Page 125 of Summer in Greece

At that same time, in 1951, Greece joined NATO and there were Greek elections. Adam went out with the army to support the new regime in what had become a very troubled country. Naturally, he went to Syros to see Anna’s family. They took Anna’s death badly. Adam was broken-hearted. He wrote to me from Greece and said he had a small job to do on Kea, then he was returning to his battalion, but I never heard from him again.

This, I knew, was all punishment for my wrongdoing. I had sworn to atone for my sins on the day the Britannic went down. How could I have foreseen this cruel twist, my son Adam being taken from me was the worst penance, but I had to bear it. I kept my pain inside, where it belonged, and when your mother grew, and married, I prayed God had forgiven me, and nothing else would happen to those I loved. To lose Adam, with no closure, no grave to weep over, was the worst punishment of all.

Eventually, Adam was listed as missing in action. Like any mother, this broke my heart. I refused to believe my beautiful son was dead. To tell you the truth, I still can’t believe it. I tried to find out what happened, but to no avail. I had saved a little each year, always planning to go back to Kea or Syros. In the end, I managed to get to Kea in the Sixties. Time had passed, and people’s memories are short. There were vague references to an English working on the island, but names were forgotten.

I visited Manno’s grave, and wept the afternoon away. I had loved that man with all my heart.

The old cottage of Yiayá was still standing, although the door was locked, and rotting along the bottom. I placed my hand on the stone near the entrance, and remembered the pretty donkey and the sweet white goat. How we had laughed. I walked along the port. The chest had long gone, so I stood there for a while, leaning against the wall and looking over to the lighthouse, which hadn’t changed a bit.

I had refused to tell anyone where I was going because I could not stand to be interrogated about my quest. All I wanted, was to remember Manno, my one afternoon of passion, and my beautiful son, Adam.

CHAPTER 50

SHELLY

Greece, present day.

BEFORE SUNRISE THE NEXT MORNING, Shelly slipped out of bed and into a white linen bathrobe. After tiptoeing through the French windows, she sat on the balcony and stared out to sea. The lighthouse flashed reassuringly in the dawn light, and for a moment she stared at the quayside and imagined Gran Gertie, and Manno sitting on the chest. Poor Gertie, what an emotional turmoil to go through.

She smiled to herself and glanced back into the room, at the man sleeping in her bed; the man she had spoken to almost every day for months. Not only did Shelly know she had fallen in love, but she knew she had fallen for Harry’s emotional warmth, the way he cared for her, and for the way he needed to be with her, be it for a week, or a lifetime.

Before Harry, she’d only had David. Oh, yes, there had been a casual affair or two, but she could not even remember their names, and as far as love was concerned, she had been too young to appreciate what she had with David, when they both lived for the moment. Now, on Kea, Shelly sensed this was a period for embracing the rest of her life. To put all her faith and trust in one man was a brave commitment, because she knew she could not stand to be hurt by Harry. All her emotions, especially love, friendship, and trust were invested in him.

The Greek light gathered, the town waking. The bakery drew its loyal customers with delicious aromas of fresh bread wafting on cool air.

Some Greek islands had sold their soul to the tourist’s bankcard; prosperous islands where the locals were thespians, blatantly welcoming. ‘Hello! So lovely to see you again, how long are you here for?’

Not Kea. On this island, the locals observed their foreign visitors with a slight air of curiosity. ‘Why have you come here when you could go to Santorini or Mykonos?’ Also, Kea didn’t suffer fools lightly. This was not an island of nightclubs, expensive cocktails, or sunbeds. There was no Demos pelican with clipped wings, strutting the beach looking for tourists to be photographed with.

Kea was an island where you felt you belonged, or you left.

*

‘Come on, no time for daydreaming!’ Harry called. ‘Shower, get dressed, then we’re off. We’ll have breakfast in a cove, halfway.’

In the dawn light, she saw their vessel was the beautiful white ridged inflatable boat they’d used before. The furiously fast and sexily sleek RIB was shaped like an arrowhead and powered by a throbbing black monster of a motor at the rear.

Harry’s pride in the vessel was as wide as his grin. She climbed in and sat next to him in the cockpit. He told her to buckle up her life jacket and hang on.

A woman came over from a quayside taverna with a cardboard tray and a bag of pastries. ‘Enjoy!’ she called with a knowing wink. Harry pulled off slowly.

‘Pull the fenders in, will you?’ he called.

A little thing, yet it made her feel part of the team. As they crept out of the harbour, she pulled in the white bullet-shaped fenders that protected the sides of the vessel from its quayside neighbours. Once she had returned to her seat, they had reached the open sea and Harry pulled the throttle hard back. The prow lifted and they planed over the crests of waves, out of the Kea Channel. She looked over to the calm sea on her left and imagined the Britannic beneath four hundred feet of warm, crystal-clear water. One day, she would dive that great ship. The mid-summer dive came back to her, and she realised she had not seen Elias yet.

Before long, the barren island of Yaros came into view. A coastline of tall cliffs with pleats and tucks seeming even more dramatic because of the early morning light. She remembered Gertie and the dolphins, Eleonora’s falcon, and Manno and his teasing. The sky turned from grey-blue to peach, then Harry indicated the horizon to their right, just as the sun peeped over the line, rising like a great crimson fireball flinging a path of red light across the undulating sea, towards them.

She caught Harry’s eye, and in a glance told him the sunrise never ceased to amaze her. He nodded, smiling, and she knew he felt the same. It was this similarity of spirit – the understanding they shared – that mattered to her as much as the spark between them, and their amazing compatibility in bed.

Harry lowered their speed, and they cruised into a shallow bay where he instructed her to drop anchor when the boat stopped. ‘It’s only chest deep here,’ he said. She could see the bottom very clearly.

‘Time for breakfast,’ he said, his eyes lustrous with want. ‘Let’s eat on that rock.’

‘Oh dear, I didn’t bring my swimwear.’

He was grinning like a schoolboy. ‘Then it seems we’ll have to go naked.’

‘But what if somebody comes?’