P.S. Olive You

LIZZIE ALLEN

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015

Copyright © Lizzie Allen 2015

Lizzie Allen 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, down-loaded, 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 © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008163600

Version: 2015–09–11

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-

-Chapter Twenty-One-

-Chapter Twenty-Two-

-Chapter Twenty-Three-

-Chapter Twenty-Four-

-Chapter Twenty-Five-

-Epilogue-

About the Author

About the Publisher

-Chapter One-

On the Christmas before the credit crunch exploded in our faces, my mother-in-law bought me a spectacular vanity case. A leather studded Versace with enough capacity for ten litres of age-defying products.

The following Easter she bought me a course of Botox. Clearly the ten litres had not been enough.

Bridgette was the sort of person who gaveth with the one hand and tooketh away with the other. Still desperately clinging to the notion I might conceive after four failed IVF attempts, she somehow conflated looking-younger with fertile eggs.

Behind my back she worked on Andrew to leave me for a younger woman and have a second go at gene proliferation. Who could blame her? I was only thirty-two but my ovaries were at least two hundred. Andrew was ten years older than me and needed to get a move on, or else he’d be mistaken for a grandfather on sports days.

How ironic that he’d selected a younger model to settle down with after screwing just about everyone his age in Greater London and the Counties, only to discover the younger model was a dud. It irked Bridgette beyond belief. I knew this because whenever I came into the kitchen and interrupted them over the Aga they’d both go silent.

Andrew leaving me was something I secretly feared myself although I never dared raise it. We didn’t share our insecurities.

Politics.

Economics.

The couple next door.

They were all up for grabs, but never our anxieties, our hopes and fears for the future. Especially not my ovaries. That would have been ‘dreadfully middle class’. Instead I tried to compensate by being the most pleasing wife in Chelsea. As long as other men desired me, Andrew would want me too. Vast quantities of money were dedicated to this end. I cooked haute cuisine, kept an immaculate house and dressed in a style that said effortlessly-classy-yet-sexy.

Glossy well-cut hair.

Plumped breasts.

Flawless skin.

On the night we left for Greece I packed enough sun cream to smear around the stratosphere three times and block out solar radiation for a year. I had no intention of returning from our little Hellenic adventure looking like a sultana.

Of all the places to buy a second property, a deserted goat-infested island in the Cyclades was not one I would have earmarked. What was wrong with Brittany where the weather was as shit as England and you had less chance of dying from skin cancer?

But after nine years of marriage, the penny was finally starting to drop that choice didn’t come in to it with Andrew. You simply got swept along on the tsunami of his enthusiasm, and woke up a few months later feeling resentful and irrelevant. His was the footprint in life we followed. He carried me on his back so that I needn’t get my feet dirty and leave any footprints at all.

The Greek adventure was partly prompted by the social circle we moved in. Andrew’s ex-Marlborough crowd were a well-heeled mob, the descendants of lords and ladies and cotton barons. Andrew was the son of an accountant. My dad owned a hardware store. That was before a multinational chain muscled its way into town and bankrupted him. That was before he developed depression, then cancer, then died and left me and my mum to fend for ourselves.

Our Chelsea crowd lived the high life. Yachts, summers in Saint Tropez, winters in Cloisters. The mandatory second home in Majorca, Ibiza, the Dordogne, with six bedrooms furnished by Jasper Conran. Andrew had been lamenting the second-home-shaped-hole in our lives for some time, but the playgrounds of the jet set were simply beyond our reach.

That’s when he came upon the epiphany of an island house in the Cyclades. The Marlborough set might do sumptuous, extravagant, opulent – but we could do interesting, quirky, surprising. Greece was going bankrupt and Andrew said a fire sale was imminent. In the spring of 2011 you could already buy a four-bedroom house with a sea view for half a million euros in Naxos.

Unfortunately we didn’t have half a million euros so we had to look further afield. Two stomach-churning ferry journeys later he came upon Iraklia, a tiny island with a permanent population of a hundred and fifty that swelled to a few thousand during the summer. He’d been there on a business trip and came back waxing lyrical about the balmy evenings, the delicious honey and the fragrant herb-covered hills. After he found it described in the Lonely Planet Guide as ‘a sleeping Aegean gem’, our fate was sealed.

Three months later I was stuck in Iraklia in temperatures of thirty degrees with my face falling off. The only fragrance I could smell was goat.

It’s the metalloproteinases that ruin the collagen in your skin. Under normal conditions they’re there to assist and repair, but excessive sun can make them spiral out of control. The UV also creates free radicals, which break the collagen down and leave it unable to regenerate itself. None of our Chelsea set went into the sun anymore after Nicole Kidman made it fashionable to go around looking like Nosferatu. The irony of this wasn’t lost on me. We responded to our fear of aging (thus death) by going around looking like cadavers. I added luminosity to my corpselike appearance by applying a thick layer of Piz Buin factor fifty each morning on Iraklia and swaddling myself in scarves and shawls. Locals frequently mistook me for the mummified body of Agios Ioannis and ran off screaming as I approached. Not flattering I know, but rather a mummy than a prune.

Iraklia was an unusual little place. A couple of dusty mountains poking out the Aegean with only two villages and three small beaches.

One cash machine.

One doctor.

One extortionate supermarket.

That was soon to change though because what most people didn’t know was that Iraklia was on its way to becoming a major tourist destination. This privileged information came from the hallowed corridors of Brussels itself. As EU Commissioner for European Development, Andrew was responsible for doling out the pot of money set aside for promoting economic growth in underperforming areas of the union. Iraklia was a pet project of his and he knew exactly how much had been allocated for infrastructure schemes. As we drove around the island he proudly pointed out the manifestations of this benevolence – a school, a desalination turbine, a new road - as if he personally was the munificent St Nicholas that had given over his own savings to bestow such generosity upon the island.

More irksome were the stock phrases he reserved for dignitaries like Ajax Galitsis, his local fixer.

‘Education is self-perpetuating’ was for when we passed a half-built school on the way to Panagia.

‘Water’s the source of all life’ was reserved for sun-downer cruises past the desalination turbine.

His favourite place to stop for an oration was in front of the oversized EU sign at the top of the new beach road that had been blasted through the mountains to Merihas bay.

‘Tourists want beaches,’ he’d proselytise, staring proudly up at the circle of yellow stars that had come to represent a force for good in his eyes.

‘And tourists bring money.’

At that, Ajax and his wife, Theodora, would both nod their large heads enthusiastically at the prospect of so much money.

It wasn’t so much that he was unethically bankrolling an economic boom on Iraklia – there were thousands of projects like this all over the EU – but more that he was not above feathering his own nest by vicariously benefiting from the growth. Iraklia was on its way up in the world and Andrew intended being part of its gold gilt future.

That meant ingratiating ourselves with the right kind of social scene on the island. Theodora and Ajax were all very well, but unfortunately one couldn’t spend every Saturday drinking raki on Ajax’s fishing boat.

In his characteristically relentless pursuit of new friends, Andrew soon managed to unearth a wealthy Athenian family called the Gerardos, whose vast holiday home sprawled arrogantly across about a quarter of the island. After our first dinner with them Andrew cheerfully listed their excellent qualities as he undressed that evening and even announced Dimitri was a ‘regular bloke’. Regular was a term he used often to describe people he liked. It meant steady and predictable. No worrying eccentricities or outspoken ideas. A fish that swam with the rest of the shoal. This was just as well, since the Aegean had virtually been fished dry and Dimitri’s frozen foods company was probably responsible for it.

Within days Andrew knew everything there was to know about the Gerardos, although they knew very little about us. Despite being loquacious, Andrew seldom gave out personal information. He was a conversational cuckoo who nested in the minutiae of other people’s private lives while offering nothing of his own. This he prided himself in. The fact that he could extract the most delicate of confessions from people at dinner parties and leave a full six hours later untarnished by the shabby business of reciprocal self-disclosure.

