by Sara Alexi
'It was a holiday home. I didn't see much of them.' Poppy shuffles a little and winces in pain.
'Oh, how exciting!' Marina is enjoying herself.
'Well, at the beginning it was an easy job, dusting and cleaning and airing the house when the old couple were due to visit. It was like playing house but with a grander house than I could ever have expected to live in. Mostly they just wanted to know that there was someone there to keep an eye on it when they were away. I suppose they had plenty of money.'
Marina makes encouraging noises and Poppy continues.
'With the owners living abroad it felt like the house was mine in those early days. There was a rumour that someone had died there a long time ago and that the house was cursed or something, but I found it a happy place. Only a foreigner would touch it, the islanders said, and this couple had bought it and restored it …'
'And all that time you were unchaperoned?' Marina interrupts. 'Did you meet anyone?'
Poppy gives Marina a stern look, refusing to rise to the bait.
'I met a lot of people, she says tersely. ‘There were the people who worked in the shops where I did the shopping. And in the offices where the bills were paid, and there was the woman in the post office where I would go to pick up the letters. Sometimes there were bills, and sometimes the owners would write to me to let me know that I should get the house ready for either them or their friends. Is that what you mean, Marina?' There is a twinkle in Poppy's eye.
'No, it is not, and you know it. Did you meet any nice boys?' Marina's voice is that of a schoolgirl, all giggly and high-pitched. Poppy seems to find this amusing and Juliet cannot help but smile at their teasing.
'Well, there was a farmer who was about a hundred, who had the olive grove behind the house.'
'Well, that’s no good!'
'And he had a boy working for him who I recognised somehow, and when I asked it turned out he was the old man's nephew, visiting from Saros town, so I suppose that was how I knew his face. I saw him in the olive grove on Orino a few times, at Easter, and in the summer, that sort of thing. He was nice.'
'Ah, now that’s more like it. So come on, what was his name and what happened?' Marina settles herself as if ready for all the details. Stella shakes her head and sucks noisily on her straw.
'You know, he was a sweet boy, and I’ve tried to recall his name now and then over the years, but I honestly cannot remember what it was. I cannot remember half the things I used to know …. But in terms of what you are talking about, Marina, nothing happened.'
'What do you mean, in terms of what I am talking about? What are you saying, Poppy!' Marina injects a shocked tone into her voice. Poppy yawns.
'Are you all right, Poppy?’ Stella asks gently. ‘You must be tired, is my guess. A shock like you’ve had can leave you feeling exhausted for days.'
'Yes, we must be tiring you, Poppy,’ Juliet agrees. ‘Do you need to rest?'
'Maybe I do.' The old lady shuffles her weight under the sheets. Her hair is sticking to the cotton pillow around her head and Juliet realises that before long she will have to find some way to help Poppy wash it. The list of ways in which having her here will take Juliet’s time and attention away from her work is growing and growing and, well, to be candid, it is going to scupper the gentle routine she has established. It’s been a while since she has had to think of anyone else’s needs on a daily basis.
‘Well, I suppose I’d better get back to the grill,' Stella says, standing. 'Mitsos will be wondering where I am. Can I bring you anything?' she asks the patient.
'Maybe I'll send Miltos down for chicken and chips later, to save poor Juliet here having to cook,' Poppy says. Juliet looks up at the mention of her name. She had made no plans to cook – bread and yoghurt would have been the most she would have done for an evening meal; she knows it’s lazy, but in this heat she has little appetite. She has not given a thought to what Poppy will eat.
'I'll send Mitsos with some later,' Stella says. 'Come on, Marina, let poor Poppy rest. You can interrogate her again tomorrow.' With which, Stella puts her arm under Marina's and tugs at her.
'I am not interrogating her, I am just expressing a healthy interest in my friend’s well-being,' Marina insists, but she looks at Poppy as if to check that she has not offended her.
