The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas

held him on her lap and stroked his hair, murmuring a stream of Greek baby talk. It wasn’t particularly hot now that it was dark, but the thundery air was oppressive. Olivia moved between the sink and the table, stepping around the chair where Meroula sat. She knew that her mother-in-law was watching her over the child’s head and she tried to shake off both the awareness and the irritation that went with it. She didn’t want Meroula sitting here in her kitchen. The older woman judged the way that Olivia ran her household and cared for her children, and always found the methods deficient, pursing her mouth so the creases ran out from it like slanting chisel marks. Olivia had no choice in the matter, however. Meroula took it as a Greek mother’s right to place herself at the centre of her son’s household and Xan tacitly concurred.

      ‘When I was a little girl, Granny used to put Max and me to bed every night at seven o’clock,’ Olivia said, although no one was listening.

      They shared a room, when they were very small, just as Georgi and Theo did now. Olivia would lie under the blankets and make up stories about runaway princesses and jungles and lost treasure. The stories had more exotic ingredients than narrative drive, she remembered. She had been very good at making up the cast list but rarely got beyond it into any action. Even so, Max would lie with his thumb in his mouth, watching her with enthralled eyes as she rambled on. She would get carried away with descriptions of the princess’s golden hair and long pink dresses, and when she finally looked again to see how riveted he was, he would have fallen into sleep as suddenly as if he had dropped down a well. In the morning he would apparently still be lying in the same position, thumb in his mouth. Time to get up, Olivia would tell him, and he would open his eyes immediately, ready to scramble up and do what she told him in their games.

      She could remember exactly how the house felt on those early evenings and mornings. It was quiet, as if nothing would ever change there, and yet there was an underlying sense that with just a single flick everything could alter frighteningly for ever.

      ‘I’m too hot,’ Theo repeated.

      ‘He has a fever,’ Meroula said to her.

      ‘Let him get down and go and lie down in his own bed.’

      ‘On his own, the poor child?’

      Meroula wore a wide grey skirt with folds that allowed her to sit with her legs planted apart. She had thick lisle stockings, the colour of dried clay, and a dark cardigan with lapels and military buttons that stretched across her chest. She didn’t always wear the same clothes, but she gave the impression that this was her unvarying uniform.

      ‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ Georgi said from the other side of the table, without looking up from his drawing. ‘I want to see Pappy when he comes in.’

      ‘Of course he does,’ Meroula said triumphantly.

      Olivia was preparing squid for Xan’s evening meal, slicing off the heads and pulling out the entrails and the ink sac, and then dropping the torsos into a dish of oil and tomato juice. Squid stuffed with rice and onions was one of Xan’s favourite dinners. The boys had already eaten their sausages and beans.

      ‘Mother? You will stay and have some food with us?’

      Meroula still lived in the house where her husband had died not long after Theo’s birth. But in the winter, when there were no guests and tourists to keep her away, she spent plenty of time with her son and his family. She inclined her head now, her expression managing to convey that this would be a duty rather than a pleasure, but still a duty that she intended to perform.

      ‘That’s good,’ Olivia said.

      From the window over the sink she could see a corner of the square and the Taverna Irini. The owners had retreated to Rhodes for the winter; the windows of the bar were lined on the inside with newspaper, already yellowing, and the door was padlocked. The islanders preferred to use the place on the harbour.

      The only light showing was in a blue wooden kiosk next to the taverna. Inside his square metre of shelter, stacked with cigarettes and chewing gum and lottery tickets, Manolis was dozing with his cheek on his folded arms on top of a pile of photo magazines. Manolis had a tiny head and a huge body, invariably encased in the same pair of greasy trousers that revealed a slice of woollen underclothing through the fly opening. Georgi said that his head wasn’t big enough to hold a proper brain and it was true that Manolis was simple. But he was able to sell cigarettes and calculate the right change from a thousand-drachma note, and he kept the kiosk open all hours of the day and half of the night, summer and winter, because the only other place he had to go was a curtained alcove in his mother’s tiny house right over the harbour. Sometimes Manolis sat in the sun on a bench near his kiosk, but the approach of a customer sent him rolling back into the blue box. As Olivia watched now, his head bobbed up.

      The customer was Xan. He pointed to something, pocketed what Manolis gave him, handed over money in exchange.

      Olivia was smiling, her hands unfurling under the dirty sink water.

      ‘Pappy’s coming.’

      Theo sprang out of Meroula’s arms and Georgi threw his crayon aside.

      ‘Pappy!’

      Meroula sat upright and smoothed her grey skirt across her lap, as if she was about to see her lover. Olivia had noticed this often enough before and it both irritated and touched her. Xan was everything to his mother; there was no corner of her life that he did not irradiate.

      Xan said when she tried to talk to him about it, ‘It’s the way it is, it’s not unusual. But you are the one I am married to.’

      She would put her hands on either side of his face and kiss him on the mouth.

      ‘Don’t you forget it.’

      He came in, bulky and smelling of smoke and bar. His arms were held stiffly in front of him with the fists clenched so he marched like a robot. The boys ran at him and battered themselves against his legs.

      ‘Left or right?’ Xan demanded.

      ‘Left,’ Theo yelled and Georgi countered, ‘Right.’

      Theo amended his choice at once. ‘Right!’

      Ignoring their responses, Xan dropped a plastic bubble into each pair of cupped hands. Inside were a block of bright pink bubblegum and a plastic toy that demanded construction from four puzzle pieces. The boys stuck the gum into their mouths and dropped to their knees to put the toys together. Georgi’s was a yellow car, Theo’s a red man.

      The first time she saw him, Olivia remembered, Xan had been handing out sweets to Bangkok street children with just the same robot movements. The children were milling around his knees, pushing and shouting for his attention, and his arms were outstretched above a thicket of grasping fingers. It was the end of the monsoon and the swollen, khaki-coloured river behind them carried a mat of floating weeds and branches. Olivia lifted her old Leica to frame the shot and Xan turned to look straight into the lens, through the tunnel of her eye and into her head. He emptied his bag of sweets into the waiting hands and came to her.

      ‘It’s a straight trade,’ he said and took an Instamatic out of the pocket in his shirt. He held it horizontally and made as if to take the picture.

      ‘If I were you,’ Olivia pointed out, I’d frame it vertically.’ He did as she suggested and clicked the shutter. They were standing in a sea of children now, all clamouring for more presents.

      ‘Nice. Thanks. You know about photography, do you?’

      ‘It’s my job. I sell my photographs.’

      ‘Is that so? You want to come for a beer?’

      That was how she lived, in those days. She took flights, she drifted through foreign cities and rode buses up remote mountain passes. She took pictures in Soweto and Havana and Bogotá, and on Caribbean beaches and in the canyons of midtown Manhattan. Some of these she sold, to picture libraries and agencies and magazines. She owned little more than she could carry, and the tide of travellers and backpackers that flowed around the world was the current