“You get on with your mother—I’m jealous. Mine is a stepmother. She’s not bad, but she’s not mine. Sometimes it’s a drag having to deal with her.”
After Sam had obliged with an “I’m sorry,” Naomi told her the story in a few sentences. Her father was an art collector and a philanthropist. Since he knew many people and bought a lot of art, he was the center of many people’s agitated attention. Her stepmother was Greek, from Kifissia in Athens, but the Kyriakou family had always been domiciled in South Kensington.
“She’s younger than yours,” Naomi went on, “and comes from an illustrious line of military fascists. I like your mother. She says what she thinks.”
“That’s a good thing?”
“It’s not a bad thing. There are worse things. Do you say what you think?”
“Not always. Don’t military fascists say what they mean?”
Naomi’s smile was easy to provoke, but it never developed fully. She controlled it in the way that a child manipulates a kite.
Sam looked up at the sky’s featureless zenith. In this place you could hear the tiniest noises from afar. The stirring of a cicada in a wall’s crack a mile away, waves echoing from an unseen cove. But when the wind suddenly rose it obliterated everything else and there was just the melancholy hissing of the sage carpeting the hillsides and shivering as if moved by a fear of its own. The Haldanes would stay here till summer’s end, and through all that time Sam would be counting down the minutes, and for that matter the sunsets. Maybe she would even find a boyfriend, a summer fling. Such things usually happened. Or else, if a friendship with Naomi didn’t blossom, she would just be alone and read a hundred novels in her little white room beyond Kamini. If it turned out that way she wouldn’t mind. Anything was better than a summer in the city, a visit to the grandparents in Montauk, the drifting from day to day that free time in libraries always induced. She rarely made new friends in the city, and she was already tired of the old ones. What she never found there, in any case, was a friend with any edge to her. The girls her own age were tiresomely uniform, as if a human-production plant in the center of the country had churned them out according to an approved paradigm. Suddenly, she had found someone different.
Eventually they got up and strolled back down to the cafe under the palapa, where a table had been laid out in the shade with a bottle of Santorini wine and a tomato salad with black olives. The mother had arranged it. The wind, again, made it slightly sinister. Sam, with some fuss, refused the bread that was offered to her. She said she was gluten-intolerant.
“Eviva,” Amy said, and raised her glass. “I learned it yesterday down in the port. Cheers, right?”
“Eviva,” Naomi said, and tapped her glass and then Sam’s. “There’s also another one you should know. Na pethanei o charos—may death die. Death to death!”
They ate some baklava with black coffee and then agreed to walk together back to the port. By now, in fact, the shadows around the cypresses had begun to shift, and when they set out they were content not to say a word until they turned a corner and saw the first houses of Hydra.
TWO
“I was never sure about this view,” Jimmie Codrington said to his wife as the maid came out onto the terrace with their gin and tonics and a bowl of Kalamata olives in oil. You never heard her until the very last moment, and then her charm appeared suddenly, as if by accident, and you had to take notice. “Don’t you think it’s gone downhill over the years? The funny thing is, I can’t say why. It just seems to have become smaller and shabbier.”
“Maybe we’ve grown bigger and more magnificent.”
Jimmie liked the idea, but it wasn’t true. The port was still there, as in their shared past, the sea still sparkled all the way to Thermisia, the captains’ houses with their palms and toy cannons and painted wardrobes still belonged to socialites, and the bells from the churches high up above the streets sent down their music to disturb the squares where decrepit cats gathered to witness every dusk.
“Or we’ve become smaller and shabbier as well. But it did occur to me. Funny, it did occur to me. You may have a point there.”
Phaine spoke to the maid in Greek.
“Are you making something for tonight or should we eat out?”
“As you wish, madame. I can make psarosoupa.”
“Oh, not that again. We’ll eat out, Carissa. You can leave after you’ve cleared up the drinks.”
“Very well, madame.”
Phaine turned back to her husband as the girl walked off, her black uniform cutting a sexual dash against the whiteness of the terrace.
“Shall we go down to the port and eat octopus? I want to.”
“I got a call from Nobbins.” It was his pet name for his daughter. “She says we should meet some Americans at the Sunset. She’s made a new friend.”
“Oh?”
“Some journalist and his family. I’ve never heard of him.”
“How tedious. Shall we tell them we have heartburn?”
“No, I think we should go. I’m tired of upsetting Nobbins. I think we should try and be jolly, like a family, don’t you? Besides, it’s good that she’s meeting people.”
“Well, meeting people was never her problem, Jimmie.”
“It’s not always a question of problems. Even if she has a few, she’s hardly alone. Everyone has problems.”
“That’s like saying everyone gets headaches.”
An old conversation, many times repeated, and it could rile him easily with its obvious futility.
“Don’t be so hard on her,” he protested. “She’s had some tough times. I don’t suppose anyone takes their mother’s death easily at that age. But enough of that. Let’s go to dinner.”
She acquiesced but felt intensely annoyed.
“All right. Can I get drunk?”
“Not at all, monster. Best behavior, if you don’t mind. When they ask me your name I’m going to say Funny and see what they say. It’ll be very telling.”
“I really don’t care. I’ll be going to bed early anyway.”
He snorted and reached for the olives. The former owner of Belle Air airlines had a way of knowing what his tempestuous wife would or would not do at the end of an evening. Sleep was the last thing on that extensive menu, and in that spirit they made a customary toast: “Who’s better than us, Funny?”