“All right, I will.”
Sam took her up to one of the spare rooms. It was on the east side looking over the sloping fields, with the dark blue Greek shutters pinned back against the walls and dried herbs in glasses set on the tables. The owner’s books were here: Seferiades and Kazantzakis, in aging English editions. Thistles lay scattered over the ship-timber floors. The bed was iron, creaky and high as in the old days when people died in them with gravitas and in confident expectation of an afterlife. There was a white table with a washbasin and jug, some lemons in the first days of decay. It was a room where Sam sometimes read alone.
They sat on the bed for a while, with their knees curled up beneath them, and gossiped about the evening. Naomi wanted to know about Sam’s petulant brother, Christopher, who was in his room. He was entering the moody phase of adolescence and often retreated into his computers and online games. Naomi had always wondered about having a brother. It must be exhilarating occasionally, just because of the competitive hostility.
“He’s too gentle for that,” Sam said. “Mostly, he’s just annoying.”
Naomi let her head sink onto her arm. Her eyes were slow and sarcastic, and they never released the object of their attention a moment too soon.
“Am I annoying?”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I’m an only child. Only children are always a bit…We’re spinning tops. You know that.”
“Really?”
“Your brother saved you.”
“From being a spinning top?”
“We need someone to keep us spinning.”
Sam drew her knees up and they began to feel more sisterly.
She asked questions about Phaine. Was she really called Funny?
“Of course not. It’s a joke.”
“So Phaine’s a Greek name?”
“Obviously.”
“I think your dad is hilarious,” Sam said.
“The people on the island like to call him a character. I’ve always thought that was an insult myself.”
Sam rolled onto her back and her limbs were relaxed and loose like those of a child gorged on chocolate cake.
“I liked that he wore a tie. My dad would never wear a tie.”
“But I like your father,” Naomi said. “Shall we swap? I don’t mind if he doesn’t wear ties. I think we should get up early and walk to the end of the island. All the way to the end.”
It was said more as a piece of firm advice, even as a directive, rather than as a casual suggestion, and Sam was jolted a little by it. However, she said nothing. She couldn’t deny that she was attracted to someone suddenly taking control of a subsequent day because such a thing had not happened to her before. Usually people quietly did what she wanted rather than the reverse, and now she wondered if she should go along with it or make a petty show of independence. Yet she realized immediately that it was the independence that bored her. Naomi offered something else—a sense of knowing what she wanted long before anyone else did.
“Sooner or later,” Naomi now said quietly, “you’ll understand that I know everything that you can do on this island and which are the most pleasurable things. I’ve done them over and over, so I know. If you let me guide you, you’ll save yourself a lot of time.”
“That’s very arrogant, but I don’t mind having a guide.”
“Guides are worth their weight in gold. But only if you want them.”
She looked at Sam archly and the smile was like a rope tugging at a horse’s bit.
“Sure I want,” Sam said.
“So we’re agreed.”
After the two had wished each other goodnight and Sam found herself alone, she couldn’t sleep for a long while. She lay on the bed with the windows wide open, the rusted hinges creaking as the wind antagonized them. She rolled herself a cigarette and calmly enjoyed it by the window so the scent wouldn’t reveal itself to the others. A lot had happened, quite suddenly, but she couldn’t say quite what it was. The Codrington family were an event in themselves, but she could already tell that they would never invite her up to tea at their lofty villa. They didn’t do things like that. They were planets closer to the sun than her own; their orbits were different. It was Naomi who would come down into the port and amuse her, who would give a meaning to her endless summer. There was something alarming about her, but it was just possible that Naomi herself had been suddenly altered—just a little—by contact with Sam. There is the spinning top and there is the girl who whips it into motion, but the two are merged in the same motion.
THREE
They got up early and, forgoing the pancakes that Amy habitually offered, walked down to Vlychos to have breakfast at the Four Seasons resort. It was a small place on the beach a mile beyond the village on a solitary path that eventually led to Palamidas. Even by six-thirty butterflies danced around the crooked fence poles, bumbling across slopes of gleaming Hottentot figs and disappearing into thin air when they felt like it. Like primitive armor, prickly pears grew along the low walls and their paddles were finely robed with tiny cobwebs. It was hushed even near the houses. They could smell fresh hay and coffee, and from the coves came the ghostly repetitions of little waves.