The Girl Below(85)

Even though we raced back to Harold, he’d already lined up all our suitcases, ready to disembark, and was pulling at the newspaper around Caleb’s fish.

“Don’t touch that, it’s for Mum,” said Caleb.

Harold screwed up his nose and grimaced. “Lucky her.”

Passengers surged toward the exits, jamming corridors and doorways with children and bags, and we were swept along in the crush, too tired to resist. For almost a minute I was squashed up against Caleb, my nose in his hair, his buttocks pressed to my groin. Better than the other way round, I thought, and blushed at what I’d been thinking. Another surge set the crowd moving again, and I was shoved into an old man, all thoughts of any kind put out by his sour armpits and garlic breath.

For a moment I lost sight of Caleb and then he reappeared up ahead of me, leaning over the railing, searching for his mother in a sea of bobbing heads. Harold was on the gangway, struggling with his and Peggy’s suitcases, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t helped him. I spotted Pippa among the crowds on the wharf and made my way toward her. The others got to her first, while I was still on the gangway, which swayed from the combined weight of so many bodies. Caleb turned to look for me and tapped his mother on the shoulder and pointed in my direction. I waved, but Pippa didn’t wave back, or even smile, and I dropped my hand, already paranoid.

When I finally reached them, Caleb had just presented Pippa with the fish, which she held aloft, as though it were a trophy, before treating her son to a long bout of hair ruffling and kisses. “That’s enough, Mum,” he said, pushing her off.

Harold stepped forward to embrace his sister, and she stepped to one side to avoid him. “Hello, Harold,” she said, suddenly brittle. “Mummy can’t wait to see you.” She turned to me. “Suki, you look like death. You’ll fit right in with the crowd at the villa.” Her voice was strained, and she talked in a rush. “I’m afraid we can’t hang about. I’ve left Peggy alone with Elena and she’s probably knocked her out with her bells and smells by now.” She laughed fakely at her little joke and touched me briefly on the shoulder. “It’s a bit of a hike to the house, but if we’re lucky we might be able to hire a donkey.”

There was no donkey, just a backbreaking, thigh-burning climb up the steepest hill in Skyros with the midday sun drilling a hole in my skull. Pippa set the pace, trotting up ahead with Caleb and his bantamweight rucksack, while behind them, Harold and I dragged and shoved our suitcases as well as Peggy’s up the knotty, cobbled street. By the time we arrived at a low wooden door set into a white plaster wall, I had begun to wonder if perhaps this was all part of an elaborate punishment. The door opened onto a courtyard paved with pebbles, with rooms that looked invitingly dark and cool off it on three sides. On the fourth side a low, whitewashed wall dropped away to a magnificent expanse of azure sea and sky, creating the illusion that it might be possible to dive off the wall and straight into the ocean. A fig tree grew in the corner of the courtyard, and I thought I was seeing things when a sort of troll hobbled out from under it and made a beeline for Caleb. It flung its arms around him and pinched his cheeks and clucked and cooed a string of Greek at him.

“This is Elena—Ari’s mother,” Pippa said, adding more quietly, “she doesn’t understand English, but I wouldn’t worry about that because she doesn’t seem to understand Greek either.” She patted her ears, which I took to mean the old woman was deaf, and excused herself to go and check on Peggy.

Elena put her knobbly hand around my waist and said, “New Zealand. Kalimera!”

“Thank you,” I said. “Your villa is lovely.”

Her face folded into a gummy smile and she quickly released me and whisked Caleb off toward one of the cool, dimly lit rooms. He had his arm around her too, and she fit snugly under his shoulder, the flag of her black head scarf peeping out over the top.

Seconds later Pippa reappeared, and Harold said, “It’s good to see you. You look great—so tan and healthy, not like us.”

We looked like refugees after three days in the back of a lorry, but I didn’t think Pippa looked much better. “I can’t think why,” she said, brushing off Harold’s compliment. “I’ve hardly been outside since we got here.”

“And how is Mother?” he said.

“Not good,” said Pippa. “She’s asleep at the moment, but we can pop in to see her if you like.”

Peggy had been set up in a small, airy room that overlooked the flat roofs of the village slopes. We stood in the doorway so as not to disturb her. She was asleep in a modern hospital bed, the sort that cantilevered in the middle, and Pippa whispered that they’d had to drag the sodding thing up the hill on the back of a donkey cart. The room smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant, and Pippa gestured to a small white tube that trailed out of Peggy’s arm and hooked onto a receptacle by the bed. “It’s a morphine pump,” she said. “Most of the time it knocks her out, but occasionally Lazarus rises from the bed and starts barking instructions.”