As she walked across the room, the silk lining of her coat rustling against her legs, she chattered about the minutiae of her day. She was putting water on to prepare herself some coffee when the man at the table rose from his chair. Anna turned round and let out a scream of surprise.
‘Who are you?’ she asked in a strangulated voice. ‘I . . . I thought you were my husband.’
‘So I gathered.’ The man smiled, clearly amused by her confusion.
As the two stood face to face, Anna saw that the man she had greeted so affectionately, though clearly not her husband, was in every way very like him. The breadth of his shoulders, his hair and, now that he was standing, even his height seemed to match Andreas’s exactly. The strong and distinctive Vandoulakis nose was the same and the slightly slanted eyes bore an uncanny resemblance. When he spoke, Anna’s mouth went dry. What trick was this?
‘I’m Manoli Vandoulakis,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘You must be Anna.’
Anna knew of the existence of a cousin and had heard Manoli’s name mentioned a few times in conversation, but little more than that. She had never pictured him as this carbon copy of her husband.
‘Manoli.’ She repeated the name. It was pleasing. Now she needed to regain control of the situation, feeling foolish that she had made such a mistake and carelessly embraced a total stranger. ‘Does Andreas know you’re here?’ she asked.
‘No, I arrived an hour ago and decided to give everyone a surprise. It certainly worked with you! You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I feel as though I have,’ answered Anna. ‘The similarity between the two of you is uncanny.’
‘I haven’t seen Andreas for ten years, but we were very alike. People were always mistaking us for twins.’
Anna could see that, but she could also see many other things that actually made this version of her husband very different from the original. Though Manoli had the same broad shoulders as Andreas, he was actually thinner and she could see his bony shoulder blades protruding under his shirt. He had laughter in his eyes and deep lines around them. He thought it was a terrific joke that she had mistaken him for his cousin and she realised quite quickly that he had set the moment up. Life was there to be enjoyed, you could see it in his smile.
At that moment, Andreas and his father returned and there were exclamations of delight and amazement when they saw Manoli standing there. Soon the three men were sitting round a bottle of raki and Anna excused herself to make arrangements for dinner. When Eleftheria arrived an hour or so later, a second bottle of raki was already drained and both she and Manoli wept tears of joy as they embraced. Letters were immediately sent off to Andreas’s sisters, and the following Sunday a great reunion party was held to mark Manoli’s return after his decade of absence.
Manoli Vandoulakis was a free-spirited youth who had spent the past ten years, largely on mainland Greece, squandering a sizeable inheritance. His mother had died in childbirth and his father had passed away five years later at the age of thirty, of a heart attack. Manoli had grown up hearing dark murmurings of how his father had died of a broken heart and whether or not this was true, it made him resolve to live as though each day might be his last. It was a philosophy that made perfect sense to him, and even his uncle Alexandros, who since the death of Yiannis Vandoulakis had been his guardian, could not stop him. As a child Manoli had noticed that everyone around him carried out a relentless round of tasks and duties, apparently only enjoying themselves when they were given permission on saints’ days and Sundays. He wanted pleasure every day of his life.
Though the memory of his parents dimmed by the day, he was often told that they had lived good and dutiful lives. But what real good had their exemplary behaviour done them? It had not kept death away, had it? Fate had snatched them like an eagle plucking its defenceless prey from a bare rock face. To hell with it, he thought; if destiny could not be outwitted, he might as well see what else life had to offer him other than a few decades of living on a Cretan hillside before burial beneath it.
Ten years earlier, he had left home. Apart from the occasional letter to his aunt and uncle - some from Italy, some from Yugoslavia, but mostly from Athens - to reassure them that he was still alive, he had had little contact with his family. Alexandros was aware that if his older brother Yiannis had not died so young, it would be Manoli who would now be in line to inherit the Vandoulakis estate, rather than his own son. But such thoughts were hypothetical. Instead of the promise of land, when he had reached the age of eighteen Manoli had come into a small cash fortune. It was this money that he had largely squandered in Rome, Belgrade and Athens.
