Suddenly he jerked awake, his eyes wide and unseeing. Then he saw her in the doorway and smiled hesitantly, obviously embarrassed at being seen. But it was Holly who felt the intruder. Half of her wanted to go and hold him like you would a child who had bad dreams, and half of her was frightened by it all. For her Titus Quayle wasn’t just a man. He was a hero figure from her childhood, the strongest man she had ever known, and what in God’s name had happened that could drive something so strong into a sweating moaning huddle the moment his conscious relaxed?
Some nights, when it was very bad, he got up and smoked on the veranda – because awake he could handle it. If she too was awake, she could smell the smoke, and sometimes she got up and they played chess.
It was in the second week, when the wind shrieked and rain lashed through the cracks under the doors, that she gathered up her blankets and crept through to his room, dragging the mattress after her. She had never liked storms and. as she lay awake in her loneliness, a jagged pitchfork of lightning flashed across the room. Quayle lowered his left hand down, his fingers running through her hair. In the dark and thunder it was what she needed. Feeling that, not even the storm could touch her she slept.
The mattress stayed on the floor beside Quayle’s stretcher and, one night, soon after – when his demons came and he lay rigidly tense and sweating – she climbed up onto the cot and soothed him, holding his head against her breasts. He could hear her heart beat through the thin t-shirt. The next day, she moved the mattress back to the bed that night she slept spooned against his back.
Nothing was said by either about the arrangement and, on the third night they slept together, Titus slept through without waking for the first time in over two years.
Some days he borrowed Nico’s brother’s boat, a brightly painted traditional twenty-two footer, and they sailed around to one of the remote bays. Holly dozed in the sun on the foredeck and Quayle – now Hemingway-esque, with a new stubble beard – sat hard in the stern, the sheets and tiller in his hands as he coaxed the old boat to windward, sometimes muttering sweet things to her, sometimes calling her all the nasty names a man can call a boat.
Once the anchor was down, he would free dive to the bottom stretching his lungs, always counting to sixty before slowly surfacing .Today he didn’t dive, but swam ashore with powerful measured strokes, and she watched him jog up the hillside to a white building, its trellised patio covered in bright blooms of bougainvillaea. Ten minutes later he returned with a bag in his teeth and, pulling himself over the side of the boat, held it up grinning.
“Ice. One needs ice with Ouzo!” And, with that, he produced a small bottle of Ouzo from his wet pocket.
It was that week that Holly asked a relative of Nico’s who was about to visit Athens a favour and, when he returned, she presented Quayle with a set of fine sable hair brushes. It was the first spontaneous present that anyone had ever given him and he accepted them awkwardly, not knowing what to say. The next day he used them for the fine gilt work on a Seventeenth Century Romanian piece. He reciprocated with a feisty little black tom kitten, who stood with his tiny paws set, and hissed at everything until she scooped him up. Sitting in the palm of her hand, pressed up against her cheek, he found her acceptable, and from that moment on forgot the hiss and began playfully biting her hair.
People in the village began to notice other changes. Bright potted plants now sat on the windowsills, curtains hung in the bedroom window, and Quayle seemed to smile more when shopping in the store. He would also take time with the people, perhaps take an Ouzo and a plate of sardines, and he showed the children a trick with a coin that he seemed to pluck from their ears. There was a rumour that he was a doctor struck off for drinking because, when the body of a tourist was washed up on the beach, he seemed to know how long it had been in the water just by looking at it, and why else would he live on the Island unless he was struck off? The women of the village, who loved to gossip, liked the change. Some Sundays, Holly walked down to the village and attended church, not understanding the service but worshipping nevertheless. The women of the village liked that and smiled at her. It was not good for a man to be alone, but they did agree that living together was unseemly and with luck they would marry soon. It was only really talk – for the island had long been smothered in tourists in the summer, and modern values mixed happily with the Greek Orthodox beliefs.
The eccentricity of the image was strengthened when Nico had one of his periodic problems paying the bank back their loan.
The restaurant was doing well – but Nico favoured his luck with the cards too often and, being a great lover, he was therefore proverbially an unlucky gambler. This surely was the reason, he morosely told Quayle.
“Bullshit Nico, you just don’t cheat as well as they do. How much are you in for?”
“I must have three hundred thousand drachmas at the bank on Friday,” he replied, “or it is gone… poof!” He waved his hand in the air dramatically.
The next day, a boy arrived with six