Dimitri’s wife, Christina, was beautiful and vacuous. She shopped and entertained for a living. A disturbing Greek version of myself. Andrew expected me to sit with these people night after night talking about nothing. All the while the boredom and fear of desiccating into shrivelled Mediterranean olive ate away at my subconscious, smudging out what was left of me, particle by particle, causing my brain to collapse into itself like a space-time wormhole through which I slid and emerged in a parallel universe. A universe where it was no longer necessary to think or even exist, just to drift along in Andrew’s slipstream. A ribbon of fragrance that trailed in the air behind him.

Andrew would vehemently have denied such an accusation if I’d ever found the courage to raise it with him, because Andrew prided himself on being a card-carrying feminist. He’d read all the literature and felt it was important to think progressively whilst behaving like a medieval laird at home.

At the end of July, he abandoned me in Iraklia to house-hunt. He had an important series of meetings in Brussels to attend and since it was ‘all agreed’ we were definitely buying, it was left to me to find a suitable abode. His instructions were clear:

West-facing.

Sea view.

Close enough to the Chora to be able to walk in for dinner.

Not so close as to be disturbed by late-night revellers.

Three to four bedrooms.

Two bathrooms.

So, not much to ask for.

After he’d gone, the Meltemi blew in from the north-east and battered the island remorselessly for seven days. My skin withered and shrivelled under its relentless onslaught. I started applying a layer of petroleum jelly as a barrier to lock in whatever moisture remained in my shrunken face. Now I looked like a shiny, white, cadaverous mummy.

Every night I’d scan the mirror for signs of damage. The line between my eyebrows that I’d botoxed before I left (another small triumph for Bridgette) was starting to re-emerge.

Ghastly stuff Botox. My friend Rene assured me it was just a gentle plumping of the skin with a product found in nature, but I Googled it and found out it was a concoction of vile toxins harvested from the Clostridium Botulinum bacteria, in other words Botulism - an illness so dangerous that each case is considered a public health emergency. By that stage my face was becoming a public health emergency, so I decided to go ahead with it anyway. Even though I was totally revolted and morally opposed, by then the line on my forehead was starting to resemble the Bristol Channel, so I had no choice. As I lay on the dentist’s chair – yes, unbelievably Dr Katz my dentist administered the shots – I could picture the poisons seeping towards my neuromuscular junctions and immobilising the acetylcholine chemical messengers. (As usual I had done way too much research). But hey-ho, if botulism was strong enough to paralyse a man, then it was good enough to paralyse my face.

The effects were remarkable, but sadly only lasted a few months. Rene suggested collagen implants, but I went right off that idea after I found out on Google that the Chinese were exporting human collagen extracted from dead convicts. Definitely a step too far.

That was then. After three weeks of Iraklia’s harsh sun I was ready to personally kill the convicts and extract their collagen with my own bare hands.

-Chapter Two -

Heavy make-up can make a woman look much older. Especially round the eyes, it’s important to taper eyeliner toward the edges. I read on a beauty web forum, that nothing is more aging than a thick bovine line of colour on the bottom lid.

With Andrew still in Brussels, I faced interminable evenings on my own, so I’d taken to going to a local restaurant for a drink in the evening – and the extra care with my make-up was because someone there had caught my interest.

Kikis was a lively restaurant in the Chora where the locals hung out. I chanced upon it by mistake one night when I snuck into town to buy some fags. Yes, yes – smoking is just about the most aging plague you could set upon your skin – but something about the island just made me want to smoke. Perhaps it was the small village of bohemian travellers camped out on Livadi beach. Perhaps it was because everyone in Greece seemed to smoke. Who knows, but I was feeling reckless, and smoking was the only thing I could think of to stick it to Andrew for abandoning me. He abhorred the habit. In fact it was Andrew who made me give up shortly after we’d met. Another on his list of ‘minor adjustments’ that I spinelessly went along with.

Kikis was rocking when I pulled up outside in my dune buggy. Apparently I’d been living in a different time zone. The Greeks ran a split-shift: up early for fresh bread and chores, back home for lunch and a siesta, out again at night. Two days for the price of one. I’d been sleeping till ten and leaving the house at midday. No wonder the island seemed empty.

That first night as I walked up the stairs to Kikis I felt this overwhelming sense of relief to see so many smiling people. Even the vulgar assault of colour felt welcoming. Blue chairs, yellow table clothes and red candles. Purple bougainvillea draped from the ceiling and green vines hung from the balustrades. There was even a parrot with violently clashing feathers parked plumb in the middle of the room. He shuffled around kicking bits of straw and shit onto the floor with gay abandon and no one seemed to mind. The waiters picked up the shit on their shoes and walked it through the restaurant, stepping over dogs on route. Cats stalked along the railings and forked food off people’s plates when they weren’t looking. It was a health and safety shockfest – but also the first signs of life I’d seen in a while, so I was not going to be put off by a few rabid animals and a bit of parrot poo.

I wandered in unnoticed and came to a standstill in front of a tableau of fresh fish displayed on a bed of ice. In the centre was a large pissed-off-looking Sea Bass with a cigarette hanging from its lips.

‘Ha ha,’ a cheerful voice said behind me. ‘You like my smoking fish?’

I turned round to see a vaguely familiar face. It was Mr Potatohead from my Goddaughter’s Toy Story DVD.

‘Kalispera!’ he said jovially. ‘Welcome to my restaurant!’

He stuck out a massive paw and enveloped my hand in his.

‘You looking like my most beautiful of actress’.

‘Really? Who’s that?’

‘Goldie Horrrn of course!’

He turned and shouted loudly towards the kitchen. ‘Sofia, Sofia!’

A tired woman with dimpled cheeks came out smiling and wiping her hands on a dishtowel.

‘Look, look! Goldie Horrrn, no?’

She laughed warmly and nodded her head. ‘Neh, neh.’

Of course the idea was absurd. I looked nothing like Goldie Hawn, apart from my blonde hair, which was inherited from Scandinavian grandparents. I did have blue eyes though, and apple cheeks which I hated.

The two of them prattled on in Greek for a bit with the word’s ‘Goldie’ and ‘Horrrn’ surfacing every so often as they nodded and smiled and looked me up and down.

‘My husband, he like American movie stars.’

She pointed to the parrot. ‘Barbara Streisand.’

The bird shouted ‘yaso’ and bobbed up and down as if it understood and they both laughed heartily.

‘But our Barbara Streisand is a boy!’

‘Ha ha,’ laughed her husband merrily.

I asked if they sold cigarettes.

‘Of course, of course but you must have a drink first. On the house! ’

Mr Potatohead led me to a bar where a small bow-legged man was spooning out dishes of olives with a smouldering fag hanging from his mouth, not dissimilar to the fish. So much for the EU ban on smoking in the workplace.

‘Christos, give my friend a drink,’ boomed Mr Potatohead, pulling forward a barstool and thumping a bowl of olives down in front of me before retreating back into the restaurant. Christos gave me a cheeky smile and revealed two missing front teeth.

‘My name Christos’ he said offering a plump hairy hand.

‘Hello Christos’ I said responding to his hearty shake by nearly falling off my stool. ‘I’m Faith’.

‘Fat?’

‘Erm…no. Faith’.

‘You no fat!’

‘Oh…no…erm. Thank you. I know I’m not fat. At least, ha ha, I hope I’m not. You can call me by my nickname, Fay.’

‘Nick name?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Your name Nick?’

‘No no. Fay! Oh never mind.

We both knew we’d exhausted that line of conversation and I looked round nervously while he continued to grin at me like a maniac.

‘First time in Iraklia?’ he asked, carefully measuring a double shot of raki into a glass and adding iced water. I smiled and nodded as the clear liquid clouded milky-white.

