The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas
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round me, which made me conscious of how brittle I felt.
I wasn’t ageing well, I thought. Now that I no longer had it, I wanted my weird beauty back again. I wasn’t a model, I had failed to become an actress – which had been my subsequent intention. Another strange choice for a woman who doesn’t like to be looked at. Much uneventful time had elapsed and I didn’t know what I was any longer. Except that I was Peter Stafford’s wife and a resident of Dunollie Mansions, for now.
‘Catherine, what’s wrong?’
He doesn’t often call me by my full name.
‘Nothing. Did you enjoy the evening?’
He shifted a little on his hip, considering, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my face.
‘Yes. I think it went quite well. Clive was in good form.’
Tenderness towards him spread beneath my breast-bone like heartburn. Peter always considered his judgements, and tried to be fair and objective. How had we lived together for so long and been so different, in our chalk and cheese way?
Lying in the dark I found myself thinking of the night we met and fell in love, standing under the ribs of a spiral staircase while a procession of models went up and down past our heads. Lisa Kirk told me about watching her Baz falling in love at a party in just the same way and I was sure I had witnessed the same flash of lightning tonight, between Lisa and my husband, even though I didn’t think they had exchanged a word in private or even an unwitnessed glance. The three scenes made a bright little triptych in my mind’s eye.
I moved an inch closer to Peter and kissed his closed mouth. At the same time I lifted and crooked my upper knee. One of those signals that long-time couples read so well. He put his hand over my ribcage and splayed the fingers over the bones, as if he was fingering piano keys.
‘I love you,’ I told him, which was the truth.
‘And I you,’ he answered politely. ‘And I worry about you.’
I didn’t press him to explain the dimensions of his anxiety. ‘What did you think of Lisa Kirk?’
‘I liked her.’
‘I thought you would.’
I exhaled and his fingers moved again.
We made love, a little awkwardly, as if there were a sheet between us.
After that, it was only a matter of time.
Every day of each season on the island of Halemni had its own perfection, but to Olivia Georgiadis autumn was the best time of all.
The heat of summer was contained in the brazen midday, while the chill mornings and evenings gave a taste of the coming winter. There was a smell of woodsmoke and burning pitch as the fishermen overhauled the boats, and the houses and tavernas around the harbour wall lost their wide-eyed summer expressions as shutters were nailed in place. The last of the holidaymakers were carried away on ferries and hydrofoils towards Rhodes, or distant Athens, and their flights to Munich or Stockholm or Gatwick. There was a collective sense of relief at the season’s end as the little community prepared to turn inwards.
Olivia was thinking about autumn and other things, as she made her way down the hill to her house. Her two boys were running ahead of her, their brown legs twinkling in the sunshine as they leapt the rocks. Olivia walked more slowly, with empty baskets in both hands. She had been to take cake and flasks of coffee to her guests who were at their easels in the shelter of a band of stunted trees near the top of the hill.
‘There’s Pappy!’
Georgi, the older child, balanced on a cone of rock and pointed. His brother Theo immediately ran up and pushed him sideways. Georgi toppled off and Theo leapt on to the rock pinnacle in his place.
‘I am the leader,’ he crowed.
‘Mummy, Mum, did you see what Theo did?’
The two of them spoke a mixture of Greek and English that Olivia and Xan always enjoyed. Xan’s Greek mother was less admiring.
‘They sound nothing like little Greek boys. They sound like nothing on earth,’ Meroula Georgiadis complained.
‘Take it in turns,’ Olivia told them automatically.
She dismissed the thought of her mother-in-law and watched her husband walking back along the harbour wall instead. He was looking over the turquoise water, past the moored caiques and the smoking tar barrel, but she could see the way the wind blew his hair into a crest, just as it did with Georgi’s. Her heart’s rhythm altered for a second or two as it always did when she caught sight of Xan after a separation, even if it had only lasted for an hour.
‘Come on, Theo,’ Georgi yelled, opting to ignore the rock dispute. He ran away downhill and his brother scrambled after him. Theo was only five, the younger by two and a half years, but he was impulsive and imaginative where Georgi was calm and cautious. Olivia began to run after them, with the empty raffia bags flapping against her legs. The low mounds of wild sage and spiny burnet alternated with outcrops of bare limestone and she skipped from one safe footing to the next, unconsciously copying her sons.
The old houses in Megalo Chorio, the principal settlement on the island, were whitewashed cubes with door and window frames painted bright blue or green. They lined the harbour wall and the sides of the one street that led away from the sea. On the village outskirts, a few metres back from the sickle curve of the beach, was a row of new concrete boxes, half of them unfinished with thickets of rusty metal sprouting from the flat roofs. These were the apartments and studios rented by the tourists in summer, those who didn’t stay with the Georgiadises or in private houses or one of the two tavernas with rooms in the main street. The new buildings were an eyesore but Olivia had taught herself not to look at them. The tourists brought money to Halemni, they needed somewhere to sleep, so it was necessary to have such places.
The Georgiadis house stood at the back of the village, forming the short side of a rough cobbled square dominated by a huge fig tree. Across the square Taverna Irini faced a tiny church with a rounded blue dome. The fourth side was open and gave a wide view of the bay and water skittishly silvered by the sunlight. The house had originally belonged to the island’s potter, but the local craftsman had lost the competition against cheap imported plates and dishes, and had retired to the west side of the island. Xan and Olivia had bought the house and its outbuildings ten years before, when they decided to make their lives here where Xan had been born. Before that Olivia had travelled so far and for so long that she believed to settle in one place, with Xan, would be as close to heaven as she could ever come.
And in many ways the belief had been justified. She would have argued with anyone that every idyll must have a flaw, in order for it to be recognisably an idyll. Xan came along the street just as Olivia and the boys reached the front door. He was a big man, black-haired and black-eyed. He put his hands against the oak of the door lintel and made an arch of his body. The boys ran underneath, shouting with noisy competition.
The house was washed pale-blue, like a reflection of the early morning sky. It had two storeys with shuttered windows and small iron balconies at the upper ones. The rooms were small and not very convenient, but the outbuildings were ideal. Xan had converted them into a row of modest studios, and it was these that housed Olivia’s summer guests. They were English, like Olivia herself, mostly middle-aged or retired, and they came to Halemni to paint.
Olivia and Xan made a living out of the painting holidays, just, which put them in about the same financial position as everyone else on Halemni. And they had the winters to themselves, when the wind worried at the shutters and salt spray caked the harbour stones.
Olivia stooped and tried to pass the same way as the boys, but Xan caught her by the hips.
‘Hello, yia sou.’
They kissed briefly, smiling into each other’s mouths.