IN THE SIX HOURS we passed about twenty islands, and stopped at seven of them. All around us tall blue headlands stood up out of the sea. If you didn’t know the chart, you could not tell which were islands and which were hills on the mainland. I went back twice for refills of my big smeary Scotch glass. I figured the whisky would antisepticize the glass.
Finally, the ship headed in for a black humpback whale of a headland straight in front of us, and the hippie kids behind me began putting their guitars away and throwing their sandwich wrappers and empty wine bottles over the side. I watched them. I had just been listening to them talk about pollution.
The distinctive thing about Tsatsos was that it was green. The rest of the land we passed was as dry as a Boy Scout’s fire kit. I was assured by every Greek I met that it was not the Greeks who cut off all the timber in Greece, but the Turks. Whoever it was, they certainly did a superior job of it. But somehow they missed Tsatsos.
As it floated closer to us, its single town showed white-white along the sea edge. The green rising behind it accentuated the white. A crusty old Colonel Blimp of an Englishman told me the white dots spotted here and there on the hills were Greek Orthodox chapels. Each one was built on the site of an ancient pagan temple.
A pretty little lighthouse made a white and black checkered spindle at one end of the town. At the other, west end was another landmark not so prepossessing. On a large headland somebody with the taste of an ape had started a big construction of modern apartment units and never finished it. Abandoned in mid-job—in mid-trowel stroke it seemed. Straight-line construction units of four and six apartments, on spindly pre-poured concrete stilts, covered most of the headland and loomed over the town below. Most of them were still uncovered red construction brick, without even door or window frames. It made a real eyesore.
Below it beside the sea in the gathering dusk was what looked like a modern luxury tourist hotel, complete with lush gardens and clients.
Next to me two of the American hippie girls were pointing at the construction site and giggling. Apparently that was where they were going. “That’s the Construction,” one of them whispered to the other.
Behind us the ship’s horn high up on the mast gave one long hoot and the engines started churning in reverse, preparing to land us at the big concrete jetty which also served as breakwater for the tiny port.
Nobody met me at the ferry. If the Countess Chantal von Anders was supposed to be looking after me, she wasn’t doing her job. The Countess had flunked out on the very first stage. I began to feel depressed again. I picked up my suitcase and went to look for a taxi.
No private cars were allowed on the island, it turned out, and the taxis were two-wheeled horsecabs, of the type that in the nineteenth century were called cabriolets. In fact, that is where the word cab originally comes from. There was a gang of them in a little square not far from the jetty.
The center of town was as lit up as a night rocket launching, and had a carnival air about it. Like all resorts in season. Tourists, and a great number of hippies, strolled up and down. Up a little rise from the jetty and the small boat moorings of the Port itself, there was a high wall on the land side with a tree-shaded terrace of cafes on its top. Strings of colored lights swayed just under the tree branches.
Fortunately for me, I knew the name of my new landlady. I found a cabman who spoke a little English. When I said, “The Mrs. Georgina Taylor house,” he nodded, then laughed a malicious laugh, but he did not explain why. I did not like the laugh.
The town darkened quickly, outside the Port area. We headed east, toward the pretty little lighthouse. We clop-clopped along the seawall road where more hippie groups were strolling. Most of the houses here were built up, at the top of two stories of slanting wall designed to baffle big winter seas. We came around a point and had in front of us suddenly the little lighthouse, the yacht harbor, and the lights of a taverna.
The lighthouse was built out at the end of a long curving arm of land. Directly across from it on the land side were the taverna lights. In between, and reaching almost to our point, small boats and five sailing yachts rocked tranquilly in the lap and chop, protected from the sea’s swell outside. The driver stopped at the very last house before the taverna. Between them was a sloping vacant lot. The house was built up the slope and had a wall around it. In the wall was a faded blue-painted door.
“Georgina Taylor Haus,” the driver said.
I held out my palm and let him take what change he wanted, thinking putting him on his honor would make him honest. I found out later he cheated and overcharged me anyway.
When I opened the garden door, it was darker inside, because of two or three scraggly trees. A stone walk led up the slope to the house, and to another blue garden door on the upper street with a brass ship’s bell above it. The house had no fight in it. But a sort of basement apartment under it built out from the slope of the hill had lights on, and a kerosene lantern burned smokily in the yard. Four figures, two men and two women, sat in its poor light on some outdoor furniture. One of them, a man, got up. He came over to me across the gravel.
He was Con Taylor, he told me, the house’s owner and Georgina’s husband. They had been waiting on me. Since they heard the ferry come in. They had begun to think I wasn’t on it. I said something about having to find myself a cab, and he smiled.
