Spending a month island-hopping in Greece was my idea.
Susie loves the sun and we don't see much of it in England for most of the year. Our daughters left the nest a couple of years ago, so it didn't take much of an effort to convince my wife to take a holiday in June, before the main holiday season begins. "Smart thinking, Jimmy!" was what she said. In her mid forties, Susie is an attractive blonde who has kept herself in good shape. She lost no time shopping for swimwear, while I planned our itinerary and the Gods no doubt laughed.
Susie and I have our own businesses. Susie is an independent management consultant, specialising in business development planning. I work as a freelance technical translator, from German into English, specialising in business-to-business, finance and paralegal support work.
Susie and I got together in our early twenties, when we were both working in the marketing department of the UK division of a German auto parts manufacturer. Susie was their business development manager and I got an assignment to translate the technical descriptions of some of their new products. It was love at first sight as far as I was concerned and I could swear that my heart beat faster whenever she was anywhere near me.
For her part, I think the young Susie Redwood initially took a liking to me simply because the work I did made her job a lot easier. Of course, it may have helped that my family name is Hunter and her favourite grandma had also been a Hunter.
It turned out that Susie and I were well matched, with shared interests in hill-walking, literature and travel. We walked and talked for hours in our free time and in less than a year we were married. A couple of years later, we had two lovely little blonde daughters, Helen and Jane, born almost exactly a year apart, and we were both working from home as freelancers, juggling our projects and assignments to fit in with our personal lives. All in all, we had a wonderful family life and our daughters both grew up with positive, 'can do' attitudes.
Now that it was just Susie and me in the frame for holidays, the plan was to visit a few of the smaller Greek islands, taking our laptops along in case we needed to deal with any work-related issues. Our clients can be quite demanding and sometimes give us very little advance notice of assignments. On the plus side, the fees for our services are inevitably higher if there are tight deadlines for project completion.
*
The flight to Athens was on schedule, the taxi transfer to the port of Piraeus went smoothly, the sea was calm, the sun shone and the six hour cruise on the large inter-island ferry to the island of Athos was idyllic. The colours of the sea and the sky in that part of the Mediterranean are truly breath-taking and have to be seen to be believed. If there is a celestial artist who designed the world, the colours on his palette the day he painted the Mediterranean were astonishingly vivid. These islands are the legendary home of the ancient Greek gods and there is something magical about the way the sunlight brings out all these heavenly shades of blue.
Athos has a sizeable population and is a hub for ferry services to many other islands, such as Porthos and Aramis, which we planned to visit. The big five star hotel on Athos is the Hotel Hermes, which overlooks the marina, but I had booked us into a beautiful, little boutique hotel near the medieval Venetian citadel that overlooks the old port. That first night we shared a bottle of chilled white wine as we watched the sunset from our balcony on the first floor. Susie was so happy about the holiday that she went out of her way to give me some good loving when we went to bed. When I came out of the bathroom that evening she was lying on the crisp white linen of the big king-sized bed, completely naked.
The warmth of the Mediterranean seemed to have stirred her sensually and she gave me an exquisite blow job before we lay face-to-face, moving together in a slow, easy rhythm while we stroked and held each other. We kissed and nibbled and looked deep into each other's eyes, expressing our love for one another and feeling the comfort and safety that comes from years of intimacy and shared dependency.
*
Everything went well until day three of our holiday. The strong Meltemi winds that occasionally blow through the islands from the north east relentlessly played with the floppy sun hat that Susie had brought along, so she decided to get some alternative headgear. After an hour or so of browsing the small boutiques lining many of the narrow, whitewashed lanes of the old citadel, Susie found a bright red headscarf that matched her favourite bikini.
There are some beautiful, shaded courtyard restaurants in the old citadel and we were on our way to lunch when she tripped on a paving stone and twisted her left ankle. It was clearly very painful and an old woman in traditional black garb almost immediately appeared from a little grocery shop nearby, with a dishcloth full of ice for Susie to hold against her ankle. Fussing over Susie, the old woman seemed very concerned about how terrible this was and how it was such bad luck. As Susie sat on a nearby bench, pressing the icy cloth against her ankle, the old woman ducked back into her little shop. Moments later she reappeared, clutching an old, gnarled wooden walking stick.
"It's too late to change what the fates have done, but this may help. Make sure you use it," she said, looking at me, rather than Susie.
*
We visited the local health clinic and they checked that no bones were broken and that there was no ligament damage. For the rest of our week long stay on Athos, Susie nursed her badly bruised and swollen ankle. With her foot wrapped in one of those stretchable elasticised bandages to help reduce the swelling, she could only hobble about, leaning on my arm and using the old walking stick to take the weight off her ankle.
