Above the suspect taverna, I lounged on the bed and listened to the old men talking in the dirty, narrow alley. Breathing in the smoke from their acrid cigarettes as it wafted through the window of my room, I wondered if living away from home was this idyllic only because what I left behind was so ruinous.

I came alone, and met Aliki and Nikolas on the beach on the first day; soon their presence filled the place even when they were not here. I rented the room above the Taverna Chelidonia because it was cheap and I wasn’t sure how long I would be staying. Andreas, who owned the taverna, showed me to the room when I arrived late one night. Lit by a naked bulb, it contained nothing but a bed and an old wooden chest on a dusty cement floor. The larger window was veiled by white muslin, and Andreas assured me it overlooked the sea. It was very cheap, he said, because the tourists would arrive next month and he would have to be in and out of the room to make improvements.

“The bed is comfortable,” he added, and motioned for me to sit on it and see for myself. I sat, and under my fingers the white cotton sheets were soft and bobbly from repeated laundering. I just wanted to get in and sleep forever.

Even so, that night I slept badly, kept awake by mice rustling behind the wooden chest and under my bed. In the morning their droppings littered the floor and they had turned out the contents of my wash bag, but when I saw the view from the room I forgot all about them. Across the road, the red beach shimmered with heat haze; the brilliant sea was directly ahead, and rising from its dazzling expanse, like a brooding black limpet, was the volcano.

I came here only because the first island flight from Athens did, and Athens was the first available destination from Heathrow when I left in such a hurry. But I was pleased to be back in these islands; I had never felt so immaculate and free as the time, ten years ago, when I sailed the Aegean for three weeks with the golden lover we all have buried somewhere in our past. Dressed in white like the Immortals, we drank gin and tonic and fucked and looked fabulous, all day long.

When I sat down to breakfast in the taverna, Andreas, pot bellied in shorts and flip flops, emerged from behind multicoloured plastic ribbons to bring me coffee with a plate of bread and pots of manouri cheese and honey. He seemed pleased when I admitted I knew nothing about the island, and as his lightly bearded wife scowled from the kitchen where she peeled potatoes, he sat down to tell me about it.

“The first time the volcano erupted around 2000 BC, it formed a cone which gradually rose from the sea and joined the existing islets to form a hollow island.” The wife of Andreas issued guttural threats from the kitchen, but he ignored her and continued with widening eyes. “In about 1450 BC, this hollow island collapsed under its own weight and the sea rushed in to cover it, apart from the islets at the perimeter. Within half an hour, the vast tidal wave had drowned Crete and destroyed the entire Minoan civilisation.”

It was all rather distant, chronologically, and the scale of devastation difficult to take in. Still, I wondered idly if there was any volcanic activity close to London.

“All that remains of that island today,” said Andreas, tenderly tracing its shape in the air, “Is a slender lava crescent, punctuated by the volcanic islet at one end.”

He gave me a lift into town so that I could change my 1000 Swiss Franc note into Drachma and send an email to my husband to let him know I was safe. I missed him, of course, but when I’d needed him so badly he hadn’t been quite enough. At the internet café I changed my mind at the last moment in case it was somehow possible for my email to be traced, and surfed the tourist office sites of other islands instead.

It was May and the islanders were busy preparing for the season, painting and building. On the way home Andreas told me that the island’s population had been wiped out several times in its history by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, most recently fifty years ago. “That is why you will see only a few elderly persons on the island,” he said. “It is mostly populated by migratory workers who cater for tourists.”

Andreas had evidently exhausted his tour guide tendencies and fell silent when we left the town and wound our way up to the higher ground, the only sounds the straining engine of the car and the clicking of his jade plastic worry beads against the rear view mirror. As we left the villages behind and drove back to the sea, I was able to lean out of the window into the fierce sunlight and gaze at the colossal volcanic extrusions with their red and white stratigraphy. Wine was the only crop, Andreas had told me, and the island was colonised with dwarfish vines in even the most extreme terrain. I wondered if living so close to death made the few permanent islanders take more chances, aware that life is cheap, or if it made them excessively cautious, anxious or superstitious instead.

I wondered if everyone at home thought I was dead.

My hasty departure meant I was unsuitably dressed for a hot, windy spring in the Aegean so I threw away most of my clothes, put on the cheap yellow swimsuit I had bought in town and headed with a small towel for the red beach. I sat with my can of beer, which I sipped through a straw. The beach was empty but for a sprinkling of bodies at the other end. Arranging my towel over the crunchy red pumice spewed from the volcano, I slid onto my belly, grinding my hip bones into the earth, which radiated heat. I stared out to sea, past the volcanic islet to the uncertainty where sea and sky merged. It was bizarre, like sunbathing on Mars.

