She leaned over the back of her seat to show Kyría Vasilakis one of the images.
‘That will suit you perfectly, Kyría Anna!’ cried the housekeeper, giving the appropriate response. ‘And you’re looking better and better by the day!’
Everyone had noticed the recent transformation. There was colour in Anna’s cheeks again, and her hair shone. She looked even more beautiful now than before her pregnancy.
‘Doctors can do plenty for us, but if you ask me, I think you’ve had the eye.’
Anna often found her housekeeper’s home-grown wisdom and superstitions mildly annoying. Kyría Vasilakis was a great believer in the power of one person to cast a spell on another, usually on account of jealousy, by giving them ‘the eye’. In her view, everyone needed protection from the máti, the evil eye. She never ventured outside her own home without wearing her blue glass talisman, believing that it protected her from all kinds of woes and illnesses.
On the subject of health in general, Kyría Vasilakis was in her element, and not to be deterred.
‘Ordinary medicine can’t treat everything, you know,’ she continued.
Anna resumed her perusal of the magazine. She did not want to hear her housekeeper’s views on herbal cures and the human body. In order to be prepared for this afternoon, she needed to study pleats and gathers and necklines, and was becoming irritated by this intrusion into her concentration.
‘But there’s something those doctors never lose patience with,’ Kyría Vasilakis went on, ‘and that’s leprosy. They just keep trying and trying.’
Anna sighed audibly. If only the woman would just go away.
‘And they say they might be making progress with it! Who would have thought? People have been dying of it for thousands of years and now they’re talking of a cure!’
For a moment, Anna could hardly breathe. Her chest had tightened and she sat motionless, her sweating hands clutching the magazine until its pages crumpled within them.
‘You see, with some diseases, even I agree there’s no place for herbal remedies. They’ve been trying those for centuries – snake oil, cactus extract, all sorts. Nothing has ever worked. But it’s so nice that those wonderful doctors never gave up, isn’t? They just kept on and on . . .’
The surfaces were thoroughly beeswaxed now. Kyría Vasilakis was never happy until she could see her reflection in them. She finished off by flicking her feather duster over an ornate clock, straightening the lace cloth on the dresser and plumping up some cushions. Anna sat frozen.
‘Can I bring you something, Kyría Anna?’ the housekeeper asked. ‘If there is nothing more you need doing in here, I’ll start the lunch. I can shake the rugs out later.’
Anna shook her head. She just wanted the infernal woman out of the room. She had heard enough. Slamming the magazine down on the table in front of her, she tried to control her trembling.
Kyría Vasilakis’s casual comment had thrown her into turmoil. The discovery of a cure for leprosy was her worst nightmare. It would mean the return of her sister Maria from Spinalonga.
The man Anna loved with her whole being had once been engaged to Maria, and she was seized with terror that her own relationship with Manolis was now in jeopardy.
When the dressmaker arrived with his assistant – it had taken them since early morning to travel by bus from Iraklion – he was told that the client was indisposed. Anna had announced to Kyría Vasilakis that she had a migraine, and had withdrawn to her room and closed the curtains.
For the next twenty-four hours, she stayed in bed, tortured by the housekeeper’s words, but late the following morning, she remembered that Manolis had promised to visit. The thought of his arrival drove her to get up and into one of her favourite dresses.
With her make-up carefully applied and a favourite necklace and matching earrings clipped in place, she dabbed some perfume onto her neck and went downstairs. The house was silent except for the sound of a ticking clock. Sofia had been taken out for a walk by the nursemaid, and Kyría Vasilakis had the afternoon off.
Anna sat down at the kitchen table and read the front page of the daily newspaper. It was waiting there for Andreas to read when he returned from the estate. It was the first thing he did each evening. He was a creature of habit. There was little in it to interest her. A rise in the cost of fuel. The death of some politician of whom she had never heard. A tremor on some islands further north.
She put a jug of lemonade, freshly made by Kyría Vasilakis, and two glasses on the table, and sat waiting. What seemed an age after the clock struck two, she heard the sound of the latch. Annoyed that Manolis was seven minutes later than she had expected him, she remained sitting, stiff and upright. Instead of a smile and her open arms, it was her back that greeted him.
Manolis was familiar with Anna’s sulks. They never bothered him, because he usually found a way to dispel them.
‘Kaliméra, agápi mou,’ he said breezily. There was no reply.
He saw that Anna was pretending to read the headlines, and stealthily pulled a flower from a vase on the sideboard.
She felt a tickling on the back of her neck, but stayed stubbornly still. Manolis then leant forward and caressed her neck with his fingers, at the same time taking the flower and sliding it into her cleavage. Anna spun round, her resolve to remain angry melting away.
As Manolis made love to her that afternoon, Anna reacted to his touch with great passion. Thoughts of her sister’s return made her responses even more explosive than normal, and she ran her fingernails hard down his back, feeling them penetrate the skin.
For a short while afterwards they lay still, and Anna rested a hand on his chest. It was only a few minutes, though, before her fears rose once again. In very few ways was she capable of restraining herself, and she told her lover what the housekeeper had said.
‘So you think nothing will change?’ she persisted. Rumours of the cure had created an unease in her that she could not allay.
‘What do you mean, moró mou?’
‘You must know what I mean! Nothing would be the same if they . . . if they came back.’
Manolis realised what was on her mind. What Anna really meant was ‘she’, not ‘they’. Rumours that a cure for leprosy might be closer had begun to circulate more widely, and he had heard the gossip that even the most deformed might soon be back and living among them. But Anna was thinking only of one person. Maria had been on his mind too, but he had suppressed any thoughts of her reappearance and how it might affect his life. He was reasonably certain that he and Anna’s sister had each relinquished any hold on the other when she left for Spinalonga, though there had never been a formal end to their engagement.
Almost roughly, he pulled Anna towards him and gave her a lingering kiss on the lips. He could feel her relax beneath him.
‘Promise me you’ll stop worrying,’ he said softly. ‘Nothing is going to change between us. The little one’s nonós isn’t going anywhere.’
‘The little one’s father . . .?’ Anna responded.
‘Who knows?’ Manolis cut in. ‘She is my little vaftistíra, my little baptised girl. I am her spiritual father. That’s what matters.’
Although they had tried to be cautious in their lovemaking, both Anna and Manolis knew that the question of paternity could not be absolutely certain. The child bore a resemblance to both the men in her life, and given the cousins’ strong likeness to each other, this was no surprise. Manolis had occasionally wondered, but preferred to put this doubt to the back of his mind. Anna, on the other hand, seemed to relish the idea that her lover was the father of her child.