evening light with a glass of chilled white wine in her hand, making polite conversation with a man she had never met before, talking about herself and her work, struck Calli as incongruous and amusing. Her memories of such events were always dominated by older relatives, parents, grandparents and old folk from the village who had known her from childhood. This was an altogether different crowd: much younger, around her age, men and women, some with young children who had all come to meet her.
‘I saw you walking to the beach today,’ Michalis continued as they stood by the barbecue. ‘Do you always go for a swim so early?’
‘The place was completely deserted this morning,’ she replied, surprised, having noticed no one apart from a couple of dogs and some cats out and about on her way to the sea.
‘I was just getting into my car to go to work, so you wouldn’t have seen me,’ he explained. He too liked to be up with the dawn, he told her, and would often start his day with a swim.
‘You’re so lucky to live in a place where you can plunge into the sea whenever you want to, especially before going to work,’ she said, remembering with distaste how she would often push herself to visit her gym’s chlorine-infused pool before starting her day in London.
‘I agree,’ he replied. ‘I feel that I’m blessed to live on this island. I wouldn’t change it for anything.’ He turned to gesture around him. ‘I used to live in the village over that way when I was a boy.’ He pointed to the mountains behind them. ‘That’s where I was born, but the sea beckoned me, so now I have the best of both.’
They were indeed blessed, Calli thought, those who lived on Crete: mountain or sea, you are never too far from either.
‘When did you move to the coast?’ she asked, her curiosity aroused.
‘First I moved to Heraklion, got a job there,’ Michalis replied, ‘but it didn’t suit me – too many people, too many buildings, not enough nature.’
She tried to guess what he did for a living. Chrysanthi had said that a couple of Costis’s friends had their own business and she tried to imagine what that might be. She observed him as he talked and decided he was handsome in an earthy sort of way: muscular arms, sunburned skin and wiry black hair – so different from Paolo with his slender suntanned limbs, yoga-honed body and smooth silky hair.
‘I’ve travelled a lot,’ Calli told him, ‘but this island, this landscape’ – she turned around to point towards the hills as he had done – ‘the people, the culture, are locked in my heart. If I was writing about Crete and I hadn’t been here before I think I’d be describing it as the land of mountains and canyons, sea and olive groves!’
‘It’s true, though don’t forget all those ancient sites too.’ He smiled. ‘But, yes, I’d agree. In fact, these olive groves are my passion and my life’s work.’
His passion, he told her, was his acres of olive plantations. His work, he explained, was running his small but prolific olive-oil distillery near the village of his birth, some twenty kilometres from the sea. ‘My father and grandfather had a few olive groves and we used to produce oil just for the family. Then I decided to come back and take on the business and develop it further. Cretan olive oil is the best in the world, you know,’ he said with pride. She didn’t disagree; she knew that Greek olive oil was superb, and if Michalis considered his island’s to be the best then so be it. ‘I always bring several bottles for your thia, when we make the first pressing; she says my oil is the only one to her liking.’
‘I know she loves her olive oil,’ Calli replied.
‘I bring a bottle to all the friends in the village when we do our first pressing but for Kyria Froso I bring more.’ As he talked, Calli could see Michalis’s pride and pleasure written all over his face and in his eyes. His eyes, she thought, were as deeply black and bright as those beloved olives of his.
As it was a Saturday evening with no work the next day, the party continued until the early hours of the morning. Once the eating was finished and the plates and food had been cleared away, the tables were moved to one side, the