The Moonspinners (15 page)

‘Thanks. Oh, are there any at five? I might as well get them now, for airmail to England.'

‘I'll see. Five . . . How nice that one's very first tourist knows all the ropes. I can never remember that sort of thing – I'd make the lousiest information clerk ever. Railway time-tables simply
panic
me, you've no idea.'

‘Then you've come to the right place. D'you mean,' I asked innocently, ‘that you've never written home once, since you came to Greece?'

‘My dear, I couldn't shake the dust of the dear old Vicarage off my feet fast enough. No, I'm sorry, we've no fives, only twos and fours. Are you in a hurry, because I can easily get some for you?'

‘Don't trouble, thanks, I'd like to go out anyway, to explore. Oh look, I'm sorry, I can't even pay you for this one now, I've left my purse upstairs. I'll be down in a minute.'

‘Don't worry about that. We'll put it on the bill. Double for the trouble, and don't mention it.'

‘No, I'll need it anyway, to get the stamps in the village. And I must get my dark specs.'

I left the postcard lying on the desk, and went upstairs to my room. When I got back, I could swear the card had not been moved, not even a millimetre.

I smiled at Tony.

‘I suppose this town does have a post office?'

‘It does indeed, but I won't insult you by directing you, dear. Agios Georgios isn't exactly complicated. Once down the main street and straight into the sea. Have a lovely walk.' And he subsided into
Lady Chatterley's Lover
.

I picked up my postcard and went out into the street.

‘Street,' of course, is a misleading word for the dusty gap between Agios Georgios' straggling houses. Outside the hotel was a wide space of trodden, stony dust where hens scratched, and small, brown, half-naked children played under a pistachio tree. The two cottages nearest the hotel were pretty in their fresh whitewash, each with a vine for shade, and with a low white wall fencing the tiny yard where the vine grew. Sofia's house stood by itself at the other side of the street. This was a little bigger than the others, and meticulously kept. A fig tree – that most shapely of trees – grew near the door, its shadow throwing a vivid pattern against the brilliant white wall. The little garden was crammed with flowers; snapdragons, lilies, carnations, mallows – all the spired and scented profusion of the English summer, growing here, as rank as wild-flowers, in the Cretan April. Against the outer wall of the house was a primitive fireplace whose blackened pots stood on trivets of a design so old that it was as familiar as the skin of one's hands. A vine-covered wall at the back did its best to hide a cluttered yard where I saw the beehive shape of a baking oven.

I walked slowly downhill. All seemed innocent and quiet in the afternoon heat. Here was the church, very small, snow-white, with a Reckitt's-blue dome, perched on a little knoll with its back to the cliffs. In front of it some loving hand had made a pavement of sea-pebbles, blue and terracotta and slate-grey, hammered down in patterns into the iron ground. Beyond it, the street sloped more steeply towards the sea, and here, though every house had a pot or two of flowers outside, the place looked barer, and there had been very little use of paint or whitewash. It was as if the richness of the flowery hills had faded and died, dwindling down to starve in the sea-bare poverty of the harbour.

And here was the post office. It was, also, the only shop the village boasted; a dark cave of a place, with double doors open to the street, beaten earth floor, and sacks of produce standing everywhere – beans, maize, and pasta, along with huge square tins swimming with oily looking pilchards. On the counter were earthenware bowls of black olives, a stack of cheeses, and a big, old-fashioned pair of scales. Shelves, crowded with jars and tins, sported (it seemed incongruously) the familiar labels of everyday advertising. Beside the door, casually supporting a stack of brushes, was the letter-box, painted the dark post-office blue. And, on the wall opposite the doorway, the telephone, in the very middle of the shop. You threaded your way between the sacks to get to it.

The shop was, obviously, the meeting place of the village women. Four of them were there now, talking over the weighing of some flour. As I entered, a little hesitantly, conversation stopped abruptly, and they stared; then good manners reasserted themselves, and they looked away, talking more quietly, but not, I noticed, about the foreigner; their conversation – about some sick child – was taken up where it had ceased. But all made way for me, and the shopkeeper put down the flour-scoop and said inquiringly: ‘Miss?'