‘The high life had a high price,’ he confided to Andreas soon after his return. ‘The best women were like good wine, expensive but worth every drachma.’ Now, however, the women of Europe had cleaned him out of everything he owned and all he had left were the coins in his pocket and a promise from his uncle that he would employ him on the estate.
His return caused a great stir, not just with his uncle and aunt, but also with Andreas himself. With only six months’ difference between them, the two were virtually twins. As children they had almost known each other’s thoughts and felt each other’s pain, but after their eighteenth birthdays their lives had taken such divergent paths that it was hard to imagine how things would be now that Manoli was back.
It was, however, timely. Alexandros Vandoulakis was due to retire the following year, and Andreas could really do with a helping hand in managing the estate. They all felt it would be better for Manoli to take on the role than for them to employ an outsider, and even if Alexandros had some doubts about whether his nephew would really buckle down to it, he would put those doubts aside. Manoli was family, after all.
For several months, Manoli lived in the house on the Elounda estate. There were plenty of rooms that were never used so his presence inconvenienced no one, but in December Alexandros provided him with a house of his own. Manoli had enjoyed this taste of family life and being part of the dynasty from which he had chosen for ten years to absent himself, but his uncle expected him to get married in the future and for this purpose insisted that he should live in his own home.
‘You’ll be lucky to find a girl who’s prepared to live in a house where there are already two mistresses,’ he said to his nephew. ‘A third woman in a house is asking for trouble.’
Manoli’s house had belonged to the estate manager in the days when Alexandros had paid an outsider to perform the role. It was set at the end of a short driveway a kilometre from the main house, and with its four bedrooms and large drawing room was considered a substantial home for a bachelor. Manoli, however, continued to be a regular visitor at the main house. He wanted to be fed and pampered, just like Alexandros and Andreas, and here were two women to do just that for him. Everyone loved his lively conversation and welcomed him there, but Alexandros always insisted that eventually he should go home.
Manoli had lived his life in a state of impermanence, flitting like a butterfly from one place to the next. And wherever he went he left a trail of broken promises. Even as a child, he had stretched things to the limit. Just for a dare, he once held his hand in a flame until the skin began to melt and another time he jumped off the highest rock on the Elounda coast, scraping his back so badly the sea around him turned scarlet. In the foreign capitals of Europe he would gamble until he was down to his shirt and then make a spectacular comeback. It was just the way he was. In spite of himself he found he was playing the same game in Elounda, but the difference here was that he was now obliged to stay. He could no longer afford to fly away, even if he had wanted to.
To Alexandros’s surprise, Manoli worked quite hard, though he did not have the same commitment as his cousin. Andreas would always take his lunch to the fields to save the time it took to return home, but Manoli preferred to get away from the harsh sunshine just for a few hours and had taken to coming in to eat his lunch at the spacious table in the Vandoulakis kitchen
. Anna had no objection. She welcomed his presence in the house.
Their interaction was not so much conversation as flirtation. Manoli made her laugh, sometimes until tears streamed down her face, and her appreciation of his teasing humour and the way the enlarged pupils of her eyes sparkled when she held his gaze were enough to keep him from the olive groves well into the afternoon.
Sometimes Eleftheria was there rather than in Neapoli and feared that her nephew was not really pulling his weight on the estate. ‘Men shouldn’t hang around the house in the day,’ she once remarked to Anna. ‘It’s a woman’s territory. Theirs is outside.’
Anna chose to ignore her mother-in-law’s disapproving comment and welcomed Manoli more effusively than ever. In her view, the closeness of the kinship between them sanctioned their friendship. It was the custom that a woman enjoyed much greater freedom once married than she had been allowed as a single woman, so at first no one questioned Anna’s liberty to spend an hour a day, sometimes even more, with her ‘cousin’. But a few people began to notice the frequency of Manoli’s visits, and tongues started to wag.
