When the Haldanes had left and much of the summer crowd had gone with them, Naomi crossed over to the island with several boxes of house paint that she had bought in Porto Heli. She already knew the exact color schemes she would impose upon her new property and how she would go about executing the plan. She knew which color every wall would be and she would lovingly paint it herself. In her mind she had rehearsed the redecorations hundreds of times since she was a small girl. It would be, as she had told Sam, a return to the house her mother had created but with the addition of her spirit and taste. Together they were the true custodians of the house, not the impostors. The tins of paint were her instruments in this act of restoration.
The port had returned to its presummer normalcy. The large yachts had slipped away and the cafes around the docks were back to their leisurely ways. By the Pirate Cove, the statue of the lion and the hero with his handlebar mustaches looked almost lonely, resigned to yet another interminable winter, though winter was still far off. She found a donkey driver, left the boxes with him, and went for a quick coffee. She wanted to look around. A few familiar faces, but no one came up to her or asked her where she had been. The noble discretion of the Greeks. But even if they had, she had prepared herself. A gritty wind blew through the awnings, and she yearned to be back at Mandraki among the prickly pears and the lizards.
Naomi didn’t know what to expect at the house. In the end she had asked Carissa to stay on and look after the place until she returned. The maid had refused, though she grudgingly agreed to clean the house a final time before she left for her homeland. Naomi paid the driver and they unloaded the boxes in the cool salon.
The place was immaculately neat. The shutters were closed to keep out the heat and the floors had been recently polished. There was a smell of pine and wax. When the driver had gone, she closed the front door and unpacked the cans of paint, lining them up according to which room they would be used in. Having done this, she went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine from the fridge (it was stocked to the hilt), and went to lie down in Jimmie and Phaine’s bedroom.
She lay on the bed and drank, slowly and introspectively. She laid out a plan to clear out this room first. She wouldn’t keep anything. The clothes, the pictures, the rugs, the photographs—it would all have to be annihilated.
When she had drained the glass she got up and opened the shutters. The room was dusty and suffocatingly sour, and she aired it as she began to collect the things gathered on the mantelpiece and the bedside tables. She piled them on the bed and then went back down to the kitchen to fetch some plastic garbage bags.
She cleared out the bathroom and then the cupboards. As she was doing this the thought suddenly came to her that she needed music. One couldn’t cleanse and purify a house without music. So she went back down to the salon and put a record on Jimmie’s ancient sound system. It was the soundtrack to High Society. She turned the volume up as high as it would go and returned to the bedroom to begin her labor in earnest. For an hour she bagged the contents of the room and then dragged the bags down to the living room. She put them all in the garden shed and then poured herself another glass of wine. She took the glass out onto the terrace and drank it with a fierce feeling of vengeance. They would never have imagined how easy it was for her to expunge them from memory. It was as easy, in fact, as repainting a room. It was the hour of the swallows and the bell of Agia Paraskevi was ringing.
She set down the glass on the parapet and stared at the parched hillsides with their near-vertical walled enclosures that seemed to have been built by spiders. Soon she heard someone passing below the outer wall, the slow shuffling of the old, but no one rang the doorbell. She returned to the upstairs room with two cans of paint, one pale green and one a canary yellow. Opening them, she tested the brand-new brushes, laid down newspaper on the floors, and began to paint the largest wall.
The work went smoothly, the music pulling her along. She worked in bare feet, enjoying the stray drops of paint that fell onto her skin, and she finished the wall by early evening. She was alone and yet she didn’t feel entirely alone. The garden grave was so close, a mere step away, and there they lay peacefully under the trees without a complaint in the world. Slightly tired, she laid down the brush and went back downstairs while the paint dried. There was a soft chill in the air now, the first cool evening breeze of autumn. She poured out the rest of the bottle on the terrace and enjoyed the wine with her feet up on the wall. She now estimated that it would take her about four days to repaint the house entirely and another three to rearrange all the furnishings and decorations according to her plan. So a week could overturn a decade of misrule. She would spend the rest of the night finishing the master bedroom and then begin the salon the next day.
Farther down the hill, in the grand sea-captain houses that were empty for half the year, the longer-term expats and the wealthy Greeks who also liked the off-season and therefore stayed longer, speculated around their dinner tables about the stories now circulating concerning Jimmie and Phaine Codrington. The news had broken out, but quietly and without fanfare. It was not a rumor, but it played like one. Jimmie, they recalled, had never been much liked. And the unliked are more easily forgotten than the amiable. Their deaths are also more easily passed over with a shrug, however violent and mysterious they have been. The unspoken consensus was that they had it coming to them, as if karma existed even here, far from the landscapes of Buddha. What interested them supremely was that their bodies had never been found. Who could be blamed for that?
