How Greek Is Your Love Read online

  How Greek

  Is Your Love?

  Sequel to A Saint For The Summer

  By MARJORY McGINN

  Published by Pelagos Press, 2020.

  ISBN: 978-1999995720.

  Copyright ©Marjory McGinn, 2020.

  The rights of Marjory McGinn to be identified as the Author of this Work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold under the condition that no part of it may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission in writing of the author Marjory McGinn

  ([email protected]).

  This book is a work of fiction, Names, characters, businesses, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front cover illustration by Tony Hannaford (www.anthony hannaford.co.uk)

  Editing, formatting and author photograph by Jim Bruce (www.ebooklover.co.uk)

  Dedication

  In memory of my parents, John and Mary

  About the author

  Marjory McGinn is a Scottish-born author and journalist, brought up in Australia and now based in England. Her journalism has appeared in leading newspapers in Australia and Britain, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun-Herald, The Daily Mail, The Times and Scotland’s The Herald.

  A youthful work/travel year in Athens inspired a lifelong fascination for Greece. In 2010, together with her husband Jim and their Jack Russell dog Wallace, she set off from Britain on an adventure to the southern Peloponnese that lasted four years and was the basis for her three travel memoirs and inspired her debut novel, A Saint For The Summer.

  Marjory also writes a blog with a Greek theme on the website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com and she can be followed on Twitter www.twitter.com/@fatgreekodyssey and on Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

  Other books by the author

  Things Can Only Get Feta

  Homer’s Where The Heart Is

  A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree

  A Saint For The Summer

  Author’s note

  How Greek Is Your Love? is the sequel to the novel A Saint For The Summer. With the same characters reappearing and a few new ones too, it can be read as a stand-alone novel, but if you are keen to learn the full story of the World War Two family mystery that first brought Bronte McKnight to Greece, and how it was solved, you will probably want to read the first novel too.

  The mystery surrounds the disappearance of Bronte’s grandfather Kieran McKnight during the infamous Battle of Kalamata in southern Greece, often described as “the Greek Dunkirk”.

  The names of the main village Marathousa and the mountain settlement of Platanos were inspired by real villages in the Mani, though their names have been changed, and the characters in this book are fictitious. The right-wing political party Ellines Patriotes Enomeni mentioned in this story is a fictitious party, however it is based on at least one similar extreme party operating in Greece during the economic crisis.

  Language: Any Greek used in the text appears in Roman script and written much as it would be pronounced in Greek. Differences in some endings result from nouns, for example, being written in the feminine or masculine forms such as xenos for foreigner (male) and xeni for a female.

  There are a few Scots words also in the text which are generally obvious from the context. But in case you are still confused, two of the most used words are the popular Scots word for fed-up, skunnered, and for messy/dirty, clarty.

  Take my hand

  I’m a stranger in paradise

  All lost in a wonderland

  A stranger in paradise

  *

  But open your angel’s arms

  To the stranger in paradise

  And tell me that I may be

  A stranger no more.

  – Lyrics from A Stranger in Paradise, 1953 Broadway production of Kismet

  Chapter 1

  The oracle of Marathousa

  On the road from Marathousa nothing stirred, apart from the Ionian wind gently toying with the heads of olive trees. No people, no passing traffic and the small farmhouses in the orchards were shuttered for the afternoon siesta. Etched on a deep blue sky above the gulf was a single line of small spherical clouds like the throw of dice. A perfect day!

  I tramped along the ragged verge of the road with the warm spring sun on my bare arms, lost in my thoughts, excited about the evening ahead, about seeing Leonidas for the first time that week. I was still in the sweet giddy days of new love and content enough with my tentative place on this foreign shore, trying to navigate its complex culture. I couldn’t say it was always easy but most days brought modest triumphs. Just as well! This day wouldn’t be one of them.

  Some 20 minutes from home, the serenity of early afternoon was scuppered by a rasping noise, faint to start with and far behind me, at the edge of the village. It steadily grew louder, becoming a stroppy buzz, like a bee plugged into an amplifier. That’s when the day began to spool away from me. The perfect line of clouds breaking up.

  It was an old blue scooter with a decrepit engine, like many you hear in rural Greece. As the buzz intensified, a stray dog came crashing through an olive grove onto the road, ragged and dirty, taking up its sentry position by an industrial-sized bin overflowing with rubbish, the only blight on this glorious stretch of road.

  I glanced behind me. The scooter was close now, the rider leaning it slightly to the right to counter the heavy weight of a bulging plastic bag hooked over the handlebar. I was on the right-hand side of the road and as the scooter passed me, I felt something shove at my left arm, hard enough for me to lose my balance. I stumbled, knees and palms landing painfully on the stony verge. The rider stopped just ahead.

  “What the hell!” I crouched in the dirt, watching him. He wasn’t coming to help but swivelled round on his scooter, staring hard. It was the dog that rushed towards me, unwelcome, yapping. A creep and a feral dog. The happiness of five minutes ago had given way to quiet terror. I never saw it coming – but Elpida had.

