc must be in ruins.

Maybe I am the only person left alive.

I must move. Do something.

‘Move.’ I hear my own voice croaking out the word. And in obedience to the command I lever myself on to my hands and knees, and crawl to the woman’s body. She is every bit as dead as she looks. I couldn’t see her head when I first noticed her, because it isn’t there.

I am not the only person left alive. There are shapes awkwardly moving in front of what remains of the hotel and I can hear shouting. Meshed with the shouts are thin, high screams for help. I struggle towards the figures and a shaft of light strikes across the mess in front of me. A man clambers past, dressed in fisherman’s clothes and carrying a big torch, and I struggle in his wake, drawn like a moth to the beam of light. He half turns and shouts a stream of Turkish commands, waving towards the side of the hotel.

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand,’ I shout back. He takes no notice of me at all and another man scrambles past me to answer his instructions.

Belongings and passport. The thought comes back to me and fighting disorientation I veer towards what was once the door to what were once the stairs leading to my room.

Slabs of marble facing and chunks of torn concrete and twisted rods of metal make an impenetrable barrier. There is no entering the building because there is no entry left, and nothing recognisable remaining of this corner of the hotel. Everything has sheared away and toppled into a mess of rubble, and the acrid dust from the collapse hangs in the air like poison gas. I can’t reach any of my possessions because they are buried under tons of masonry. If I had been asleep in my bed, I would be buried there with them. But instead I am outside in the darkness, unable to speak the language of the cries for help I can hear rising all around me. People are stumbling and shouting, and hauling at the wreckage.

I can’t communicate with them. I don’t know what to do. I am invisible.

I sit down in a heap against the spars of what was once the terrace bar. Only yesterday I was perching here on a tall stool, dipping my spoon into an ice cream that – after Andreas – I saw no reason not to allow myself: pistachio and almond ice cream, palest sea-green, speckled with nuts.

Now there is broken glass, a flag of half-buried awning.

The full scale of the devastation is becoming clear. I can read it in the anguished flailing of a man who is tearing handfuls of mud out of a bank of silt washed up against collapsing walls. He is shouting a name, over and over. It sounds like Oma, Oma.

There must be scenes like this all over Branc, and how far beyond that?

There are more people now and bobbing lights weaving across the ruined garden. The beams swing across a woman who is standing alone, screaming at the sky, her fists clenched above her head. They light up a man’s face, caked with grey dirt and blotted with blood. In another place I see a knot of men with garden spades who have begun to dig at the mud bank. The man in fisherman’s clothes is pointing and shouting directions but he is the only one who seems capable of organising any rescue attempt. And in the face of this devastation, rescue of any sort seems an impossibility.

Help. Sluggishly, my reactions impaired by shock, it dawns on me afresh that I should also try to help someone. Once I am on my feet I move clumsily towards the nearest light. A woman in a torn and bloodied nightdress is crouching over the wreckage of the bar. I can see her hair hanging forward in a grey coil over her shoulder, and the filth caking her wrists and arms, because there is a girl of about twelve holding a tiny torch with the narrow beam shining on her. The woman is muttering and frenziedly hauling at a painted pole that once supported the bar canopy.

I shout at her, ‘I’ll help. Who is in there?’ but she is too intent to hear me. The girl stands her ground, shivering and sobbing. When the pole comes loose the woman throws it aside without even noticing the weight. She kneels down and peers into the space and then doubles her efforts to haul away the rubble. Her hands are bleeding, but she is oblivious.

I can see a third hand, curled in the dirt.

The woman seizes it, her muttering becoming a moan. The child is shaking so much that the torch beam is jumping. There is a warning shout from further off and then a crack and rumble of a further collapse. I don’t even look around to see. I crouch down by the woman instead and begin furiously digging with my hands, hauling away debris to expose an arm and shoulder dressed in a white waiter’s jacket. The woman is pulling on the limp hand as if she could drag the buried weight out by it.