‘You like?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘But too hot.’

He nodded cheerfully and concurred. ‘Eeez wery wery hot!’

‘And windy,’ I added.

‘No so wendy,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes.’

He loaded up a pile of empty boxes and disappeared down some stone steps into a cellar. I looked around self-consciously and sipped at the raki. It slid down my throat and left a pleasant liquorish taste on my tongue.

Halfway through my second one I started to relax and enjoy my surroundings a bit more. Kikis was at the top of a cobbled road overlooking the steep cliffs of the harbour and the rest of the Chora. In truth it was no more than a wooden terrace with a tiny kitchen attached to one end, but the vined walls gave it a feeling of permanence, as if the ancient bougainvillea was enough of a structure without the annoying complication of bricks and mortar. At the far end stood the family’s living quarters, cordoned off by a row of pot plants.

Tables were occupied by a variety of clientele. Families spanning four generations, romantic couples, old men playing backgammon. In the distance, the twinkling lights of Schoinoussa blinked halting Morse code across the purple sea.

I wasn’t the only loner at the bar. At the other end, a woman in her late twenties was industriously threading beads onto a leather thong by the light of a candle. Her forehead was creased into a frown of concentration and wisps of blonde hair hung from a turban coiled around her head. She stopped to stretch out her neck and examine her handiwork before carefully laying it alongside several others in a wooden display case. As she took a slug from her beer, her wide eyes caught mine, green and moody. I blushed and smiled but she just continued staring over the rim of her beer with a kind of hostile indifference. I popped an olive into my mouth and pretended I didn’t care but it turned out to be a discarded pip and I nearly cracked a tooth before gagging silently into my raki.

A motorbike pulled up outside and there was a commotion as several people shouted in delight and waved to the new arrivals over the railings. Two men appeared in the doorway and Mr Potatohead hurried over to greet them with warm hugs and hearty backslaps. Even the dogs got up to say hello.

The new arrivals shook various hands as they crossed the restaurant towards the bar, looking for all the world like a couple of local celebrities. Identical gaits and easy smiles meant they were presumably related, like everyone else on the island. My heart caught in my throat as the taller one approached. He was beautiful. Sinewy and high-browed, like one of the javelin throwers on ancient Greek earthenware. He looked at me briefly with deep-set brown eyes before slapping his hand on the bar and ordering a round of drinks from Christos who was practically gurning with happiness. The second man made his way over to Turban Girl and kissed her on the forehead.

‘Yaso,’ he said.

‘Ja,’ she replied, smiling for the first time. ‘Griss dich.’

So she was German.

The din in the restaurant had risen by about ten decibels and, as Javelin Man topped up people’s glasses with raki, it got even louder. Christos was drying glasses next to me. He smiled and nodded towards the two men.

‘Urian and Gregorie. Good boys’.

‘Brothers?’

‘Cousins.’

I tried not to sound too interested. ‘Are they from the island?’

‘Grow up Iraklia,’ he said. ‘But work Athens now’.

To my embarrassment Christos hailed the shorter one over. ‘Gregorie! Come, come!’

Gregorie picked up the bottle of Raki and came to sit next to me.

He was shorter and squarer than Javelin Man. They both looked about my age.

‘Kalimera,’ he said with a friendly smile. ‘Germany?’

‘No,’ I replied, smiling back. ‘English.’

‘Ah. Europe’s Special Member,’ he said, using his fingers as quotation marks to emphasise ‘special’.

I blushed, unsure of what to say.

‘So,’ he said, pouring a raki and pushing it my way. ‘Mrs Thatcher, she was right, no? The single currency was stupido.’

Internally I sighed. Not the frigging credit crunch again. In Andrew’s absence I’d been enjoying some respite from its endless white noise. I looked at the smiling man in front of me. His earnest gaze swept my face looking for signs of where I stood on the issue. Did he want a personal apology for us opting out of the Eurozone?

‘Things bad in Athens at the moment?’ was all I could muster. He shook his head and took a swig of his Raki.

‘People have gone mad. Rioting. Fighting. Burning things.’

‘Why are they rioting?’ I asked.

‘Because Greeks are stupid,’ said a voice behind me.

A warm body reached between us and grasped the bottle with strong brown hands. I made space to my left but Javelin Man slumped into a barstool on the other side of Gregorie.

‘The Greek people, we choosed a bunch of monkeys for a government and now we are angry they no do magic tricks.’

‘My cousin Urian he thinks the world is now come to the end,’ said Gregorie laughing.

Urian muttered something in Greek and downed his drink. ‘Maybe not the world but Greece, of course yes.’

This conversation was not going the way I’d planned.

‘And now we are in the shit up to here,’ he said, raising an elegant hand to his forehead to demonstrate just how deep in the shit he thought they were. ‘Our country is on sale. Foreigners, they come to buy us. The Dutch, the Germans.’

He turned the full beam of his brown eyes directly on to me.

‘The English, they will all come here to buy us,’ he said bitterly. He picked up his helmet and got up to go.

Gregorie sighed theatrically. ‘Another day screwed by politics. On the ferry people throw themselves overboard when Urian start talking.’

He finished his drink and turned to follow his cousin, waving his goodbyes on his way out.

Mr Potatohead came to clear away their glasses.

‘Don’t worry about Urian,’ he said kindly. ‘He’s just pissed they must be to sell his farm. His family there for two hundred years.’

‘Two hundred years,’ I repeated to myself.

‘He will get over it.’

As I heard the angry roar of his bike flaring into the distance I doubted that very much.

-Chapter Three-

After that I felt less inclined to house-hunt. I hung around the villa, took myself on long walks and read my book. On day four, our agent, Theodora, turned up on my doorstep frothing at the mouth. She was an annoying little woman. A five-foot troll with a screeching voice that escalated to a glass-shattering pitch if you tried to talk over her. She wanted to know why I’d not been returning her calls. I lied about being busy, but it was obvious the little enthusiasm I’d previously mustered had evaporated entirely. Our excruciating house-hunting expeditions thus far had amounted to no more than driving round the island in her Opel Corsa and stopping here and there to extort information from locals. She wasn’t even a proper estate agent, but since Ajax was a local politician, it apparently entitled her to stick her fat fingers in every pie.

Part of the problem was the lack of sale stock. The island’s permanent population lived in houses so poor and run-down no one wanted to buy them, and the smattering of plusher holiday homes rarely came on the market. Andrew was convinced that would change as the country slid deeper into recession but the longer I was on the island the less I believed him. The people had an almost familial bond with the place. Generations of families descended there for their annual holidays to homes owned by grandparents and great-grandparents before them. You got the feeling they’d rather starve than give up Iraklia. Me circling like a buzzard waiting to pick at their bones wasn’t going to change that.

Theodora felt differently. The scent of money had morphed her into a truffling pig, digging deeper and deeper into the undergrowth until she excitedly announced she had unearthed a whopper.

I knew before she even told me – Urian’s farm.

Unbeknownst to her I’d stalked it on Google Maps several times already. It wasn’t difficult to find. A few ‘naïve’ comments to Christos about ‘that side of the island’, and within minutes I had him drawing up a full-sized map on a napkin and gleefully marking out Urian’s place with a cross. His eyes twinkled as he did it, so it’s quite possible my ‘naïve’ comments weren’t as disguised as I thought. Anyway, by the time Theadora came grunting in with her two-paged sales pitch, I’d already scanned the place on satellite, hiked past it along the beach front, and driven up the gate on the pretence of being lost.

The property was a picturesque smallholding that straddled two hills and rolled away towards a rocky coastline. The name, presumably charming in Greek, translated clumsily to ‘Goat’s Neck’ in English, which, according to Theodora, was on account of the way the property occupied its own small peninsula and was dotted with goats.

