The Potter’s House

‘Of course he does,’ Meroula said triumphantly.

Olivia was preparing squid for Xan’s evening meal, slicing off the heads and pulling out the entrails and the ink sac, and then dropping the torsos into a dish of oil and tomato juice. Squid stuffed with rice and onions was one of Xan’s favourite dinners. The boys had already eaten their sausages and beans.

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

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

‘That’s good,’ Olivia said.

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

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

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

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

‘Pappy’s coming.’

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

‘Pappy!’

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

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

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

‘Don’t you forget it.’

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

‘Left or right?’ Xan demanded.

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

Theo amended his choice at once. ‘Right!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s my job. I sell my photographs.’

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

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

‘Yes, a quick one.’

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

Xan said, ‘Home.’

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

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

‘Greece.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Give him that last spoonful.’

Xan pushed over his plate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘There it is.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas came and went. January brought the first of the wild flowers in sheltered places. Olivia discovered clumps of tiny white wild cyclamen and blue anemones, and found the furry rosettes of mandrakes with their central boss of flowers like flattened eggs in a bird’s nest. She climbed between the wire-netting bushes and clumps of wild sage, up the steep goat path to the abandoned old village, and made herself at home in it. The stepping stones of the narrow streets were broken and tilted, with the spear-shaped leaves of arum and wild hyacinth pushing up between them.

The last few families had left in the Sixties, driven out by the lack of water and the hardness of life, retreating down to the coast to join the rest of their dwindling community. This was before the great money tide of tourism washed over the islands. The young men no longer wanted a back-breaking existence spent farming their family’s hillside terraces with donkeys and their bare hands, and the young women refused to marry into such a life. The little stone houses were roofless, door and window holes gaping, home to the goats and a few snakes and lizards.

Olivia wandered through the ruins with her camera.

Each house had its own atmosphere. In some the bare earth smelled sour and the loose stones rattled underfoot. In others the bread oven beside the ruined hearth still felt almost warm and she could imagine the smell of baking on the air. The twisted trunk of an old rose bush leaned at an angle against one door, blue paint daubs marked family ownership on another. But the Halemni families would never come back to Arhea Chorio. The only inhabitants were ghosts. Sometimes Olivia could feel people, walking up the street to the ruined church to answer the silent bell.

‘I can’t live with your mother any longer,’ Olivia said to Xan when spring had properly arrived and the hillsides were a picture of flowers.

‘You don’t have to.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Vangelis is going to sell us his house. Bit by bit, as we raise the money. It’s more expensive than buying it outright, but beggars can’t be choosers. Let’s go and look at it.’

They walked up to the potter’s house. It was dirty and barely weatherproof, and full of the twisted remains of aborted pots, but Olivia and Xan knew immediately that they could make a home in it. They moved into one room, with plastic sheeting nailed across the window frame and fruit boxes for furniture. But the days were long and hot now, and they were happy to work all the hours that came.

‘You can’t live in that house together. You are not married. Do you know what people will think?’

Xan still laughed. ‘I am not worried what one hundred and fifty people think on one small island. What if we were doing something wicked that the whole world might disapprove of? Which would make you more ashamed?’

‘You should not make your mother ashamed at all.’

Xan laid the heavy flagstones in the kitchen, with the help of his friends Stefanos and Yannis. It was back-breaking work. At the end of one day he sat on the terrace with Olivia under a velvet midnight sky.

‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘I will take that as a yes.’

They were married in September, a Greek Orthodox ceremony in the church across the square from their house. Olivia spent the week beforehand staying in the house of Stefanos’s married sister, and every night of that week Xan and his bachelor friends came and brought her presents, and took away the women’s offerings of cakes and wine before embarking on a night of drinking.

‘It’s the Halemniot custom, always before a wedding,’ Xan protested blearily in the mornings.

‘What am I supposed to do meanwhile?’

‘Work on your wedding clothes. Prepare the bed linen. You are marrying a Greek man.’

‘God help me.’

‘God has got nothing to do with it,’ Xan said. He pulled her into the windowless storage room off Stefanos’s sister’s kitchen and rapidly made love to her against a sack of bread flour.

Olivia’s parents and brother and three of her old friends from university came out for the wedding. Polly and Celia sat on the beach in holiday bikinis and Jack rubbed sun cream between their shoulder blades, and flipped through their magazines while they went swimming.

‘I can’t believe how lucky you are, coming to live in this heavenly place.’ Polly sighed.

‘And with Xan,’ Jack added enviously.

Celia was the married one, with small children whom she had left behind with her husband. She worried about them, and telephoned mornings and evenings from the public phone at the harbour.

‘Won’t you miss home?’ she asked.

‘Darling,’ Jack protested. ‘Olivia has hardly been home in ten years. Why should she start missing it now?’

‘Well, you know what I mean. This is coming to live somewhere for good, starting a family. Putting down proper roots.’

‘I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be, root and branch,’ Olivia said.

‘I’ll drink to that.’ Polly smiled. They all raised their glasses to her in an affectionate toast.

Max liked Halemni as soon as he came ashore from the ferry. On her last day of being a single woman, Olivia took him for a walk up the hill behind the potter’s house. She loved showing him the best view of the sea and the clear view of the Turkish coast from the rock ridge. They sat down on a stone outcrop with the sun hot on their shoulders and Olivia leaned comfortably back against her brother’s knees. After working on Vangelis’s house all through the long Greek summer Olivia was almost as brown as Xan.

‘I’m so glad you came,’ she told Max as he pulled at the ends of her salt-dried and sun-bleached mop of hair.

‘You think I’d miss this? Look at this hair. Jack will despair of you,’ he teased. ‘I thought brides were supposed to spend days beforehand getting crimped and painted.’

‘It’s not like that on Halemni. Who would care?’

‘I’m glad you’re going to be married,’ Max said. ‘It will suit you.’

‘I never thought I would be. It seemed so unlikely, ending up doing the same as Mum.’

Max laughed derisively. ‘The same? I don’t think so. And you aren’t just marrying Xan, are you, and settling down to a mortgage and a routine? You are marrying this beautiful place and a life as unlike Mum’s as it could possibly be.’

Olivia nodded. Her head felt as if it couldn’t contain so much happiness.

‘Exactly. I knew you would understand about the island. The others don’t, not really. We always understood each other, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, we did.’

They had been a company of two, all through their childhood and teens. When she left university and set out with her rucksack and a camera it was Max whom Olivia felt guilty about leaving behind, not their parents. It wasn’t many years before Max left England too, in her wake. He had recently come to rest in Sydney.

Now that the two of them were adults they sometimes talked about the uncomfortable marriage that their parents had endured. Its quality was monotony cut with menace, Olivia diagnosed, once she was old enough. Every table mat and duster and saucepan lid had its proper place in her mother’s domestic order, there was a rigid programme of what was cleaned when and what was to be eaten on which day. Nothing was ever allowed to vary, but Maddie seemed always to be tensely waiting. When she was young Olivia never wanted to come too close to what the element of menace consisted of, although it shifted around the arguments that she and Max overheard when they were lying in bed, and her father’s absences.

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

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

‘Be happy,’ Max ordered.

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

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

‘Giving each other facials, I think.’

‘Of course.’

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

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

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

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