“Where did you find a beer around here?” Dazzled by the midday sun and with my long hair in my face, I pointed across the road towards the dusty shack that was the Chelidonia and then shaded my eyes to see who was asking. A man and a woman stood side by side looking down at me. I felt irritated to be instantly recognised as English, but my winter white skin was impossible to disguise. The man went to fetch some beers and the girl told me that they were Nikolas and Aliki.

“Clara,” I said, extending my hand. They were archeologists from Athens, she said, here to work on the excavation of Minoan ruins not far from the red beach. She sat down beside me. She spoke Greek-accented English and she was Greek but she might have been half Asian, with her skin tanned to a high roast next to my whiteness, her black hair and her small, even features. We sat side by side, saying little. She didn’t ask anything about me. There was a sweetness in her face. I wanted to touch her.

“I can’t find this place,” said Nikolas, reappearing at her shoulder. I stood up. “Let me show you,” I said.

Nikolas and Aliki and I sat at our small table and the air around us floated hazy and bluish. I’ll eat pretty much anything pureed with olive oil, and when Andreas brought us dishes of mashed fava beans with small puddles of yellow oil and plates of smoky charred octopus, crusty bread and ouzo, we said nothing for a while as we ate. Nikolas’s warm leg touched mine under the table. With delicacy he moved it away, and then with even greater delicacy he moved it back until he almost touched me again, but not quite. He had unlikely blue eyes for a Greek, I noticed. The jug of cold white wine, the local nychteri or night wine, tasted pure and clean, as if filtered through the volcanic soil that was as thin as pepper dust.

“You’re married,” Aliki said, looking at my finger. “Your husband isn’t with you?”

I shook my head. They both leaned towards me and Aliki touched my wrist lightly.

“We have such high hopes, don’t we, that one person can fulfil our expectations?”

“You have to look inside yourself,” I suggested, and was immediately embarrassed at mouthing such a platitude.

“Maybe,” said Nikolas, and waved the empty wine jug at Andreas, who brought another.

We talked a little about their work. “Nikolas helps with the fundraising and he controls the finances of the project, but his real passion is getting down in a ditch and unearthing fragile signs of life, isn’t it Nikoli-mou,” said Aliki. “The fragments might be so precious, you have to brush off the dust with tiny brushes,” he said. “It’s never immediately obvious how they will fit together, and I love that.”

“By the end of the day you’re covered in ash and your throat is all dry and scratchy. Imagine what it must have been like at the time. Ash from the eruptions has been found on the seabed from Chios in Italy to North Africa, and almost as far as Cyprus.” Aliki filled our glasses and we all drank, as if to clear our throats.

Eventually, I placed several crumpled notes on the table and stood up, surprised that the air seemed so swimmy. They stood up, too, chairs scraping on the tiles.

“So you have a room upstairs,” said Nikolas. I waited for the languor that enfolded me to fall away, but it didn’t. They both stood, quiet and gleamingly attractive, watching me. I just wanted something good to happen. “Come up,” I invited. They followed me upstairs, and still mellow and moving slowly as if through water, we took off our clothes and lay on the bed and touched, a little shyly at first, but then Aliki with her glass-smooth limbs was so warm and wet, and Nikolas, his hands like sandpaper from all the excavations, was so slow and assured, that I forgot everything.

The next day they came again, in the evening this time. The wife of Andreas brought us a jug of nychteri and we sat on the verandah watching the sun set. The swifts and swallows dipped and swooped as we drank, scouring the limpid air with their high pitched cries. “Do you think it’s the male or the female swift that screeches like that?” said Nikolas. “No idea,” I said. “Well, it’s both,” he said. “One starts the scream and its mate completes it. That’s how they identify each other.” Aliki refilled our glasses as we watched the creatures expertly catch their prey.

“They pause on islands like this on their way to Europe from Africa,” he continued. “Some stay to nest, but others only stop to recover for a few days. Sometimes a mated pair will tolerate an exhausted interloper in the nest for the night. Its life depends on staying silent, because if it cries it will threaten one or other of the birds in the nest, and be turned out or even killed.”

“We’ve never done this before,” Aliki told me when we left Nikolas in a used heap on the bed and crunched along the beach under the thin moon. “We were waiting for the right person. When we saw you, we recognised you right away. You were sure of yourself and lost at the same time.” I touched her shoulder and told her that this double measure of consolation, exactly when I needed it, was as sweet and comforting as baklava.

“Fifty percent extra, free,” said Aliki as we picked up a litre and a half of pink wine, chilled to within an inch of its life, from the tiny supermarket. “This should revive Nikolas.”

After that we met in the afternoons, Aliki with her fragrance of baby cologne and Nikolas whose scent reminded me of citrus peel; warmed up together we smelled of rising dough. I was the star attraction and their mouths worried at me gently and insistently until I yielded what they wanted. I felt like the gourmet morsel thrown into a carp pond and I abandoned myself to my fate. Being with them emptied my mind in a most desirable way.