'Get out of here, you two,' Poppy jests, and Marina pats her friend’s hand before she leaves. As they slip out of the bedroom door, Poppy calls Juliet back and Marina and Stella are left to find their own way out.
'Everything all right, Poppy?' Juliet asks.
'Yes, fine. I am strangely tired, though.'
'I’m not sure it is strange. You did have a shock and your body is working hard to help you recover. All those broken bits need energy to mend.'
'Perhaps.' Poppy seems distracted.
'What is it?' Juliet can sense there is something else.
'I just wondered what happened to my clothes.' Poppy pinches and lifts the sleeve of her nightgown as if to say 'this is not mine.'
'The ones you had on at the time of the accident are here.' Juliet picks up a plastic bag from beside the chest. 'I was going to ask you about them. Shall I wash them?'
Poppy holds out her hand for the bag, pulls out the clothes and recovers from the pocket of her skirt a rather crumpled-looking letter.
Chapter 11
Poppy smooths the letter flat on the bedcovers with her twisted, knobbly fingers.
The atmosphere in the bedroom is calm once the women – Marina in particular – have gone, and Juliet tries to read Poppy’s face for clues about how the visit has left her feeling, but without being obvious. It’s hard to tell what effect Marina’s teasing has had on the patient, and if it has left Poppy feeling tired, as it well might, perhaps what she needs now is to take a nap.
Juliet gathers up the glasses from the bedside table and the windowsill. ‘Shall I leave you to rest, then?’ she says, making her way towards the door.
But Poppy looks up and pats the bed. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Stay for a minute.’
Juliet sets the glasses down again and sits on the chair, and Poppy gestures for her to come closer.
Juliet brings the chair right up to the bedside, closer than she would consider ‘normal’. Poppy seems to want to confide in her, or perhaps she does not want to be overheard. But there is also something premeditated in the way she directs Juliet to place the chair just so, as if she has already thought the whole moment through in her mind and now she is re-enacting it. Juliet gets the feeling she is about to be invited into Poppy’s confidence, that the ‘English lessons’ Poppy requested are about to commence. For a while, though, Poppy says nothing. She fiddles with the sheets, and her hand caresses the letter. Juliet has begun to wonder if she has forgotten what she was going to say when suddenly she speaks.
'It was not the boy in the orchard Marina should have asked me about.'
Juliet, unsure what it is that Poppy needs, says nothing, but her curiosity is aroused.
'He was nice.' Poppy’s eyes become glassy, as if she is focusing on something in the far distance. 'Really nice, in fact, and there is no doubt we had an attraction, but I was very young then.'
Juliet finds herself nodding her head. Poppy’s words remind her of herself and how young and foolish she had been when she met Mick.
'I thought you would understand,' Poppy says, and Juliet is now sure that this is the subject Poppy wanted to talk about in her English lessons. 'Yes, I was young and the old people I worked for were – well, as I say, old. No one told me, you know. No letter, nothing. Then one day a man turned up. He was a bit older than me, but not much. Eight years, I found out later, just enough to know better if he wanted to, but close enough for him to ignore the difference if he didn't want to.' Poppy seems to be looking at something beyond the bedroom wall and she is silent for a while.
'I’m sorry, I don't quite understand,' Juliet says finally.
'No, that’s because I haven't told you.’ Poppy smiles
, and the years drop off her face. ‘He was the owner, you see – Pantelis. The new owner. The only son, and he had inherited the house and all the money. The old man had died and the woman had gone into a care home. It all seemed rather sudden to me but it was over a year since they had been on the island, so perhaps I should have guessed that everything was not right. So there he was, the son, rich, good-looking and worldly-wise and, as I said, I was young.'
'Ahhh, I see,' Juliet says, frowning slightly.
'Exactly,' Poppy replies. 'And I had never had a baba, or any kind of father figure, and so he held all the aces, as they say.’
'Hm. I know how that feels,' Juliet replies. 'I lost my father when I was young, too.'