‘These ladies—' I said, with a gesture meaning that I could not take their turn.

But I had to in the end, defeated by their inflexible courtesy: ‘I only came for some stamps, please. Six at five drachs, if you will be so good.'

Behind me I heard the stir and whisper: ‘She speaks Greek! Listen, did you hear? English, and she speaks Greek . . . Hush, you ill-mannered one! Silence!'

I smiled at them, and made some remark about their village, and was, on the instant, the centre of a delighted group. Why did I come to such a place? It was so small, so poor, why did I not stay in Heraklion, where there with big hotels, like Athens or London? Did I live in London? Was I married? Ah, but there was a man? No? Ah, well, one could not always be fortunate, but soon, soon, if God willed . . .

I laughed, and answered as best I could, and asked, in my turn, as many questions as I dared. Did they not get many strangers, then, in Agios Georgios? Many English? Oh, yes, Tony, of course, but I meant visitors like myself, foreigners . . . The Danish gentleman, yes, I had heard of him, but nobody else? No? Ah, well, now that the hotel was getting under way, and so efficiently, no doubt there would soon be many visitors, Americans too, and Agios Georgios would prosper. Mr Alexiakis was making a good job of it, wasn't he? And his sister was helping him? Yes, Sofia, I had met her; I believed she lived in the pretty house at the top of the village, opposite the hotel . . . ?

But on Sofia, we stuck. Beyond swiftly exchanged glances – kindly enough, I thought – and murmurs of ‘Ah, yes, poor Sofia, it was lucky for her that such a brother had come home to look after her,' the women said nothing more, and the conversation died, to be ignited again by one of them, young and pretty, with a child clinging to her hand, and an air of assurance, inviting me to her house. The others, who seemed only to have waited for her lead, pressed eagerly forward with similar invitations. How long was I to be in Agios Georgios? I would come and see them, yes, and bring my cousin, too. Which house? The one by the harbour wall – the one above the bakery – behind the church . . . it was no matter, (this with laughter), I had only to walk in, there was no house in Agios Georgios where I would not be welcome, so young and pretty, and speaking such good Greek . . .

Laughingly promising, but temporarily parrying all the charming invitations, I finally escaped, not much the wiser about Georgi's phantom Englishman, but having learned what I had come for, and more as well.

First, the telephone was out. Even without my promise to Mark, there was no chance, whatever happened, of getting in touch with authority, either the Embassy, or even Heraklion, by telephone. The one in the hotel, impossible. The one in the post office, open to the day in what amounted to the Ladies' Clubroom – in English or in Greek, it couldn't even be tried. We were on our own.

I found that, without conscious direction, I had reached the tiny harbour. A sea wall, and a little curved pier, held the water clear and still as a tear in the flower cup. Someone had scrawled cyprus for greece along the harbour wall, and someone else had tried to scratch it out. A man was beating an octopus; some family would eat well tonight. Two boats lay at anchor, one white, with vermilion canvas furled along her beautiful spars, the other blue, with the name
Eros
along her bows. On
Eros
a youth was working, coiling down a rope. He was wiry and quick-moving, and wore a green sweatshirt and blue denim trousers tucked into short gumboots. It was the lad who had been watching the backgammon players. He eyed me curiously, but did not interrupt his work.

I stood there a moment or two longer, conscious of eyes watching me from the dark doorway of every house, where the women sat. I thought: if only Lambis' boat would come in now, sailing quietly in from the east, with them all on board; Lambis at the engine, and Mark steering, and Colin in the bows, with a fishing line, laughing . . .

I turned sharply away from the shining stretch of the empty sea, and, the terms of my self-deceit forgotten, brought my mind back with a jerk to my problem, the other thing that I had discovered in the village shop – that there was, in fact, no house in Agios Georgios which could have anything to hide. Colin Langley was not here. Nothing could be served by my prying further in a village where every woman must know all her neighbours' affairs. Any answer to the mystery was only to be found at the hotel.