We always met above the taverna because the room they rented in town was surrounded by nosy neighbours who would hear us making love. Not that it was easy at the taverna, because Andreas frequently knocked at the door wanting to add a lampshade or a bedside table or even to paint the ceiling and we would have to send him away.

Of us three, nobody ever felt left out. “Who had the least attention today,” Nikolas might ask when it was late enough for the swifts to begin their sunset screaming. “It wasn’t me. Was it you, Clara? Next time is for you, sweetheart.” And they would always remember.

Occasionally we went and lolled about on the red beach together and looked out to the volcano, and I felt as if our slow warmth had burned away everything from before. The pair of them amused me. Beneath their veneer of subversion they were, like me, stolidly conventional. So probably accidents were waiting to happen but I thought: let them wait.

I decided I needed a job, and Nikolas managed to get me some work as a guard at the excavations of the Minoan town which had been buried beneath the ash from the volcano. I was hardly Lord Lucan; there had been some misappropriation of funds from the bank where I had been working, so I was wary about producing papers but Nikolas smoothed things over so that I was paid in cash. As the odd tourist turned into a steady stream, all I had to do was stand high on an excavated house and watch them being herded through a kind of narrow, roped-off pen. I would admonish them for using flash photography, and ensure they didn’t touch the ancient amphora or other pottery fragments, but all the time I would be thinking about Aliki and Nikolas and what we would do.

After a hot morning’s work we would meet up and hurriedly shower off the volcanic dust, before Aliki would push me down on the bed and drill me with her tongue and I would caress the madly furred Nikolas and he would stroke Aliki and me with olive oil and dark, pungent honey.

One day as I lay coated in this sticky Greek salad dressing I told them why I had come to the island.

“I had a kind of silent breakdown,” I explained, “And failed to collect interest and capital repayments at my branch of the bank when I should have. My husband’s business was going down the tubes at the time, and I felt as if I would be doing it to him. So I let people off when they were in difficulties. I failed to sell people’s assets when I needed to. And then I opened fake accounts to pay off the sums owed. I invented proposals and customers and loans. And in time, an irregularity was discovered, which I knew would lead to all the others.”

“Did you take no money for yourself?” asked Aliki, removing a sticky paw from my back. “I did take some,” I said. “I bought tennis racquets for my husband and me.”

“That’s funny,” said Nikolas. “What you have finally done to your husband is far worse than what you were afraid of doing.”

“Part of me knew you had some secret,” Aliki said. “You never invited questions. But Clara,” she said, her eyes slipping away from my face, “Clara, part of me was utterly innocent.” I rolled over, laid my chin in the curve of her waist and looked at Nikolas, whose agitation was tangible in the tiny room. He got up and strode the two steps to the window, where he flicked the curtain and monopolised the fading light.

“This must never come out,” he said, gesturing at me and Aliki. “I already stretched a point to let you work on the site. You know I’m responsible for the fundraising. I have to be totally clean, and the association would finish the project as well as us. For you it’s probably already too late,” he added, not unkindly. I got up and stood beside him at the window, wanting to look at the darkening sea. There was no sound but the swishing broom of the wife of Andreas, who swept the taverna deck below.

“I’m not blaming you for anything Clara, it’s just unfortunate,” he said, rubbing his fist in his eyes.

That evening I picked my way through the donkey shit on the stony path which led from the excavation to the taverna, past the goats belonging to the wife of Andreas which lounged beneath the discarded parasols she had thoughtfully erected in the fields for them. Andreas stood in the doorway of the taverna, looking mournful.

“I am putting up the price of the room, Clara,” he said. “I have made many improvements, and I can let it out at many times the price I am charging you.”

“I can afford to pay a bit more now,” I said, but he shook his head. “It is my wife,” he said. “She says people will say we are a suspect taverna, and she is afraid the priest will find out.”

The next afternoon, before I joined Aliki and Nikolas, I booked my flights home and telephoned my husband to tell him I would be turning myself in. Then I climbed the dark stairway to where my friends were waiting. I sank between them with a sigh and Nikolas rubbed slow circles over my back, while Aliki stroked strands of my long hair from root to tip.

When I woke several hours later it was almost dark. It was late and I had drunk too much wine and come too many times, and I fervently wished that the black volcano would explode and spray our throats and fill our ears and eyes and lungs until it covered the three of us with scalding ash, to preserve us here together, above the suspect taverna.

####


Wendy Vaizey lives in London. She has worked as an investment banker, and as a financial columnist for The Times, London. Her stories have been published in UK magazines, including most recently The Sunday Express S-Magazine.

She can be reached at:pacificpotpourri@home.com