The Potter’s House

Brian pushed aside the ice pack and forged to his feet. The bleeding had stopped, but there was a rusty patch on his chin and a crust in the groove beneath his nose.

‘I know what’s right,’ he bellowed. ‘Whose side are you all on?’

Xan and Olivia were shoulder to shoulder, with Christopher under the tamarisk branches a yard away. At the same moment two of the men who had led Yannis away rematerialised at the outer rim of the lantern light. The men looked around. ‘I see. Stick together, you island people, don’t you? Suppose you have to, in a place this size. Marry each other’s sisters. Or your own.’

‘Brian …’

He cut his wife short. ‘I’m going to wash my face, then I’m going to bed.’

After he had gone Christine said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She looked embarrassed and unhappy.

‘It was Yannis’s fault. But he meant no harm, I can promise you.’

She followed her husband, out of sight around the blue wall of the house to the studios.

Xan picked up the brandy bottle. ‘I’m so sorry about all that. Would anyone like another drink?’

But it was clear that the party was over. Olivia glanced up at the shutters of her sons’ room. If either of them had been woken by the raised voices, they might be afraid.

‘I’m just going to see …’ She whispered to Xan.

The room was faintly barred with light that came through the cracks in the shutters. It was scented with skin and damp, sweaty heads. Georgi was sleeping on his back with one arm flung above his head but Theo’s bed was empty.

The bedsheets were rumpled, still slightly warm. She knelt on the splintery floorboards and looked under the bed, but there were only a few clumps of dust and a plastic toy soldier. The one cupboard was empty except for clothes and toys. She whirled round, soundlessly for Georgi’s sake. The window was open but the shutters were securely latched behind it. Outside in the corridor there was darkness and only the light from downstairs throwing a dim glow that just reached the top of the stairs. The door to her bedroom stood ajar; the white bedcover was stretched smooth, the curtain that hung across an alcove to make a wardrobe revealed nothing but clothes when she drew it aside. Theo was not in here either.

Olivia fled to the last door on the upper floor.

The door stood open. This was a little boxroom, with one tiny window looking away from the sea. It had been Olivia’s darkroom, or that was the original idea when she and Xan had first bought the house. But she took very few photographs now: there was too little spare time. It was used mostly as storage space for art supplies. She stepped into the thick darkness and immediately she knew that Theo was here.

Carefully she knelt down and stretched out her hand. Her fingers connected with a warm curve of pyjamaed body. She gave a sharp exhalation of relief and patted him, quickly exploring the small shape. He was fast asleep, curled up on the floor between the door and the wall. He had been sleepwalking again, had found their bed empty and had wandered on in search of his mother and father.

Olivia crouched down, breathing unarticulated snatches of gratitude and relief. She scooped the child into her arms and held him against her, one hand cupping the back of his head. Then she trod back to his bedroom and laid him down under the covers. She sat for a few minutes on the floor beside the bed, listening to his easy sleep and breathing in the smell of him. A yard away Georgi gave a small sigh and turned over. They were fast asleep, both of them. She stood up and hovered for a minute longer. Theo had always been a light sleeper, troubled by nightmares that were the dark side of his vivid imagination. He didn’t yet have the words to express his ideas and the frustration came out as tantrums or clashes with his brother, or in his sleepwalking. She didn’t know why this frightened her so much.

Max and she had been the same, she was thinking, only she had been the volatile one and Max had obediently followed where she led. He climbed the garden walls after her and dug burrows to hide in, and stole penny sweets from the corner shop under her direction. They made their own world of hierarchies and escape routes, clothing them from the dressing-up box and living outside what they didn’t yet understand to be their parents’ compromises.

It was the better way round, the way her own children were. The older, more circumspect one restrained the younger one just enough for safety, but was lit up by his anarchy. Olivia bent down and kissed each of them again, made warm and heavy by the absolute weight of her love for them. A sense that she was too fortunate, that she couldn’t hope for this perfection to continue, scraped at the margin of her mind. She pushed it away from her, out of the room and into the darkness where the sea rubbed over the shingle beach. She closed the door of the bedroom and went downstairs again.

Outside under the tamarisk tree the candle 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.