The Island (28 page)

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Authors: Victoria Hislop

BOOK: The Island
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Manoli was always in his element with a pretty girl, but never more so than with one like this, who added innocence to such sweet beauty. He took in every detail: a slim waist, a neat bosom and muscular arms built up by years of hard physical work. She was at once fragile and strong.
 
At one o’clock they all sat down to eat. With Alexandros, Eleftheria, their two daughters and their respective families, there were at least a dozen. Chatter was noisy and animated.
 
Manoli had decided in advance that he would flirt with Anna’s younger sister. A practised lothario such as he was did so out of habit. What he had not expected was that Maria would be so pretty and so eminently easy to tease. Throughout lunch he dominated her with his playful talk, and although she was unused to such flippancy, she parried his witty remarks. Her unaffected personality made her so different from most of the women he was used to meeting that he eventually found himself toning down his banter and asking her questions about herself. He discovered that she knew about mountain herbs and their healing powers, and they talked earnestly about their place in a world where the boundaries of science were being pushed forward by the day. Maria and Anna were as unalike as a raw pearl and a polished diamond. One had natural lustre and its own unique, irregular shape. The other had been cut and polished to achieve its glittering beauty. Manoli loved both such jewels, and this soft, gentle-eyed girl who was so clearly devoted to her father appealed strongly to him. She was without artifice and had a naïvety that he found unexpectedly alluring.
 
Anna watched as Manoli drew Maria into his magnetic field, telling her stories and making her laugh. She saw her sister melt in his warmth. Before the meal was over, Anna realised what she had done. She had given Manoli away, handed him like a gift-wrapped parcel to her sister, and now she wanted him back.
 
Chapter Thirteen
 
FOR THE NEXT week, Manoli was vexed. This was unusual for him. How could he pursue Maria? She was quite unlike most of the women he had met on his travels. Besides which, the accepted patterns and modes of behaviour between men and women in Plaka were very different from those governing such relationships in the cities where he had lived. Here in rural Crete, every move, every word was subject to scrutiny. He had been perfectly aware of this when he had visited Anna on all those occasions, and though he had always been careful to ensure that certain boundaries were never crossed, he had known that he was playing with fire. In Anna he had seen a bored, isolated woman who had separated herself from the village where she had grown up and achieved her ambition of being in a position where other people were paid to do those tasks which would otherwise have kept her busy and occupied. She had improved her position, but now floated in a friendless social vacuum, one in which Manoli had been happy to entertain her. A woman with eyes that so hungrily sought his and lips that spread themselves into such a generous smile: it would have been rude to ignore her.
 
Maria was quite different. Not only did she lack her sister’s ambition to marry outside the village, she seemed without desire to marry at all. She lived in a small house with her widowed father, apparently content and yet so exceptionally marriageable. Manoli would not have admitted it to himself, but it was largely her lack of interest that attracted him. He had all the time in the world, though, and would be patient, certain that sooner or later she would be won over. Confidence was not lacking in the Vandoulakis male. It rarely occurred to them that they would not get what they wanted. Manoli had much on his side. Perhaps the most important factor was that Fotini had protected Maria from the gossip about Manoli and Anna. The source of the endlessly flowing fountain of stories was Fotini’s brother Antonis. It was more than five years since that kiss which had meant nothing to Anna and far too much to Antonis, but the sense of having been cast aside still rankled. He despised Anna and had watched with malicious satisfaction the comings and goings of her husband’s cousin, which had increased in regularity now that Eleftheria and Alexandros Vandoulakis were spending more time in Neapoli and less in Elounda. Antonis gave reports to Fotini whenever he called in for supper at the waterfront taverna which was now her home.
 
‘He was there for at least two hours one lunchtime last week.’ he gloated.
 
‘I don’t want to hear your stories,’ Fotini said brusquely to Antonis as she poured him a raki. ‘And above all, I don’t want Maria to hear them either.’
 
‘Why not? Her sister is a tart. Don’t you think she knows that already?’ snapped Antonis.
 
‘Of course she doesn’t know that. And nor do you. So what if her husband’s cousin comes to visit her? He’s family, why shouldn’t he?’
 
‘Just the occasional visit would be one thing, but not virtually every day. Even family don’t bother to visit each other that often.’
 
‘Well, whatever you think, Maria mustn’t know - and nor must Giorgis. He has suffered quite enough. Seeing Anna married to a wealthy man was the best thing that could have happened to him - so you’re to keep your mouth shut. I mean it, Antonis.’
 
Fotini did mean it. She slammed the bottle down on the table in front of her brother and glared at him. She was as protective of Giorgis and Maria Petrakis as she would have been of her own flesh and blood, and wanted to keep these vicious and damaging rumours from them. Part of her could not believe them in any case. Why would Anna, whose whole life had turned around the night she met Andreas, risk throwing it all away? The very thought of it was baffling, ridiculous even, and besides, she held out hope that Manoli, the subject of Antonis’s scurrilous rumour-mongering, might one day notice Maria. Since the lunch on the feast of Agios Giorgis, Maria had chatted incessantly about Andreas’s cousin, repeating every detail of their encounter at the Vandoulakis house.
 
Manoli had been seen a few times in the village. With his connection to Giorgis he had found a warm welcome among the men of Plaka and soon became a regular fixture at the bar; he was found there as often as anyone, playing backgammon, passing around strong cigarettes and discussing the politics of the island beneath a thick pall of smoke. Even in this small village on a road that led only to even smaller villages, the pressing issues of world politics were high on the agenda. In spite of their remoteness from them, events on mainland Greece regularly aroused both passion and fury.
 
‘The Communists are to blame!’ exclaimed Lidaki, banging his fist on the top of the bar.
 