‘Stop. Help me like this,’ I order her. She doesn’t hear or can’t understand what I am saying so I labour on, moving the fallen spars as carefully as I can to spare the person beneath. It is a hard struggle, shifting the cumbersome pieces. I can see more of the waiter now. He is lying on his side with his back to us, part of his shoulders and head exposed by our efforts.

Tears are streaming down the woman’s face. She looks up beyond me and shouts for help, her mouth pulled square with desperation. Two men run to her and join their efforts to hers. Within a few minutes enough of the man’s body is freed to enable one of the rescuers to reach into the hole and work his arms under the shoulders.

I am standing to one side, my hands hanging loose.

I can’t watch this, but I must.

The waiter’s body is dragged out of its resting place and laid on the ground. His head lolls as they move him and the old woman runs to cradle it. The skin of the face is waxy, covered with mud and dirt. She rubs at it with a fold of her nightdress, whispering words of faith and encouragement, and as she smooths away the mess I recognise him. It is Jim. And I can also see that he is dead. It takes longer for the truth to dawn on his mother and sister because they fend the knowledge off with hugging the inert body and rubbing their cheeks against his.

One of the men mutters to the other and they move off to where another group of people is frantically digging and calling out. When I try to look away from Jim’s mother I see that the same scene is repeated all along the beach front. Knots of rescuers have started to claw at the fallen buildings and disorientated survivors rush from one group to the next, crying out names.

Jim’s mother is on her knees beside his body.

She can’t any longer hope that he is alive. She gathers him up in her arms, holding him against her like a baby. And she wails, a raw note of desolation that cuts the noise around us and turns everything else to silence.

I can’t bear to listen, but I can hear nothing else. The same deafening, despairing note has been in my head for ever.

Jim’s mother becomes my mother. The debris of Branc is an English garden and the fallen hotel just a stone statue. The mother lifts up a child’s body and cradles him, and her world and the rest of the world is torn to fragments.

The girl, Jim’s sister, is standing a little to one side. The torch lies at her feet, where she has just dropped it. She is white-faced and as mute as the statue and her eyes slide from her dead brother to her mother’s living horror.

I see myself in her.

But this child is blameless. None of this, the wreckage, or the wailing or the flood of horror is her fault.

It is different for me and it always has been.

And now I am a woman in my forties left standing in the aftermath of an earthquake. A new world of grief plays itself out in front of me.

A hand touches my shoulder and I spin round.

Andreas is beside me. His face blots out everything else. As if I am a tiny child and he is my powerful father, a surge of relief washes through me, diluting the grief and easing my terror. I will be safe now.

‘Look at this,’ I say, pointing to the tableau. Jim’s mother is kneeling almost at our feet.

Andreas takes hold of me. He is warm and solid, dry against my wet clothes. His arm circles my shoulders, protective and insulating. I feel myself being lifted to safety.

‘I know. There’s nothing we can do here. Come with me,’ he says.

He does know, not only about what is left of Branc and here and now, but about the steps that led me here. It was this unworded familiarity that made our day in the boat so right and even here the rightness of it stays with me.

‘We should help them.’

The girl has moved to her mother’s side. Together the two women lower Jim’s body to the ground and they sit on either side of him, holding his hands. They are both crying, but quietly now.

‘What do you want to do for them?’ Andreas gently asks.

There is nothing tangible, physical, of course. I have nothing, not even clothes, let alone light or digging implements or medical equipment. Maybe I can just tell them, I have been where you are now. You may not think it, but you can endure it. In a way, I think, looking at the young girl and remembering my six-year-old brother’s dead body and my mother holding him; you can go on living, in a way.

But what could I tell them, in English, here and now? Even the thought is a presumption.

Andreas is waiting. I can feel the tension of it in his arm.

‘I’m coming,’ I say.

But still I hover. Under the mud and dirt, Jim looks as if he was tired and has simply fallen asleep. He must have been working one of his endless shifts and now I understand that he would have been the breadwinner for these two women. I bend down, close to the girl’s thin shoulders, to express a mute goodbye. From the nearest knot of diggers there is a confusion of shouting and then terse commands leading to frantic activity. Someone else has been discovered, trapped, but this one is alive. There are many more people out now, pouring on to what is left of the beach strip with shovels and blankets and torches. A surge of them head for the new focus.

