Rosie Thomas - The Potter’s House

The customer was Xan. He pointed to something, pocketed what Manolis gave him, handed over money in exchange.

Olivia was smiling, her hands unfurling under the dirty sink water.

‘Pappy’s coming.’

Theo sprang out of Meroula’s arms and Georgi threw his crayon aside.

‘Pappy!’

Meroula sat upright and smoothed her grey skirt across her lap, as if she was about to see her lover. Olivia had noticed this often enough before and it both irritated and touched her. Xan was everything to his mother; there was no corner of her life that he did not irradiate.

Xan said when she tried to talk to him about it, ‘It’s the way it is, it’s not unusual. But you are the one I am married to.’

She would put her hands on either side of his face and kiss him on the mouth.

‘Don’t you forget it.’

He came in, bulky and smelling of smoke and bar. His arms were held stiffly in front of him with the fists clenched so he marched like a robot. The boys ran at him and battered themselves against his legs.

‘Left or right?’ Xan demanded.

‘Left,’ Theo yelled and Georgi countered, ‘Right.’

Theo amended his choice at once. ‘Right!’

Ignoring their responses, Xan dropped a plastic bubble into each pair of cupped hands. Inside were a block of bright pink bubblegum and a plastic toy that demanded construction from four puzzle pieces. The boys stuck the gum into their mouths and dropped to their knees to put the toys together. Georgi’s was a yellow car, Theo’s a red man.

The first time she saw him, Olivia remembered, Xan had been handing out sweets to Bangkok street children with just the same robot movements. The children were milling around his knees, pushing and shouting for his attention, and his arms were outstretched above a thicket of grasping fingers. It was the end of the monsoon and the swollen, khaki-coloured river behind them carried a mat of floating weeds and branches. Olivia lifted her old Leica to frame the shot and Xan turned to look straight into the lens, through the tunnel of her eye and into her head. He emptied his bag of sweets into the waiting hands and came to her.

‘It’s a straight trade,’ he said and took an Instamatic out of the pocket in his shirt. He held it horizontally and made as if to take the picture.

‘If I were you,’ Olivia pointed out, I’d frame it vertically.’ He did as she suggested and clicked the shutter. They were standing in a sea of children now, all clamouring for more presents.

‘Nice. Thanks. You know about photography, do you?’

‘It’s my job. I sell my photographs.’

‘Is that so? You want to come for a beer?’

That was how she lived, in those days. She took flights, she drifted through foreign cities and rode buses up remote mountain passes. She took pictures in Soweto and Havana and Bogotá, and on Caribbean beaches and in the canyons of midtown Manhattan. Some of these she sold, to picture libraries and agencies and magazines. She owned little more than she could carry, and the tide of travellers and backpackers that flowed around the world was the current she swam in. She had drunk beer with hundreds of strangers and some of them had become friends. Some, even lovers.

‘Yes, a quick one.’

When they were sitting under an awning beside the river Olivia began with the question that always followed the exchange of names. ‘Where are you heading?’

Xan said, ‘Home.’

The intense pleasure in the way he said it, the way he anticipated the prospect as if he was starving and about to be fed, filled her with a wash of melancholy. It wasn’t homesickness – England and her parents’ present house in the country, where she had never even lived, was hardly home any more. Yet she could feel the pull of home through Xan Georgiadis, the idea and significance and safety of a place rather than her own reality, like a thread passing straight through her innards. She felt a longing to be connected to a place again after so many years of wandering.

Over the rim of her glass she watched him, thinking how good-looking he was. There was an unfamiliar knocking in her chest. Don’t get too excited, she tried to warn herself. But already it was too late for warnings. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Greece.’

Xan had lived for five years in Melbourne. He had been working in his second cousin’s building company, putting up cheap houses for immigrant communities on the city outskirts, and he was brawny from carrying and deeply suntanned, and an Australian twang overlaid his Greek pronunciations. But now, he said, his parents needed him at home. His father was getting old and his mother missed him.

‘It’s one of the islands, in the Dodecanese. You should just see it. It’s paradise.’

Olivia had been to most of the world’s paradise destinations, but she could easily believe that with Xan Georgiadis in it this one would outstrip them all.

‘You are going up to bed right now. You can bring the toys with you,’ Xan said.

The boys kissed Meroula and Olivia, and padded after their father. They always did as he told them.

‘See, they are their father’s children,’ Meroula said with a broad smile of satisfaction. Olivia tucked the last of the stuffing into the last of the squid and slid the dish into the oven before her mother-in-law could tell her that Xan really preferred meat to fish. She could hear the thuds and scuffles of the boys romping with Xan overhead. Meroula nodded and smiled.

When he came back from settling the children they sat down to eat, with Xan at the head of the table and his wife and mother on either side of him. They had a dish of olives with bread and oil, and then the squid. Xan had been playing cards in the taverna and watching a football game on the television that hung over the bar, and he had come home hungry. Meroula ate a substantial plateful too, but with an expression of forbearance. She looked at Xan’s plate every minute or two, to check that he had enough. The room was quiet except for the clink of cutlery. If Meroula had not been there, Xan and Olivia would have chatted and maybe even drunk some wine. These empty, out-of-season evenings when the children were asleep were among the best of their times on Halemni.

Olivia contented herself with looking around the room as she ate.

There were candles burning on one of the stone shelves and a row of books on another. There were logs stacked in a basket next to the stone hearth, but the fire was unlit – this luxury was reserved for the coldest evenings, or for the times when the island’s power supply failed. Two comfortable old armchairs sat on either side of the fire, with cupboards for the boys’ toys and games beside them. There was a bread oven at the side of the fireplace, but Olivia baked in the new gas oven that occupied the far end of the room together with all the cupboards and equipment for cooking for a dozen guests at a time. The big oak table filled the centre of the space, and windows on one side looked from the front of the house to the square and the sea in the distance. On the opposite side a row of doors opened on to the shaded terrace and the slope of hillside behind the village. In summer this was where life was lived.

Xan had built almost everything and laid the limestone flags of the floor. The doors of all the cupboards were painted with squares and diamonds and lozenges of brilliant colour, turquoise and saffron and tangerine and crimson – this was Christopher’s work – and every spare piece of wall was covered with pictures by guests, the boys and Christopher, and with Olivia’s photographs. There was no television, but there was a CD player and a radio. It had taken a long time to create it all on limited resources but it was a warm and comfortable place now, lit with the candles and low lamps.