The Officer and the Spy, page 6
The only sign of life came from Yorgos, stepping out onto his and Eleni’s own terrace, suited and ready for the surgery, raising his arm, beckoning her home.
She waved back, but hesitated before setting off.
She took her time too, returning to the cove, just in case…
‘Please don’t go so deep,’ Yorgos cautioned, when, wrapped in her robe, she finally joined him in the kitchen. He was brewing coffee on the range. ‘I wouldn’t be able to get to you if you needed me. It’s my worst nightmare.’
‘I was fine,’ she said, kissing him, ‘I promise.’
‘I fed your animal.’
‘Tips.’
‘A ridiculous name.’
‘It’s better than nothing.’
As soon as she was dressed, she called to Yorgos that she’d cycle to the bakery for breakfast. There was a small one not far inland, past Nikos’s villa as it happened, but that absolutely wasn’t the reason she went. If you got there early enough, they still had bougatsa left: the cinnamon-dusted, custard-filled pastries Eleni fantasised about through winter and never, not ever, considered trying to resist (hang the extra stone). It was the thought of enjoying one of them, warm from the oven, that motivated her. Only that.
She still looked out for Otto though, when she passed his gate (that forever-deserted gate) on her way to the bakery.
She looked out for him again as she made her way home, her basket wafting tantalising vanilla sweetness.
She was poised for the sight of him with every push of her pedal.
But, other than Irena, who ran the bakery, and her husband, Philip, out in the sunshine, loading the morning deliveries onto a cart, she saw no one.
The morning wasn’t a complete bust. There was the bougatsa at least. She devoured hers leaning against the kitchen counter, chatting to Yorgos about his day’s appointments, offering to see to their dinner since he wouldn’t be home until late. She was working herself – her first shift at Dimitri’s – but that didn’t start until noon. She had plenty of time, she assured Yorgos, to put something in the oven before she’d need to catch the bus to Chania.
‘Thank you,’ he said, kissing her goodbye. ‘In return, I’ll try and say no more about those things.’
‘Shorts,’ she corrected, swallowing another mouthful. ‘And you probably will say more.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, heading off. ‘I probably will. Don’t miss your bus.’
‘I won’t,’ she said.
She very nearly did.
Tips got into the pantry whilst she was out in the garden picking aubergines for an imam, and wrought havoc with a bag of rice and jar of honey, covering the villa in sticky, grainy paw prints. She had to mop the floors before they ended up with an ant infestation, then prepare the imam, then extract Tips again from the pantry (locking the door this time. Fool me once… ), all of which left her mere minutes to make some rolls for her lunch, pack her bag, and race for the bus stop.
It was several hundred yards away, uphill along the dusty, unshaded road, past Nikos’s villa, that gate. The sun, directly above, blazed, so fiercely the static afternoon seemed to quiver with its force. Sweating in her sundress, sandals slapping the crackling shrubs underfoot, Eleni cursed, hearing the tell tale protest of the bus’s engine behind her, and picked up her pace, only just beating it to the stop.
Clutching her smarting waist, handing her drachma to the driver, she collapsed in a sprung seat beside the window, turned to yank the murky pane down, and felt her breath catch in her mouth because, oh god, there he was.
He was there, right there, coming over the verge of the roadside, climbing from the shore below. He’d been swimming. His hair was wet; he wore shorts, an open shirt, a towel slung around his neck.
Heart racing (palpitations!), still holding the window, she wondered if she should say something, then, before she could decide not to, called, ‘Hello again.’
Play hard to get.
Too late.
In that moment, she couldn’t have given less of a damn. Because he looked up, their eyes connected, and, just as the bus jerked into motion, he smiled.
A smile that lifted his contemplative face.
A smile that made her pumping heart expand.
A smile that felt entirely for her.
‘Where are you going?’ he shouted, above the engine.
‘Work,’ she said.
‘Work where?’
‘That café,’ she said, leaning out of the window so that she could keep looking at him, heady with the turn of events.
He said something else.
She put her hand to her ear, unable to make it out. The bus, moving faster, was too noisy.
He shouted again.
‘I still can’t hear you,’ she shouted back.
Now he was laughing. He yelled a third time.
She heard an ‘I,’ a ‘see’, a ‘you.’
I’ll come and see you?
Had it been that?
It might have been.
She really thought it might have.
The bus rounded the bend, she flopped back in her seat, laughed too, and, ignoring the odd look her neighbour gave her, hoped so much that it had. She floated on the possibility, all the way into town.
Even when the journey took longer than it should have, thanks to an unscheduled stop for a herd of goats, she floated.
They were, inevitably, late in, compelling her to run, yet again, for the café, dodging the throngs at the harbour, which, unlike the evening before, was packed, the colourful, Venetian terraces in business, baskets of produce on display, fishermen haggling to sell their morning’s catch.
‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, sprinting the final stretch to Dimitri, visibly run off his feet, laden tray aloft, tables heaving with customers around him. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ he said, with an airy wave. ‘The world has not ended, I don’t think. No problem.’ He said the latter in English, an American accent. He’d done the same the night before, talking about her hours. The turn of phrase was, like the gramophone, a new development. ‘Come,’ he continued, in Greek, beckoning her on into the café’s serving room: a hole-in-the-wall at the bottom of his narrow, lemon-painted home. There was hardly any furniture inside, just a mahogany bar, on which the gramophone and a coffee stove stood, then shelves full of cups, sacks of oranges on the floor. ‘I need you to juice.’
It was Eleni’s least favourite job. The oranges made her hands go yellow, and quickly stung invisible nicks in her skin, but not even a half-hour spent doing that dampened her mood. Nothing could. Not the smell of the rubbish bin behind the café, when she carried the orange shells out to throw them away. Not the flies who gusted up when she opened the bin’s lids. Not the soaring temperature when she set to waiting tables, wiping spills, emptying ashtrays. Not even the tourists who spoke to her in too-loud, too-slow English. (She found them funny.) Whatever she was doing, she had one eye out for Otto (I. See. You.), her heart hovering between her chest and her mouth in case he appeared.
But three o’clock rolled around, the quayside emptied for the siesta, and still he hadn’t come. Resolutely telling herself, there’s still time, Eleni left Dimitri to head for his rest upstairs and set off for the quiet stretch of beach at Paralia Koum Kapi, where she’d spent so many of her siestas the summer before. Just as she had then, she ate her sandwiches alone on the sand, wriggled into her swimsuit beneath a towel, and indulged in a long soak in the sea. After, she lay down to dry, watched the sun through the web of her raised fingers, but didn’t pick up the book she’d brought, too preoccupied with wondering where Otto was.
Impatient to be where he might appear, she returned to Dimitri’s well before it opened again at five. She didn’t have long left in her shift; whilst the customers would keep coming until gone ten, she always left at seven. It had been Yorgos’s one stipulation when, seeing Dimitri’s ‘help really needed’ sign the previous summer, Eleni had offered up her services: she must be home before dark. Dimitri, who’d been a patient of Yorgos’s since the day Yorgos had brought him into the world – quite a regular one, thanks to the asthma Dimitri refused to admit being bothered by to anyone besides Yorgos – had readily agreed. Anything Doctor Florakis says. Sometimes, Yorgos collected Eleni himself, if his appointments allowed. Mostly she caught the bus home, as she would be doing that evening.
It was always quieter, after the siesta, trade not really picking up again until the sun started to go down. Pleasanter too, in the softening heat. There was time for Eleni to sit and chat with Dimitri, hear his news. He told her about a friend of his, Socrates, who’d moved to Athens as a child, but had recently returned to Crete to take up a post at the local school come September. He was, like, Dimitri, in his late twenties, and had leased an apartment close by. It was a bit of a state. Dimitri was helping him redecorate it each night after the café shut.
‘He sings when he strips the wallpaper,’ he said, tapping his cigarette into the ashtray. ‘He makes up his own songs. He used to do that when we were boys too. He loves music. Actually, he helped me buy the gramophone.’
‘Ah,’ said Eleni, smiling. ‘And does he by any chance say, no problem, all the time?’
Dimitri’s brow furrowed. ‘How did you know that?’
‘Never mind. When will I meet him?’
‘Soon. He’s going to help me when you go.’
‘You’re expanding, Dimitri. Two staff… ’
‘No, Socrates doesn’t want wages. He says it’s repayment for the decorating.’
‘That’s very nice of him.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Dimitri. ‘Very nice. If only… ’
‘Don’t even think it,’ she said. ‘Look at my yellow fingers.’ She wiggled them. ‘I need payment.’
Socrates arrived, as promised, just as Eleni was getting ready to leave for the bus. She saw him from the café’s doorway, laughingly clasping Dimitri’s hand in greeting at the waterside, slapping his shoulder. The first thing that struck her was how pleased both he and Dimitri were to see each other. They must really have been good friends when they were children. The second was that Socrates was very nice looking. Comfortable. Different to Dimitri’s other acquaintance, indeed to Dimitri himself; he had none of their lean height, Grecian features, or dark moustaches. He had no moustache at all. But he was broad, with a square frame, even squarer jaw, light-brown hair, and tan skin that creased around his eyes when he smiled.
She saw that up close, when, moments later, bag on her shoulder, she crossed over to the pair, apologising to Socrates that she had to run off so soon.
‘I promise not to take it personally,’ he said. ‘But are you sure you don’t want me to walk you to the bus?’
It was a sweet offer.
She liked him for it. Liked him for having come to help Dimitri. She’d felt bad, the summer before, leaving him in the lurch, knowing, whatever his insistence to the contrary, that he’d have been better off hiring someone full-time. Given that, she really wasn’t about to steal Socrates away, just as he’d arrived.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she assured him, ‘but thank you.’ Determinedly, she found a smile to repay his, concealing how low she’d by now started to feel.
It was hardly his fault, after all, that he wasn’t Otto.
Otto, who she’d foolishly waited for all day, and who hadn’t come.
Otto, who she still, ridiculously, looked around for as she bade Dimitri and Socrates goodbye, and retraced her steps through Chania’s dimming streets to the bus stop.
She didn’t see him.
