The Unquiet Mind (The Greek Village Collection Book 8) (16 page)

‘Did you find the tomatoes?’ Juliet calls from the front.

‘Oh yes. Coming.’ She picks and pockets as many as she thinks they will need and returns to find Juliet has laid the table on the patio. ‘Beautiful garden.’

‘It was a mess when I moved in. Some help getting the vegetable plot in order would be very much appreciated, though. The beans are very sad.’ Sophia takes the tomatoes from her skirt pockets. Juliet takes them inside and returns with them glistening wet. They sit down to eat.

‘So what happened to Vetta, then?’ Juliet asks, tearing off some bread.

‘She shut the doors to her room and refused to come out. There was a big fuss about what to do with her. To cut a long story short, she ended up hiding away in Baba’s net storage room by the port, to get away from the pressure, I suppose. She’s still there now; she turned the top into her home and the bottom into a shop and she sells her lace. Never married.’ Vetta always knew her own mind, she was the strongest of all of them. Mama and Baba found more suitors, and with one, it even looked like a match could be made but after walking out with him, it was all over. Her lace-making grew in complexity, she was asked to make things for other peoples’ weddings, and as time passed, it seemed her business became more important than her desire to be married.

‘And your other sisters?’

‘Well Sotiria was the looker, always in front of a mirror. She married a man from Athens and lives in America now. Angeliki loved to cook and she married the son of a taverna owner. There were only a couple of tavernas on the island in those days, so it was good business then and still is today. Now their sons are the waiters. Angeliki is still doing as much of the cooking as she can. And Sada, well Sada married Aleko, a fisherman like Baba, but not like Baba.’ She crosses herself three times. ‘He drinks, he smokes, the front yard of their house is a tangle of nets that need repair. He goes fishing only when the bills that need paying press him and Sada, and poor Sada takes comfort in a Czechoslovakian piano player from the jazz bar, and everyone knows it except her husband, who is mostly too drunk to care.’ Sophia stops talking to bless the food. Juliet pauses in her eating but does not close her eyes.

‘So just the three dowries,’ Sophia says with a smile.

‘And then there was you.’ Juliet passes her an earthenware dish of yoghurt.

‘Yes, and then there was me.’

Chapter 20

‘Yes, and then there’s me.’ Sophia’s voice is quiet. She puts the yoghurt down and does not look up from her food, pushing an olive around her plate with a chunk of bread. After a moment or two, she lifts her head. ‘Your garden is amazing, I saw a peek of it when I was picking the tomatoes.’

Juliet seems to melt into her chair. ‘It’s my oasis,’ she replies and the talk turns to plants and soil. When Sophia uses technical terms in Greek, Juliet takes out a notebook, asking her the meaning and scribbling it all down. Their plates empty and their talking slows. The cat jumps onto a chair and begs for crumbs from the table. After a final heavy sigh, they both push their chairs out from the table, laughing because it happens in unison. Juliet stands slowly and offers to show Sophia her room.

‘It’s off the sitting room here.’ Juliet lifts the latch and opens the wooden door. It is a simple room, with a single bed, white sheets, white walls, and a cupboard set into the thick stone wall. It is not so different to her convent cell but there is a jar of flowers on the bedside table and a framed, brightly coloured print on the wall. It is more friendly somehow, lived in.

‘There isn’t anywhere really to hang your clothes; that’s the only problem. Only a hook on the back of the door here with a coat hanger,’ Juliet says. The coat hanger, of shiny wood, has a little bag hanging round the hook. She reaches out to touch it. ‘Do you like lavender?’ Juliet asks. ‘It grows by the gate and last year, I dried a load and made those. Pretty, aren’t they?’

Sophia leans forward to smell it. ‘Lovely.’ Sada made little bags like that and put them in the chests. It seems everything is bringing back memories of her life before she entered the convent. She takes a breath as tears prick.

‘I am going to lie down for a bit. This time of day gets way too hot for me to do anything. Do nuns take a
mesimeri
sleep?’

‘We have a quiet time in our cells. I know I used to sleep.’ Sophia keeps her eyes busy looking around the room, holding back the tears, the emotions, the memories, the waste. She crosses herself at her thoughts.

‘Right then, see you later. There’s a portable electric fan you can take from the kitchen and there’s a plug by the bed head if you want it. Let me know if you need anything else.’ She heads across the sitting room to a corridor that leads into what looks like an older part of the house.

As it happens, Sophia does not see Juliet until much later. The best solution to the tears stinging her eyes, the emotions bubbling to the surface, the lurking horror to think the years have been wasted is to close them. When she wakes, there is no sign of Juliet. The double doors to her bedroom are closed and so, leaving a note, Sophia sets of for the village square, to work. She took the morning off for her move but must be back for the late afternoon shift.

