The Potter’s House

‘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.