The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas
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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,