A Saint for the Summer

by Marjory McGinn

  Chapter 2

  Villa Anemos

  The front door opened again and the man in black reappeared, holding something in his hand. He seemed agitated, and started talking. It took me a few moments to work out he wasn’t speaking Greek, as I expected, but perfect English. Funny kind of Greek priest.

  “Gone already? I wanted to give the driver a tip,” he said, with a shrug.

  I stared at him with a rising sense of shock − and then relief.

  “Angus? …. Is that you?” I said in a small voice, like a plucked string.

  “Well who the bloody hell do you think it is? I’ve a few euros here for the driver but he’s bolted.”

  “You were in the house a long time.”

  “Couldn’t find my wallet. Oh, well, I bet you gave him a generous tip. Probably didn’t deserve it. He drove like a lunatic, I suppose, overtaking, talking on his mobile, yes?” he said.

  I nodded. “The taxi driver and I both thought you were a Greek priest. You’re certainly dressed like one,” I said, checking the outfit again, although from close up I could see it was an amalgam of black layers: a T-shirt, a long kind of waistcoat and baggy trousers.

  He stared at me wide-eyed and then chortled, throwing his head back as if he hadn’t had a good laugh for a while.

  “I don’t think anyone here would ever think of me as a Greek priest. Okay, it’s the hair perhaps,” he said, grabbing the ponytail briefly between his fingers.

  “Could be,” I said. The hair made him look more ageing rock star than Greek priest, though it was thick and healthy as it had always been, with just a smattering of grey.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said, with forced lightness. “I didn’t expect it, that’s all.”

  “I lost interest in getting it cut all the time. This is easier… Och, let’s not blether on about hairdos, Bronte. Come on in. You’ll be tired after the flight,” he said, picking up my suitcase and leading me inside.

  I followed him into a darkened room that smelt of coffee, herbs and something else I couldn’t place. He set the case down and gave me a hug. It was sudden and strong, as if to cover a feeling of awkwardness at meeting up after such a long absence. I caught the unidentified aroma once more, only this time it smelt like incense, which chimed strangely with my first impression of Angus. He stepped back and stared at me.

  “You’re looking great, Bronte, if a wee bit peely-wally though.” I smiled at his Scottish reference to my pale complexion.

  “Thanks, Angus.”

  I had called him Angus since he left the family home 10 years earlier. It was not just an act of defiance on my part but because in a sense he had become a stranger, someone outside of our lives. To his credit, he never complained about the moniker, or the rebuff.

  “I heard the church bell. Who’s the funeral for?” I asked.

  “An old guy in the village. He was 95. I planned to go to the service but it was later than expected. And you were due, so I decided to wait in for you. I’ll wander over to the kafeneio later, where Yiorgos’s family will be gathered, and offer my condolences.”

  I gave his casual black outfit another appraisal and wondered if this was normal funeral attire here, or just Angus’s take on formal clothing. He picked up my suitcase as if to take it somewhere, then put it down again. He seemed a bit nervous and he coughed, a sandpapery smoker’s cough.

  “Still smoking?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Won’t do your heart any good.”

  He frowned and didn’t answer. Despite the levity a few minutes earlier, I had a sudden sense of how this mission would play out, with certain antagonism. I was going to spend my weeks with a father I didn’t really know, who had probably gone slightly feral. A Greek mountain man.

  “Anyway, sit yourself down and relax. I’ll get you a cold drink. You look hot. I keep most of the shutters closed in the heat but I’ll open them later to get the afternoon breeze. Are you hungry? I’ve got some bread, feta cheese and olives.”

  “I could eat a bit, I suppose, if you are.”

  I wasn’t really hungry but I hoped that eating would give us both something else to concentrate on, apart from each other.

  “Would you like a beer?”

  I nodded.

  “Come and sit at the table and I’ll put the fan on for you. I never bother much, but you won’t like this heat. I know how the hot weather gets to you, pet.”

  The comment jarred on me, as if the past 10 years had never happened and I was nothing but a kid again, my parameters well-known. And the Scottish endearment ‘pet’ was something I would have to bat off into the undergrowth. But I was too tired for acrimony.