She doesn’t say any more than this, so as not to detract from Poppy's story. The truth was that her dad moved out, and her mum kept back the letters he wrote. Juliet found them by accident after he was dead and it tore her apart. That had a lot to do with her choosing a waste of space like Mick, she now knows – because he had an Irish accent like Dad, and the same sense of humour. But those things did not make Mick a good man.
'I got the feeling you might know how that feels,' Poppy says. Juliet eyes her steadily. 'People tend to recognise their own, don't you think?'
Juliet nods and makes an effort to focus on Poppy's story. Now is not the time to be raking up the ghosts of her own past.
'So there I was, nineteen years old, and this rich, good-looking foreigner turned up at my house on the island. Of course it wasn’t my house, but I sort of felt like it was, and would pretend to myself, you know, in the silly way that girls do … Anyway, there he was, and he was going to stay for two weeks. He explained about his parents and said that it was his house now. It was hard to see it as his house. Living there as I did, it felt like – well, the house was entrusted to me, but suddenly here was this stranger claiming it all. Suddenly it was his, and it was up to him to decide if I was to continue working there or if I had to return to my mama in Saros.'
'Tricky,' Juliet says.
'Nineteen is so young.' Poppy almost sighs the words and again her eyes seem to lose focus. She can feel herself drifting. It could be the shock of the accident, or maybe the effects of the painkillers. The bedroom drifts out of focus, and the day when Pantelis appeared is there with such clarity it is hard to believe it all happened so long ago.
The house on Orino was built beyond the top end of one of the main roads that led up from the port – a shallow incline, paved in stone, that twisted its way between the shops and the houses – and it commanded a good view across the town and the port area. There were no cars or any motorised vehicles on the island then, and nor are there now, apart from the dustbin lorry. If you have anything heavy or large to move, the only option is to hire a donkey.
There were no other houses above the one that Poppy looked after, which was so high up the hillside that the paved road did not quite reach the front door. From where the road ended, a short but steep flight of steps gave access to the front door, and not even the donkeys were any use for this last section. When it was built, some two hundred years ago, there was a risk of attack from pirates and it was safer to be up in the hills. Poppy loved the view but she could see why the newer houses down near the water were more desirable in these more peaceful times. To one side of the house was a beautiful leafy garden, and on the other side another house. To the back was the olive grove, separated from the house by a low stone wall, and behind that the pine trees that hissed in the breeze and covered the upper slopes of the island, right up to the rocky ridge at the top. The area at the back of the house was one of Poppy’s favourite spots. This space seemed connected with the earth, and more personal somehow. She would sit and sew or clean the vegetables looking over the old twisted olive trees whose massive roots struggled to keep a grip on the rugged hillside. The man who tended the trees was as old as the hills, wrinkled and burnt black, and in the summer months he had a youth to help him who was about Poppy’s age and all taut muscles and browned by the sun. When he worked near to the house she would silently admire his strength, the honesty of the soil ground into his hands and under his nails. In the autumn, when she made jams and preserves with the fruit picked from the trees on the terrace, he would turn up and eye the jars hungrily. Quince jam, he said, was his favourite, and so, as is the way of these things, she delighted in serving him a slice of bread spread thickly with warm jam, and she named him Kithoni. When the bottling was complete, she would leave a jar for him on the wall that divided the olive trees from the big house, and when he collected it, unseen, a wild flower would be left in its place.
She noted that his hair was short at the beginning of summer, and she saw it grow long and thick by the end. He cut a romantic figure in her mind and she would make excuses to go out the back, hoping for a chance encounter or just for the sight of him working under the trees in the distance.