  An hour earlier I was sitting in Elpida’s kafeneio, the Zefiros, checking emails, enjoying the specialties of the day, which was always honey cake with a side order of gossip. Elpida, the owner, was short, sturdy and just on the right side of curvaceous. When she smiled, her small white teeth gave her the appearance of a feisty terrier. She knew everyone who lived within a few miles of this Mani hillside. She knew most of what went on as well, and she liked to impart her findings. She had a gift for it and something else more valuable. Elpida had robust intuitions.

  “My stomach is twitching,” she would say, “And when my stomach twitches, for sure something’s not right.”

  Elpida’s stomach twitched at regular intervals in her kafeneio. She occasionally shared the reasons for it, trifling though they seemed: a snippet of conversation overheard, a certain facial expression on one of her clients, even the way a villager might walk across the plateia, the square where the Zefiros was its beating heart. The twitch could be inspired by anything, but generally it was something she could plunder for intimations of havoc, and future gossip. But whatever the superior gifts were of this homely Greek oracle, her stomach was usually right.

  It was quiet in the village as people made their way home for an afternoon sleep. Elpida sat beside me at one of the metal tables under the huge plane tree that dominated the square, chatting and watching the road. She jerked her head towards a small lay-by on the roadside, presumably to
draw my attention to a couple of men on old scooters who were chatting, their heads leaning together. There was a blue metal installation nearby with locked, numbered boxes. Most people in Marathousa collected their mail here but it was also a place where villagers gathered, where the hawkers stopped their vans, and the bus from the coast disgorged passengers onto the dusty roadside.

  “Who are they?” I asked her, glancing towards the two dark-haired characters, who were similar to so many other rural men in Greece.

  “Xenoi,” she said, flicking her eyebrows up and grimacing lightly at the same time, a Greek gesture of cynicism. I laughed. Xenoi, I had learnt, was the Greek word for foreigners, for non-Greeks, I assumed.

  “They don’t look like foreigners.”

  “They’re from down the Mani somewhere, I think. I can tell from the way they talk, but I don’t think I’ve seen them much before.”

  So, the word covered other villagers as well and I wondered how far outside Marathousa you had to be to earn the title of a ‘foreigner’.

  “I don’t like the look of them,” she said. Her big brown eyes, with their heavy lids, were full of distrust.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t say yet, Bronte, but they look like they’re plotting.”

  “Plotting what?”

  She shrugged manfully. “Don’t know, but I will watch out for them, don’t worry.” Twitch, twitch. I could almost feel it myself.

  When I finally paid up and set off for home, she stood on the edge of the paved plateia, hands on hips, her eyes strafing the road. She shouted in her usual way, “Sto kalo,” or ‘Go to the good’. A warm but curious Greek farewell that carried, I always thought, the insinuation you might be leaning the other way, towards a little strife, but implored you to reconsider the righteous road. In the spring of 2013, in one of the worst years of the country’s economic crisis so far, there was no need to seek out trouble, it had a way of finding you, at times when you least saw it coming. Even when a day presented itself as perfect.

  The way back to the house from Marathousa was part of the route that connected the coast with the main road further inland, which led one way to Kalamata and the other way further down the peninsula. Marathousa was the only village in this area, built up the side of a hill like a small citadel. The plateia was its natural centre, with a taverna at the back, the kafeneio on the right, and on the left flank was the main church of the Anastasi, or Resurrection. The road traversed a dramatic stretch of rural Greece, wedged between the broad Messinian gulf below, with Kalamata at its head, and the Taygetos mountains, which run the length of the Mani peninsula in the southern Peloponnese, one of the wildest regions of Greece. On either side of the village road were miles of lush olive groves.

  Just outside the village, I passed the church of the Ayia Triada (Holy Trinity) and its small graveyard nearby, enclosed in a high stone wall. From the road, a couple of farm tracks on the right wound up through the orchards towards the foothills of the Taygetos. I’d been in no hurry, enjoying the walk, the warm spring weather, the solitude of the early afternoon, lost in contented thoughts.

  But now I was on my hands and knees on the edge of the road with a strange man and a filthy stray mutt.

  The man kept to his scooter, a short distance in front of me, his head swivelled round, staring hard.

  “Bastard!” I said loudly, rocking back onto my haunches, wiping gravel from my hands. One palm bled from a small cut. Still the creep stared; dark soulless eyes, a long bony nose, long oily hair. Had he done it on purpose? I felt nervous suddenly with no-one around, no passing cars.

  The dog rushed towards me in a fizz of dark grey matted fur, yapping, agitated, then backed off, instinctively wary, watching me and the creep, by turns. Trouble on his patch of canine misery. I was on my feet now, gathering up my bag. Some of the contents had spilled onto the side of the road, like the small box of honey biscuits Elpida had given me for Angus because she knew my father loved them. The dog lifted its nose in the air and sniffed but kept its distance. The creep kept up the stare and then finally spoke.

  “Very sorry. Just accident,” he said in a thick, clumsy accent, with a sneer that made him look anything but sorry. It only ramped up my anger even more, but I felt the frustration of not having enough Greek to parry with. I was still an apprentice with this difficult language.

