I.
Take the afternoon, said Mr Hubert. There was no need for both of them to sit with the girls and be bored to horsehair in Madame Salle's villa all afternoon. Courtesy visits, he added dryly, and didn't she need to do anything? Postcards home, or something. They'd see her in the evening, sometime after supper. Not too late. She could sort something out on her own, of course?
She could. Yes. If he was sure -?
He was sure. He hardly looked forward (sotto voce) to his afternoon himself; he certainly wouldn't wish it on her. No, no, she should sit here and finish her tea at leisure; she needn't behave like she was on a timetable just because they were. He had settled the bill.
Not that she didn't like the girls, she told herself, and Mr Hubert was kindness itself, of course, but six weeks trailing hither and thither across the Continent with them – Myra's asthma, Elspeth's selectively delicate stomach, Mina's wool-gathering, their uncle's overjolly attitude to everything from seasickness to cockroach-infested bedlinens - had rather devalued their currency, and an afternoon off was nothing less than deliverance. She had finally made it to Greece and would not be found dead mouldering among the flies in amongst the stuffed birds and silk flowers of some stifling more-English-than-England old bat's parlour, not for one minute. Or at least not today. She waited until Mr Hubert and the three girls, four straw hats in the back of an elderly Studebaker, disappeared around the last corner of the square, and set off firmly in the opposite direction.
What Mary Weaver, doomed since childhood to be a governess, had no way of knowing was that free time has a way of becoming a duty. Those unused to it find themselves unable to decide what to do with it, but terrified of spending it poorly. Sitting at a café table in the plaza seemed to be a waste of time, as did trawling through the small shops and stalls that lined the narrow streets around it, as she would certainly end up doing it two or three times with the girls. The church held no more attraction, having been the subject of sightseeing and several fairly desiccating lectures on fifteenth-century iconography by Mr Hubert yesterday afternoon. She could not, in good conscience, go back to the pension and kill off the day that way, by sleeping and reading. She could sketch, but the idea bored her. She stood beneath the shade of the thin thorn-tree outside the lunch-rooms doors and cast around, hoping something would catch her attention and draw her that way. White doves sat in the ring of shade cast by the parapet of the fountain in the centre of the square, stupefied by the heat; the fountain coughed up only a thin stream of water through a thin iron pipe. As she stood there waiting, a man burned dark as bark stopped by it and cupped his hands under the dribble, then laved the shallow handful of water down over his neck. Her gaze travelled past him, across the old stone of the church and the cafes and the fire station, into the gap. At the bottom of that street, water glimmered. Of course. That way.
It was further than it looked. She passed down a shadowed cobbled street with a strong smell of drains, through a brilliant band of afternoon light and the flat green hands of palm leaves pressed against the inside of a bay window, down another dark street and a bright cross-street, the houses looking less dejected here, and into a bright square. Church, fountain, doves, rival cafes with scowling headwaiters and spindly outdoor tables. Except this church wasn't streaked with soot, the fountain ran, the doves cooed and bobbed, and the cafes had menus extending beyond ancient cheese and dubious fish. And directly ahead of her, a broad paved waterfront and a small thicket of masts. The light came down hot and pale, a lemony dusty light that brought only blues and whites to the eye; the honey-yellow stone seemed bleached in the sudden blaze. It was warmer here, on the water. No breeze came off the sea at noon. Across the bay, almost hidden by heat-shimmer, a small island studded with cypresses hung like something out of a fairy-tale book, some imprisoned princess's fastness in the middle of the pale-blue bay and sky. The impression of enchanted vastness was a little spoiled by the smoke of the grubby little steamer that plied between the mainland and this arm of the archipelago, but even so: Mary Weaver was suffused with heat and light and the impression of distance.
II.
"No, sit," said a voice somewhere above her. "Just sit for a moment, I think."
It was cool, and dim. There was a hand on her shoulder. Her head swam.
"Don't go anywhere. Back in a tick."
Movement, going away and then coming back. The clang of a bowl being set down and maybe a glass. The trickle of water falling into a shallow dish.
"Here you are."
A glass nudged into her hand. The water was cold, clean, tasteless, quite unlike the tepid chlorinated horror that the pension provided.
"I'm so sorry," she managed, now that her mouth no longer felt like the inside of a hat.
"Not at all. Here." The glass was replaced by a damp cloth. "That'll help."
"I'm so sorry."
"Really, not at all. Would you like more water?"
"No, thank you," she said, through the damp cloth, glorious against her face. "You're very kind."
"The heat can come as a surprise. Of course. You'll want these back."
She took her spectacles out of the outstretched hand, and didn't immediately understand what she was looking at or where she was. The room was vast, longer than it was wide, and low-ceilinged, dim in its recesses and lit by lamps in thick parchment shades. The floor and walls seemed to be covered in some sort of furred richness, gold-flecked and darkly jewelled, disappearing into shadows. She was seated on a leather stool, beside a small table on which sat her empty glass and an enamel bowl. As her brain recognised the smell, she realised where she was: inside a bookshop. The richness was the colour and embossing of several thousand spines, bound in leather and cloth and stamped in gold and silver. Books lined shelves and tables, lined under the windows, stacked on the dense Persian carpets that covered the floor. She smelled old paper, ink, leather, cloth, glue, something dry and fragrant, starch.
"Alright," she said to herself, and made an effort to pull herself together.
"Feeling better?" said the other person, getting to their feet.
"Thank you, yes."
"Don't rush to get up. There's no hurry."
"No, I must – the girls – oh."
The proprietor stood a few feet away, arms folded casually. Mary Weaver's gaze travelled from a pair of soft leather moccasins, up narrow dark trousers, a dark waistcoat with some sort of discreet embroidery, a bright white shirt sharp with starch, open-throated, sleeves rolled above the elbow. The glint of a chain somewhere about the throat, a watch-chain across the narrow midriff. Mary Weaver had spent most of her life among people who were only wealthy but strove to be rich, an accessory to make their prearranged lives run more smoothly; since the war she'd seldom seen a woman in trousers and never one in a waistcoat and watch-chain, or a man's shirt, and certainly never one with her hair cropped close all over her head. The bookshop proprietor stood taller than Mary herself, narrow-framed and long-limbed. She was tanned the colour of tea in a glass, dark-haired, dark-browed, dark-eyed. Foreign, Mary thought, but she couldn't be, of course: her English was unaccented, smooth, idiomatic.
"Where are you from?" she asked, unthinking.
"Well," said the woman. "I live here. This is my shop. Are you feeling somewhat better?"
"Yes. Thank you. You must think me terribly rude –"
"No, no. You very nearly fainted out there, you know. I see it at least once a week during the summer. Visitors step out onto the waterfront and it's tickets. Think nothing of it."
"How many of them do you rescue?"
"Very few," said the woman, and grinned.
"Well, thank you, then. I'm grateful."
"Think nothing of it, Miss -?"
"Weaver. Mary."
"Weavermary?"
"Mary Weaver, rather. I'm sorry."
"Pleased to meet you, Miss Weaver."
They looked at one another.
"I beg your pardon." Mary Weaver shook herself. "And your name -?"