She realized, of course, that there could be any number of reasons for that – not least that there was every chance she’d misheard him earlier. He might not have said I’ll come and see you, at all. It could have been, I’ll see you soon. Or, I’ll see you again. Possibly, he’d already had plans for the day. Plans he couldn’t change.
That was actually entirely likely.
All of this she repeated to herself, waiting for the bus beneath the bird-filled trees in the square, then on the rickety ride home. Yet, no matter how hard she tried to reason her disappointment away, it wouldn’t budge. It sat, heavy and stubborn, in her chest.
She’d really believed he was going to come.
Foolish it may be, but now that he hadn’t, she felt shunned.
It confused her.
He’d looked so happy to see her, earlier. As happy as she’d been to see him.
Hadn’t he?
She rested her head against the bus’s cool frame and sighed, increasingly unsure.
The sun was almost down by the time she got off the bus. Above, the first stars glinted through the sky’s pale, purpling sheen. The sea, beyond the cliff-edge, had begun to darken. The water was no longer still, but choppy, teased into ruffles by a sudden, thyme-scented breeze. The road, once the bus had lumbered off, rustled; all shadows and cicadas, a couple of grazing goats.
Go straight home, Yorgos had reminded Eleni, only that morning. I’ll be counting on you doing that.
She hadn’t argued, knowing he already gave her a deal more freedom than most Cretan girls her age had. She loved him for it. Loved that, for all his despair over her shorts, King Edward’s morals, he – who’d taught her to read Greek with the aid of newspaper articles campaigning for women to vote (something they still weren’t allowed to do here) – didn’t treat her as though she were a china figurine.
She certainly couldn’t have resembled one less now, grubby and tired, her salty hair sticking to her skin as she reached up to release it from its ponytail. She felt instant relief, pulling the band free. It had been hurting. She ached, everywhere. In her shoulders, her back, the soles of her feet.
The stroll home, downhill in the wind, was at least much easier going than her morning race up to the stop had been. She let her mind wander, to the imam, her hope that it hadn’t turned too dry in the oven; Tips, and if he was hungry; the bath she was about to have. Nikos’s damned gate, when she passed it.
Still no one there.
From somewhere, she found a laugh, that she’d bothered to check, and carried on, down the last stretch, around to the entrance to the villa.
Then stopped short.
Was she imagining it?
She didn’t think she was imagining it.
Her heart, well and truly back palpitating, didn’t think she was either.
It was him.
It was.
He was sitting on the ground, at the head of her driveway, in shorts, a jumper rolled up at the sleeves, his back against the tree there. He had a sketchpad on his lap. His attention was on the paper, the line he was measuring. His hair fell over his face. Absently, he moved it behind his ear.
‘Hello again,’ she said, just as she had that morning.
And, just as he had that morning, he looked up.
Grinned.
At her.
Her disappointment evaporated. What disappointment?
She wasn’t disappointed.
‘Finally,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘You have?’ she said, delighted, audibly. (Play hard to get. Who cared? Not her.)
‘Yes. For quite a long time.’
‘Oh,’ she said, enjoying that, quite a long time. Enjoying it very much.
He set his pad aside, and stood, moving towards her.
She moved towards him, off the road.
‘I thought… ’ she began.
‘I wanted to come into town,’ he said, speaking at the same time.
They both laughed.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I got caught up in… something. By the time I was free, I thought it might be too late. So I came here.’
‘To wait.’
‘To wait. And now you’re here too.’
‘I am.’
‘Are you in a rush?’
‘No rush,’ she said, forgetting the imam, forgetting poor Tips.
Was this happening?
‘Would you like to sit with me, then?’ He held out his arm to the tree, as though to a chair. ‘It’s very comfortable.’
‘Really?’
‘Not at all.’
She smiled.
Not taking her eyes from his, she sat.
He joined her.
His hand rested on the grass, almost touching hers. She knew it was close, even without looking, from the tingling in her skin.
‘So,’ he said, ‘I have many questions.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have a fair few myself.’
His smile grew.
She felt hers do the same.
Without thinking, she stretched out her hand.
Or, he did his.
Either way, their fingertips touched.
In the Greek twilight, on the hard, baked ground, they kept touching.
And off she went, again.
Floating.
‘Remembering wartime Greece.’ Transcript of research interview undertaken by M. Middleton (M.M.) with subject seventeen (#17), at British Broadcasting House, 5 June 1974
#17:
Do you believe first love can be real love?
M.M:
I thought I was meant to be the person interviewing you.
#17:
Do you, though? Or do you think it is simply the force of attraction, novelty? Overwhelming, shocking. Selfish, often. But ultimately doomed to burn out?
M.M:
Doomed? No, I don’t think it’s always doomed.
#17:
Really?
M.M:
No. If that was the case, there wouldn’t be so many people who choose to spend the rest of their lives with their first love.
#17:
But that choice is so often made in the initial flush, without clear thought.
M.M:
I don’t think that necessarily makes it less genuine. I think a choice to spend a lifetime with someone is one that’s taken again and again, year after year.
#17:
Out of obligation. Societal expectation…
M.M:
No. Not always.
#17:
[Frowns]
