“Gone back to your chalet,” he said, sitting up a bit in his chair. “The girl with the red towel?” And suddenly he looked just a bit embarrassed. So he was an ogler after all. “Er, while you were in the sea…” He took off his specs and rubbed gingerly at a large red bump on the lid of his right eye. Then he put his glasses on again, blinked at me, held out the beer bottle. “Fancy a mouthful? To wash the sea out of your throat? I’ve had all I want.”
I took the bottle, drained it, said: “Thanks! Bite?”
“Eh?” He cocked his head on one side.
“Your eye,” I said. “Mosquito, was it? Horsefly or something?”
“Dunno.” He shook his head. “We got here Wednesday, and by Thursday night this was coming up. Yesterday morning it was like this. Doesn’t hurt so much as irritates. There’s another back of my knee, not fully in bloom yet.”
“Do you have stuff to dab on?”
He nodded in the direction of his wallowing wife and sighed, “She has gallons of it! Useless stuff! It will just have to take its own time.”
“Look, I’ll see you later,” I said. “Right now I have to go and see what’s up with Julie.” I excused myself.
Leaving the place, I nodded to a trio of spinsterish types relaxing in summer frocks at one of the tables further back. They looked like sisters, and the one in the middle might just be a little retarded. She kept lolling first one way, then the other, while her companions propped her up. I caught a few snatches of disjointed, broad Yorkshire conversation:
“Doctor?…sunstroke, I reckon. Or maybe that melon?…taxi into town will fix her up…bit of shopping…pull her out of it…Kalamari?—yechhh! Don’t know what decent grub is, these foreign folks…” They were so wrapped up in each other, or in complaint of the one in the middle, that they scarcely noticed me at all.
On the way back to our chalet, at the back of the house/taverna, I looked across low walls and a row of exotic potted plants to see an old Greek (male or female I couldn’t determine, because of the almost obligatory floppy black hat tilted forward, and flowing black peasant clothes) sitting in a cane chair in one corner of the garden. He or she sat dozing in the shade of an olive tree, chin on chest, all oblivious of the world outside the tree’s sun-dappled perimeter. A pure white goat, just a kid, was tethered to the tree; it nuzzled the oldster’s dangling fingers like they were teats. Julie was daft for young animals, and I’d have to tell her about it. As for the figure in the cane chair: he/she had been there when Julie and I went down to the beach. Well, getting old in this climate had to be better than doing it in some climates I could mention…
I found Julie in bed, shivering for all she was worth! She was patchy red where the sun had caught her, cold to the touch but filmed with perspiration. I took one look, recognized the symptoms, said: “Oh-oh! Last night’s moussaka, eh? You should have had the chicken!” Her tummy always fell prey to moussaka, be it good or bad. But she usually recovered quickly, too.
“Came on when I was on the beach,” she said. “I left the blanket…”
“I saw it,” I told her. “I’ll go get it.” I gave her a kiss.
“Just let me lie here and close my eyes for a minute or two, and I’ll be OK,” she mumbled. “An hour or two, anyway.” And as I was going out the door: “Jim, this isn’t Nichos’s bad water, is it?”
I turned back. “Did you drink any?”
She shook her head.
“Got crabs?”
She was too poorly to laugh, so merely snorted.
I pocketed some money. “I’ll get the blanket, buy some bottled drinks. You’ll have something to sip. And then…will you be OK if I go fishing?”
She nodded. “Of course. You’ll see; I’ll be on my feet again tonight.”
“Anyway, you should see the rest of them here,” I told her. “Three old sisters, and one of ’em not all there—a little man and fat woman straight off a postcard! Oh, and I’ve a surprise for you.”
“Oh?”
“When you’re up,” I smiled. I was talking about the white kid. Tonight or tomorrow morning I’d show it to her.
Feeling a bit let down—not by Julie but by circumstances in general, even by the atmosphere of this place, which was somehow odd—I collected the sunscreen blanket and poles, marched resolutely back to the taverna. Dimitrios was serving drinks to the spinsters. The ‘sunstruck’ one had recovered a little, sipped Coke through a straw. George and his burden were nowhere to be seen. I sat down at one of the tables, and in a little while Dimitrios came over. This time I studied him more closely.
He was youngish, maybe thirty, thirty-five, tall if a little stooped. He was more swarthy peasant Greek than classical or cosmopolitan; his natural darkness, coupled with the shadow of his hat (which he wore even here in the shade), hid his face from any really close inspection. The one very noticeable thing about that face, however, was this: it didn’t smile. That’s something you get to expect in the islands, the flash of teeth. Even badly stained ones. But not Dimitrios’s teeth.
His hands were burned brown, lean, almost scrawny. Be that as it may, I felt sure they’d be strong hands. As for his eyes: they were the sort that make you look away. I tried to stare at his face a little while, then looked away. I wasn’t afraid, just concerned. But I didn’t know what about.
“Drink?” he said, making it sound like ‘dring’. “Melon? The melon he is free. I give. I grow plenty. You like him? And water? I bring half-melon and water.”
He turned to go, but I stopped him. “Er, no!” I remembered the conversation of the spinsters, about the melon. “No melon, no water, thank you.” I tried to smile at him, found it difficult. “I’ll have a cold beer. Do you have bottled water? You know, in the big plastic bottles? And Coke? Two of each, for the refrigerator. OK?”
He shrugged, went off. There was this lethargy about him, almost a malaise. No, I didn’t much care for him at all…
“Swim!” the excited voice of one of the spinsters reached me. “Right along there, at the end of the beach. Like yesterday. Where there’s no one to peep.”
God! You’ll be lucky, I thought.
“Shh!” one of her sisters hushed her, as if a crowd of rapacious men were listening to every word. “Don’t tell the whole world, Betty!”
A Greek girl, Dimitrios’s sister or wife, came out of the house carrying a plastic bag. She came to my table, smiled at me—a little nervously, I thought. “The water, the Coke,” she said, making each definite article sound like ‘thee’. But at least she can speak my language, I had to keep reminding myself. “Four hundred drachmas, please,” she said. I nodded and paid up. About two pounds sterling. Cheap, considering it all had to be brought from the mainland. The bag and the bottles inside it were tingling cold in my hand.
I stood up—and the girl was still there, barring my way. The three sisters made off down the beach, and there was no one else about. The girl glanced over her shoulder toward the house. The hand she put on my arm was trembling and now I could see that it wasn’t just nervousness. She was afraid.
“Mister,” she said, the word very nearly sticking in her dry throat. She swallowed and tried again. “Mister, please. I—”
“Elli!” a low voice called. In the doorway to the house, dappled by splashes of sunlight through the vines, Dimitrios.
“Yes?” I answered her. “Is there—?”