When Theodora heard from Urian’s aunt that the family’s dry-cleaning business on the mainland was struggling she’d called Urian in Athens and persuaded him to sell. As far as she was concerned she’d brokered the deal of the century, so my sudden retreat drove her into a frenzy of indignation and she persisted with her assault like a fly smashing into glass.

The entire thing left me feeling sick and confused. Clearly his family were in dire straights financially, but this was their history for God’s sake! Urian’s legacy. I’d seen the pain in his eyes the first time I’d met him.

‘Our Country is on Sale’ he said.‘ Foreigners will come to buy us.’

How could I do that? Be the foreigner that capitalised on his loss. The vulture that tore the meat from his bones. I wanted to be toasting the sunset on Goat’s Neck beach with him, not driving him from the place he loved.

To avoid her I tried to keep on the move. I started going to Kikis for breakfast, mostly in the hope of seeing Urian, but also because I became quite fond of Mr Potatohead whose name I’d since learned was Evangelos.

His wife Sofia was equally charming. She ran the kitchen while Evangelos did front of house, a job ideally suited to him. Wherever he went he was followed by a menagerie of people and animals wanting his attention – the keys to the cellar, a titbit of bacon, a pat on the head. One of his errant offspring was invariably hanging off his leg as he gracefully wove his way between tables with plates held aloft in his massive hands. Even Barbara Streisand plumped up his feathers and called out loudly as he passed. Evangelos made a habit of stopping every so often, no matter how busy the restaurant, and scratching the colourful bird behind the ear. His party trick was to dance comically in front of it which would make Barbara Streisand jump up and down in excitement and shout ‘Yaso, yaso’ loudly.

If I turned up before ten I was usually in time to see Urian and Gregorie arrive for breakfast. My heart would speed up as soon as I heard the distant buzz of their motorbike coming over the hill. Ridiculous I know, but it felt enlivening having an adolescent crush after all these years. It made me want to feel beautiful again with that same blushing awkwardness that gave teenaged passion its pulse-quickening edge. The more Andrew annoyed me with his pompous calls from Brussels (barked instructions and orations about his own glorious conquests), the more I justified my titillating daydreams to myself. I’d played the dutiful housewife for fifteen years. Hell, I was owed a few harmless fantasies.

Not that Urian even looked my way. He’d stalk in, grab a paper, order a coffee and commandeer his usual table on the veranda without so much as a surly nod. Clearly he wasn’t a morning person. Although he didn’t seem like much of a night person either, given how moody he’d been the first night we’d met. That set me off thinking about the times of day that would suit Urian…

Carnal carousal at dawn?

Febrile fondles at dusk?

Comforting cuddles at lunch?

I needed to get a grip.

Gregorie was the opposite. Warm, convivial, approachable. There was clearly something going on between him and Turban Girl as they often arrived together and shared things like forks and plates of food. She could speak fluent Greek (of course!) and I’d turn green with envy as she huddled conspiratorially over the newspaper or round the radio.

Only Gregorie was kind enough to give me the time of day. He usually wandered over after breakfast and asked what I’d been up to, whether I’d taken in the caves at Agios Ioannis or climbed Papas, the island’s highest mountain. I usually felt embarrassed that I’d done so little with my time.

Moisturising.

Exfoliating.

Detoxing.

Toning.

That’s what filled my days.

Halfway through my stuttered excuses I’d feel Urian turn his scornful gaze on me. Once, I was brave enough to return his stare but I had to break away first. He just continued staring over his paper with his bottomless brown eyes as if seeing me exactly for who I was. No one.

After that I often felt his hot stare penetrating my forehead from across the restaurant as I self-consciously scooped my yoghurt and honey into my mouth, trying not to smudge my lipstick. His expression was unreadable, but I figured it was one of disdain. I was the vanguard of league of greedy foreigners come over from Europe to gobble up his heritage like low-hanging fruit off a vine. What was he thinking? Did he know I was the devil Theodora was in league with? Or did he just disdain me for being a stupid, botoxed foreigner? The more he condemned me with his Heathcliffian scorn, the more I responded with a Brontean yearning to feel his thighs against mine.

Back home in the villa I Facebook-stalked him – but of course he was way too cool to be on Facebook. In desperation, I ended up Googling his name like the sad loner I was. I found it on a page of popular Greek names for boys.

Get this, Urian means ‘from Heaven’.

Naturally.

Theodora worked herself into a flat spin of bewilderment over my refusal to engage. I had the money, she had the property - why would I not dance? She soon worked out my new schedule and started turning up earlier in the mornings, prompting me to take up jogging to Livadi before breakfast. If I left early enough I could catch the cinematic splendour of dawn breaking across turquoise sea. I’d circle the castle ruins and then double back to the concrete bunker restaurant where I’d do my stretches on the shuttered deck.

Livadi was so peaceful at dawn. The bedraggled city of colourful hippy tents flapped contentedly in the breeze and goat bells chimed softly in the surrounding hills.

One morning I saw Turban Girl crawling out from one of the tents. She was instantly recognisable from the trademark coil of tangerine fabric wrapped around her head despite the fact that she was wearing only a skimpy brown bikini.

I studied her through the small window between my thighs as I counted my sit-ups. Her breasts were large and pendulous while by some strange miracle her arms remained thin and her stomach flat.

Bitch.

She probably did no exercise at all.

As if reading my thoughts she stretched and yawned, arching out the vertebrae of her spine like an oversexed cat. In her hand she appeared to be holding something – a leather pouch. She sauntered over to a rock near the water’s edge, perched on top and began digging around in the pouch until she produced a roll of tobacco and a packet of Rizlas. Of course, I thought to myself sourly, Turban Girl was far too cool to smoke pedestrian cigarettes like the rest of us plebeians. It went without saying she’d roll her own.

The luminous surf framed her bent head as she painstakingly rolled her smoke with the same care she’d taken over her leather bracelets. Then she lit up and smoked with ritualistic solemnity, savouring the morning light in meditative silence. She looked beautiful sitting there. Like a rebellious mermaid that had crawled from the lapping waves to escape Neptune and his lecherous demands.

When she was done smoking, she ground the fag out on a rock and stood up, turning in my direction. I ducked involuntarily but she didn’t see me spying on her from the deck like a weirdo. Instead of going back to her tent, she picked her way through the thorny undergrowth to the dune behind, kicking at the sand as if she was looking for something. Intrigued, I sat up and squinted to get a better look. To my horror she yanked down her bikini bottoms and squatted down to pee in broad daylight.

Unbelievable.

Simultaneously disgusted and fascinated, I froze, mesmerised by the stream of yellow urine that shot out from between her legs into the sand. Suddenly she looked up, directly into my eyes, and lasered me with a penetrating glare as if she knew I’d been there all along. Flustered, I launched back into my sit-ups with the commitment of an Olympic athlete.

You’d think she would have dived for cover or something but she just carried on squatting there, staring straight at me and peeing into the sand like a horse. When she was done she waggled her bum in the air for a few seconds before pulling up her pants and nonchalantly strolling back to her tent.

By then I’d done so many crunches my stomach was killing me and I collapsed back onto the deck in agony. Something about the girl infuriated me. The way she met my gaze as if I was the one committing the transgression through my voyeuristic curiosity, not her by peeing in a public place. Annoyed by her louche confidence and my own spinelessness, I pounded up the hill at double the speed, my anger building with each step.

Jogging’s not great for the skin. The repetitive up and down motion tears at the collagen and makes it sag like a rubber band that’s been stretched once too often. Each time my trainers struck the tarmac I pictured the hundreds of small rents opening up in my subcutaneous layer. But whereas in the past I had avoided activities that diminished my looks, for once it actually felt liberating embracing the destruction that the act of living entails.

Fuck the shackles of perpetual youth, I ranted as I pounded my way home

Fuck the fear of aging, I fumed as I opened my stride.

Fuck Chelsea perfection.