  “Poli kako,” I said forcefully. Telling the creep his behaviour was ‘very bad’ was banal but I thought he’d at least scarper now. Instead, he glowered at me, got off the scooter and pushed it towards the wire fence bordering the road, letting the machine sag against it. He started walking towards me and I began to fret, regretting my Greek outburst.

  Whatever the creep had in mind, the dog didn’t like it and began barking, big wild gusts of noise, strangely energetic for a skinny, starved mutt. It ran at the man, retreated, and then ran again, almost comically, barking all the while. I mentally urged it on, relieved the dog had turned into a scrappy defender. The creep stopped and faced off angrily with the dog, shouting a stream of oaths, or so it seemed. Then he raked about on the edge of the road until he found a stone, the size of a tennis ball, and threw it, hitting the animal just above one eye. It yelped loudly and backed off.

  “Hey, don’t do that!” I shouted.

  No apology this time, but a laugh like a door with rusty hinges. The dog started up again, barking fiercely despite the blow to its head, until the creep gave up. He spat vibrantly on the roadside before grabbing his scooter. Before he buzzed off he gave me one final toxic stare that made me think, perhaps illogically, that I hadn’t seen the last of him. Elpida’s twitching stomach had been dead right.

  The dog went mental and tore up the road after the scooter, galloping like the north wind, its filthy fur flying out in all directions. After it ran out of puff, it hung about the roadside, as if waiting for me to catch up. Then it rushed at me, eyes alert, tail wagging lustily, and I caught the sweaty aroma of its wild, homeless life. It was a curious, slightly comical-looking dog: dark grey fur with a large patch of dirty white over the left side of its face and just above the eye, like a small Phantom of the Opera mask, and one tuft of white on the top of its head, standing up like a cockatoo’s crest feathers. There was a large patch of white on its chest as well, now the colour of a café latte. It looked like no breed in particular, the size of a collie dog with long legs but with some of the features and keenness of a Jack Russell terrier. Close up I could see it was a male dog. The blood from the head wound was trickling over his brow, about to trace a dramatic red line down the Phantom mask.

  “Poor old mutt,” I said, warming to my solitary crusader. He had probably saved me, but from what exactly? Surely it wasn’t an accident. I had the vague recollection that when the creep buzzed past me, he’d stuck his hand out, deliberately catching at my arm. It wasn’t normal for village Greeks to behave like that, not in my limited experience. If he had mischief in mind, why hadn’t he snatched my bag instead? At least he’d have scored the wonderful honey biscuits, if nothing else. I smiled. That would be a first in Greece: mugging a woman for her confectionary!

  I trudged on, wishing someone would come by and give me a lift to the house. I’d have clambered onto Myrto’s donkey if she’d been passing by with it. But if our neighbour Myrto had been here, the creep would have been no match for a shrewd, tough Maniot farm woman like her.

  The dog was still following me, but I couldn’t shoo him away now, not with a head wound. I bit on my lower lip. The day had turned fiendish. ‘Go to the good?’ Perhaps, but this was a side trip I hadn’t seen coming.

  By the time we got to Villa Anemos, the dog was panting. Starving, no doubt. Up close he had nice eyes: big, pale chestnut coloured. His teeth looked strong and white for a stray.

  “Come on, boy. I’ll clean you up somehow, but then you have to go.” Go where? Back to garbage bin cuisine, kicks and stones, or maybe finally the foles I’d heard about: bits of poisoned meat often left on rural roads
, next to the bins, to kill stray dogs or foxes. Up until this afternoon, I’d never had to think about these things too clearly. Now I did.

  I led the dog down the side of the house to the wooden gate into the backyard.

  “You stay in here for now and don’t make any trouble.”

  In the house, Angus was sitting at the dining table, with a sheath of papers in front of him and some on the floor, which he was reading and correcting. Angus was writing a book and it had occupied him all over winter. It was the story of the Battle of Kalamata, the heroic last-ditch attempt by the Allies in 1941 to repel the Germans as they invaded southern Greece. It was a battle that had occupied us both in many ways after I’d arrived in Greece from Scotland the previous September. It was a subject close to Angus’s heart and one that had been rarely written about, despite the devastating consequences for this region. It was a book that involved us personally too, with a family mystery attached to it.

  The house was a bit of a mess. There were bread crumbs on the floor around the table and on the kitchen floor.

  “Are you leaving a trail of crumbs so I know where to find you when the papers pile up around your chair?” I said, in the bantering fashion that Angus and I often used with each other.

  He looked over at me, his hazel eyes sensing something was wrong, the way a father would. I told him the whole story of the creep on the scooter, and about the dog.

  “I don’t like the sound of that. Despite his feeble apology, it looks like this creep meant to knock you over. Did you get a good look at him?”

  “Well, yes and no. He looked like dozens of other men you see in villages. But this one’s mean-looking. Don’t think I’ve seen him in Marathousa before. I was in the kafeneio when I first saw him, and Elpida did too, out on the road with his blue scooter. She thinks he comes from further down the Mani.”