The Girl Under the Olive Tree (2 page)

‘But Alex ought to know something of the Georgiou heritage,’ Lois argued, before changing tack. ‘I never took you for a coward.’

I had to laugh at this direct assault. The young didn’t mince their words and she had a point. If only Lois knew how old age was creeping through these creaking limbs and sapping my confidence to roam far from home, let alone revisit the dangerous past. ‘Our Greek ancestry was back in the nineteenth century. My mother made sure we were as English as a cup of tea. This needs some thinking about. You mustn’t rush me.’

‘You do that and, talking of tea, I’ll put the kettle on.’ Lois darted off towards the kitchen door. ‘Breakfast in the garden?’

‘I only said I’d think about it . . .’ I shouted to her back. ‘And there’s Trojan to think about, too.’

Lois stopped and turned back. ‘There is such a thing as a kennel, or one of your friends might have him. It’ll be for only two or three weeks.’

‘
If
I go on holiday he goes to a pet hotel,’ I said.

Lois’s dark eyes were flashing in triumph as she pointed to the wooden hut in the corner of the lawn. ‘I’ll bring breakfast over to the summerhouse.’

Then my legs wobbled. I had to sit down on the old bench under the cedar tree that shaded the lawn and looked down to the lake. I could just see Stokencourt Place, the former Georgiou family house, across the lake, now developed into luxury apartments. All that was left of the estate was this smaller dower house, closer to the village boundary wall. I was the last of the three siblings to survive. Since my retirement fifteen years ago this was home, too large, too empty, too full of ghosts.
But it’ll see you out,
a voice inside me said.

Dear Lois had no idea what this surprise gift was stirring up. But I couldn’t let her down. Lois’s mother, Athene, died far too young and now that Evadne, my own sister, was gone, she needed someone’s support.

Alex was suffering too. The three of us were the last link to the George clan and Lois regarded me as a grandmother substitute. It seemed cruel to refuse and yet . . . How could I face going back to the island even though it was a lifetime ago? How could it be sixty years since those troubled times?

Even now, with the very thought of that place such fearful memories arose. The best and worst of times indeed: savage cruelty, suffering, hunger, and yet it was also the time of my life, a time filled with the exhilaration of danger and the overwhelming kindness of strangers. There were many things about that time that I could never tell anyone.

Lois was calling Alex from the TV, clattering a breakfast tray of cups and glasses as she trundled across the lawn, yet she did not entirely break my reverie. Why was my heart racing at the idea of a return to the island, that first reluctance to go back weakening by the minute?

Why shouldn’t they know a little of my story? Who else is there left to pass it on to now? Who is there left to harm? Someone should know what really happened before all my precious secrets are buried in the ground with me for ever.

At my age each day was a bonus not to be squandered. Though I balked at the idea of sharing some of my past, a part of me knew it was time to let go of so much that had burdened my heart over the years. The young had a right to know just how it was then. We endured terrible times but embraced them too, and discovered parts of ourselves not known before.

Boys like Alex should learn that war was not all computer games, all swash and buckle gung-ho. It was a bloody, filthy affair. Men and women gave their lives so he could live free from fear; he ought to know that. So many of my friends hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy the comfortable retirement I had. The battle for Crete was long forgotten now; just a page in dusty textbooks.

How can I go back and face all those ghosts and all the emotions locked within that sacred island? How can I survive the remembering, the nightmares and the dream?

Perhaps then, old girl, it’s time you set them free?
the inner voice niggled at me.

So I picked up the brochure and made my way slowly to the comfort of the old summerhouse chairs where Lois was waiting.

That night he came to me again, the bronzed man of my dreams in the shadowy half-remembered figure of his youth. He wore a black shirt, crisscrossed with a leather bandolier, cavalry jodhpurs, leather knee boots scuffed with dust. Round his forehead hung the lace bandana, and always there was that twist of his lips into a sardonic grin. His presence blazed through the morning mist and I smelled again the rosemary and thyme on the grey-white rocks of the White Mountains. I was running towards him with longing but then his face changed, the roar of the guns carrying my cry away. The dust and sand thickened, screening him from me. I couldn’t reach him . . . Then I woke, my eyes wet and blurred, the only sound the sheep calling to their lambs on the morning air through the open window.

