It felt like the beginning of so many summers that had gone before. Eleni, sitting beside her grandfather in his beloved Cadillac, roaring along the dusty coast road from Chania – sticky with sweat beneath her travelling clothes: the skirt suit that had been so appropriate in Portsmouth, but in Greece was too thick, too dull; grey with lingering English chill – gave not a moment’s pause to the possibility that the one ahead might be different. Why should she? She’d been summering in Crete since she was a baby. This was to be her nineteenth stay. She trusted in what the island held waiting for her, entirely.
The road grew quieter, the further her papou, Yorgos, drove them out of Chania’s bustling centre. There were no other motorcars on the winding hillside pass, just the odd farmer and laden donkey, goats that grazed in the dry, golden heat. Yorgos overtook them all, at a speed Eleni’s British father would have called reckless, had he been there, but which she hardly noticed. She rested her head back, feeling the balmy wind in her tired eyes, the ebbing sun a warm cloth on her face, and, heedless of the Cadillac’s wheels skimming the cliff edge, luxuriated in the relief of her three-day odyssey across Europe finally being over.
She’d travelled by herself that year. Her father, Timothy – a naval captain, and off to sea himself for the summer – hadn’t been happy about it. He’d wanted her to take her usual chaperone: a retired teacher by the name of Miss Finch. But Miss Finch had, only the week before, broken her leg – playing croquet, of all things – leaving Timothy no time to recruit a replacement, and little choice but to give in to Eleni’s assurances that she could manage the trip alone. Which she had. Happily. Sorry as she’d felt for Miss Finch (and really, poor Miss Finch), it had been such a relief, not having to spend endless hours nodding along to her tales of various nieces and nephews, so many pet rabbits, and pure liberation, deciding for herself when to have a drink, or read, or simply stare from the carriage window in silence.
And now she was here.
Here…
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