To the front there was nothing to block the view all the way down to the port, and from here Poppy could look out over the cascade of whitewashed homes nestled in the basin around the port. The port itself was built in a natural inlet in the rock and was laid with stone on all sides, to create a wide paved area. A solid stone jetty extended across the mouth of the bay, offering protection from storms and leaving just a small gap for the boats to come and go. At this time, the island was only just starting to be discovered by the bravest of travellers from abroad. It was only later, in the sixties, that famous musicians and artists would come for inspiration, lured by the natural beauty of the place, and tavernas and bars would be set up to cater to them. But back then the house she looked after was the only one that belonged to foreigners, as far as she knew. Strictly speaking, the old couple were not foreigners, as the man's grandfather had been born on the island and both the old man and the old woman considered themselves to be Greek. They spoke the language fluently, even if they did speak it with an American twang.
When they bought the house it was a complete ruin – little more than a pile of stones, and there were faded photos on the walls showing the house at different stages of its reconstruction.
Although there were no foreigners on the island then, one or two wealthy Athenians kept second homes there, but even that was not the fashion back then. One of these families engaged Poppy’s mama as a housekeeper one summer, and that was how Poppy came to be on the island. Whilst she was there, the old couple, who were friends of her mama’s employers, offered Poppy a permanent job, and when her mama returned to Saros at the end of the summer, Poppy remained on Orino, alone.
‘You are a brave girl,’ Poppy’s mama said to her, with tears in her eyes, ‘and I will miss you, but this is a good opportunity.’ She pressed an icon into Poppy’s hands and held her tightly, and then she was gone, on the boat back to the mainland.
Poppy had made some friends on the island over the summer; most notably Maria who worked in the post office, with whom she would drink coffee in one of the cafes in the port at the weekends. Maria would complain about how small the island was, and they would dream about possible futures together; play with the idea of moving to the capital, although they knew they never would.
The old couple were kind to Poppy, treating her more like a daughter when they were there, and their friends who sometimes used the house also treated her well and often left a tip.
But Pantelis was not like his mama and baba, or their friends. When he came he hired a donkey for himself and another for his bag, so he did not have to walk from the port.
Poppy had been sweeping the terrace when the boat came in, and she paused to watch the people disembark from the ferry. When old Mr Kalopoulos was there, he loved to spy with his binoculars on the people as they flooded like ants onto the quayside. He would laugh to himself gently, and then get all excited when he spotted people he knew and call out their names to his wife, who would generally ignore him and continue sunbathing. Poppy was shocked when she first looked through the binoculars, suddenly seeing everyone so clearly
. It was almost as if she could touch them, they were so close! There, in front of her, as clear as if she were in the next street, was the baker’s wife greeting a woman who looked just like her – a sister, perhaps, come to visit. And there, oh my, a cat stealing a fish from the fisherman’s basket when he was not looking. No wonder Mr Kalopoulos spent so much time watching the world through them. After that first time, she would often use the binoculars when a ship arrived, always with the strap around her neck so as not to drop them, aware that they were delicate and unsure if Mr Kalopoulos would approve of her using them.
And so it was that, on the day when Pantelis arrived, Poppy was leaning on the railing and looking through the glasses at the people getting off the ship. She could recognise most of them, and there were only a few she did not know. Poppy watched as bags were unloaded and greetings exchanged. She saw Pantelis step off the boat too, although of course at that point she did not know who he was. He stood on the stone pier and looked around him, as if he was asking the island to explain its very presence. He had on a white jacket and white trousers, and he dabbed at the back of his neck with a white handkerchief. One of the sailors brought his bag off the ship and put it by his feet, then hurried off to speak to one of the donkey men.
The well-dressed stranger looked the beasts over dubiously as his bag was strapped to the lead donkey and a stool was brought to help him onto the second animal.
Poppy watched this pompous, pretentious behaviour with fascination, the other passengers forgotten, and tried to guess which poor household would have to put up with this ridiculous man.
Her broom was forgotten too as the donkeys made their way slowly up the main street, and as the man came nearer Poppy found herself studying the details of his clothes, his face and his luggage, still wondering where he would turn off. Higher and higher the donkeys climbed, and Poppy’s interest turned to shock when it became clear that there were no other houses left apart from hers, to which he might be heading.
