A Saint for the Summer

by Marjory McGinn

  “Thank you,” I said. “And for today.”

  “You are welcome, but I can’t promise you will find what you are looking for.”

  Pavlos got up, stacked the tray and went inside. Leonidas followed him. We could hear them having a vigorous conversation inside. Angus cocked his head slightly.

  “What are they saying?” I asked.

  He held up his hand to silence me. His face was puckered with concentration. Then he bent forward and whispered, “I didn’t get it all, but I think they’re talking about the shooting up on the ridge. I just heard the words ‘German’, ‘British soldier’. It all sounded a bit heated … it makes me think that …” Angus stopped mid-sentence when he heard footsteps at the door of the pantopoleio. It was Leonidas coming back. He had settled the bill and Angus thanked him and asked him casually what he and Pavlos had been discussing inside, as it had sounded quite animated.

  “Oh, nothing, just about the village, how the population here has sadly diminished and how nice it is on the feast day of Ayios Dimitrios, when we see a few more people in the village.”

  “I see,” said Angus.

  “Do you want to see the church of Ayios Dimitrios while we’re here?”

  “Yes, why not,” I said, feeling more optimistic about our mission now and the possibility of meeting Dimitris, the one person who could shed light on the identity of the soldier. If his family had hidden him for several weeks, then Dimitris had to know something.

  Leonidas led us to the church on a pathway that cut through from the plateia to the edge of the large church with the blue dome that we had seen from the roadway on our first trip. Angus took my arm as we walked along. He whispered in my ear, “I don’t think they were talking about the village population back there. It was about the war. We’ll talk later …”

  The church was set in its own grounds, with a low stone wall around it. I could see the area where the long table had been laid out in the photo Pavlos had given us. Around the periphery of the churchyard were tall trees, cypresses and an orange and pomegranate tree. On the other side of the church was a raised stone wall and spring water spout. The village was blessed with water spouts, it seemed. Behind the church was a graveyard. The graves were ornate, with marble and glass mounts filled with icons and photos. We wandered around. Leonidas took us to one corner of the cemetery, where some of his own family were buried. The graveyard was neat and orderly but rather forlorn because the dead now outnumbered the whole living population of the village at any time.

  “Is the church open?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. It isn’t used much now and the papas who keeps the key lives in Kalamata,” said Leonidas.

  On the drive back to Marathousa, Angus was in high spirits, chatting about this stroke of luck, but Leonidas was quiet, keeping his attention on the road perhaps. I kept going through things in my mind that Pavlos had said, and I wondered why he hadn’t bothered to mention the feast day for Saint Dimitrios the first time we met him, suggesting that we might want to come as a way of making contact with the older villagers. Or did he think that as foreigners we would have no interest in trekking up to Platanos for a religious event? The upcoming gathering was opportune, but when I calculated how much time I had left of my holiday, something occurred to me.

  “I won’t be here on October 26,” I said.

  Angus half-turned in his seat. “Ach, Bronte, you’re not serious?”

  “I am. My boss gave me three more weeks, remember, but they run out just before the 26th.”

  Leonidas glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. “You will have to try to stay longer, Bronte. You cannot miss this event,” he said.

  “Jesus, yes! Tell that numpty boss you must have more time,” said Angus.

  “Do you know how lucky I was to get six weeks here. He won’t agree to more time, I know him,” I replied.

  Angus grabbed his ponytail, as he did in times of delight or frustration, and gave it a twist.

  “You can manage without me. Leonidas will help you,” I said, watching his face in the mirror. He grimaced. Already things were going pear-shaped. “Okay. I will write to Crayton today and ask for more time, but it’s not going to work, I tell you.”

  When we got back to the village, Leonidas suggested we might all like to go out for lunch down by the sea, as he was free for the day. Angus declined, saying he had go into Kalamata. I gave him a searching look.

  “I have something organised, Bronte,” he said with a shrug from the front seat.