Few customers venture out in the heat and the afternoon is slow. Across the road, a group of farmers are bantering with Stella. Along with her voice, there is a new noise and after focusing in on the sound, Sophia sees an air-conditioning unit that was not there yesterday. She is pleased for both Stella and Mitsos. They work hard and it must be so hot by the grill. The farmers’ laughter grows wilder and louder as the afternoon changes to evening and as the day begins to cool, more villagers emerge. Mitsos spends most of his time behind the grill listening and mopping his brow. From her doorway, Sophia can see him smiling at Stella’s words, occasionally turning his head sideways, presumably to look through the interior adjoining door when Stella says something that particularly amuses the farmers. Everything in the way he moves and listens and turns his head betrays his admiration, his love for Stella.

How wonderful it must feel to have someone love you like that. Sophia folds her arms across her chest. To have this empty yearning, this fidgety drive not lurking, sitting, waiting to be ignited by a thought, or a dream, or a word. The feeling has become so much a part of her, sometimes she no longer notices it until her shoulders ache and the realisation comes that she has been tensing her shoulders to her ears, or her jaw is sore and only by opening her mouth can she unlock the stress she has been holding there. To feel at peace, truly content, what that must feel like! Something she never ever found on her knees or in church no matter how much she concentrated, or if she did, it lasted a fleeting second, just long enough to make this hollowness feel worse when it returned.

Mitsos must have sensed her staring. He looks over to her and smiles. She smiles back, her hand lifting to wave but not quite making it. He laughs and turns his head, his attention back on Stella.

At the far end of the square, a priest crosses the road to the corner shop. His long black robe hanging from his rounded stomach, he rocks his weight from foot to foot, leaning forward to climb the few steps to the doorway, pressing hands on knees. The sisters would fuss so when a priest came to visit the convent. There would be a flourish of cleaning and polishing, biscuit baking and a general alteration to their routines. For a while, she was quite excited by such visits, the anticipation of something different. In more recent years, she resented the change in routine, the jolting out of the meditative state that carried her through her days.

It feels like a dream of years gone by but in reality, that was her life just hours ago. Now she is just an ordinary citizen. The thought makes her eyebrows raise. An ordinary citizen. It doesn’t sit properly. It’s a nice idea, but she feels far from ordinary. Ordinary people live full time in ordinary houses doing ordinary jobs. She is never going to manage that. There seems to be a skill to being social that she just doesn’t have anymore. It exhausts her to think what to say at the right time and then remember to say it loud enough for people to hear. She can imagine spending a lot of time on her own in the future.

Back
at school, she was social. She would speak out all the time. She didn’t have to think, she just did. It was the easiest thing in the world. But then again, maybe it was not the best thing. Maybe Mama was right, maybe that was the problem. Maybe if she had thought more, many things could have been avoided.

Speaking before she thinks. Twenty years in a convent has ironed most of that out.

A car stops by the shop. It’s cooler inside, where she makes the driver a frappe and puts a cheese pie into a paper bag, his change on the counter. He leaves it behind as a tip, says he has just got a job, grinning, his legs jiggling as he walks, expending the energy of his excitement.

And how do people cope with the instability of working for other people? The possibility of being unemployed at a moment’s notice, no money coming in and no way to bring money in? She too is in that situation now, the convent doors closed firmly behind her. Her shoulders tense and raise. What if the sandwich shop does not make a profit, if she cannot make a living, then what? Her jaw stiffens.

A shriek of laughter comes from the taverna. Mitsos has the sausage tongs in his hand and he is wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist, laughing so much, he is crying.

That’s the other side of all this uncertainty perhaps. What she would give to abandon herself and laugh like that, like she did back at school. The fridge rattles as it reaches temperature and the motor switches off. She needs to give the fridge a bit of a clean. Now would be as good a time as any. Keep busy; it is one answer.

The heat of the afternoon gives way to a softening of the light and a slight breeze. A pink hue over the village announces the evening drawing in. The children pour from the bus, coming home from
frontistiria
, the cramming schools where they have exhausted themselves to keep up their grades. They pour into the shop in a tired exuberant mass, buy the last of the cheese and spinach pies. The sausage rolls are gone and there is only one piece of
bougatsa
left.

The lady who owns the house next door to the shop comes out to sweep the dust from the road in front of her house, her white apron stark against her mourning black. She stops just to have a word. She talks of God and the strength He gives her, her eyes drawn to the lone cream-filled pie.

‘Thirty years ago, my husband died. You are a nun, you know how to live alone. I do not. It is lonely for me.’ Sophia can hardly bear to hear, nods without listening. She cannot think of anything the lady will want to hear so she says nothing.