Who was calling me back to the island, back to those scents of sage and lemons, back to our Mediterranean nights? ‘Didn’t every love have its own landscape?’ I once read somewhere.

But that was not where it all began, oh, no, I sighed, lying back on the pillow. To make sense of this journey one had to begin in another, far northern landscape of mountain streams and heather moors, recalling that first unpromising glimpse of what might be . . .

Penny Georgiou sat on the damp heather, spying out the land with binoculars for a sighting of the old red stag that the laird’s gamekeeper had earmarked for the cull. She loved being out on the moors, ‘glassing the hill’, as they called it, lying hidden in the heather with binoculars searching for the quarry, pretending she was one of the boys, stalking in the hills around Blair Atholl.

The sun was high and the hills sparkled purple, falling away in every direction like a vast sea of rolling waves as far as the eye could see. She loved the thrill of the stalk, the hikes on rough tracks, the scrambles over scree. The gillie said she was so fleet of foot, her long legs could outpace many a man, but when she’d told her mother about this compliment, it had not gone down well. ‘I didn’t breed you for mountaineering in breeches, get out of those nasty things and make yourself presentable,’ she’d demanded.

Out in the mountain air Penny could forget all the daily restrictions of her life: the schoolroom, the dancing lessons, the interminable dressmaker’s appointments. Here she was free to stretch her limbs, to breathe in the tang of the heather and forget that she was a girl. Even so, she was a crack shot, better than her brother, Zan.

Now she should be heading back; today was just a trial run. Most of the shooting party were out doing a Macnab, a challenge to catch a salmon, and shoot a brace of grouse and a stag all in one day, not that she was allowed to take part. It was the night of the Highland Ball and the women were busy dressing, preparing for the dancing and for showing her sister, Evadne, off to her prospective relatives, the Jeffersons.

It was Evadne’s second season as a debutante and their mother, Lady Fabia, had stalked the ballrooms of Belgravia, sniffing out suitable quarry for her elder daughter in vain. The court was still in mourning for King George the Fifth, who’d died earlier in the year. Evadne had insisted on wearing black for the dance her parents gave for her. It was daring and sophisticated, and she’d bagged her own prize in the shape of Walter Jefferson, a young diplomat in the Foreign Office, well connected but with no title, much to her mother’s disappointment. Their engagement was to be announced tonight.

At least no one was bothering Penny, leaving her free to roam around the magnificent house, with its staircase full of portraits of the noble Murray family down the generations. She’d found the library, its walls lined with leather-bound learning, books that were well thumbed and read, not like the showy tomes that passed for literature in Papa’s study at Stokencourt. Why did they all think reading was such a waste of time, she mused. Papa read the
Financial Times
, Mother glanced through
The Lady
, looking for domestic servants, Evadne didn’t read at all. She was always out riding with her friends and Penny was too young to enjoy all their girly chitchat. She sometimes wished, though, that she was more like her big sister in looks and temperament. Perhaps then Mother wouldn’t be so hard on her for having her head stuck in a book.

Penny returned down to the big house, skiving off to the library where the magnificent busts of Milton and Shakespeare peered down at her. Her own scanty education had been imparted by poor Miss Francis, who had tutored her privately for a while, but now Penny was sixteen and a half and not expected to bother with anything other than flower arranging, drawing and ballroom dancing lessons. She longed to go to college, all because of a secret passion that none of her family would ever understand.

It started when Albert Gregg, the old gardener, gave her a knapped flint he’d found in the garden when she was seven. He’d pointed out how the flint had been worked in ancient times, an arrowhead for hunting. To be touching something thousands of years old thrilled her, sending her digging up the borders to find more treasures. Her mother had been furious when she’d turned up late for tea, covered in mud. Poor Nanny was blamed for this disgrace. It had not stopped Penny searching the ploughed fields for Roman remains, bits of tiles and pottery, which were later hidden in shoe boxes. Once she’d even found a coin stamped with an emperor’s head. She wished she knew Latin so she could understand what it said. Her interest made every walk in the brown Cotswold fields an adventure into history.