Fuck wrinkles.

Fuck Andrew.

I was way too vain for self-harming so this was as close as it was going to get! A wave of relief washed over me as let it all out. A lifetime of frustration and neurosis. Of never looking good enough and never being perfect enough to be loved.

By the time I got home I was a foaming, wobbling, salivating wreck but my anger had drained away. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for some time.

Eyebrows plucked, arched high.

Skin dermabrased, acid peeled.

Top lip waxed.

Eyes vacant.

Behind me my clothes sat in a tidy pile waiting to adorn me.

Gossard Plunge Bra for extra lift.

DKNY control briefs for smooth thighs.

Silk blouse with slimming vertical stripes.

Cigarette capris for elongated legs.

My gaze transferred back to my face. It seemed suddenly greyer and pallid in comparison with Turban Girl’s glowing tan. As if all the life had drained from it and I was looking at my own dead corpse.

That day I left the house without sun cream. Pasty face held high (foundation-free!), I marched defiantly toward Livadi in my bikini top (no sun hat even!), my marbled shoulders as naked as the day I was born.

I would no longer kowtow to the fear tactics of the cosmetic industry!

I would no longer simper and snivel at the altar of beauty!

I would no longer numb myself with restraint.

From that day forward I, Faith Cotton, would worship at the bacchanalian feet of ‘The Gods of Excess’! When I got to Livadi I pulled off my bikini top and tanned half naked on a rock, hoping Turban Girl would appear to marvel at my breathless insouciance. Heck, I could be as defiant as the next turbaned beach bum. If I had been camping and needed the loo, I would have peed right there on the beach.

Behind a bush.

Well, maybe, behind some rocks.

Luckily I did not need the loo all that day.

By five pm the Bacchanalian Sun God of Excess had burned me to a crisp. Theodora nearly screamed when she came knocking.

‘What you done?’ she said. ‘You look haggard.’

That night I dreamed my face was falling off, sliding down the sheets like melting wax, but over the next two days the colour settled and I started to go an attractive shade of brown.

A day later my nose peeled white again. I dug my sun cream out of the bin (where I’d chucked it that morning in defiance) and decided a ‘once-daily’ application would still count as a form of rebellion. After all, being a feminist was one thing. Dying of cancer was another. Whilst rummaging round in the bin I retrieved my foundation, mascara and lippy (gosh I really had gone overboard that morning!). Perhaps I’d been a bit over zealous in my outright rejection of the cosmetics industry. Even feminists had the right to look pretty.

On Friday Andrew flew back from Brussels. I picked him up from the midday ferry looking hot and irritable in his crumpled suit.

‘What the hell happened to your face?’ was the first thing he said as he threw his bag into the back of the buggy.

All charm was Andrew. He lived by the maxim ‘I say what I think’, and said what he thought far too often. Somewhere along his life’s journey he had actually come to believe that the recipients of his unfettered opinion-giving should be grateful for these unsolicited pearls of wisdom on account of the fact they were his honestly held views and therefore tantamount to universally held truth.

‘I got a bit of sun.’

‘A bit of sun. You look like you’ve been freeze-dried.’

I decided not to dignify his comment with a reply but made a mental note to re-moisturise when I got home. Knowing full well Andrew liked to drive, I made a point of firing up the engine and revving it with feminist indignation. He frowned but got in the passenger seat and plugged in his seatbelt before leaning over to plug in mine. While I may have embraced the Gods of Excess, Andrew was still worshipping the Gods of Health & Safety.

‘Really Fay,’ he persisted above the din. ‘God knows what damage you’ve inflicted to your skin and how that could age you in years to come. All it takes is a bit of sun cream’.

My mum always said Andrew took an unhealthy interest in my appearance. The first weekend I stayed at his place, I was applying my make-up in the bedroom mirror when he walked past and snapped the lights off. ‘Natural light for make-up please,’ he said without irony.

I still married him. My dad had died the year before and it seemed too much effort to say no.

I studied him now out of the corner of my eye as we chugged up the hill towards the villa. He was not a particularly good-looking man although he was aging well. His forehead was a little too high, his eyes a bit too pale, his jaw too pronounced.

For someone that craved perfection, the realisation when he hit puberty that he would never be more than a mediocre-looking adult must have come as a blow. He’d overcompensated in the gym ever since.

Right now his pronounced jaw was working overtime, grinding and flaring at the point where the mandible meets the zygomatic bone. This was his stress indicant. Clearly his meetings in Brussels hadn’t gone well. I listened absently to his remonstrations about the airline, the ferry, the queues – a preamble to the herculean disburdenment of his real grievances which he’d hold back to ruin dinner with.

Ironically it was his loquaciousness that attracted me to him in the first place. The first time I saw him he was holding court in the Foreign Office canteen surrounded by a gaggle of wide-eyed disciples lapping up every word of his diatribe on UK interference in the Middle-East. Of course, he didn’t refer to it as interference – as far as Andrew was concerned the British Empire was the greatest thing God visited upon the face of the earth and any country fortunate enough to attract UK interest in their affairs, their minerals, their cash crops, should be thanking their lucky stars. Once his oration was over he detached himself from his fan club and zoned in on me. What Andrew lacked in looks he made up for in gumption and self-confidence. As he slid into the chair opposite mine, I clocked the jealous glares of the other women and blushed with pride. I was after all only a junior advisor in the Migrations Directorate whereas Andrew had the grand title of ‘Deputy Permanent Director to the EU’. He insisted on taking me out for dinner and my fate was sealed from that moment on as he regaled me with clever stories of capricious foreign dignitaries and ambitious commonwealth aspirants. His Cambridge accent seemed so erudite, his turn of phrase so eloquent.

Nowadays I just wished he’d shut up.

When we got back to the villa he showered, went for a half-hour run, showered again and announced he was hungry. This was my cue to disappear into the kitchen and produce some culinary victual from the warmer.

Bridgette encouraged Andrew to believe that women loved men through food. The more effort put into a meal – the finer the filo pastry, the smoother the hollandaise sauce – the more a wife valued her husband. This he reminded me of at every meal with a crumb-by-crumb critique of his gastronomic experience.

Fortunately, our meal was interrupted halfway through by his mobile.

Unfortunately, the call was from Theodora.

He listened quietly while chewing on his sea bass en croute with grinding concentration.

‘I see,’ he said, pausing to take a swig of wine. ‘And where is it?’

He eyes settled on me with a look of annoyance.

‘I understand. I’ll get her to see it on Monday.’

Theodora would have prattled on for a quarter of an hour longer but Andrew didn’t suffer gasbags lightly.

‘Got to run. Thanks for your assistance Theodora.’

He hung up and poured another glass of wine thoughtfully.

‘Fay, I hope you are taking this house-hunting thing seriously.’

‘Of course I am,’ I replied, pushing my lettuce around the plate.

‘Theodora tells me she’s found a perfect property but you’ve refused to view it.’

‘I drove past it. Just to have a look. You can see it quite easily from the gate.’

‘Did you go in?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It seemed a bit far from the Chora.’

He studied my face whilst cleaning out the inside of his cheeks with the tip of his tongue. I could feel myself blushing as I tried to lie my way out of the corner I was painting myself into, but how could I explain the truth to him? What was the truth anyway? That I didn’t want to pull the carpet out from under the man I’d become obsessed with? Oh my God, I was actually obsessed with him, wasn’t I?

Ridiculous! I thought to myself.

I hardly knew the man.

Barely spoken to him!

I got up and noisily started clearing away the plates.

Some bloody feminist you are! I mentally screamed.

Can’t seem to exist five minutes alone in the universe without switching allegiance to some other penis-wielding vassal.

At the mention of the word penis my subconscious skipped to thoughts of Urian naked.

I wonder if he’s well hung.

Bet he is!