  He flicked a switch on a pedestal fan and a strong current of cool air moved around the room, dispersing the slightly fetid aroma of the old house.

  This part of the property was one long room, with a kitchen and dining table at one end, and the sitting room at the other, with a wood-burning stove. The room had a high pitched ceiling lined with long strips of bamboo, with thick, smoke-blackened crossbeams below. Cool in summer perhaps but probably cold and draughty in winter. Double doors, shuttered against the afternoon sun, led from the kitchen onto what I imagined was a balcony. In the corner, a spiral staircase led to a lower floor.

  In the sitting room, an old tartan rug – a nod to Scotland no doubt − covered the sofa. A coffee table was strewn with books and papers. There were heavy wooden bookcases, and on the walls hung prints with a Greek theme and several wooden icons of saints. The place had a shabby chic quality, more like a bachelor pad, and I had the impression that nothing much had been done to it for a few years. The inside could have done with a fresh coat of white paint.

  Angus put some cans of beer on the dining table and ferried over small plates of food. There were cubes of feta, black olives glimmering in an oily coating, and slices of cucumber and tomato.

  “The olives are mine from the trees below. I didn’t prepare them though, a neighbour does that. Och, life’s too short to pickle an olive!”

  I smiled. It was a Greek take perhaps on Gloria Steinem’s famous quip that ‘life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’. I couldn’t have agreed more, but it crossed my mind what Angus did with his time. I tried an olive. It was a bit salty and tart and I tried to bury the taste with a piece of bread that he’d cut from a rustic-looking loaf. The crust was rugged, earthy-tasting, and I feared for my dental work. I winced.

  He laughed. “Kali orexi, as they say here. Good appetite. But I can see you’re not enjoying the bread much. Never mind, you’ll get used to it. I buy it from the village bakery. Proper bread cooked in a wood-fired oven. Lasts for days.” I didn’t doubt it. This was a loaf that would survive a nuclear disaster.

  He drank his beer but ate little, apart from the bread, and I sensed that his even white teeth, one of his better features, hadn’t suffered at least from his Greek lifestyle or the volcanic loaves. He stopped chewing for a moment, a hunk of bread in his hand.

  “Thanks for coming here at short notice, pet. I know it can’t be easy for you. We haven’t exactly been close these past 10 years.”

  I frowned. It was a poor choice of words. The only reason ‘we’ hadn’t been close was because that’s what Angus had wanted. I had seen him three times in the past decade: once when I came to Greece with Shona, after he moved here, and twice in Scotland. It was obvious he hated going back there now. He said he couldn’t abide the cold and damp, the smirring rain and glum faces. But the main reason was that there was nothing there for him any more.

  I picked at the cheese and salad and drank some beer. It made me feel more relaxed. I watched him while he drank from his can. He looked a lot older, of course, and different, with the shoulder-length hair tied back, but good for a man of 71. He was lined about the eyes but deeply suntanned and fit-looking, despite the health problems and a bit of weight round his middle.

  “What’s wrong with your heart exactly?”


  “I’m not sure yet. I get breathless when I’m out walking. You can see how hilly it is round here. Once I had some chest pains. The landlord is a doctor. I called him and he told me to go to A&E at Kalamata Hospital. They gave me one of those bike stress tests and everything looked normal. I was told all the usual things: no booze, no cigarettes. The landlord said the tests they do here aren’t conclusive. You can get false negatives, or some such thing, and that I may have narrowed arteries. He said I need to see a cardiologist to arrange more tests, or else I’ll end up having a heart attack.”

  “Why haven’t you then?”

  “Had a heart attack?” he asked, with a sardonic smile, as if I’d just made a kind of Freudian slip.

  I shook my head. “You know what I meant. Why haven’t you seen a cardiologist?”

  He sighed and ripped off another piece of bread, chewing it quickly and washing it down with beer.

