The Potter’s House

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

Inglis man.

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

‘Thank you.’

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

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

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

‘May I come in?’

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

‘What are you doing with my husband?’

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

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

‘What does this mean?’

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

‘That we are in love with each other.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cary …’

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

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

‘It’s too late for that.’

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

What to do now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inglis man, again.

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

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

‘I’m sorry. Thank you, that’s kind.’

‘Are you all right?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.

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

‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’

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

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

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

‘I can’t sail.’

‘You are sailing.’

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

‘Do you live here?’ I ask.

‘Some of the time.’

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

‘That’s where we are going.’

‘It looks beautiful.’

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

‘Welcome to my bay.’

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

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

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

‘My favourite place,’ he says lightly.

‘I can see why.’

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

‘Lunch.’

We sit under the boat’s awning.

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

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

‘This is wonderful.’

‘Good.’

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

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

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

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

‘Have you eaten enough?’

I nod.

‘Come ashore.’

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

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

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

‘You could do that.’

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

His hand uncurls and he touches my mouth.

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

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

‘I could sleep,’ I murmur.

Andreas yawns. ‘And me, too.’

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

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

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

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

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

Andreas is busy with the rope that has anchored us to the buoy. He hauls in the dripping length of it.

‘I’ll take you home.’

‘Home,’ I think and the notion was nothing to do with the white-skinned hotel. It’s somewhere else, somewhere I can’t yet locate. The sky has grown steadily darker and a few raindrops pock the water, but I hardly notice. Outside the confines of the bay there is just enough wind to stiffen the sail. We sit quietly and the coastline slides backwards until the beach hotels come into view.

We reach the jetty and he brings the boat alongside, passing a double length of rope through an iron ring to make us fast.

‘Thank you,’ I say uncertainly. The questions I dismissed earlier sound again. Who? Why?

Andreas says, ‘We will see each other again, but it won’t be another day like today.’

Why? Again, but I don’t ask the question aloud. I already know that there will be no answer, not now, no answer that would qualify as such. Maybe he is about to go away. Maybe there are other considerations that I don’t yet understand.

‘I had a very happy day, today.’

Already in my mind it is set aside, marked out with a memory. With the rhythm of Andreas’s company I have stopped thinking about Peter. There has been a whole chain of hours during which I have been completely happy and unmarked.

On the jetty, looking out at the brown hummocks of the Greek islands and the backdrop of pewter sky, Andreas briefly puts his arms round me and holds me close.

‘So did I,’ he says.

Then he kisses my forehead and lets me go.

I stand watching the boat slip away, but he has put his straw hat on and there is no glimpse of his face.

I am in my hotel room again. A handful of days separate me from the hours I spent with Andreas, but the effect of our strange encounter has stayed with me. I have been content with my own company, not needing to block myself out with reading or barbiturate-heavy sleep. My memories of Peter and our life together have been tender and untainted by bitterness. I am awake and anticipatory, and there is no weight on my back. I have walked on the beach and through the streets of Branc, looking at the people who live here and making up stories for myself about their lives. People have looked at me in return, nodding and smiling – casual greetings, just the way that ordinary people acknowledge each other. And I have not minded or shied away from the scrutiny. I feel that I have the freedom of myself.

Maybe this is normal, maybe this is the happiness of normality.

Maybe I have never known it since before my eighth birthday.

I can’t sleep.

The clock at my bedside tells me that it is a little after one a.m. The close, thundery weather has lasted for three days now, since I went sailing with Andreas. A storm would clear the air, but it never comes, and the nights are long and airless. I find that I don’t mind the absence of sleep, now, whereas only last week I would have obliterated myself with sleeping pills.

I slide out of bed and put on a pair of loose trousers, a thin shirt. I step noiselessly out of my room and walk down the hotel corridor, past the numbered and nameless doors, across the deserted lobby where the night porter is dozing in a chair behind the reception desk. Outside in the garden there is the faintest breath of wind and I pursue it down the steps on to the beach. The sand grates cool and pleasant under my bare feet. The sea is black, the sky starless. I walk for a couple of minutes, to the water’s edge and a step beyond, soaking my feet and ankles and the hems of my trouser legs. Then I pace along to the jetty where Andreas moored the boat. I walk to the end and sit down. I hook my fingers in the iron ring and dangle my legs over the edge.

There is stillness and silence except for the restless water.

I look back at the darkened town. There are few holidaymakers left, the bars and clubs are mostly closed for the season. It is as if everyone in the world is asleep.

I sit and wait.

Four

‘It’s too hot,’ Theo complained.

His grandmother held him on her lap and stroked his hair, murmuring a stream of Greek baby talk. It wasn’t particularly hot now that it was dark, but the thundery air was oppressive. Olivia moved between the sink and the table, stepping around the chair where Meroula sat. She knew that her mother-in-law was watching her over the child’s head and she tried to shake off both the awareness and the irritation that went with it. She didn’t want Meroula sitting here in her kitchen. The older woman judged the way that Olivia ran her household and cared for her children, and always found the methods deficient, pursing her mouth so the creases ran out from it like slanting chisel marks. Olivia had no choice in the matter, however. Meroula took it as a Greek mother’s right to place herself at the centre of her son’s household and Xan tacitly concurred.

‘When I was a little girl, Granny used to put Max and me to bed every night at seven o’clock,’ Olivia said, although no one was listening.

They shared a room, when they were very small, just as Georgi and Theo did now. Olivia would lie under the blankets and make up stories about runaway princesses and jungles and lost treasure. The stories had more exotic ingredients than narrative drive, she remembered. She had been very good at making up the cast list but rarely got beyond it into any action. Even so, Max would lie with his thumb in his mouth, watching her with enthralled eyes as she rambled on. She would get carried away with descriptions of the princess’s golden hair and long pink dresses, and when she finally looked again to see how riveted he was, he would have fallen into sleep as suddenly as if he had dropped down a well. In the morning he would apparently still be lying in the same position, thumb in his mouth. Time to get up, Olivia would tell him, and he would open his eyes immediately, ready to scramble up and do what she told him in their games.

She could remember exactly how the house felt on those early evenings and mornings. It was quiet, as if nothing would ever change there, and yet there was an underlying sense that with just a single flick everything could alter frighteningly for ever.

‘I’m too hot,’ Theo repeated.

‘He has a fever,’ Meroula said to her.

‘Let him get down and go and lie down in his own bed.’

‘On his own, the poor child?’

Meroula wore a wide grey skirt with folds that allowed her to sit with her legs planted apart. She had thick lisle stockings, the colour of dried clay, and a dark cardigan with lapels and military buttons that stretched across her chest. She didn’t always wear the same clothes, but she gave the impression that this was her unvarying uniform.

‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Georgi said from the other side of the table, without looking up from his drawing. ‘I want to see Pappy when he comes in.’