“Chantal didn’t meet you? Oh, well. She’s inclined to be absent-minded.”
He was a medical scientist, he told me, in a big Athens physics research lab, and had to take the same ferry back tonight. He spoke almost perfect English. The name Taylor sounded English or American, but this guy was pure Greek. I found out later the name came from some romantic ancestor who came to Greece to fight with Byron, and married into an all-Greek family.
He introduced me to the others. Georgina Taylor, clearly English, was a tall woman with her long hair skinned back and tied at the neck. She had enormous eyes, and two small wens on her face. She looked like the salt air and gravity together were slowly drying her up and shrinking her. I couldn’t see anything about her that would make the cabman laugh like that.
The other couple were called Sonny and Jane Duval. Americans. Sonny Duval was a big shaggy man, with long hair and an Elliot Gould mustache. He looked forty-four or -five, too old to be the hippie he was dressed as. Jane Duval was more than twenty years his junior, but other than that I couldn’t get any fix on her. She was just sullen. She seemed negligent of the three-year-old daughter it turned out that they had with them. I hadn’t seen the tiny girl in the bad light.
It was clear that the Taylors were obviously fighting, but trying to hide it in front of me. Tension stretched the air. I had dropped right into the middle of a domestic crisis. The Duvals were apparently witnesses. There seemed to be an odd disquiet between the two couples, covered up in front of me, as if they had all stopped arguing when I opened the garden door.
In my trade, you learned early on how to assess situations of this sort very quickly. Well, it wasn’t any of my business. But what a hell of a way to start off my free month.
“This is Mr. Frank Davies,” Con Taylor said, “who will be taking the house. I understand they also call you Lobo. That’s a timber wolf, isn’t it, in the United States?”
“It means that,” I said. “It also means loner, out in the West where I come from. A solitary.”
“Delightful. Do you mind if we call you that? Lobo?” Con Taylor asked. “I like that.”
“Not if it makes you feel good,” I said.
“Sonny here is going to be your boatman,” Georgina Taylor cried, too brightly, and emitted a kind of high despairing giggle. “So in a way we’re all your employees. I hope you don’t mind our keeping the basement apartment for ourselves.”
“No. I don’t mind,” I said. I looked again at the big overage hippie.
As if aware he was being inspected, the big man got to his feet, and seemed to keep unfolding more and more of himself as he stood up. He was at least six-two because he was at least three inches taller than me. He smiled cheerfully behind his mustache. But his mind seemed a million miles away. A huge peace medallion dangled from his neck. His wife simply sat, sullenly. “Yeah, I’m going to be working for you.” He put out a meaty hand. “Chantal von Anders hired me and my boat for the month you’ll be here. Be available to you from nine in the morning till six at night.” He sat back down, and seemed to lapse into a kind of tongueless gloom.
“Come on,” Con Taylor said. “I’ll take you up and show you the house and how everything works.” He smiled in a smug way.
I followed him up the walk. It was nice to get out of that tension.
The house was very nice, though much too big for a lone man. Inside the front door three steps on the right led up to a long living room with a fireplace, French windows and tile floor. One huge long beam supported the ceiling of the room. At the other end a fine porch showed the harbor beyond thick stone arches that gave it a pleasant cave-like feeling. Everything was made of wood and chintz and materials that would stand up against mold in the wet sea air. The bedrooms were on a second floor. It was the kind of place where you expected James Mason and the Flying Dutchman might walk in and pour themselves a brandy at any moment.
Taylor showed me where the electric fuses and the circuit breaker were, and how to turn on and off the French-style hot water heater for the bathtub. There was no shower. I also inherited from the Taylors a Greek woman who sniffed at my one bag as if it had dead rats in it, as she took it upstairs to unpack it.
“I’m sorry I have to leave tonight,” Con Taylor said before he left. “But I’ll be back in two weeks. And then I’ll be here two weeks for my summer vacation.”
I said that was just wonderful. We shook hands.
A little later, after I had looked at the bedrooms and was standing on my new porch with a drink in my hand, I heard the Taylors arguing in the basement apartment below, as Con packed a bag. It was about a woman, naturally.
So here I was. And my landlords were fighting. And they were keeping their basement apartment. And I was supposed to say Fine. I raised my glass of Scotch to toast the waxing moon. Below, Con Taylor came out slamming the door to rush down the walk and take a horsecab to the ferry. The moonlight was beautiful on the susurrating waters of the little harbor.