  “It’s a faff here, medical stuff. The Greek health system is going down the pan in the crisis. There are only a couple of cardio guys for this region and a long wait to see them. Even if I could see one straight away by paying privately I’d have to go to Athens for the tests. They don’t have heart scanners in Kalamata. But I don’t want to bore you with my health problems right now.”

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

  He shifted on the hard wooden chair and toyed with his ponytail. I regretted the rancour that kept surfacing, despite my best intentions. I could see now how much I had bottled up over the years without realising it. Being face to face with Angus in this remote location was harder than I’d imagined.

  “Look, pet. There’s plenty of time to talk about my old ticker and what I need to do about it …”

  “But in your letter you made it sound like you were on a bit of a knife-edge with your health.”

  “Did I?” he said, looking dubious.

  “Well, yes. Like I said before, that’s why I’m here, right?”

  “Okay. Clearly I’m not at death’s door just yet and there’s time enough to talk about the whole thing,” he said, with a conciliatory smile. He sipped his beer.

  We lapsed into silence. Maybe it was just fatigue but I was starting to feel confused about why the hell I was here. Angus had always been very independent, and fairly tough. A man doesn’t decide to walk out on his marriage and his old life to resettle in a foreign country unless he has some inner resolve. So surely he didn’t need me to fly out from Scotland just to hold his hand at the doctor’s? He could have dealt with this himself or with one of the expat friends he was bound to have by now. Or perhaps the nonchalance was just a cover for his anxiety.

  “Anyway, you can ask the doctor about it all when he comes here tomorrow to collect the rent. He speaks very good English.”

  Angus went over to the kitchen and opened a white cardboard box set on one of the work benches. He took out two large slices of a sticky-looking confection he described as honey cake and brought them over on small plates. They had the dense syrupy look of Greek cakes that I never liked all that much, but I cut off a sliver to please him. It was cloyingly sweet.

  “Thekla, the woman who runs the bakery, makes sweets as well. Honey cake is her best, though on the contrary she’s quite a nippy character … you’ll see.” I doubted I’d have the time to develop an acquaintance with a woman who could knock out your gnashers and ignite your blood sugar in one hit.

  He polished off his honey slice in no time and I could see how his waistline had expanded and his arteries had log-jammed.

  “How long have you been renting this place?”

  “Five months. It’s a good house but a bit cold in the winter, I imagine. The landlord offered to fix the place up a bit but I can’t be bothered with all the faff and, really, it needs a total renovation, not just cosmetic stuff. But it suits me and it’s cheap. And I like this village. It has a different vibe to the coastal settlements.”

  “Why did you never buy anything here before the crisis? Small houses must have been cheap even then, and you had your redundancy money.”

  “I was having too nice a time to worry about real estate and I didn’t know how long I’d stay. Now it’s too late. Only a fool with deep pockets would buy a property in Greece.”

  “What’s your landlord like?”

  He gave me a long, searching look. “I can see why you’re a journalist, pet. You like asking questions. But then you always did. You were like this as a kid, always asking stuff. Your grandmother used to say you asked so many questions, you’d spear the arse out of a donkey. Remember?” he said, with a big belly laugh.

  I chuckled as well. “I do, yes.” I didn’t know if it was a Scottish expression or just my maternal grandmother’s own eccentric saying, of which she had many. Catriona was from the Isle of Mull and despite having had a remote existence she had a spirited slant on life and a great sense of humour.

  “Okay, forgive the inquisition. Just curious,” I said. I figured I was talking out of nerves or tiredness.

  “Well, yeah. It must be a bit bewildering for you.”

  I nodded.

  “The landlord’s a decent guy. He’s got the big villa next door, for weekends. Nice pool too. Always telling me to use it. I have a key to the door into the back garden and I cast an eye over the place for him when he’s not there. But swimming in the landlord’s pool seems a bit naff to me. His name is Leonidas Papachristou, by the way, and he’s a good-looking guy. I imagine his bedside manner’s as sweet as this honey cake,” he said.

  He drank some more beer, then added, “I saw your eyebrow twitch, by the way, with interest.”

