The Potter’s House

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.

Just as well, she thought afterwards. Meroula had no time for sentiment. She was as sentimental as a mousetrap.

The newlyweds gave a party on their terrace, under the newly planted vine. Everyone on the island who could get away from their summer work came, and the tavernas and restaurants operated for the night with a skeleton staff. Celia and Polly and Jack danced with the goat men, and her father got drunk and made a long speech interspersed with the classical Greek he remembered from school, to the bafflement of the entire company.

Xan and Olivia went to bed that night in their room still furnished with fruit boxes.

‘Will your mother be happy now?’ she asked.

She felt him smiling against her hair, his breath warming her scalp. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Why?’

‘There must be sons.’

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’