One lunchtime that spring, Manoli had lingered even longer than usual. Anna sensed his recklessness and for once shuddered at the danger she was putting herself in. Nowadays when he left he would hold on to her hand and kiss it in an absurdly histrionic way. She could have passed it off as a frivolous gesture, but the way in which he pressed his middle finger into the very centre of her palm and held it there made her shiver. More significantly, he touched her hair. It was dead matter, he said laughingly, and anyway she had started it, he teased, by kissing a total stranger . . . on the hair. And so it went on. He had picked some meadow flowers that day, and presented her with a bouquet of bright, if wilting, poppies. It was a romantic gesture and she was charmed, especially when he pulled one from the bunch and carefully placed it in the front of her blouse. His touch was subtle and there was a moment when she was not entirely certain whether the contact of his rough hand with her smooth skin was accidental, or whether he had, very deliberately, brushed her breast with his fingers. A moment later, when she felt his gentle touch on her neck, the doubt was gone.
Anna was an impetuous enough woman, but something held her back. My God, she thought, this is the threshold of insanity. What am I doing? She pictured herself standing in this huge kitchen almost nose to nose with a man who, though he looked so very like him, was not her husband. She saw the situation as it would appear to someone looking in through the open window, and however hard she tried to convince herself, she knew it would not seem ambiguous. She was one second away from being kissed. She still had a choice.
Her marriage to Andreas lacked nothing. He was warm, adoring and gave her free rein to make changes in their homes when she wished; she even got on tolerably well with her in-laws. They had, however, quickly settled into a pattern, as happened in such marriages, and life had a predictability that made it unlikely that the next half-century would hold any real surprises. After all the anticipation and excitement at starting a new life, Anna was discovering that it could be just as dull as her old one. What it lacked was the thrill of the clandestine, the frisson of the illicit. Whether such things were worth risking everything for, she did not quite know.
I ought to stop this, she thought. Otherwise I could lose everything. She addressed Manoli with her usual haughtiness. It was their game, how she always talked to him. While he was extravagantly flirtatious, she treated him as her inferior.
‘Look, young man,’ she said. ‘As you know, I’m spoken for. You can take your flowers elsewhere.’
‘Can I indeed?’ Manoli answered. ‘And exactly where shall I take them?’
‘Well, my sister isn’t yet spoken for. You could take them to her.’ As if the true Anna was somewhere very distant, she heard a voice saying: ‘I shall invite her to lunch next Sunday. You’ll like her.’
The following Sunday was the feast of Agios Giorgis, so it was a perfect excuse for inviting Maria and her father to visit. It was a duty rather than a particular pleasure to see them both; she felt she had nothing in common with her tedious little sister and little to say to her father. For the rest of that week Anna dreamed of Manoli’s lingering touch and looked forward to the next time they could be alone, but before that happened, she mused, the dull family luncheon had to take place.
There were still shortages of many kinds of food in Crete at that time, but these never seemed to affect the Vandoulakis household, especially on a saint’s day, when it was conveniently considered a religious duty to feast. Giorgis was delighted to receive the invitation.
‘Maria, look! Anna has invited us to lunch.’
‘That’s kind of her ladyship,’ said Maria with uncharacteristic sarcasm. ‘When?’
‘On Sunday. In two days’ time.’
Maria was secretly pleased that they had been invited. She yearned to strengthen the bond with her sister, knowing that this would have been what their mother wanted, but nevertheless she felt some trepidation as the day approached. Giorgis, however, who was finally emerging from his long state of grief, was happy at the prospect of seeing his elder daughter.
Anna cringed as she heard the spluttering sound of her father’s newly acquired truck in the driveway and with little enthusiasm made her way slowly down the big staircase to greet them. Manoli, who had already arrived, had got to the front door well before her and thrown it open.