Slowly I stand up. Andreas takes my arm and leads me away.

We pick our way over rocks and through pools of filthy water. When we clamber by it I see that the woman’s body has already been covered with a torn piece of curtain. Our progress is slow because of the debris that has been flung everywhere and the hampering darkness. But still I follow Andreas unquestioningly, holding on to the anchor of his hand. I have abandoned all thoughts of my belongings. They are buried and I have no need of them. Nobody has anything now.

I stumble beside Andreas, and as we near the end of the beach and my eyes become used to the darkness I can see beyond the major wreckage of modern buildings to the old town. Some of the whitewashed old houses are still standing, because they are low-built and constructed of stone. There are flickering lights in some of these and activity as survivors are hurried into shelter. The mosque looks mostly intact but I can’t see the minarets.

There is now no sign even of the jetty foundations. The bay is a black gulf out of which huge waves rush to the shore and smash a chaotic jumble of splintered wood and hoardings and the remnants of jaunty parasols on to the ruined beach. The undertow makes a greedy noise as it sucks at the shingle.

Andreas leads me over bigger rocks, moving so fast that I am breathless. I am barefoot and the stones hurt me but I keep up with him because this is where the last thread of security resides. I can’t imagine what I would do in this desolation if he were to disappear.

We reach the lee of the headland where the waves thunder into rocky inlets, but more naturally, as if all of this could almost be the aftermath of a winter storm. There is a boat riding crazily at anchor in one of the channels. It is sawing at the anchor chain and the dark outlines of the prow and tiny cabin pitch on the wave backs. It looks like one of the fishing boats that work up and down the coast.

As soon as I am aware of it it becomes evident that this is where Andreas is leading me. It is bigger than the boat in which we sailed to our secret bay, but not by a long way.

‘Think of these people as friends,’ Andreas tells me. He has to put his mouth close to my face and his breath is warm. I realise that I am shivering uncontrollably. Shock lends everything a dreamlike dimension and I don’t question the boat or the friends, or what is about to happen. I let myself be steered, like a tired child.

Extraordinarily, there is a dinghy riding the vicious swell between the boat and the rocks. A black snake coils through the air and becomes a rope that Andreas deftly catches. He steers me forwards until I am balanced on a rock while a wave roars up around my thighs and then swirls away again, and the dinghy pitches a yard away. The rope goes taut and I cling to it.

‘Jump.’

I am past fear. Andreas’s voice is clear and I do what he tells me. I launch myself forward and there is a second of space and then I fall hands outstretched in a wet space full of net and hard edges. There is one oarsman in the boat and he moves roughly past me as Andreas jumps and lands beside me. The man takes up his oars and bends double to pull us away from the rocks but we are almost submerged as another glassy hillside of water smashes over us. The ebbing wave propels us towards the bigger boat and we collide with the flat stern. More hands reach down for the rope and make us secure.

Moving in the wake of the boatman I swarm up a precarious ladder. As soon as Andreas has landed in the bottom of the fishing boat alongside me there is a thrumming roar from the engines and I feel the propellers start churning under my ear. I lie still, exactly where I fell, and the bows come round and head into the waves. The decks rise up to what feels like the vertical and I slide backwards, and then we pitch downwards into the wave trough and I roll inertly in the opposite direction. But I can tell that we are making headway I reach out and find a locker ring and hook my fingers into that. With this purchase to cling on to I stop slithering and lie as still as I can, salt water sluicing over me. Twin images are colliding in my head. Jim and the garden. England and Branc. My mother and his mother.

Someone bumps down next to me and puts an arm under my shoulder to haul me upright. It is Andreas. I sit with my head on his shoulder and let him support me. It is cold but he makes me warm, and after a moment I can look up and try to work out what is happening.