It was a major inconvenience, but Susie is an avid reader and had no trouble adapting to the circumstances, with her earphones plugged into her iPod and her Kindle loaded with the latest whodunit from her favourite thriller writer, she lay on a sun lounger by the hotel swimming pool in her red bikini and headscarf, soaking up the sun and chilling out. She didn't complain much about her misfortune and the occasional glass of chilled white wine also seemed to help.
I love the Greek islands, but I am not one to lie in the sun for hours on end. Don't get me wrong, I can sunbathe for an hour or so with the best of them and that would include Susie, but I like to be a bit more active. My original plan was to do some walking on the networks of old mule paths or monopatia, which are a feature of the smaller islands, as well as doing some swimming and sunbathing.
Susie was happy to be left to her own devices, but she could tell I needed to get out and about, so we quickly established a new routine. I would go off for a walk after breakfast and we would meet up for a late lunch back at the hotel, followed by sunbathing and a siesta with some gentle love-making before aperitifs and dinner.
At the end of our first week, we caught the small inter-island steamer to Porthos as planned. Susie's ankle had turned an interesting shade of dark purple and she was only slightly more mobile. With the aid of the old lady's walking stick she was able to walk short distances without my help.
*
Travelling on the small inter-island steamer is a remarkable experience. A crowd of people gathers expectantly, the small ship arrives with smoke billowing from funnels on either side of its stern, turns slowly and reverses towards the quayside. Eventually it is secured by the hawsers that have been thrown ashore and dropped over the squat bollards at the edge of the pier. The stern ramp is lowered and a couple of cars and a small truck drive off, followed by a small crowd of tourists and locals, clutching cases, bags, rucksacks and boxes of supplies. At the same time, those who have been waiting to board surge forward, keen to secure a seat on the wind sheltered or lee side of the vessel for the next leg of its voyage. Amongst all this organised chaos, a crew member does his best to collect tickets as the new passengers jostle to get past him. There is no such thing as a queue.
It took the little ship about four hours to reach Porthos, which is a long, narrow island, with a rocky northern coastline and a series of four sandy beaches on its southern coastline, separated from each other by rocky outcrops. Porthos is comparatively flat, so its beaches have some shelter, but they still benefit from cooling northerly breezes. The only significant settlement is the little port towards the south west of the island, featuring around fifty of those astonishingly white houses, clustered together on a gently sloping hillside behind half a dozen quayside tavernas.
On the west side of the town is a broad sandy beach with shallow waters. It is popular with families and the children run about, playing volleyball, football or frisbee. To the east, behind another little hill is a small sandy beach, which is set between rocky outcrops and is "nudism friendly". Public nudism is against the law in Greece, but nowadays there is a practice of tolerance of nudism, on the basis that it is restricted to one or two designated beaches that are out of sight of the general public.
The beach with the families was nice, but not very relaxing. We had spent many summers on beaches with our own children, so we didn't need to be a part of beach life with children and families. Instead, on our second day on Porthos, we left the guesthouse where we were staying and made our way over the hill and down to the small beach to the east. There was a paved path and it was about as far as Susie could manage with her stick and me for support, although it took us quite a while to cover the distance.
There were only a couple of dozen people on the beach. Most were completely naked and none of the women was wearing a top. By this time it was about ten o'clock in the morning and the sun was splitting the heavens. Once we had found a nice place to lie down and do some sunbathing it wasn't long before Susie decided to take off her bikini top. I was pleasantly surprised, as I couldn't remember any previous occasion when she had gone topless in front of other people. However I was really pleased that she was feeling uninhibited and she looked absolutely stunning. Okay, if you need the stats, she's five feet nine inches tall and 36C.
Later that morning I watched her go for a swim to cool off. When she eventually emerged from the sea with the salt water streaming off her beautiful breasts she looked like a goddess. She shook her hair and her tanned skin glistened in the sunshine. Forget Ursula Andress in Dr No or Halle Berry in Die Another Day. I remember thinking that Susie looked like nothing other than Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, born of the foam of the sea.
*
I'm a glass half full type, so I looked on the bright side when one of my best clients emailed me to ask if I could do a rush job on another technical translation. It would mean having to work for a couple of days while on holiday and the timescale was very tight. However the work would be comparatively straightforward and the fee would be a hefty contribution towards the cost of our holiday. It seemed a 'no brainer' to me, but I asked Susie if she thought it was worth accepting the assignment.
"It's up to you," she said, "Just as long as you don't mind leaving me alone with the nudists."
"Most of them are sun worshipping old age pensioners from northern Europe," I replied. "No doubt you'll get ogled by the men, because all the other women on the beach have tits that hang down to their navels. The men are all around seventy years old and it looks like they have acorns for penises, so I don't think you'll be hassled. Anyway, that's beside the point. You're more than able to look after yourself."