  Leonidas had stopped the car outside his house and swivelled round in his seat.

  “Would you like to accompany me for lunch, Bronte? I know some nice places by the sea.”

  It would have been churlish to decline lunch when we had already messed around with his touring plan. The idea had sudden appeal, anyway, because spending the afternoon with Leonidas would be better than spending it alone in the house.

  “Okay, that would be nice, thanks. I’d like to get changed for lunch, if you don’t mind, so I’ll meet you back at the car in 20 minutes.”

  “Excellent. And we can swim later, if you like. Your father tells me you like to swim.”

  Angus cleared his throat and jumped quickly out of the car. Ah well, I had bought the new swimming costume for just such a baptism.

  When Angus and I got in the front door, I rushed about, trying to get ready. I was hot and dusty after the trek and wanted to shower and change. I grabbed Angus before he disappeared.

  “What’s happening in Kalamata? A date with Polly?” I asked.

  “Och, you don’t want the ageing old dad hanging about. You’ll have more fun on your own.”

  “You’re winding me up again, aren’t you? And you didn’t answer my question,” I said firmly.

  “Is this how you carry on with difficult interviewees?”

  “I do worse than that. I cut off their ponytails,” I said, grabbing his hair, and tugging it. “Well?”

  “What was the question again?”

  “You know damn well!”

  “Does it bother you if I see Polly?”

  “No, it doesn’t. It bothers me that you can’t just admit you’ve got something going on.”

  “That’s because we don’t. I told you that. And by the way, you’ve just wasted five minutes blethering to me when you should be getting ready, right?”

  I let it go. I showered and went to the bedroom to change for lunch, but not before I had retrieved the photo from my bag, the one of Leonidas at the yiorti. I leaned it against the picture of Kieran. The top of the chest of drawers was slowly gaining more characters. I got changed into the swimming costume, with the sundress fitting snugly over the top, and matched it with the strappy sandals. No point in wasting an expensive outfit, even if I looked a bit too clean and crisp. What the hell! I brushed my hair and applied some subtle make-up and wondered why I was suddenly faffing over lunch with a man I would probably never see again in less than three weeks’ time.

  Angus was standing in the sitting room when I left the bedroom and gave me an appraising look.

  “You look nice!”

  I held up my finger. “Don’t!”

  “I mean it. You look lovely, Bronte. Beautiful, actually.” He couldn’t resist a wink.

  “One night, old man, I will sneak into your bedroom and cut it off. Just watch yourself.” I laughed.

  “I hope that was the ponytail you were referring to.”

  I slammed the door behind me.

  Chapter 18

  That minx Medusa!

  Despite having spent the whole morning with Leonidas, as we drove together to the sea I felt strangely on edge. I hadn’t been on any kind of ‘date’, if you could even call it that, since Rory. Now I was lunching with a Greek god, blessed by the Hippocratic Oath, whereas most of the men I’d ever been out with had been showered with the Hypocritical version.

  We went to a small fishing village called Kitries at the end of the sea road heading south, at the f
oot of a wooded cape which formed a natural barrier between here and the next few villages further down the coast. The name gave me a jolt. It was the village that Angus had once told me he thought Kieran and the other soldiers in the RASC had been heading for to find a boat. They would have set out on the same road from Kalamata, which hugged the coastline, though it was a rougher kind of road back then.

  At the turn-off from Marathousa, when I looked back, I could see some of the distant peaks of the mountains to the east and the deep Rindomo gorge cleaving the land down to the sea. From here on the coast, it wasn’t hard to imagine how a long, arduous trek would end up at the kalderimi Angus and I had checked out. For a moment, I felt I was stepping into Kieran’s shoes, but the scenes of summer bathers on the long beach to the right, the busy cafes and tavernas, belied the terror of those war days.