At least Miss Francis let her clean her finds and draw them in her special jotter. That was one thing she was good at: line drawing, sketching in pen and ink. Miss Francis said she had a good eye for accurate representation but not for imaginary stuff.

Here in the castle library was a whole world of fresh books, including one on her favourite topic:
Digging up the Pas
t by Sir Leonard Woolley. It had pictures of digs in faraway, exotic places: Egypt, Persia and Greece. Penny idly wondered if she could borrow it for a day or two, but Mother would only snatch it away in disgust saying, ‘You really are the most unnatural girl. I didn’t bring you into the world to be a blue stocking.’

She sometimes wondered why they’d bothered to produce her at all. They’d got one of each, Evadne and Alexander. She was just an afterthought and the wrong sex. Girls were expensive to bring out and so they didn’t get the education Zan took as his due. It was so unfair.

She’d managed to slip her chaperone one afternoon in London and found an exhibition in Burlington House showing details of the Palace of Knossos, with reproductions of frescos and what looked like a wonderful blue monkey. She persuaded Evadne to visit the British Museum, spending hours going through the Ancient History rooms, marvelling at the wonderful relics of past civilizations while Evadne yawned with boredom. This made Penny determined to get a library ticket in Cheltenham, the nearest town to Stokencourt, and carry on her studies in secret. She borrowed everything to do with ancient history.

Then there had been a mix-up over a library fine for a book she’d not been able to get back on time. Mother had torn into her in fury. ‘What do mean, Penelope, sneaking behind our backs? What are we going to do to curtail all this silliness?’

‘It’s
not
silly. I want to go to college,’ she’d snapped. ‘I’m going to be an archaeologist.’

Everyone at the dining table had roared.

‘Don’t answer me back! Girls of our class don’t do . . . they just
are,
future partners to the great and good of the country. Papa, tell her! I was married at your age, Penelope, and never read a book in my life. It’s just time-wasting.’

Fabia turned to her husband, who slunk behind his paper muttering, ‘This one’s got a mind of her own. Let her use it or she’ll make mischief

Penny knew Papa was on her side but no one stood up to Mother when she was on the warpath.

‘Over my dead body!’ Fabia exclaimed. ‘She needs to learn obedience. Look at her, like a beanpole, and the way she slouches . . . I pay for all those dancing lessons and still she hunches her shoulders, plus her skin is too brown.’ She paused, eyeing Penny with distaste. ‘But I suppose one of our brats had to inherit your Greek colouring, Phillip. Sit up straight, girl, for once. You need fattening up.’

‘I’m not a turkey for Christmas. I’d really like to go to college, take exams. I don’t want a season. If it’s the expense, think of the money you’d save. I could earn my keep. Miss Francis said there were courses—’

‘No granddaughter of Sir Lionel Dellamane gets a job.’ Fabia spat out the word as if it was poison and that was the end of the conversation. She stormed off, leaving Penny in tears of frustration.

Her father sighed. ‘Bad luck, old girl, but she really wants the best for you.’

‘She wants the best for herself,’ Penny muttered out of earshot. Her mother was nothing but a snob. The titled Dellamanes might go back to the Conquest but their wealth came from banking, and the success of Lady Fabia’s husband’s Greek grandfather in trade, from shipping, something she chose to ignore, anglicizing his surname whenever she could. Penny was a reminder of that heritage; a dark-eyed blonde with walnut-coloured arms.

Yet the changing of their name was the one concession that Fabia had not been able to force through. Phillip was proud of his family and made sure his children learned to speak his mother tongue. It had helped Zan through his classics studies at Harrow. Penny had copied out lessons from his textbooks but it was hard to study without encouragement. Miss Francis taught the girls only French, ready for finishing school in Switzerland, should it be needed . . .

A bell rang summoning everyone to change and Penny reluctantly stuck the book on the shelf, making a vow to return. Up in their suite of rooms, everyone was fussing over Evadne’s hair and make-up. She really did look beautiful in her white satin ball dress, and radiant with something no powder puff could create. Effy was clearly in love. The wedding would be in spring and Mother was already planning the trousseau and wedding dress. Penny would miss her big sister when she moved into her own home in London, but there was always the chance of visiting her and escaping Mother’s regimented routines, a chance, too, to explore all London had to offer.