Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

The Canadian poet is upstairs on the terrace tapping away at his green Olivetti.

‘That housekeeper is very loyal to the first Mrs Ghikas so Leonard dropping the name of Nikos’s new fiancée when he introduced himself was unfortunate to say the least.’ Charmian is warming to the latest island scandal which concerns the new poet’s housing. ‘Barbara Rothschild had better watch out for Mrs Danvers when she marries him.’

News of Leonard’s rejection from the great painter’s grand house has ricocheted from wall to well. George is writing Nikos Ghikas a letter. A door slammed in the young man’s face, but worse than rude. ‘We don’t want any more Jews here’ was what the housekeeper said. Was the island harbouring a Nazi? George is railing; not much of his monologue is making it on to the page.

By the time I run into him Leonard is nicely settled over his typewriter, his shirtsleeves rolled, a Greek cigarette burning between his fingers.

I’ve been shooed up here to the terrace with an offering of watermelon. He’s set himself up facing out to sea and stops typing when he hears me, stands silhouetted against a blazing blue sky.

His back and shoulders remain hunched from the worktable. ‘Please, I didn’t want to interrupt you,’ I say. It feels awkward, being alone with him. He’s removed his sunglasses and I get the sense he’s looking at me as though the bowl of cut fruit is suggestive. I’m young enough to find this sort of consideration from a grown man with stubble and hairy arms mortifying. I know I’m blushing as red as the watermelon I’m thrusting towards him. For want of something to say I tell him I’m shocked about what happened to him at Ghikas’s house. The sun spikes his eyes with green so they are the same khaki as his shirt.

‘Well, you know I put a curse on the place?’ and, though he chuckles as he says it, his face darkens.

He has everything he needs. A divan, a chair, his typewriter and a workbench set up with a view to the port. The sun is strong enough to make him squint as he takes the bowl of melon and places it on a low wall within reach of his work.

Pots of rose geranium and basil sweeten the air. Written pages flutter their corners to a breeze. A loop of amber komboloi beads and a pottery pomegranate prevent them from flying away. He reaches for his sunglasses, tips me a salute as he returns to his typewriter. He seems to be blackening a significant number of pages, certainly more than either Charmian or George.

The days grow longer and the sun stronger, enough that Janey gets badly burned while sunbathing on the terrace. Naked, naturally. Now she’s pink all over like strawberry ice cream, a moaning calamine ghost. I buy cartons of sun cream from the pharmacy and become helpless beneath Jimmy’s hands as he rubs it in. He’s already tanned enough to switch to olive oil. We arrange some foam mattresses and cushions, beyond the painting tables and easels, where our terrace meets bare red and gold rock. A few straggly olive branches are strung with our clothing; flowering thyme and white star of Bethlehem spring from fissures in the hillside. Jimmy sketches the rocks and the roots, fills a few pages of his notebook. There is only the most flirtatious of breezes to stir the perfume of spruce and donkey shit and flowering herb. I lie propped on my elbows with the sun on my back while Henry Miller heavies my eyelids. Jimmy reaches across me for wine. The mountain shimmers. Poppies blush. I want to snap my whole being around him, like some sort of carnivorous plant that his fingers brush up against.

Jimmy and I make a good team in the beginning. We get everything done before lunch so most days are like this one, languid and free as the water that gently bobs the boats below our nest on the hillside. We’ve been up and down the steps three times already, from the vegetable boat and the market, the bakery and the butcher. We earn our siesta.

I’m first out of bed every morning, up with the Orthros bells. I’m usually first to sleep at night too because Jimmy and my brother and the girls stay up late drinking and playing poker on the terrace with Trudy and the other American students. The guardian at the art school is, by all accounts, a gorgon so they are regularly locked out for not making her curfew and have to doss here.

There’s no electricity to run a fridge. Every second morning I fetch our block of ice from the foot of the steps where it has been deposited by Spiros and his mules. The others sleep right through the bells and the donkeys and the workmen hammering; if left to them our ice would be a puddle so it’s as well I’m a lark.

I stretch my eyes across the gulf towards the mountains of Troezen. Beauty rises up to greet me. The sea lies waiting, the port promises drama, the rocks clang with bells from the island’s many churches. I stand at the top of the steps and drink it all in. The hills flame with yellow flowers, the mountains are tipped with rose gold, every whitewashed wall shines crystalline with quartz. Leafy vines drape the white tunnel of steps. An arched door is garlanded by ripening apricots; wild flowers sprout from cracks in every tumbledown wall and ruin. A woman shakes a rug from a doorway and even the dust glitters.

I cart our block of ice back up to the house, stopping only to make way for a jingling train of donkeys and to talk to various cats sprawling in familiar patches of sunlight along the twisting steps. My favourite black cat has hidden her kittens among clumps of rosemary in the rubbled terrace of the crumbling house below ours. I push the branches aside and talk to her as they suckle and her semi-precious eyes shine.

The early morning is mine and I’m glad of it. Back home, I bumble about in my vest and shorts, tipping water from the icebox into a bucket to swab the floor, pushing the new block into place. I boil coffee on the Primus and sing to myself as I start clearing away last night’s dinner things, carefully observing our systems for the conservation of water.

As I’ve said, Hydra is dry apart from a handful of wells, but it’s not difficult to clean a whole kitchen with one bowl if you do things in the right order of greasiness, and there is a certain satisfaction to it. I start with the glass of the lanterns, bring them to a shine with a lemon wrapped in a wet cloth the way Charmian showed me, trim the wicks while I’m at it. It’s Jimmy’s turn to cook so I sort through some dry beans and leave them to soak. There will be fresh vegetables if we get down to the market in time, and we can probably all do with a bit of meat of some kind.

The black mother cat comes to the door for scraps. I treat us both to a creamy swirl from a can of evaporated NouNou, mine in my first coffee of the day, hers in a saucer, and lean against the door jamb to drink it. Across the ridge comes Fotis the shepherd and his donkey, on its back the milk cans glinting in the sun as the donkey’s little feet pick a careful path down the mountain. It’s a jolly-looking donkey, its bridle decorated with blue beads and a tassel swinging from an evil-eye amulet at its brow. Fotis ambles behind, his usual sack and shovel at the ready, but this morning his waistcoat is unpatched and he sports a nosegay of mountain hyacinths in his buttonhole. It’s a feast day of some kind; that’s what all the bells of the island have been trying to tell me. Several cats skulk a perfectly measured foot-kicking distance from Fotis as he pours milk into my jug. He has terracotta pots of sheep’s yoghurt in one of his panniers so I am especially glad I waylaid him before he reached the market.