  Kitries had a small harbour crammed with boats and several tavernas at the waterside. We took a table in the Delfini taverna, with the crystal water of the gulf lapping gently just a foot in front of us. In the distance, the long Messinian peninsula shimmered in a blue-grey haze. It was quiet here, with only one large table of Greeks at a respectable distance. Leonidas ordered a selection of seafood and a bottle of white wine from Santorini.

  “You look very lovely, Bronte. The colours of your outfit suit you, may I say.” Well, the shopping trip with Polly hadn’t been in vain then.

  It was a leisurely lunch, and while we ate we talked about Platanos and about Leonidas’s own family, who had lived there since the early 19th century. He told me that his forebears on his mother’s side had come from further down the Mani and were fugitives to Platanos after fighting against the incursions of the Turks. On his father’s side, the family had originally come from Sparta, hence his name, Leonidas.

  “My grandfather also had land in Marathousa with olive trees, and built what is now Villa Anemos. He spent summers in Platanos and every winter he came down to Marathousa to harvest the olives, and to escape the harsh mountain winters, as many people did. All the family would move down and the children would go to different schools for winter. In the spring they all moved back up again. As my grandfather got older, this life became more arduous and one day he moved down to Marathousa for good. He was a hard worker and shrewd. When he had some money saved, he bought up small parcels of land in and around Marathousa, and then passed them to my father,” said Leonidas.

  “My father built the original house that is now mine. He also built some apartments near the beach to rent out to tourists and he made a good business out of that, and still does. Good enough to send me and my brother to universities in Athens. My brother is an accountant and lives in Kalamata now. My father lives in Kalamata too, but he still likes to harvest his own olives every year, with help, of course. He has about 700 trees. All the village people here are tough and resourceful. It’s how they have survived the Turks, the Germans, and now the economic crisis. They never do just one thing,” he added with a laugh.

  “I understand now how difficult life must have been in the past, but I get a sense that it was also more satisfying, too,” I said.

  “Perhaps. You hear a lot of Greeks now who will say that they used to be happier, even before we joined the EU and things improved financially. We were happier people because we were more in charge of our lives and they were less complicated.”

  He took off his sunglasses and wiped them with a serviette. The sun was on his face. His eyes were remarkable, so dark they were almost impenetrable. Yet today there was something more about him, a thoughtfulness in his expression.

  “Tell me, what do you think about Dimitris Maneas? Do you think he will show up this year?” I asked.

  “Bronte, I just don’t know. I am very sad about the story of the Germans shooting the soldier. More sad if it was actually your grandfather. How old was he?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Too young. And he died after trying to defend us.”

  “I would be devastated to think of Kieran dying up in Platanos the way he did, if it really was him, but it would bring us all closure. My father doesn’t talk about it much, but he has been haunted by his father’s death. After he enlisted, I don’t believe Kieran ever received his wife Lily’s letter to say she was pregnant, so he never knew he had a son. Angus feels his loss deeply, I think.”

  He held my gaze long enough for me to feel a jolt of discomfort and then he reached over and squeezed the back of my hand. It reminded me of the day I interviewed him at his house. This time the gesture felt more than avuncular.

  “Well, all the more reason, Bronte, why you must be here for the yiorti of Ayios Dimitrios.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know if I can pull that off.”

  “You must.”

  “If only life were that easy.”

  “It can be. You are young. You are free. It depends how much you want something.”

  “Sadly, it’s not up to me at all. I’m sure my boss on the paper will knock back my latest request to stay longer. He wasn’t happy the last time.” Leonidas looked uncomprehending. “It seems harsh, I know, when I’m here to help my father, but it’s one of the things you will soon discover about working in Britain, if you go … too many rules and regulations, too much interference, and we have austerity too.”

  “Yes but perhaps we have gone to the other extreme in Greece, with a lack of organisation and everyone doing just what they want. And when we have new regulations now, often they make no sense at all. Crazy taxes come and go constantly, more new forms to fill, new anxieties. Life may be more straightforward in Britain. Phaedra always gives a good account of life there.”

