Free An Inch of Time by Peter Helton Page B

house!’ Nothing happened; not even the hen pecking crumbs off the table reacted. I stood in the door, letting my eyes adjust to the low light within the building. What I feared most at this point, of course, was a Greek guard dog that would jump out and, in the absence of its owner, consider it his job to thoroughly savage me.
    The door led straight into a whitewashed room. Its windows were small – to keep the heat out in summer and in during winter – and its main feature, apart from two spartan sofas and a few bookshelves, was a large black wood burner with ten feet of convoluted stovepipe that disappeared into the wall between a small painting and an oil lamp. A few faded rugs dotted the uneven stone floor. The rest was the type of I’m-a-busy-painter clutter I recognized from home.
    The door to the next room was ajar; a faint scratching noise came from there.
    â€˜Hello?’ I gingerly pushed the door open and found myself looking into a small painting studio. I was pretty sure I was in the right place now, though the few examples of work on the walls, mostly watercolour sketches of nature subjects, didn’t look like her work. One wall was entirely taken up by shelves crammed with enough drawing and painting materials to equip an art shop. The scratching sound came from a small brown hen pecking persistently at half a biscuit among some empty mugs on top of a plan chest. A door on the far side led into a kitchen. I went to investigate. It’s what PIs are supposed to do.
    It looked as if it had survived intact from the 1930s: a small solid-fuel oven, presumably the source of the smoke I’d seen rising from the chimney, a three-ring hob running on bottled gas and a large stone basin with a cast-iron water pump. I pushed on the handle of the pump; it gave a faint gurgle.
    â€˜In Greece it’s considered polite to ask first.’ Morva’s voice, full of schoolmistress disapproval, made me turn guiltily. She had drawn herself up to her full five foot two and was standing in the door brandishing a billhook. ‘Oh my god, it’s you. It’s
you
! Chris, what are you doing here?’ We hugged by the sink. ‘I can’t believe you finally got yourself down here. I can’t believe you
found
me.’
    â€˜Were you lost?’
    â€˜Oh . . . well, you know . . .’ She made a vague gesture with the billhook, which looked old but sharp. ‘It can feel a bit remote sometimes, yes. It isn’t really. Well . . . I still can’t believe you’re here, and just when . . . And you’ve still got the long hair and everything.’
    I wasn’t sure what ‘everything’ meant, but apparently I still had it. Morva looked as if she still had everything too, though she had acquired enough lines in her face to prove she’d been busy while hanging on to it. She wore her hair long and a bit wild and had allowed the grey to take over.
    I pointed at the billhook she was holding. ‘Were you on your way to a peasant revolt or did you intend to prod me with it?’
    â€˜Oh that.’ She dismissed it with a shrug and leant the murderous-looking object in a corner of the nearest window. ‘You know the kind of thing: speak softly but carry a big stick.’ She took a small long-handled saucepan off a hook above the cooker, spooned coffee and a little sugar into it, then added water from a fire-blackened kettle. ‘So, tell me all. What brought you down here now? What time did you land?’
    â€˜I drove down, through Italy, in an ancient motorhome.’
    She set the pot on to the gas stove, opened the valve on the tall red gas cylinder and lit the ring. The gas caught with a low bark. ‘Really? Dan and I did that all those years ago when we first moved down. We broke down in every country on the way.’
    â€˜Is he around?’
    â€˜Sweet Daniel? Ran off with an Australian waitress half his age. Half my age, more importantly,