—
The female half of the Haldane family had discovered the cove the very first day they arrived on the boat from Piraeus. They had gone on a long walk around the island themselves, without Mr. Haldane, and if Amy thought about it she would have had to admit to herself that she always made the best discoveries when her husband wasn’t around to spoil it.
“It was Samantha who found it—she asked the cleaning women at the villa, which was very clever. But I think you got here before us.”
“I’ve been coming here for years,” Naomi said with deliberate weariness.
“So you know—”
The other girl was younger than Naomi, maybe nineteen or twenty to her twenty-four, with eyes that were steady and cool: perhaps like herself a student of human beings and their calamities.
“You live here?” she said, calmly interrupting her mother.
“My father has a house. He’s had it since the eighties.”
“Lord,” the mother said. “We’ve stumbled on an expert. He’s really been here that long? So you must have grown up here.”
“Summers.”
“Summers on the island. We have a summer house on an island in Maine almost as nice as this one. But we’re New Yorkers. Maybe we know your father?”
She was a little eager, and Naomi had to tamp her down.
“I don’t think so. My father and stepmother are quite odd socially.”
“My husband, you know—he’s recuperating from an injury. He came here to heal, and it didn’t seem like a bad idea. He’s recovering already—wouldn’t you say, Sam?”
“He’s already walking around on his bad foot.”
Naomi moved to the lounger next to theirs. She stretched out, and there was something in the unfurling of her body that drew attention to itself. A narcissist, the mother thought.
“I speak Greek,” Naomi said, smiling. “I can order anything you want. They have a lot of things off menu.”
The mother looked up at the waiters by the bar, and her mouth wavered.
“What about yogurt?” she murmured, pointing to Naomi’s abandoned breakfast. “I wouldn’t mind some yogurt.”
“Yaourti,” Naomi called over sharply. “Me meli.”
The heat crept to the back of their necks, and when it settled in behind their ears it refused to relinquish its quiet grip. Two trees hovered at the crest of the hillside, burning in their own gray light. They could sense dogs still asleep beneath them though they couldn’t be seen, and Naomi asked quietly what was wrong with Mr. Haldane.
“He went into a cage of monitor lizards at the zoo,” the girl said without expression, “and one of them bit his foot. It severed the tendons, and they have bacterial agents in their saliva.”
“Sam, really.”
The truth was he had fallen off a ladder while painting a greenhouse near Blue Hill.
“It’s embarrassing. Jeffrey is such a fool with ladders. But he broke his hip and his foot.”
“No lizards?”
Amy turned to her daughter. “I don’t think there were any involved.”
“He was in a wheelchair for a month,” Samantha said, “and now he’s on an island with no cars or bikes. He said that was the whole point—it would force him to walk. But now that we’re here—”
“He just sits in his chair painting all day.”
“Well,” Naomi said, looking up at the sky. “It’s kind of hard to do much else here. It’s what I do.” It was a lie but, as far as she could tell, they didn’t spot it and she didn’t care if they did.
—
They talked for a while. It was the banter of people of similar social standing subtly divided by a common language. Seabirds circled overhead and there was no music; the bouzouki for the tourists was not yet necessary. They could hear only the water moving against the rocks and the first cicadas stirring as the sun encroached upon the hillside. The heat rousing all living things. Amy finally lay back and sank into her comatose sunbathing, and the two younger women decided to swim out together to the rocks of the outer cove. They went down to the water in a sun that now burned their faces and slipped in together. They swam very quietly, and it seemed to Naomi as they paddled with their hands below the surface that they had rubbed up together companionably in some unconscious way from the very first moment. One never knew why that was, but Samantha—she might as well call her Sam since her mother did—was cool and dry in a new way to her. She was the elder child of a wealthy father who, apart from his inherited money, was a retired journalist. Her fifteen-year-old brother was also back at the rented villa, playing chess with Mr. Haldane. Sam admitted she hadn’t really wanted to come but, as always, her mother had insisted. They had found the perfect house through friends in New York.
“It’s near Vlychos, but I guess you know it. There’s a donkey in the garden. Which I think is cool.”
“A donkey?”
“Well, it comes and goes.”
“I think I know the one—it’s Michael Gladstone’s house.”
“Then you do know it. He’s had it for years. Dad says it’s the best house he’s ever seen. But I think he means it’s the best house he’s ever been an invalid in. You?”
“We’re high up above the port. My parents bought it when they were young and Leonard Cohen was still living here.”
“That was smart of them.”
“They calculated it,” Naomi replied. “That’s the way my people are.”
They swam past a jetty tilted sideways into the water and surrounded by flotsam: iron posts with elaborate moldings, bright green fishing nets and wire racks. It was as if whole villages had been smashed by violent winds that winter and their debris scattered over the coast. Where the path turned the first corner, there were piles of discarded machinery. They got out here, lay on a small protuberance of rubble, and looked back at the beach. The sullen rows of sunloungers looked like discarded toys or mechanical refuse identical to the debris accumulated behind them. It was curious, as if the place were about to be abandoned forever. The signposts knocked flat, the mineral orange stains in the surfaces of the rocks. Even the reconstructed fort above them—if that was what it was—had the look of something thrown to the winds. And yet above, the white abode of saints shone in sunlight.
Sam’s mother had finally been approached by one of the boys and was talking up to him with unnecessary smiles. One never knew about mothers. Naomi’s own was long dead and the woman asleep at this very moment in her father’s arms far up the mountain was a different matter. But Amy had seemed normal at first, and now here she was flirting with the beach boys in aprons. Was it because her husband had a crippled foot for the summer?
She turned to Sam.