Maria was not at all what he had expected. She had the biggest brown eyes he had ever seen and they looked at him with wide-eyed surprise.
‘I’m Manoli,’ he said, striding towards her with outstretched hand, adding: ‘Andreas’s cousin.’
So negligent was Anna in her correspondence that Maria and Giorgis had known nothing of the arrival of the long-lost relative.
Manoli was always in his element with a pretty girl, but never more so than with one like this, who added innocence to such sweet beauty. He took in every detail: a slim waist, a neat bosom and muscular arms built up by years of hard physical work. She was at once fragile and strong.
At one o’clock they all sat down to eat. With Alexandros, Eleftheria, their two daughters and their respective families, there were at least a dozen. Chatter was noisy and animated.
Manoli had decided in advance that he would flirt with Anna’s younger sister. A practised lothario such as he was did so out of habit. What he had not expected was that Maria would be so pretty and so eminently easy to tease. Throughout lunch he dominated her with his playful talk, and although she was unused to such flippancy, she parried his witty remarks. Her unaffected personality made her so different from most of the women he was used to meeting that he eventually found himself toning down his banter and asking her questions about herself. He discovered that she knew about mountain herbs and their healing powers, and they talked earnestly about their place in a world where the boundaries of science were being pushed forward by the day. Maria and Anna were as unalike as a raw pearl and a polished diamond. One had natural lustre and its own unique, irregular shape. The other had been cut and polished to achieve its glittering beauty. Manoli loved both such jewels, and this soft, gentle-eyed girl who was so clearly devoted to her father appealed strongly to him. She was without artifice and had a naïvety that he found unexpectedly alluring.
Anna watched as Manoli drew Maria into his magnetic field, telling her stories and making her laugh. She saw her sister melt in his warmth. Before the meal was over, Anna realised what she had done. She had given Manoli away, handed him like a gift-wrapped parcel to her sister, and now she wanted him back.
Chapter Thirteen
FOR THE NEXT week, Manoli was vexed. This was unusual for him. How could he pursue Maria? She was quite unlike most of the women he had met on his travels. Besides which, the accepted patterns and modes of behaviour between men and women in Plaka were very different from those governing such relationships in the cities where he had lived. Here in rural Crete, every move, every word was subj
ect to scrutiny. He had been perfectly aware of this when he had visited Anna on all those occasions, and though he had always been careful to ensure that certain boundaries were never crossed, he had known that he was playing with fire. In Anna he had seen a bored, isolated woman who had separated herself from the village where she had grown up and achieved her ambition of being in a position where other people were paid to do those tasks which would otherwise have kept her busy and occupied. She had improved her position, but now floated in a friendless social vacuum, one in which Manoli had been happy to entertain her. A woman with eyes that so hungrily sought his and lips that spread themselves into such a generous smile: it would have been rude to ignore her.
Maria was quite different. Not only did she lack her sister’s ambition to marry outside the village, she seemed without desire to marry at all. She lived in a small house with her widowed father, apparently content and yet so exceptionally marriageable. Manoli would not have admitted it to himself, but it was largely her lack of interest that attracted him. He had all the time in the world, though, and would be patient, certain that sooner or later she would be won over. Confidence was not lacking in the Vandoulakis male. It rarely occurred to them that they would not get what they wanted. Manoli had much on his side. Perhaps the most important factor was that Fotini had protected Maria from the gossip about Manoli and Anna. The source of the endlessly flowing fountain of stories was Fotini’s brother Antonis. It was more than five years since that kiss which had meant nothing to Anna and far too much to Antonis, but the sense of having been cast aside still rankled. He despised Anna and had watched with malicious satisfaction the comings and goings of her husband’s cousin, which had increased in regularity now that Eleftheria and Alexandros Vandoulakis were spending more time in Neapoli and less in Elounda. Antonis gave reports to Fotini whenever he called in for supper at the waterfront taverna which was now her home.