I picked up my rolling pin and began caressing its long shaft with a suddy sponge. Seconds later I dunked it beneath the water with a loud splosh as if to silence my thoughts.

Stop this! It’s just pure lust.

The rolling pin emerged from the water covered in more suds than before. Suddenly, another thought occurred to me.

Isn’t that what we accuse men of doing all day long. Lusting after women?

Hang about! Perhaps that does make me a feminist after all.

I squirted more washing-up liquid onto the rolling pin with alacrity and began lathering it up again.

Hell yeah! I’m lusting after a man like an oversexed…sex…machine.

I am empowered enough to make men the object of my lust.

Well, Urian anyway.

I jumped as Andrew suddenly sharpened into focus through the suds of the rolling pin. He’d come over to the sink and was staring at me as if I was a science experiment. Blushing crimson, I made a pretence of taking out the garbage mid-washing up, leaving a trail of water and suds across the floor. Andrew dumped the rest of the dishes into the sink with crash

‘Well I think you should see it’, he snapped. ‘Sounds perfect. Two hectares with its own borehole.’

I hastily returned to the sink, skidding across the floor in alarm.

‘You can’t drink the borehole water,’ I replied desperately.

‘Is it hooked up to the mains?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Really! What have you been doing all week?’

‘The same thing I do back home in Chelsea,’ I muttered to myself as I started drying the dishes. ‘Sweet bugger all.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Andrew chipperly.

‘Nothing,’ I replied with a sigh. ‘I’ll ring Theodora tomorrow.’

-Chapter Four-

Theodora’s man-sized hands clutched onto the steering wheel with military purpose. They were attached to short stubby arms that disappeared into the armholes of a shockingly yellow sundress. Flabby puckerings of flesh gathered at the armpits and her batwings wobbled alarmingly over every hump.

As we thundered along the dirt track towards Urian’s farm at maximum speed, an undeniable sense of smugness filled the air. Theodora had worked out the pecking order in my marriage:

Andrew – Head Honcho

Fay – Minion.

Her toadying days, such as they were, were over.

A plastic strawberry bobbed from her rear-view mirror, seeping sickly sweet vapours of rotting watermelon into the airless car.

‘That’s a nice smell,’ I said insincerely, flicking at it with my forefinger.

‘Smells exact of strawberry, isn’t it?’ she said pleased.

‘Yes,’ I lied, wiping my fingers down the side of the chair.

A herd of goats appeared further down the track. Theodora slammed on the brakes and hooted at the young boy minding them. He didn’t look too fussed. The more Theodora cursed and bellowed, the slower he went. The deadly strawberry vapours ebbed and flowed through the afternoon heat as we waited for the bedlam to subside.

‘You haf nice name,’ she said, trying to be charming.

‘Thanks.’

‘What this mean, Fay?’

‘Actually it’s not Fay. That’s just what everyone calls me. It’s Faith.’

‘Ah, Fayeth. Eeez like – to haf belief, no?’

‘Yes,’ said I, who believed in nothing. ‘My father chose it.’

‘Verrry verrry good man your father. He live London?’

‘No, actually he died a few years ago’.

She made a ‘tch, tch’ sound with her tongue. Silence filled the car again.

‘Have you lived on Iraklia long?’ I probed, wondering how well she knew Urian’s family.

‘Since I retire.’

‘You seem too young to be retired’ I lied.

She was pleased with the pseudo compliment. ‘I hav fifhafty two years,’ she said proudly.

Her sausage fingers gesticulated with large rings glinting in the sun.

‘In Greece government say OK, you retire fifhafty if you haf dangeros job.’

I looked at her with interest.

‘Really? What did you do for a living?’

‘Hairdresser.’

‘Hairdresser?’

‘Neh. I was making hairs thirhaty years.’

‘And that was dangerous?’

‘Of course!’ she replied seriously. ‘Fumes verrry bad’. She shook her head gravely from side to side and dropped her double chin to her chest to emphasise the severity of her situation. ‘Chemicals verrry dangeros.’

‘And the government gives you a full pension from fifty?’

This made her click her tongue in annoyance.

‘No full.’

She pointed indignantly into the air with her chubby forefinger.

‘Ninety per-ha-cent only.’

I digested this news in silence. Andrew would not be pleased to hear his angel Theodora was one of the scroungers he admonished for bleeding the state dry with phony disability claims while working on the QT as an estate agent.

I couldn’t wait to tell him.

Ahead the young lad started pushing the goats with his bare hands off the road. As soon as he pushed one, another would return.

‘Do you have any other family on the island?’ I asked, changing the subject.

‘Sister,’ she said, hooting pointlessly. ‘She also retired.’

I couldn’t help myself. ‘She have a dangerous job too?’

‘Yes. Baker.’

I nearly guffawed out loud.

‘What’s dangerous about baking?’

‘She breevist in that flour,’ she said, getting out the car. ‘Verrryy dangeros.’

I watched her trundle over to the terrified boy like Shrek and begin haranguing him and the goats off the road. She was the least disabled person I had ever seen. Her flour-inhaling sister was probably equally as robust and running some other scam across the island.

Five minutes later we were back on the move. We skidded into Urian’s place as if we were competing in a dirt road derby and screeched to a halt at the front door. Fortunately there were no other cars and no sign of Urian’s motorbike.

As the dust settled I could already see the house occupied a spectacular position in relation to the rest of the island. It looked out towards Schoinoussa in the east and Paros in the west. The sun hovered over the horizon, suspended in the sky like a giant lantern ready to splash the world with colour before it dipped below the water.

The house itself was a single-storey dwelling consisting of no more than a series of interlinking white boxes, each with its own wooden veranda attached. Below, the land rolled away in gentle undulations to a small beach, and to the rear of the house the strong masculine shape of Papas Mountain could be seen rising in the distance.

But it was the inside of the place that transfixed me. I was used to the bland sameishness of English interiors that replicated each other within a degree of colour.

Artwork: elegant, non-descript.

Furniture: ditto.

Light Fittings: John Lewis.

Bathrooms: Fired Earth.

Kitchen: Smallbone of Devizes.

Such was the manner in which we regulated our army of clones. We made a huge pretence of shunning catalogues and designing our own ‘colour stories’ – but each time Farrow & Ball added a new tone to its range, a veritable stampede ensued in the race to become fully homogenised.

The same applied to clothing. I was once frogmarched out of a coffee shop in Putney because I was wearing last year’s boot-cut trousers. My friends were so anxious not to be seen with me looking yesterday that that they took it upon themselves to dragoon me into purchasing trousers from the boutique next door that were more of-the-moment. Despite my agitation I went along with it like the spineless amoeba I was.

Urian’s house could not have been more different from the flavourless middle-class world I had become accustomed to. It was filled with amazing artefacts from all over the world, presumably collected on globe-trotting expeditions and adventures.

An ornate camel saddle with rows of plaited tassels.

A bronze cooking pot, precariously balancing on three legs.

The ancient skull of some horned animal.

No house was more revealing of its occupant. Stacks of ragged VHS tapes next to an aging VCR machine showed an eclectic taste in film, Westerns to Woody Allen, Lars Von Trier to Lasse Hallström.

I was surprised to see he had a sense of humour after all. An ebony carved black woman stared out through aviator goggles and a furry football mascot sported pink Asteras Tripoli underpants.

Some of it looked expensive, like the luxurious duck egg silk carpet that ran the length of the sitting room, but the majority of the stuff seemed to have been salvaged from the island. Bits of bleached driftwood, shells and feathers. On the veranda a quaint mobile of glass and copper tubing tinkled in the breeze and a neat row of potted herbs gave off a minty green smell.

There were more delights outside. What looked like a rickety old shed turned out to be a fully equipped potter’s studio complete with wheel and kiln.

