Free Songs of Blue and Gold by Deborah Lawrenson Page B

to find the shrine path again after trying one of the three promising-looking tavernas at Agni, but in the end she packed up herbag and wandered in the other direction. The road rose up over the northern headland, and swiftly dipped down again to Kouloura.
    It was enchanting: another deserted blue bay, clearly still mainly used for fishing. Brightly coloured wooden boats lay upturned on the shingle and bobbed in the tiny harbour. The only buildings were clustered around the toy port, capped by the Byzantine roundels of a solitary white villa. She sat in sunshine by the wall, feeling relaxed. One day at a time, she’d told herself. If every day could have been like that blue afternoon, just as Julian Adie experienced it when he was on the island, she too would have felt like the king of the world.
    The path to the house called Seraphina twisted up through an orchard of oranges and lemons. Here, too, were blankets of pink cyclamen that grew so profusely in the olive groves that she was having to pick her way through carefully to avoid crushing them underfoot. Notes of music threaded down through the trees from a house to one side.
    The idyll was rudely interrupted as Melissa drew closer.
    â€˜Ay-ooo! Po-po-po! Aaayyyy-oooooo!’
    â€˜Po-po-po!’
    The terrace of the modest stone house was abandoned for all that there was a sewing box and some mending on the table along with a glass of water. Uncertain what to do, she followed the wails towards an open door into the house, where a bead curtain was partially pulled back. She wondered whether it was not, after all, a good time and she should melt away again. She was about to turn back whena hand pulled the clinking beads back further and Manolis sauntered out.
    â€˜Ah! Hello!’ he greeted her as the noise intensified. ‘Come in!’
    As if nothing untoward was happening, he ushered her into a wide white room with a shiny tiled floor. The screams echoed slightly. They came from an older man with a sweating forehead who was waving a large white handkerchief as if in surrender to his fate.
    â€˜He’s got a clove in his tooth,’ explained Manolis. ‘This is Eleni, my wife.’
    A plump woman with smooth golden skin and a prominent mole above her lip stepped forward. She too was smiling warmly, following the rules of hospitality.
    They shook hands. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Melissa, ridiculously, trying to follow their lead and keep a sociable tone against the background roars of pain.
    An elderly woman she took to be the older man’s wife launched a stream of withering invective.
    â€˜Ay-ooooo. . . .’
    The older man was clutching his jaw, bobbing until he was bending double, and pulling an agonised face. The wife, a tiny woman with a helmet of short grey hair, crossed her arms and stood by, nodding grimly.
    â€˜My father . . . Manos. He’s got a toothache but he won’t go to the dentist.’
    â€˜Nasty,’ Melissa agreed.
    There was another outburst to which they listened politely. Melissa glanced quizzically at Manolis and Eleni.
    â€˜My mother is saying, “You stupid man, brains of a donkey, when we said clove, we meant oil of cloves, not a hard brownclove from the kitchen. To wedge it into the hole – you’ve probably cracked it further open and done some damage more terrible than the first!”’ said Manolis.
    The man then counter-attacked in a furious eruption.
    Manolis cocked his head, listening. ‘Hmm,’ he said, and pulled down the sides of his mouth.
    Melissa couldn’t help herself. ‘What now?’
    â€˜My father has said my mother is surely the most ineffective wise woman in the whole of the Ionian Islands, one who could not tell the difference between a goat’s bottom and a bee sting, and if she can cure headaches by telephone then why cannot she lift her own loyal husband’s dreadful suffering . . .’
    â€˜Or