“I had the strangest day,” she began.
She had slept in the salon that night. For four days she had combed through the house looking for signs of violence and derangement, smoothing them all out until the villa was as perfectly organized as it had been during their long absences in the winter. The worst part was the master bedroom. She had to remake the bed, go on her hands and knees and search the floors for stray earrings, and, as it happened, Jimmie’s mobile. It had ended up on the floor under the bed. Imagine that. She had taken out the battery and put the phone in the rubbish. Then she had gone through their bathroom and removed the toiletries they used every day. Everything had to disappear. Everything had disappeared. She was thorough about these things, “a real lawyer when I want to be.” The villa was now restored to order. But still she couldn’t sleep well in it. That morning she got up early and went shopping in the town. She took a donkey to haul the bags back to the house, and at midday she made a fish stew and drank half a bottle of wine. It didn’t even make her tipsy.
Nevertheless she took a nap in the salon. She was roused from that sleep by the doorbell ringing, the first time since the event that anyone had come to the house.
She composed herself, checked her face in a mirror, and went quietly to the door and peered through the hole. It was someone she didn’t recognize. She waited and thought it over, then decided not to answer. The man on the far side of the door rang a second time and eventually gave up and walked away.
An hour passed and she ventured onto the terrace and looked down the narrow stepped path that led up to Belle Air. It must have been one of Jimmie’s drinking pals, but she couldn’t think who. Sooner or later she would have to face them and give them her story to explain Jimmie’s absence. She would have to perfect her lying. Sometime later the doorbell rang again and this time it was someone else—the American her father and Phaine called the Ancient Beatnik. She braced herself and opened. She didn’t know the man’s name, but he had been in the house before as their guest, and so she feared him less.
He uttered a little “Ah!” as she opened the door and peered up at her through blue-tinted specs. The conversation was brief. He had come up to remind Jimmie that he was expected at the annual arts festival ceremony on the mountaintop the following week. The Codringtons attended every year, but since Jimmie had not been around for a few days the Ancient Beatnik had thought to come up and remind him.
“Is he here now?”
“They left Hydra, I’m sorry to say. I think they drove somewhere for a few days.”
“That’s weird, man. Are they coming back soon?”
She said she didn’t know, she rarely consulted with them about these things. Did they have his number? Of course they did. He looked confused for a moment, then thought it over and gave her what she supposed was a beatnik smile. She offered a few extra thoughts: maybe they had gone to see Phaine’s family in Athens? Or maybe they had gone to the Mani. Jimmie loved the Mani.
With these ruminations she got rid of him. She went back to the terrace and watched him totter down the path, steadying himself with outstretched hands against the walls. That might have been the end of it for the day, but two hours later the first old man reappeared at the door and this time he rang the bell more insistently. Once again, she considered not opening. But somehow the visit of the Ancient Beatnik had changed the odds and this time she felt compelled to do so. It was a dapper-scruffy English gent by the looks of him, in sunglasses and wearing a ridiculous foulard with a wilted pocket square with a pattern of rose and yellow butterflies.
The linen suit, in the way of linen suits in the heat, had gone a little to hell. Despite the dandy touches, the man looked like he had spent the night in a comfortable dumpster. He took off his shades as soon as the door opened and his eyes were the pale oysters of old men on the slide, and the freckles on his forehead looked as if they had appeared within the last few hours at first contact with a Greek sun. He looked mildly surprised to see her. But she was pretty sure that she had never seen him before, either in Greece or elsewhere. Nevertheless, he didn’t greet her with any sense of unfamiliarity. On the contrary, he shook her hand and said, in a voice from another age, “You must be Naomi!”
As soon as her name was mentioned, so casually and yet so irrevocably, she was obliged to open the door wider and suggest—by body language alone—that he come inside.
“My name’s Rockhold. I’m a good friend of your father’s.”
“I’m afraid they’re not here right now. But would you like to come in? I can make some tea.”
“I’d be delighted to. Nothing better than a spot of tea when it’s hot.”
She could see that he was perspiring. He had refused to dress down for the heat, which was a charming and anachronistic mistake. She also now saw that he held a straw panama in one hand—he had removed it before she had opened the door. As he stepped into the hall’s cool there was a look of relief on his face. He left the panama on one of the coat hooks by the door and they went into the salon. Rockhold looked it over as if for the first time. He admitted at once, in effect, that he had never been to Hydra before.
“My father didn’t invite you?”
“No, I’m not the inviting kind. People hesitate before inviting me.”
He smiled broadly, as if this statement made perfect sense, and sat down, clearly a little tired by the long climb up the Hydriot steps.
“I’ll make some tea,” Naomi said, and she went to the kitchen.
Her hands were shaking. Yet he was mild enough. Just maybe not the friend she had assumed him to be: something else.
She came back with the tray and set it on the glass coffee table. As she did so, he said, without fuss, “I see your table here has a nasty crack. Someone drop something on the glass?”
She hadn’t even noticed it. But there it was, a spidery crack at the table’s corner. She tried to smile.
“Yes, the maid broke it last week. She drops things.”
“Does she, now? That’s not much of a maid, then, is it?”
“She’s wonderful otherwise.”
“I believe her name is Carissa?”
She was pouring for him, but her hand froze and she had to steady it and continue pouring.
“That’s right. That seems like a funny thing to know, Mr. Rockhold.”
“You can call me Samuel. Your father and I are old friends. In fact, we were in the army together. Perhaps he didn’t mention it. One rarely mentions the men one was in the army with.” The eyes were suddenly merry and all-forgiving.
“Not to me, Mr. Rockhold.”