  “For the doctor?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t be daft,” I said, smoothing down the eyebrow with a honeyed finger. “I’m not here for a holiday romance, remember?” He said nothing, licking syrup from the corners of his mouth. “And I’m definitely not interested in Greek men either. Let’s get that straight. Or Greece, for that matter. I’m definitely not you!”

  “Oh! That must be a consolation for you anyway, to be anything but me,” he said sarcastically.

  “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” I said, lying.

  “Look … You’ll feel different about Greece, if not me, in a few weeks, or even days.”

  “Even if I fell in love with the place, I’ve still got to leave in three weeks, all going well. That was the deal.”

  “Okay. No bother,” he said, with a Greek-style shrug of resignation. “In the meantime, make yourself at home, Bronte. Have a siesta if you like. The bathroom’s downstairs beside my bedroom. I’ve given you the top bedroom up here. You get a nice view over the olive groves. I’ll be out for an hour or so at the kafeneio.”

  I felt my shoulders suddenly relax. I was eager to have some quiet time alone. He carried my suitcase into the bedroom, through a side door off the sitting room, which I hadn’t noticed when I arrived. Then he went downstairs to get ready to go out. My room was long and narrow and fairly monastic, with a single bed on the far wall, a wardrobe and an old wooden chest of drawers on the main wall opposite the balcony doors. On top was a vase of fresh wild flowers, a curiously feminine touch.

  I opened the balcony doors and unhooked the blue shutters, pushing them wide. As I stepped out, a wave of heat engulfed me. The sun was beating down on the balcony. The space was tiny, just big enough for the rush-seated chair and small metal table. An intimate space for one, or two at a crush. I liked it. As the house was built on a gentle slope it seemed higher here than it had from the road and the view was unexpectedly grand, looking straight over the ruffled heads of hundreds of olive trees towards Kalamata. To the right was a mountain with a rounded peak and a zigzag road carved onto the face of it, a small village clinging limpet-like to its upper reaches.

  I sat down briefly, becalmed by the heat. Yet nothing was tranquil about the scene. It buzzed and boiled with noise: the rasping of cicadas, the melodic tolling of goat bells, striking different notes. I
silently claimed this tiny patch of balcony as my solitary retreat while I was in Greece. I came back inside, closing the shutters again.

  I opened my handbag to fetch the letter my mum, Marcella, had scrawled quickly to Angus before I left. It was no doubt to wish him a good recovery from his health issue. It showed her forgiving nature. As I hunted about for the letter, my fingers closed over something unexpected. I pulled it out and held it for a moment. It was a sweet image of a saintly character with a boyish face. He was on a russet-coloured horse, a dark cape flying out behind his shoulders. The horse was rearing up and the saint was aiming a long spear at a sword-wielding soldier lying on the ground.

  How the hell did this get here? I thought. But the plastic frame was familiar enough, one of twelve. I laughed, remembering the close call on the airport road; the sudden braking and the jiggling of saints on the dashboard. One must have fallen off and into my open bag. I hadn’t noticed. I took it into the sitting room with the letter. Angus was ready to leave. He looked smart now: a blue shirt tucked into black trousers and a black jacket. Less ecclesiastical, at any rate. I held up the image of the man and his horse.

  “I seem to have had a saint in my handbag,” I said. I explained the curious décor of my taxi from Kalamata. His eyes wrinkled at the corners with amusement as he examined the picture.

  “Who’s the guy on the horse – Saint George?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s Ayios Dimitrios, or Saint Dimitrios.”

  I was impressed. “I didn’t think you’d be up on Greek saints.”

  “I’m not acquainted with all of them, but I know this one. He was a crusading saint − from the 4th century AD, I think − who got imprisoned and tortured for encouraging the citizens of Thessaloniki to rise up against the pagan teachings of its Romans conquerors. More importantly, there’s an expression used in Greece at the end of October during this saint’s feast day when he is celebrated. When the weather stays fine and hot, it’s called The Little Summer of Saint Dimitrios, like an Indian summer. It’s a lovely time of year − my favourite.”