The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas
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lanterns had been blown out and the fire spread into a grey mat of ashes. The trestle table had been cleared of the last cups and glasses and the white cloth bundled into a ball. Xan and Christopher had moved quickly. There was no sign of any of the guests. She picked the cloth up in her arms and went inside with it.
The two men were in the kitchen. Xan was scraping and stacking plates, and Christopher was cradling a brandy glass against his thin chest and leaning against the stone side of the old bread oven.
‘Theo’s been sleepwalking again. I found him asleep on the floor in the darkroom.’
Xan came to her and took the ball of tablecloth out of her arms. He threw it into the corner and put his arms on her shoulders.
‘Is he all right?’
‘I put him back into his bed. He seems all right, he never woke up, but I’m worried about him. Why does he keep doing this?’
It was perhaps the sixth time in three months.
Xan said, ‘Children do it. You worry too much.’
Christopher drained the two fingers of brandy left in his glass and put it down amidst the clutter of dirty crockery on the wooden drainer.
‘I’ll be off. I’ll be up in the morning to wave them off, of course.’
‘Goodnight, Chris. Thanks for your help.’
‘Nothing to it. Pity Yannis didn’t sock him a bit harder.’
When they were alone Xan put his arms round her again. ‘Let’s leave this. Come to bed.’
Olivia rested her forehead against his. They were the same height.
‘Yes.’
They had no curtains anywhere in the house and in their own bedroom they left the shutters open at night. They had to get up early and it was easy to wake up with the light creeping across the room. Olivia lay with her husband’s arms round her and her chin in the hollow of his shoulder. It was the best moment of the day, this, when they exchanged their last thoughts, the words becoming disconnected as they drifted towards sleep.
‘It must be worse than being dead,’ Xan breathed.
‘What?’
‘To live in a marriage like that. Those people, the Darbys. They look at each other as if they wish they were.’
‘You can’t tell. You can only guess what other people are like inside their marriages. You only know your own.’
‘You can tell,’ he insisted, stubborn as his mother.
‘It doesn’t matter. Why are we talking about the bloody Darbys? This is all that matters. I’m worried about Theo.’
‘Don’t be. He only walks in his sleep, like children do. I don’t know why you worry so much.’
Olivia tilted in his arms, looking into the room’s blackness and at the faintly paler suggestion of the window.
‘Maybe because I’m happy. Because I am afraid to lose it.’
However hard she tried to banish it there seemed to be a whisper of threat here in the room with them, a whisper that was nothing to do with the problem of Meroula or the worry about money or guests or the business.
Xan laughed. It was a sound deep in his chest and she felt the vibration as he pulled her closer. He didn’t share her fears.
‘You were once so brave. My lone traveller, afraid of nothing in the world.’
He often teased her about this, that she had come to Halemni to be a wife and mother after having seen everything there was to see and done everything else there was to do.
‘It isn’t fear, exactly. I don’t want anything to change and yet the boys change all the time, and I suppose anxiety comes out of that.’
‘You can’t stop change,’ he murmured. Xan was sleepy, but he still ran his hand over the curve of her ribs, into the hollow of her waist and up the swell of her hips. Olivia breathed out and lay back. It was late and they had to be up very early, but it made no difference when he wanted her, as he did now. It hadn’t changed since the first time he saw her and wanted her, in Bangkok by the monsoon-swollen river. She was a thin, crop-haired, pale giantess then, all dangling legs and arms, among the tiny smooth Thais.
‘Don’t worry, I love you,’ he muttered as his hand slid between her thighs.
Christopher Cruickshank had walked down to the beach. He sat on the shingle now, smoking a last cigarette with his back to the lapping water. The beach beds had all been taken into storage for the winter.
Only one or two lights showed in the tiers of houses. Left to itself, Megalo Chorio went to bed early. The tip of his cigarette glowed as Christopher gazed upwards. Immediately above the Georgiadises’ house was the dark hump of the little hill where he had taken the guests for their last morning’s painting. Beyond and behind that was a paler glimmer against the black sky. This was the limestone cliff, crowned by a ruined castle of the Knights of St John, that dominated Halemni bay and the beach and the harbour. And perched in the saddle of hillside that rose up to the bluff were outlines too square to be natural rock forms. Although they were all but invisible in the darkness, Christopher knew the shapes and the scenery so well that his mind’s eye supplied the image as clearly as if it had been bathed in sunshine. These were the ruined houses of Arhea Chorio, the old village. It had been abandoned a generation ago, when families moved down to the coast away from the hill farms to the tavernas and beach stands. Now the roofless houses disintegrated slowly into the heaps of stone from which they had been built.
Christopher liked the old village. When he had a free afternoon he would climb up there to spend an hour reading or sketching among the stones, with only the lizards and an occasional basking snake for company. Very few of the summer tourists ever bothered to make the hot scramble up there and for weeks at a time he was the only visitor. Now, as he smoked, he kept his eyes fixed on the ruins, or the view of them that his inner eye supplied. He felt an uneasiness at his back, coming off the water like a winter fog, and it was more comfortable to look up the hill at the old houses.
When he had finished his cigarette he threw the butt over his shoulder into the sea. He played with the idea of smoking another, but he was cold and the invisible fog breathed around him. He scrambled to his feet instead and crunched up the shingle. He rented a room in the main street and his bed was waiting for him.
It had been a long day, the end of a long season. He would stay on Halemni maybe another week, or two weeks, and then he would head north again for the winter.
I am in Turkey, sitting on the sea coast and staring westwards.
I have almost forgotten why I am here, if there ever was a particular reason for coming. It doesn’t matter anyway. One place is much like another for the time being.
This is a skeleton of a hotel, pasted over with white concrete skin so that it looks smooth but brittle. There are big blind windows and flimsy balconies like pouches under a drunkard’s eyes.
I sleep as much as I can, in my hotel bedroom, behind closed curtains. And when I can no longer sleep I sit on the balcony under the shade of a parasol. Even though it is late in the season I don’t like the sun to touch my skin and my pale eyes water in so much harsh white light. I keep my sunglasses in place and try to read, and the time slowly passes.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when Dunollie Mansions stopped feeling like a refuge and became instead a place that I wanted to get away from. It was probably not very long after the dinner when Peter met Lisa Kirk for the first time.
He was busy in the weeks immediately after that night, working on a job that demanded longer hours and even more concentration than usual. He stayed late at the office, and seemed tired and distracted when he did come home. I should have interpreted