Or – and here I started to walk slowly back up the street, conscious of the eyes that watched me from the dark doorways – or at Sofia's cottage.

There might, in fact, be one house in Agios Georgios at which I was not welcome.

Well, there was nothing like trying. And if the husband was still at home, over his meal, then I should be quite interested to meet him, too.

I wondered if he favoured Cretan dress.

9

She seem'd an ancient maid, well-skill'd to cull

The snowy fleece, and wind the twisted wool

POPE
:
The Iliad of Homer

She was sitting just inside the door of her cottage, spinning. In all my months in Greece, I had never quite got used to the pleasure of watching the peasant women at this primitive task. The soft, furry mass of white wool on the distaff, the brown fingers pulling it out like candy floss to loop across the front of the black dress, the whirling ball of woollen thread on the spindle – these made a pattern that it would have been hard not to appreciate.

She had not looked up at my approach; the trunk of the fig tree must have hidden the movement from her. I paused for a moment, just beyond its shade, to watch her. In the deep shadow where she sat, the lines of trouble could no longer be seen: her face showed the smooth planes of youth, while even the ugly hands, caught in the fluid movements of her task, had taken on a kind of beauty.

I thought, then, of the legend I had told Mark, the story of the moonspinners that had been intended to send him to sleep, and to bring me comfort. I looked again at Sofia, a black-clad Cretan woman, spinning in the hot afternoon. An alien, a suspect, an incomprehensible native of this hard, hot country, whose rules I didn't know. Somebody to be questioned.

I walked forward and put my hand on the gate, and she looked up and saw me.

The first reaction was pleasure, of that I was sure. Her face split into a smile, and the dark eyes lighted. Then, though she did not move her head, I got the impression that she had cast a quick glance into the cottage behind her.

I pushed open the gate. ‘May I come in and talk to you?' I knew that such a direct query, though perhaps not good manners, could not, by the rules of island hospitality, be refused.

‘Of course.' But I thought she looked uneasy.

‘Your husband has gone?'

She watched me with what could have been nervousness, though the deft, accustomed movements helped her to an appearance of ease, as a cigarette will sometimes help in a more sophisticated situation. Her glance went to the small fire of twigs outside, where a pot still simmered. ‘He did not come.' Then, making as if to rise: ‘Be pleased to sit down.'

‘Thank you – oh, please don't stop your spinning, I love to watch it.' I entered the tiny yard, and, obedient to her gesture, sat on the bench near the door, under the fig tree. I began to praise her spinning, admiring the smoothness of the wool, and fingering the piece of woven cloth she showed me, until soon she had forgotten her shyness, and put down her work to fetch more of her weaving and embroidery to show me. Without being asked, I left my seat, and followed her indoors.

The cottage had two rooms, with no door between them, merely an oblong gap in the wall. The living-room, opening straight off the yard, was scrupulously neat, and very poor. The floor was of earth, beaten as hard as a stone, with a drab, balding rug covering half of it. There was a small fireplace in one corner, unused at this time of year, and across the back of the room ran a wide ledge, three feet from the floor, which served apparently as a bed-place, and was covered with a single blanket patterned in red and green. The walls had not yet been freshly white-washed, and were still grimed with winter's smoke. Here and there, high up in the plastered walls, were niches which held ornaments, cheap and bright, and faded photographs. There was one in a place of honour, a child – a boy – of perhaps six; behind this was a fuzzy print, much enlarged, of a young man in what looked like irregular battle dress. He was handsome in a rather glossy and assured way. The boy was very like him, but stood shyly. The husband, I supposed, and a lost child? I looked for the family ikon, but could see none, and remembered what Tony had told me.

‘My little boy,' said Sofia, behind me. She had come out of the inner room with an armful of cloths. She betrayed neither resentment nor surprise that I should have followed her into the house. She was looking sadly at the picture, with – you would have sworn – no other thought in mind. ‘He died,
thespoinís
, at seven years old. One day he was well, and at school, and playing. The next – pff – dead. And it was the will of God that there should be no more.'