Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson

lantern.
    It was peaceful in this warm garden with autumn coming: the late grapes puckering on the vines, shrubs bolting after the early rains. Eleni went about her business rustling and clipping. It made Melissa think of the garden she would have loved to have made in England. She closed her eyes and pushed that aside.
    So she thought about Alexandros instead, and the disconcerting extent to which her imagination had pulled her in the wrong direction, had made her expect a much older man. Forall the old-fashioned manners, he was probably in his late thirties, maybe early forties. He wore a wedding ring and Melissa wondered idly what his wife was like, where she was this Saturday morning.
    â€˜You like Alexandros!’
    Melissa started round, caught off guard.
    Eleni had come up silently. ‘Yes?’
    She had meant it as a question, or so Melissa took it.
    â€˜He is very nice – seems a very interesting man,’ she replied.
    The difference between Alexandros in reality and the image which had immediately sprung into her mind was a timely reminder not to jump to conclusions. It was one thing to make a mistake that could be so easily rectified but quite another when there was no way of proving how much about a person was fact and how much conjecture. She would have to draw on all the professional detachment she possessed if she was to draw a picture of Julian Adie and her mother with any accuracy.
    Eleni pulled at bunches of leaves so they were not so tightly packed in the baskets. Then she looked up.
    â€˜He is sad too,’ she said simply.
    It took a while for Melissa to realise she was talking about Alexandros. Unsure how to react to that, she kept quiet.
    But Eleni did not elaborate, and perhaps she had not intended any comparative judgement of her in any case. Melissa was just too raw, and over-sensitive.
    Instead, Eleni shouted into the trees – an angry-sounding tirade which was most likely nothing more than a parting shot to let her sons know she was leaving and when they should come home for lunch – and they set off back down towards the village road. Melissa took one of the sweet-smellingbaskets and listened as Eleni told her which herbs she had picked and what she intended to do with them.
    â€˜Come to the beauty shop tomorrow morning,’ said Eleni. ‘I will show you.’
    That afternoon Melissa lost herself in the water at the flat rock where the fig tree grew. She cleared her mind of everything but the present and the sea-silk against her skin. Wavelets unfurled on her shoulders from a mazarine sea and delicate plumes of smoke rose from the headland to make signals across the bay.

IV
    FOR THE FIRST morning since she had arrived in Kalami, the weather had closed in. The water in the bay was black, ruffled by a near-horizontal wind into a sheet of crepe. The yellow buoys that normally bobbed calmly by the White House were drowning in long pipeline waves that gathered strength as they neared the shore. Against the rocky headland cliffs the swell splashed in great white plumes. Any lingering heat had gone. Melissa stared out of the balcony door for a long time.
    Clouds scowled across the water as she left the apartment. Out in the open she could see a massed invasion of cumulonimbus thunderheads, tumbling ponderously down from Mount Pantokrator. It was mid-morning but the resort had the air of a stormy winter evening.
    Eleni’s directions took her into the village centre, down by the side of the largest of the two small supermarkets, to a hairdresser’s salon under a sign reading
Filoxenia
. A light was on inside but the salon was empty and the door was locked.
    She rang the bell.
    Eleni was wearing a professional white starched tunic andtrousers, her exuberant hair tamed into a tight bun at the back of her neck.
    â€˜You didn’t give me an exact time – is now all right?’ asked Melissa.
    â€˜Of course. Any time is all right.’
    Melissa wondered how