No one went up to call on Naomi, though they all knew that she had inherited the estate and had decided to stay on Hydra. It was her right, after all. It was not that she was disliked either, it was that no one—more enigmatically—knew who she was. Even though they had known her since she was a child, they didn’t feel comfortable exchanging more than pleasantries with her. People sometimes saw her walking down through the sunlit alleys of the old port, but few knew what she was doing with her time on the island. Her eccentricity kept them at bay, and it seemed to them that the older she became the more eccentric she appeared to be. The English in any case were always distanced from the Hydriots. They lived in slightly different spheres and both sides acknowledged the fact. Peaceably, they left each other alone, and so with time they left the English girl alone as well. On the terrace of the Xeni Heli, under the plumbago, the old seadogs playing backgammon watched her flash under the shade, bright and young and alien, a beautiful animal indeed—ena omorfo zoo—and they had no theories about her.
She walked down to Mandraki in the dry cool of the mornings with a portable parasol, as she always had, and swam alone on the far side of the headland by the Mira Mare. She took books with her and read under the parasol, as if she would do this for the rest of her life, and at dusk she walked slowly back to Mandraki to have a drink at the taverna next to the resort. It was there one evening during the first cold days, overlooking the bay, as she was drinking her tsipouros in a pair of mittens, that she saw a familiar rowing boat coming slowly toward the wrecked and tousled beach of the Mira Mare.
It was the girl rowing, with her measured oar-strokes and her sense of knowing at all times who was on the shore. She must have rowed all the way from the most remote parts of the island, diligent and cunning in the way of the sea, unafraid of the gathering dark. Around her the sea looked feverous and almost black, as if its energies had fallen back on themselves and were brewing below its surface. She pulled the boat onto the mixture of sand and debris and pulled her leather satchel out of it. There was no one at the resort and the wind that blew through it was already cold as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon. She glanced around, saw the idle seaplane with its dust-covered floaters, and came along the beach until she was through the small gate that gave onto the path. There she caught sight of Naomi seated outside at the taverna with her solitary glass and her bowl of chopped ice, and she recognized her at once. The English girl who loped through life with a mental hunchback. The girl who was possessed some days—you could see it in her white eyes.
She gave Naomi a cool Yassou and sat at the same table. She seemed to know the old couple who owned the place and they came out with a paper mat and a glass for her. The girl was thick with salt, and she poured a little water onto her arm to show how much had accumulated on her skin.
“My clients,” she said, “have all gone for the winter. I thought you had too. I didn’t see you for a while.”
“No, I decided to stay on. I’m not going back to London after all.”
“You’ve become one of us?”
“In a sense. I always was, anyway.”
“I can see you look much happier.”
“Do I?”
“You look like a grown-up finally.”
Naomi offered her a toast.
“Death to death?” the girl said. “I’ve never heard that one before.”
The best of all toasts, Naomi thought. One could cheat death in a certain way, or one could sidestep around the death of others. Doesn’t everyone feel immortal in their deepest self? It didn’t matter if it was an illusion, the intuition was still there and had to have a kernel of truth to it.
“Do you have any weed?” Naomi asked after their first round.
“I’ll make it free, as a welcome gift now that you’re a citizen of Hydra.”
She unwrapped a plastic bag on the table and laid flat on the surface a low mound of golden fluff. She had with her a metal pipe and she filled it with the weed, then lit it and set it going. The smoke was blown quickly away, revealing nothing to Naomi, but the remainder that made its way into their lungs made them high almost immediately. They sat back and swilled the tsipouro to increase the effect of delicious lostness, and the water in the bay began to turn a darker violet as the light retreated.
“By the way,” the girl said, a great slyness in her eyes but no trace of judgment, “what happened to the Arab boy who I used to see on the far side of the island washing his hair in the sea? I always gave him a free hit. I liked his eyes. Do you know who I mean?”
“I think I saw him get onto one of the ferries,” Naomi said.
“Ah, I thought so. At least the police didn’t get him. He had a look of freedom about him.”
“Freedom?”
“Something like that. That’s why I felt sorry for him and gave him a free hit. He was always charming.”
“Yes, he was a charmer.”
She’s right, Naomi thought, that freedom and charm are the same thing.
They lit a joint and the owners brought out a plate of olives, some bread, some oil and salt, and some sardines. The simple and eternal food of the ancients, Naomi thought.
The wind soon picked up and the girl returned to her boat, pushing it back into the bay, and raised her oars. Naomi could hear her laughing in the dark, half stoned, unconcerned, and soon she had slipped away as quietly as she had arrived, and Naomi recalled that she didn’t know her real name and never had. She was just the girl who rowed around the island with weed, half stoned and enchanted on a feverish sea. Life was full of such people. One didn’t know anything about them, even though they occupied a position of utmost importance in one’s life for a time. They were like shooting stars, flaring up for a brilliant moment, lighting up the sky even for a few lingering seconds, then disappearing forever.