There are three men in oilskin dungarees and thick jerseys, one at the wheel and one beside him in the half-shelter of the open wheelhouse, intent on the instruments. The third is forward in the bows, watching the walls of water rearing up and vertiginously dropping away, and shouting instructions back to his crew mates. It is several numbed minutes before I realise that the language they are using isn’t Turkish.

‘Where are we? Where are we going?’ I ask Andreas.

‘To somewhere safe,’ he tells me.

The tsunami wave struck the beach at Megalo Chorio at one twenty-six in the morning. It was generated by the shudders at the earthquake’s epicentre on the sea floor off the Turkish coast and instead of just the surface, as with ordinary waves whipped up by the wind, the whole body of the water was moving. In the shallow Aegean the wave rapidly built up to a swell of forty feet and it swept westwards at a speed of more than a hundred miles an hour.

Halemni was partially shielded from the full force of it by a scatter of small uninhabited islands to the south-east, but the impact was still massive. The wall of water thundered over the crescent of beach, uprooting half the fringe of tamarisk trees. It smashed into the village houses, surging the length of the street and through the square at the end. The houses were stonebuilt and so resisted the major shock, but the wave tore into the rooms and swirled out again, carrying a scum of broken furniture, papers, branches and ruined possessions with it. The half-built shells of flimsy concrete tourist apartments on the village outskirts collapsed like the hotels in Branc.

The wave finally collided with the hill behind the village and a backwash coursed through the houses and funnelled along the street in the opposite direction. Manolis’s blue wooden kiosk was swept away and the old fig tree in the square was torn in half. The harbour wall withstood most of the impact but the bay became a heaving morass of flotsam that crashed over the harbour with every succeeding wave.

After five minutes of booming water an eerie stillness settled over the houses again, fractured with dripping and gurgling, and the creaking of broken structures. The people of Megalo Chorio slowly released their hold on whatever fixed point they had clung to to stop being swept away, then paddled through their flooded bedrooms to open the shutters and look out into the street.

There was no power because the island’s generator station was flooded. One by one, points of candle flame wavered and steadied, and torch beams picked out the scum-laced khaki river where the cobbled road had once been. A dog howled somewhere and was answered by another.

Theo was screaming louder than the noise of the water. Georgi’s cries were lower and more confused.

Dazed with sleep but with the shock of sudden adrenalin pounding in them, Xan and Olivia stumbled out of bed and covered the soaking pitch-dark distance from their bedroom to their sons’ without stopping to light a candle or locate a torch. The familiar few steps had become an obstacle course of overturned furniture.

The screaming turned into hysterical crying as they plunged into the room.

‘I can’t see you,’ Georgi shouted.

‘I’m here. It’s all right. It’s a big wave, it’s gone.’

‘It’s coming back,’ the child sobbed.

Olivia found his shivering body and lifted him in her arms. ‘No, it won’t come back. You’re safe.’

Theo’s sobbing turned muffled as he clung to his father. His mattress was damp; thirteen feet above street level, the tide of water had just licked it. Xan held him, stroking his head with his free hand.

‘I want my man,’ he whimpered. ‘My red man.’

‘We need some light. Hold them both while I get the torches.’

Olivia and the boys crouched together on the raft of one of the beds. From beyond the window there was the noise of confused shouting. She hugged her children against her with their breathing interlacing in shocked gasps. They were alive and not hurt. Nothing else mattered, whatever might have happened downstairs, even if everything they owned was ruined. Gratitude hammered in her chest as she heard Xan running back to them. Torchlight sliced across the room and over their gaping faces.

‘Here. Put these around you.’

Dry blankets were bundled around the shivering children. Xan had a fistful of candles and he put these on the windowsill and struck a match. In the wavering soft light they stared at the room. Water had been driven up the stairwell and slopped through the door, then drained away in the wake of the racing wave. It had pulled the rug with it, and the toys scattered on the floor, and the baskets of clothes and shoes that stood beside the door. These were toppled and the contents lay spread along the landing and down the stairs, black with sea water and mud, and limed with grey scum.

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