When the Haldanes had left and much of the summer crowd had gone with them, Naomi crossed over to the island with several boxes of house paint that she had bought in Porto Heli. She already knew the exact color schemes she would impose upon her new property and how she would go about executing the plan. She knew which color every wall would be and she would lovingly paint it herself. In her mind she had rehearsed the redecorations hundreds of times since she was a small girl. It would be, as she had told Sam, a return to the house her mother had created but with the addition of her spirit and taste. Together they were the true custodians of the house, not the impostors. The tins of paint were her instruments in this act of restoration.
The port had returned to its presummer normalcy. The large yachts had slipped away and the cafes around the docks were back to their leisurely ways. By the Pirate Cove, the statue of the lion and the hero with his handlebar mustaches looked almost lonely, resigned to yet another interminable winter, though winter was still far off. She found a donkey driver, left the boxes with him, and went for a quick coffee. She wanted to look around. A few familiar faces, but no one came up to her or asked her where she had been. The noble discretion of the Greeks. But even if they had, she had prepared herself. A gritty wind blew through the awnings, and she yearned to be back at Mandraki among the prickly pears and the lizards.
Naomi didn’t know what to expect at the house. In the end she had asked Carissa to stay on and look after the place until she returned. The maid had refused, though she grudgingly agreed to clean the house a final time before she left for her homeland. Naomi paid the driver and they unloaded the boxes in the cool salon.
The place was immaculately neat. The shutters were closed to keep out the heat and the floors had been recently polished. There was a smell of pine and wax. When the driver had gone, she closed the front door and unpacked the cans of paint, lining them up according to which room they would be used in. Having done this, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine from the fridge (it was stocked to the hilt), and went to lie down in Jimmie and Phaine’s bedroom.
She lay on the bed and drank, slowly and introspectively. She laid out a plan to clear out this room first. She wouldn’t keep anything. The clothes, the pictures, the rugs, the photographs—it would all have to be annihilated.
When she had drained the glass she got up and opened the shutters. The room was dusty and suffocatingly sour, and she aired it as she began to collect the things gathered on the mantelpiece and the bedside tables. She piled them on the bed and then went back down to the kitchen to fetch some plastic garbage bags.
She cleared out the bathroom and then the cupboards. As she was doing this the thought suddenly came to her that she needed music. One couldn’t cleanse and purify a house without music. So she went back down to the salon and put a record on Jimmie’s ancient sound system. It was the soundtrack to High Society. She turned the volume up as high as it would go and returned to the bedroom to begin her labor in earnest. For an hour she bagged the contents of the room and then dragged the bags down to the living room. She put them all in the garden shed and then poured herself another glass of wine. She took the glass out onto the terrace and drank it with a fierce feeling of vengeance. They would never have imagined how easy it was for her to expunge them from memory. It was as easy, in fact, as repainting a room. It was the hour of the swallows and the bell of Agia Paraskevi was ringing.
She set down the glass on the parapet and stared at the parched hillsides with their near-vertical walled enclosures that seemed to have been built by spiders. Soon she heard someone passing below the outer wall, the slow shuffling of the old, but no one rang the doorbell. She returned to the upstairs room with two cans of paint, one pale green and one a canary yellow. Opening them, she tested the brand-new brushes, laid down newspaper on the floors, and began to paint the largest wall.
The work went smoothly, the music pulling her along. She worked in bare feet, enjoying the stray drops of paint that fell onto her skin, and she finished the wall by early evening. She was alone and yet she didn’t feel entirely alone. The garden grave was so close, a mere step away, and there they lay peacefully under the trees without a complaint in the world. Slightly tired, she laid down the brush and went back downstairs while the paint dried. There was a soft chill in the air now, the first cool evening breeze of autumn. She poured out the rest of the bottle on the terrace and enjoyed the wine with her feet up on the wall. She now estimated that it would take her about four days to repaint the house entirely and another three to rearrange all the furnishings and decorations according to her plan. So a week could overturn a decade of misrule. She would spend the rest of the night finishing the master bedroom and then begin the salon the next day.