Urian a potter. Who would have thought? I could picture us together in this room, his Patrick Swayze to my Demi Moore, our thighs straddling the wheel, our intertwined hands rising and falling gently across the expanding ball of clay. The Righteous Brothers would be playing softly in the background and he’d spin me off my feet, clenching rhythmically at my buttocks and nuzzling gently into my neck.

‘Ah ha, ahem hem.’ Theodora cleared her throat from the doorway.

‘You must really like pottering?’ she asked, suspiciously peering at the sweat beading on my top lip.

I quickly withdrew my hand from the wheel where I’d been caressing its silky surface.

‘Erm, yes, yes, I absolutely adore pottery, in all its forms, and all the…creative arts.’

My voice trailed off as I examined the rows of finished work lining the walls. Bowls, cups, vases. His style was extraordinary. Everything was glazed white, except the edges, which were serrated and ragged. The result was that all the vessels lining the shelves looked like the delicate shards of prehistoric hatched eggs. It was exquisitely worked, paper-thin to the touch.

The studio walls were lined with a collage of photos. Family members and friends smiled out at Urian as he worked.

One girl appeared more frequently than the others. A mischievous brown-eyed imp whose life story from flat-chested tomboy to arcane temptress was played out in a pictorial narrative across the walls, more telling than any verbal account could be. Disturbingly, the girl also featured in a strange little shrine on the windowsill – a statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by red candles. The statue’s open hands fell to her sides in supplication and seemed to point to photos of the girl, aged about eighteen, framed by rosary beads.

It all seemed so intensely personal that I suddenly became aware of how I must look in Theodora’s eyes, snooping through all Urian’s things with voyeuristic fascination, indulging myself in that peculiar freedom to intrude that the act of house-hunting affords potential buyers. I’d looked in his fridge, poked through his bathroom cupboard, smelled his aftershave and even lain on his bed.

The earlier transgressions I committed while Theodora was on the phone, but now that she was in the room watching me I felt like a right grubby old stalker. The only saving grace was that Urian wasn’t home to witness my shameful intrusion into his privacy.

No sooner had I thought this when I heard the distinctive buzz of his motorbike coming over the hill in the distance.

‘Right, thank you Theodora, I think I’ve seen enough,’ I said, hastily pushing past her to the sunshine outside.

‘But you haf see the bitch,’ she said authoritatively.

‘Bitch?’

‘Beeeeeeeeech.’

‘No, that’s quite all right, thanks, although I’m sure it’s lovely.’

I hurried through the glass doors leading into the sitting room where I’d left my bag. The distant buzz had already turned into a throaty roar and soon I could hear the bike idling to a standstill outside.

‘Fuck,’ I muttered as the contents of my bag clattered across the floor.

Seconds later Urian stooped through the front door and stood over me. Without looking up I hurriedly crawled about the floor picking up eyeliner, hair clips and a stray tampon.

‘Yaso’ came his gravelly voice.

‘Yasus,’ I mumbled in return.

Where the hell was Theodora? Alone in his house, I looked like some kind of deranged stalker. Not that crawling around through the dust balls on all fours was helping. It couldn’t get any worse!

A pair of large feet in dusty mules appeared in my peripheral vision. Long and sinewy like the rest of him. Toes not too hairy. How could feet be so sexy? I wrenched my eyes away and made a hopeless pretence of peering under a dresser for a lost lipstick. The feet came closer until I was virtually bowing to them in supplication. This was getting embarrassing. Slowly I rose to full height until we were eye to eye. Well, eye to collarbone really – he was so bloody tall. A breathless sigh escaped my lips.

We were standing about a foot apart. I could smell him. Musky sweat and pheromones with a hint of fabric conditioner. Up close he was even more gorgeous than I realised. His burning charcoal eyes were softer than I thought, more chocolate than volcanic rock. My friend Kate back home would have said they were too close (never trust a man with close eyes), but his full black eyebrows drew them upwards and outwards and gave him a permanently quizzical look, which I found charming.

Straight cheekbones and nose.

Strong jaw.

Rounded velvet lips.

Despite my blushing shame, my eyes caressed his olive skin, unable to pull away. He stared back at me with equal intensity although his emotions were unreadable. Was he angry to find me in his home? Did he know we were even coming?

For once I felt relieved to hear Theodora’s enormous high heels clattering in from the patio door.

‘Urian!’ she shouted in her high-pitched voice, shattering the tension between us.

She prattled away at him in Greek and he replied in monosyllabic grunts, eyeing me derisively every so often. In an effort to broker the deal, she soon reverted to her pidgin English.

‘Urian, this eeez Missus Fay. I tell you on phone. She like buy your house maybe’.

He’s dark eyes fused onto my face, their expression broody and filled with emotion. A kind of hostile longing.

After a while he sighed and said flatly: ‘Lemonade?’

‘Pardon,’ I blushed.

‘It is hot. Do you like drink lemonade?’

‘Yes, yes. Very good,’ replied Theodora, slapping her huge hands together. For good measure she turned to me and added: ‘Made in the home with Greek lemons and honey. Also Greek.’

Urian went to the kitchen and returned with two tall cool glasses of smoky liquid.

‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating towards the sitting room.

We obediently took our drinks and sat down amongst the treasure trove of possessions I’d just nosed my way through. Urian sat in front of us looking strained and uncomfortable, his big brown eyes meeting mine from time to time with an imploring look. Bizarrely he didn’t pour himself a drink. Just sat there watching us drink ours.

Theodora drained her glass first and said: ‘Bravo, bravo. Verrrry verrry good.’

I downed mine, shuddering at the brain freeze that followed, and then hastily added my own stuttered string of compliments lest I seemed rude.

‘Oh yes. Delightful. Citrusy. Um, fresh.’

After that strange little ceremony was over, we were permitted to leave. Urian escorted us to the car and I shook hands clumsily before descending into the strawberry fog of the sauna-like vehicle. Theodora fired off a few sentences in Greek before revving the engine and scudding out across the rutted road with the same bolt-rattling haste we arrived in.

In the rear-view mirror, the tall lonely shape of Urian shrank into the distance.

-Chapter Five-

Being in Urian’s house had a profound effect on me. Up until then my crush on him had been no more than an indulgent teenage fantasy to fill the time, but after I’d entered his personal sanctum, something about the way he treasured things, valued memories and people, made me fall in love with him amongst the polished bric-a-brac and tenderly weeded herb pots.

I thought about our sterile flat back home. The plumped-cushions and tasteful uplighters. The ammonite greys and lime whites. When Andrew and I first married, I used to love colour. Orange and amber, turquoise and sage. But now my life had been bleached into neutrals. Under Andrew’s patronage I was slowly fading away. I’d always worried about how I would survive if Andrew left me, but now, for the first time, I starting worrying that maybe in order to survive, I should be leaving him.

Theodora automatically assumed my fascination with Urian’s property would amount to a sale, but on the contrary it became imperative to me that we did not buy Urian’s home. There was something magical about the place, something almost sacred, and I wasn’t going to let Andrew make us the villains who drove him out of it.

We’d barely spoken a word since that bizarre incident in the kitchen when I’d behaved like a porn-star with the rolling pin. The rest of the weekend had been an exercise in strained politeness and I may have seemed a bit over zealous in my keenness to pack his bag the following Monday for his usual weeklong commute to Brussels. I began preparing myself for a stand-off and went through endless discourses in my mind about what I would say. Fortunately I was spared when Andrew rang to say he was having some crisis in the office and couldn’t come back on the weekend. It was a relief not to have to see his smug face or listen to another sermon about the EU or the subprime crash for a whole eight days. And it would give me time to come up with a reason not to take him to Goat’s Neck. The thought of him picking his way through Urian’s stuff with cold objectivity filled me with resentment. He wouldn’t find Urian’s treasures special – just a collection of old tat. The two men were almost diametrically opposite. Andrew, prim, conventional, starchy. Urian, eccentric, original, fluid.

