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.