The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas

the house and in their own bedroom they left the shutters open at night. They had to get up early and it was easy to wake up with the light creeping across the room. Olivia lay with her husband’s arms round her and her chin in the hollow of his shoulder. It was the best moment of the day, this, when they exchanged their last thoughts, the words becoming disconnected as they drifted towards sleep.

      ‘It must be worse than being dead,’ Xan breathed.

      ‘What?’

      ‘To live in a marriage like that. Those people, the Darbys. They look at each other as if they wish they were.’

      ‘You can’t tell. You can only guess what other people are like inside their marriages. You only know your own.’

      ‘You can tell,’ he insisted, stubborn as his mother.

      ‘It doesn’t matter. Why are we talking about the bloody Darbys? This is all that matters. I’m worried about Theo.’

      ‘Don’t be. He only walks in his sleep, like children do. I don’t know why you worry so much.’

      Olivia tilted in his arms, looking into the room’s blackness and at the faintly paler suggestion of the window.

      ‘Maybe because I’m happy. Because I am afraid to lose it.’

      However hard she tried to banish it there seemed to be a whisper of threat here in the room with them, a whisper that was nothing to do with the problem of Meroula or the worry about money or guests or the business.

      Xan laughed. It was a sound deep in his chest and she felt the vibration as he pulled her closer. He didn’t share her fears.

      ‘You were once so brave. My lone traveller, afraid of nothing in the world.’

      He often teased her about this, that she had come to Halemni to be a wife and mother after having seen everything there was to see and done everything else there was to do.

      ‘It isn’t fear, exactly. I don’t want anything to change and yet the boys change all the time, and I suppose anxiety comes out of that.’

      ‘You can’t stop change,’ he murmured. Xan was sleepy, but he still ran his hand over the curve of her ribs, into the hollow of her waist and up the swell of her hips. Olivia breathed out and lay back. It was late and they had to be up very early, but it made no difference when he wanted her, as he did now. It hadn’t changed since the first time he saw her and wanted her, in Bangkok by the monsoon-swollen river. She was a thin, crop-haired, pale giantess then, all dangling legs and arms, among the tiny smooth Thais.

      ‘Don’t worry, I love you,’ he muttered as his hand slid between her thighs.

      Christopher Cruickshank had walked down to the beach. He sat on the shingle now, smoking a last cigarette with his back to the lapping water. The beach beds had all been taken into storage for the winter.

      Only one or two lights showed in the tiers of houses. Left to itself, Megalo Chorio went to bed early. The tip of his cigarette glowed as Christopher gazed upwards. Immediately above the Georgiadises’ house was the dark hump of the little hill where he had taken the guests for their last morning’s painting. Beyond and behind that was a paler glimmer against the black sky. This was the limestone cliff, crowned by a ruined castle of the Knights of St John, that dominated Halemni bay and the beach and the harbour. And perched in the saddle of hillside that rose up to the bluff were outlines too square to be natural rock forms. Although they were all but invisible in the darkness, Christopher knew the shapes and the scenery so well that his mind’s eye supplied the image as clearly as if it had been bathed in sunshine. These were the ruined houses of Arhea Chorio, the old village. It had been abandoned a generation ago, when families moved down to the coast away from the hill farms to the tavernas and beach stands. Now the roofless houses disintegrated slowly into the heaps of stone from which they had been built.

      Christopher liked the old village. When he had a free afternoon he would climb up there to spend an hour reading or sketching among the stones, with only the lizards and an occasional basking snake for company. Very few of the summer tourists ever bothered to make the hot scramble up there and for weeks at a time he was the only visitor. Now, as he smoked, he kept his eyes fixed on the ruins, or the view of them that his inner eye supplied. He felt an uneasiness at his back, coming off the water like a winter fog, and it was more comfortable to look up the hill at the old houses.

      When he had finished his cigarette he threw the butt over his shoulder into the sea. He played with the idea of smoking another, but he was cold and the invisible fog breathed around him. He scrambled to his feet instead and crunched up the shingle. He rented a room in the main street and his bed was waiting for him.

      It had been a long day, the end of a long season. He would stay on Halemni maybe another week, or two weeks, and then he would head north again for the winter.

       Three

      I am in Turkey, sitting on the sea coast and staring westwards.

      I have almost forgotten why I am here, if there ever was a particular reason for coming. It doesn’t matter anyway. One place is much like another for the time being.

      This is a skeleton of a hotel, pasted over with white concrete skin so that it looks smooth but brittle. There are big blind windows and flimsy balconies like pouches under a drunkard’s eyes.

      I sleep as much as I can, in my hotel bedroom, behind closed curtains. And when I can no longer sleep I sit on the balcony under the shade of a parasol. Even though it is late in the season I don’t like the sun to touch my skin and my pale eyes water in so much harsh white light. I keep my sunglasses in place and try to read, and the time slowly passes.

      I can’t pinpoint exactly when Dunollie Mansions stopped feeling like a refuge and became instead a place that I wanted to get away from. It was probably not very long after the dinner when Peter met Lisa Kirk for the first time.

      He was busy in the weeks immediately after that night, working on a job that demanded longer hours and even more concentration than usual. He stayed late at the office, and seemed tired and distracted when he did come home. I should have interpreted the signs at once and spoken out about them, but the potential for that kind of conversation seemed already lost. Instead I tried hard to be less demanding, as if that might win his approval again. I embarked on some redecoration in the flat, and discussed colours and finishes with the painters. I went out looking for fabrics and spent time putting together colour boards for Peter’s approval.

      ‘Very nice,’ he said, pressing the rim of his glasses against the bridge of his nose with the tip of his finger, an indication of stress that I had learned to recognise long ago.

      ‘You like the green, then?’

      ‘Yes, if you do.’

      I didn’t care about the green and I knew that he didn’t either.

      Once or twice I had a cup of tea upstairs with Lisa in her flat.

      There was no reason to refuse her invitations, nothing I could have identified except the thin squeak of hostility between us, and I was ready to think that that might be a product of my imagination, the murmur of my own madness. Peter apparently didn’t hear the sound, although he always had done so up until now and been able to take the right reassuring steps. He was too busy, or maybe he was simply tired of listening out for it.

      Lisa didn’t choose to come again to my flat, Peter’s and mine, although I always invited her. We went upstairs instead.

      Each time I saw her she seemed younger and warmer and more bursting with life. There were signs that she was making a home of Dunollie Mansions, but they were fairly limited ones – an armchair of steel and cowhide stood in the living room, with its paper and corrugated wrapping only partly removed; a patch of wall in the dark hallway had been experimentally striped with different paint colours.

      ‘What do you think?’ Lisa waved a hand as we passed on the way to the kitchen.