‘You are wise,’ the woman informs her. ‘I have a daughter. She is a good girl, don’t get me wrong, but she is out all the time, making her own life. Which is as it should be. But it is the love I have for her that makes it so painful. My selfishness wants her to stay at home with her mama.’ She puts a flat hand on her chest. ‘Which is selfish.’ The hand lifts from her chest a fraction, her fingers pinched together, and she taps the smallest sign of the cross onto her rib cage, her eyes again wandering to the
bougatsa
. ‘But it is God’s will that must be done. We manage on what little money I have.’ She makes a huge dramatic sigh and rests one arm on the counter.

‘Can I offer you the last of the
bougatsa
?’ Sophia breaks the ensuing silence and takes the well-worn path behind the counter to put it in a paper bag.

‘Oh no, no, no, I couldn’t,’ the woman protests, her hand outstretched to receive it. ‘Things are not that bad. I am just not very good at being lonely.’ She takes the bag and Sophia wipes the crumbs from the counter and folds the cloth, putting it in the sink.

‘Is anyone?’ Sophia asks.

‘Ha!’ The woman barks her laugh. ‘With belief like yours, everything is possible.’ She forgets her broom as she walks back to her house with the paper packet. Sophia waits until her front door is closed, then she takes the broom and puts it inside the woman’s gate. Back at the shop, she counts the change in her pocket from her tips to pay for the
bougatsa
.

There is nothing left to sell now until the delivery comes in the morning.

Everything is cleared and clean. She makes a note of what sold out first and what they need to order more of, then counts the day’s takings and locks the till. A man stops and asks if she is closed, buys a can of beer, so she leaves his money on top of the till with a note so she will not forget what it was for tomorrow.

Outside, she takes a second to admire the fairy lights all lit up round Stella’s tree. Is that a vanity, wrapping lights around a tree? It looks pretty, whatever it is. She pulls her stool inside and shuts and locks both the door and the window. The chain around the drinks fridge outside gets stuck under one corner of the door and for a moment, she wonders if she will have to call Mitsos over to help, but it suddenly frees itself. The chain and padlock seem unnecessarily thick and heavy to protect some cans of fizzy orange and colas.

When all is secured, she stops to think, looking up to the smeared grey of the Milky Way. She cannot remember who will be giving her a lift back to the convent today. She puts her hand over her stomach as it turns with a little panic and then she smiles, her hand drops, she pockets the keys, and strolls looking at a million stars in the dark sky, heading towards Juliet’s.

The men in the
kafeneio
briefly glance her way as she passes, but all eyes are on a basketball match showing on the television that is balanced in the window of the café, facing out to the square. Tables and chairs have been pulled outside into the cool of the evening and Theo is trotting backwards and forwards across the road with coffees and ouzos. His halo of frizzy hair bobs as he moves, and he is smiling. Always smiling. She has heard that he too is loved but the woman refuses to marry him. The luxury of such a choice.

Her arms and legs feel light and floaty. No abbess to face, no hours of evening prayers in the church that manages to be cold at this time of night even in the middle of summer. No hushed silence in icon-lined corridors.

The front of Juliet’s house is lit up with soft orange lamps. It glows in the dark, inviting. Her feet slow and she savours the approach, a ripple of excitement running through her chest.

‘Hi,’ Juliet calls from the sofa where she is lying with a book. She looks so comfortable.

‘Don’t get up.’ Sophia sits in one of the wicker chairs. The cat that was pinning Juliet’s arm jumps off the sofa and up onto her own knee.

‘Was work alright?’ Juliet puts her book face down over the arm of the sofa and takes off her glasses to put them on top.

‘Oh yes, thank you.’ It feels a nice question to be asked. ‘How is your book?’

‘It’s a bit dry. It’s about Greece, the role the church has played in its history.’

A little of the charm seems to drain from the moment and just for a fleeting second, Sophia experiences a feeling she cannot quite recognise which is aimed at Juliet and her choice of books. Reason states that Juliet’s choice of book has nothing to do with her, but the feeling persists, and it dawns on her that the feeling is anger. Her lips part and she makes the smallest of gasps. Her hand flinches, never completing the movement to raise to cover this reaction, but the twitch is a tell-tale sign. Her cheeks glow a little warm and she looks at the floor.

‘You okay?’ Juliet asks.

‘Oh yes, sorry.’

‘No, you are not. What is it?’

She cannot blurt out that she is angry that Juliet is reading such a book. How ridiculous that would seem. Besides, what difference does it make to her what book Juliet chooses to read? She takes a moment to let everything settle.