‘How can you say that?’ answered another voice. ‘If it wasn’t for the monarchy, the mainland wouldn’t be in half the mess it is,’ and so they went on, sometimes into the small hours. ‘Two Greeks, one argument’, the saying went, and here, on most nights of the week, there were twenty or more villagers and as many arguments as there were olives in a jar.
 
Manoli had a broader world view than others in the bar - many had been no further than Iraklion and most had never got as far as Hania - and he brought a new perspective to argument and conversation. Though he was careful not to brag of the casual conquests that had been a recurring theme of his travels, he entertained them all with stories of Italians, Yugoslavians and their brothers on mainland Greece. His was a light touch and everyone liked him, enjoying the gaiety that he brought to the bar. Whenever there was a pause in the argument Manoli would have an anecdote or two to tell and the assembled company were happy to indulge him. His tales of the old Turkish quarter in Athens, the Spanish Steps in Rome and the bars of Belgrade were mesmerising and while he spoke there was silence, except for the occasional clack of worry beads. He did not need to embroider the facts to entertain. The stories of his brief imprisonment, being adrift on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean, and fighting a duel in the back streets of a Yugoslavian port were all true enough. They were the tales of a man who had travelled without responsibilities and initially without cares. They showed him to be a wild but not uncaring man, but as he spoke, Manoli was conscious that he did not wish to be perceived as an unsuitable match for Giorgis’s daughter and accordingly toned down his stories.
 
Even Antonis, who had ceased to skulk in the corner whenever his boss’s rakish cousin appeared, now greeted him warmly. Music was their common bond, plus the fact that they had both spent a few years away from this province; though decades younger than the grizzled men they drank with, they were in some ways more worldly-wise than their elders would ever be. As a child, Manoli had learned to play the lyre and during his travelling years it had been both a companion and his security, at one point the only thing that stood between him and starvation. Often he had found himself singing and playing for his supper, and his lyre was the only possession of any value that he had not gambled away. This precious instrument now hung on the wall behind the bar, and when the raki was low in the bottle he would remove it from its hook and play, the bow sending the sound of its vibrating strings shuddering through the night air.
 
Likewise, Antonis’s wooden flute, his
thiaboli
, had been his constant companion during his years away from home. Its mellow sounds had filled a hundred different caves and shepherds’ huts, the notes soothing the hearts and souls of his companions and, more prosaically, helping them while away all those hours they had spent watching and waiting. As different as Manoli and Antonis were, music was a neutral space where wealth and hierarchy played no part. The two of them would play in the bar for an hour or so, their haunting melodies casting a spell over their audience and over those whose open windows captured the escaping sounds as they drifted through the stillness.
 
Though everyone was aware of the great wealth that Manoli’s parents had enjoyed and of the fortune that he himself had frittered away, most of the villagers now accepted him as someone just like themselves, who needed to work hard for a living and who, quite naturally, aspired to having a wife and a family. For Manoli, the simplicity of this more settled life had its own rewards. Even without the possibility of seeing Maria, which had been his original motivation in visiting Plaka, he found much in this village to love. The bonds between childhood friends, the loyalty to family and a way of life that had not needed to change for centuries, all had great appeal. If he could secure a woman like Maria, or perhaps even one of the other village beauties, it would complete his sense of belonging. Apart from saints’ day celebrations in the village, however, there were few legitimate occasions for him to meet her.
 
The formalities still observed in villages like Plaka drove him mad. Though he found the enduring traditions part of the attraction, the obscurity of the courting rituals he found nothing less than ridiculous. He knew he could not mention his intentions to Anna, and anyway, he was not visiting her so much now. It was a pattern he knew he needed to break if he wanted to achieve his planned conquest of Maria. Anna had been predictably brittle with him when he last visited.
 
‘Well, thanks for coming to see me,’ she said tartly.
 
‘Look,’ said Manoli, ‘I don’t think I should come at lunchtime any more. People are beginning to mutter about me not pulling my weight.’
 
‘Suit yourself,’ she snapped, her eyes full of angry tears. ‘You’ve obviously finished your little game with me. I assume you’re now playing it with someone else.’
 
With that she marched out of the room, and the door slammed behind her like a thunderclap.
 
Manoli would miss their intimacy and the sparkle in Anna’s eyes, but it was a price he was prepared to pay.
 
Since there was no one at home preparing him meals, Manoli often ate in one of the tavernas in Elounda or in Plaka. Each Friday he went to Fotini’s taverna, which she and Stephanos had now taken over from his parents. One visit in July, he sat there looking out to sea towards Spinalonga. The island, shaped like a large, half-submerged egg, had become so familiar to him that he scarcely gave it a second thought. Like everyone else, he occasionally wondered what it must be like over there, but he did not dwell on such thoughts for long. Spinalonga was simply there, a lump of rock inhabited by lepers.
 
A plate of tiny
picarel
fish sat on the table in front of Manoli, and as he stabbed each one with his fork, his eye was caught by something. In the dusky half-light a little boat was chugging its way from the island, creating a broad triangular wake as it cut through the dense water. Two people were in it, and as the boat came into the harbour, he saw that one of them looked very like Maria.
 
‘Stephanos!’ he called. ‘Is that Maria with Giorgis? You don’t usually see a woman out fishing, do you?’
 
‘They haven’t been fishing,’ replied Stephanos. ‘They’ve been making one of their deliveries to the leper colony.’
 
‘Oh,’ said Manoli, chewing slowly and thoughtfully. ‘I suppose someone has to.’
 
‘Giorgis has been doing it for years. It’s better money than fishing - and more guaranteed,’ said Stephanos, putting a plate of fried potatoes down on Manoli’s table. ‘But he mostly does it for—’

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