  I stared at him, smiling. “I have a feeling you’ve made your mind up finally to go to England, yes?” I’ve got you this time, I thought.

  He did that Greek thing then: the raising of the brows, eyes narrowed, the tiny tilt of the chin, the ‘no-comment’ thing. I actually laughed, more out of frustration. It was absolutely maddening, and so effective. It was meant to totally disarm the opponent. Or was it a warning shot across the bows. ‘Go no further!’ it seemed to say.

  “I saw Myrto the other day, and was sad to learn that her stepson Hector has now put the land up for sale, with an agent,” I said.

  “Yes, I have heard this too,” he said.

  “Is there no-one in the village who could perhaps talk Hector out of selling the land? Or maybe someone in the village who could buy it from him?”

  “No-one has money to buy land now. And Hector is obviously desperate for funds.”

  “But to lose the trees, her income!”

  “Bronte, it is so very kind of you to be touched by our village and the people suffering in the crisis, but you can’t become too involved. It will drive you mad and will spoil your time with your father. Angus needs you right now,” he said, with a hint of paternalism.

  “Yes, I do realise that,” I said, a little sharply. It was nice he worried so much about Angus, but I wondered what he would have said if he knew the whole truth about my father leaving the family for his mid-life odyssey and that I was already putting my own life on hold to help him out.

  Leonidas sensed that the mood of our lunch was turning. He quickly summoned the waiter for the bill. After he settled it, he gathered up his mobile and his keys.

  “There are some lovely coves nearby. Shall we go for a swim?”

  A few minutes’ drive up the coast, he stopped the car at a cove with a pebbly beach, where the water was calm and enticing, protected by two rocky arms that seemed to hold it in a steady embrace. We fetched our beach bags from the car and clambered down a rocky path to the empty beach. We spread out our towels and got ready to swim. I wished I had been browner when I peeled off my sundress and saw pale Celtic legs barely air-kissed by the sun.

  “I like your costume very much. It is very elegant. You look like … a Hollywood starlet,” he said, his eyes lingering over the halter top of the one-piece. I burst out laughing. No-one had ever put me and Hollyw
ood together in one sentence.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No. And thanks for the compliment.”

  The water felt cool and silky as we dived in. He was a good swimmer and did a fast freestyle away from the shore before turning and swimming back towards me.

  “Thank you so much for suggesting this,” I said, as the slightly spiky conclusion to our lunch floated off. It was glorious to bob about in this secluded cove, with its backdrop of mountains and olive groves under an indelibly blue sky. I knew just how lucky I was at that moment and it felt good.

  “I’ll race you to that rock over there,” he said, pointing to a protruding wedge of rock on one of the arms of the cove. We went into a fast freestyle but I knew I was no match for him. He was a powerful swimmer and he easily made it before me. He laughed as I got there and I clung onto the side of the rock to catch my breath, like a breathless limpet. We hovered around a while longer in the deep water, talking about nothing in particular. Occasionally, when a wave rippled through the cove, our arms and legs brushed against each other. Or so I imagined.

  Then I felt a nip on my left arm. I let out a squeal. “Something stung me, I think.”

  He came closer and inspected my upper arm, holding it slightly out of the water.

  “I can’t see anything much. It was perhaps a small jellyfish. Nothing serious, I think. Come on, let’s swim back to the beach.”

  We did an easy swim back to the shoreline. He examined my arm again. I felt rather silly making a fuss over such a small thing, a jellyfish, even though it was still stinging quite a bit.

  “There’s a small red mark. It will be fine in a moment, I think. This is the time of year, I am afraid, for jellyfish and perhaps a bigger one. We call it the medusa in Greek. It can give a very nasty sting.”

  “You’ve named a jellyfish after the mythical Greek character Medusa?”

  “Yes, it’s very expressive, is it not? They have long tentacles, like Medusa’s hair snakes.”