‘Okay, good.’
She brought them towels and soap, opened the doors and left the room, beaming. Scully took the pack off Billie’s shoulders and walked out onto the balcony. The fishhook of the harbour lay plainly below, and he looked out at the gulf and beyond it the mottled mass of the Peloponnese where the faraway smoke of charcoalers smudged the air above the peninsula.
He wondered where she would be. Unless she’d organized something from Australia, she wouldn’t have a house yet. Maybe a hotel by the water or a spare room in one of the expats’ houses. He tried to think. Where would be go after bolting in some kind of panic? God, the thought of her having a breakdown in some bare room twelve thousand miles from home. What else could make you act like that? Surely it couldn’t be a way of making a point. You couldn’t be right in the mind to do this to people you love.
Scully felt his fingernails in his palms and tried to shake it off. It was not time for macho bullshit. No breastbeating, no torrent of recriminations. Just be prepared to listen, he told himself; don’t go shitting in your own nest.
He felt Billie’s hand on the back of his leg. One of her shoelaces was undone, so he knelt and retied it and looked into her troubled face.
‘We’re gonna go down now and look, orright? It’s a small place — we’ll probably find her before lunch and she’ll explain why it happened. Everything’ll make sense somehow, and then I think we’ll understand. I just want you to be brave and let us sort it out. Let her say what she has to say, okay? Sometimes people having a baby can be very nervous — flighty, you know, like a horse. Now are you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell me first?’
Billie’s eyes began to fill as she shook her head.
‘It’s alright. I’m gonna fix it up.’
• • •
ON HIS WAY BACK down the jumbled steps to the harbour, feeling bilious and goosefleshed, Scully stumped through spokes of light that ran between the smooth white blocks of houses, and he only faintly sensed the brief heat of the sun’s concentration. He was lighter without all the northern clothing he’d been wearing, and despite all this weirdness, he felt more himself because of it. Jeans, sneakers, cotton windcheater, the old Scully uniform.
At the waterfront with its summer marquees peeled back to let in the sun, there were a few tables set outside tavernas here and there. Fishermen, old sailors, and a few gold-toothed muleteers sat in the kafenion playing tavla and shooting the breeze. The gold merchants, the postcard stalls and claptrap tourist joints were shuttered up, and no speakers played ‘Zorba’ across the water. The bank was open and sleepy and the hardware-cum- liquor store had its doors wide to the water. The Up ’n’ High was closed, the Pirate Bar looked forlorn without its summer Eurotrash. The place felt cleaner, happier for winter.
He ducked back off the waterfront and headed for the Three Brothers. In the lanes, islanders gave him troubled greetings, as though trying to place him, or even, he thought, trying not to place him, as if he was the last man they wanted to see this morning. He felt them turning, each of them, to watch him go. Living here the three of them had been distinctive, even among the xeni. No one forgot Billie and that rude awakening of blonde curls. She had been such a vivacious ambassador, easing their way every place they went, and here on Hydra she gave them respectability as well, the illusion of soundness, of family solidity.
Scully smelled pine and linseed oil as he passed a workshop whose saw fell silent. It was dark inside the double doors and he was blinded to its interior by the sunlight, but called a greeting and pulled Billie along when no answer came. It’s as if they smell disaster, he thought, bad luck. Am I imagining it, or are they uneasy? They’ve seen her arrive and then me, put two and two together, and they smell trouble.
In the market square, the butcher hacked at a goat carcase, cigarette in his mouth. Scully did not speak as he passed.
In the lane outside the Three Brothers, a few tables stood in the sun, their plastic covers pulsing lightly in the breeze. Inside were a couple of old islander men with great smoke cured moustaches and waistcoats who greeted him dully, and in the corner was Max Whelp whose eyelids hung low as the ash that drooped from his cigarette.
‘Max,’ said Scully without sitting down.
Billie stood by while the old men pulled comical faces at her.
‘Scully? You idiot, what are you doing back?’
‘Where are they all?’
‘The scum, you mean?’
‘If you like.’
‘Fuck em.’
‘There’s a kid here.’
‘Fuck em twice. I’m banned. That fucking Alex!’
‘You look terrible.’
‘Strange, you know, but I feel better every day. 1963 I came here, Scully, and I’m feeling better every day.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
Max pulled himself more or less erect and looked Scully up and down. ‘Didn’t you go back to the colonies?’
‘Where you banned from, Max?’
‘The Lyko. The smug bastards. Hm, that’s a pretty girl.’
‘It’s my seven-year-old daughter, Max.’
‘Lost-looking. Like her mother.’
‘You’ve seen her, then.’
Max Whelp stubbed his fag out, looked hard at Scully and laughed. Scully hauled Billie out of there and headed back down to the water.
‘When I was a boy on the farm,’ said Scully to the child, ‘my mum used to tell me to beware of worthless characters. I thought she was a bit hard on people, you know, being a farmer’s wife and everything, but I found out otherwise when I came here. Max is a worthless character. Don’t ever go near him.’
Billie held his hand and was jerked into a run to keep up with his long driving strides.
The Lyko, then. Okay, the Lyko. He didn’t mind owning up to it: the expats had always intimidated him. In their presence he felt the complete farmboy, the toolslinger, the deckhand. He looked at them sometimes and felt his knuckles drag on the ground. They were world-sodden, tired, confident, and while you were learning Greek out of a two-buck Berlitz, they were unavoidable. Before Greece, Scully had never met people with hidden money, with independent means, and they fascinated and frightened him. They were Oxford graduates, poor aristocrats, American bohemians, artists and faded lower-order celebrities whose hopes had somehow fallen away. There was a mercenary from Adelaide who he quite liked, and a defrocked priest from Montana who came down from his hilltop eyrie now and then, but the ones who worried him were the ones you saw every day without fail, the ones who staggered down to the waterfront morning after morning and stayed till the wee hours, drinking, sniping, recalling better days. They lived for the youthful influx of summer when they could mingle with the fresh and the novel, when they could whine entertainingly and fall in love, strike poses, relieve each other of the burden of old gossip. They were bright, funny, lordly, talented for the most part, and almost completely idle. To Scully they were like bookish inventions. He learned not to bristle.
Jennifer found them engaging. She loved their backlog of stories, she envied the poets their old words, the sculptors their hands, idle or not, and the heirs their independence. She liked to swim with some of them in the afternoons, or meet them for dinner a few nights a week, and Scully went along, often as not for something to do. To Scully in private Jennifer told cynical jokes about the expats. The two of them rolled their eyes at the mention of oily Rory, the Canadian stud who wrote novels in his few daylight hours, or the two nice queers from Spain who carted a Steinway a thousand steps up to their house with a donkey and two old men. Scully knew why she liked these people. They were not boys and girls who’d followed their parents’ dreary instructions, gone to a sensible school, dated sensible boys, closed off all possibility of spontaneity and ended up as bureaucrats whose job bored them rigid and whose only act of defiance, late in their twenties, was to marry a little beneath themselves. Jennifer admired poor Alvin the gold dealer, who needed a bottle of vodka a day just to sign his own name. Alvin, she said, had class. He just refused to be browbeaten by commonsense, by the mean, the average, the sensible. She liked Lotte the destitute German princess who sublet her rooms in the summer and slept with every guest, male and female, and charged extra for services rendered. And there was Alex, who truly was a worthless bastard, who dined out on his friendship with Francis Bacon, his collaboration with Leonard Cohen, and his fling with Charmian Clift. Alex was a carbuncle, but Jennifer saw his painting talent as awesome, despite his not having squeezed more than a toothpaste tube since the early seventies.