The following week I spent just about every free moment at Kikis in the hope of catching a glimpse of those dark eyes shrouded in shadow. I wondered if Urian suspected my transformation into a barfly was on account of my crush on him or just as a consequence of me being a budding alcoholic. Evangelos and Sofia certainly seemed pleased to have me round. Their cheerful work-worn faces would break into vast smiles whenever I arrived and they’d ply me with treats – a bowl of nuts or a freshly baked bougatsa.

I liked the table at the far end of the veranda where the dappled bougainvillea framed the little harbour below like a Sisley painting. I could sit for hours watching the busy fishing boats and ferries chugging in and out of the tiny bay at random times, their booming horns prompting a flurry of activity as scooters, cars and vans buzzed down to the quay to collect their cargoes of fruit, meat, tourists.

My favourite scene was the arrival of the water boat, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The rusty old behemoth took up the entire bay and looked comically out of place in the tiny harbour. As it turned to dock sideways, it came within inches of taking out the desalination turbine and you could hear the hysterical shouts of the port officials all the way up at Kikis as they frantically waved fishermen out of the way and tried to catch the carbuncled old ropes thrown over the side.

Iraklia’s one natural spring was not enough to sustain the whole island’s needs, which is why the water boat was so crucial. After a thirsty weekend you could almost feel the island licking its dry lips and looking out to sea. The whole operation took a couple of hours and while the water boat rehydrated the parched pipes and rose to full height above the quay, its crew would descend upon Iraklia. To be fair there were only six of them, but they were a lively bunch and you certainly knew when they were in town because laughter would rise in the taverns. The captain was married to Christos’ cousin and usually popped into Kikis for some gossip. He was a jovial Naxian who treated his ragtag crew like family members, although in truth they were probably all related anyway.

It lifted me to see them all hugging and slapping each other on the back even though it had only been two days since they last met. Lots of things lifted me on Iraklia: bread being delivered on the back of a scooter, fresh herbs soaking in buckets, stripped squid drying in the sun.

I started recognising regulars at Kikis. The little fat man who raided the kitchen twice a week was Albercio, Evangelos’ cousin, who did a bad job running the restaurant at Hotel Villa Zouganelli. Stamatis was the island’s postman, a hoary baobab of a man, with a thick stumpy torso and steel wool hair. There was a long-running private joke surrounding Stamatis - whenever he came in Evangelos would lay an empty place next to him with a bowl of olives and a glass of water in front of it. As various punters arrived they’d wander over to greet Stamatis and then respectfully doff their caps and say a few words to the empty chair which would make everyone laugh jovially, including Stamatis himself. I never quite got the gist of the joke but found myself enjoying everyone’s mirth none the less. It made me smile to see Stamatis’ stocky little shoulders bouncing up and down with laughter.

Turban Girl was a regular feature at the corner of the bar too, her jewellery kit spread out in front of her, her face screwed in concentration as she plaited her delicate strips of leather. She usually chatted to Christos as she worked.

‘Ze Germans want to come here and run your country, Christos.’

‘Germanies? Here?’

‘Zat’s true, ja! Zey want to take over. Like World War Two again.’

He’d shake his head and cackle loudly. ‘Germanies here on Iraklia?’

‘Not Iraklia. Athens’.

At that point Christos would usually tsk loudly with his tongue and disappear into the cellar still laughing.

‘You don’t believe me? Read ze papers!’ Turban Girl would shout after him.

I was envious of the imperial way she commandeered the end of the bar as if it were her own private domain. She’d skulk in at random times, set out her jewellery-making kit and work in quiet concentration for hours. If another punter was sitting on her stool she’d squash in to next to him until he finally gave way and moved somewhere else. Evangelos and Sofia didn’t seem to mind her using their restaurant as a workshop and glowering at their customers. She repaid them with jewellery and gifts for the restaurant – a dreamcatcher above the till, leather and silk bunting across the bar. If I were to engage her attention by admiring her jewellery, she’d just brush me off with monosyllabic grunts. There wasn’t much to say by way of conversation:

Pee on the beach today?

Do you use the restaurant toilets, or do you just pee in the car park?

Every so often, a battered pickup pulled up outside and the dogs would go ballistic. That signalled the arrival of Zosimo, the swarthy shepherd who delivered goat and lamb carcasses to the back door and then came round the front for a complementary raki while the dogs circled and growled.

One day I caught Zosimo and Evangelos looking at me and nodding my way. When he’d gone, Sofia approached me saying he had a property in the Chora that he was trying to sell. I went down there with her that afternoon and was pleased with what I saw. It was a pleasant if run-down little terrace that backed onto the church square. I was immediately taken with its sense of antiquity and the delightful little tiled courtyard to the side, so I began rehearsing my sales pitch for Andrew’s return that Friday.

When I collected him off the ferry he looked even more dishevelled than usual, his pulsating jaw accompanied by nervously overactive fingers that thrummed on the dashboard and picked at his cuffs. I looked at him closely. Dark rings circled his eyes and his skin looked pallid and stretched.

‘Bad week?’

‘Stinker.’

We drove back to the house in silence and I made a show of doing the ironing while he changed into his running kit. He was gone longer than usual this time, at least an hour, and stalked straight passed me and into the shower upon his return. I followed him into the bedroom, picking up his sweaty togs on the way.

‘I wondered if we could eat out tonight?’ I asked through the din of the shower.

‘What?’ he said through the noise.

I went into the kitchen and poured us both a large gin and tonic. When I got back he was still in the bathroom, flossing his teeth with manic intensity.

I handed him the drink and braved my request a second time.

‘I wondered if we could go out to eat tonight?’

The floss snapped out from between two teeth and sent bits of plaque splattering against the mirror. Lovely.

‘I’ve had nothing but restaurant food for a fortnight,’ he said, smearing the plaque across the glass. ‘Could do with some home-cooked food really.’

I swallowed a quarter of my gin and picked out the lemon with my fingers.

‘The truth is I’ve not really had time to shop.’

He stopped and stared at me through the mirror incredulously.

‘At the risk of sounding repetitive, what have you been doing all week?’

‘House-hunting, like you said.’

‘Right,’ he said sarcastically. He turned back to his flossing and spoke between sawing motions. ‘Find anything?’

‘Well yes actually. There’s a lovely little two-bed terrace come up in the Chora.’

‘But we agreed the Chora was too noisy. We were going to find something slightly out of town.’

My hackles were starting to rise. There had been no ‘we’ in our decision to buy out of town, just Andrew’s incessant me, me, me. I bit my tongue and stared out the window while I counted to ten. The man was so bloody intractable, he could be a pig-headed nightmare if his position became entrenched. It was easier to bring him round gently whilst massaging his ego into believing the change of plan was his decision all along.

Back home in Chelsea I had a whole host of techniques I could deploy at any given moment to achieve this end. The most successful was frying him kipper with onions and capers. Eeuw. I couldn’t stand the smell, the texture, the colour. But it was his favourite dish and I was not above using it to curry favour. I’d paint my lips with Estee Lauder Neon Azalea pink, (his ‘preferred ‘colour), flatter him with empty compliments (easily done) and then fry up his blasted kipper whilst mentally wording and rewording the request I hoped he’d cooperate with.

Darling, would you mind awfully if I did such-and-such.

Sweetheart, the neighbours have bought a such-and-such and we could so do with one.

My love, would you mind awfully if we didn’t do such-and-such.

In Greece I’d sooner batter him over the head with a piece of kipper than serve it to him on a bed of capers and onions. I breathed deeply to calm myself down before speaking.

‘This place is so charming, Andrew, it would be a shame not to consider it.’

‘Did you see the place up on the neck?’

I chewed the lemon and took another swig of my gin.

‘Yes, it’s OK. Bit isolated.’

He gave me a long look and went into the bedroom to change.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.