Page 8 of Hot Greek Summer

Winnie rolled her eyes and stepped gingerly out onto the cracked, crazy-paved patio.

‘Donkey,’ she called, in an inviting, sing song voice. ‘Mr Fonz …’ She moved to check down the side of the building, and then ventured further across the parched grass. The garden looked to stretch back quite a way and be walled around the edge by a low, pale, rough stone wall. ‘I think we’ve got fruit trees out here,’ she called back. ‘But I can’t see any sign of a donkey.’

Perplexed, she picked her way along a path haphazardly tiled into the grass, making her way down the length of the garden to the wall at the bottom. Along the way she passed bright wildflowers that would be great on the tables out front and several different types of fruit tree, but no donkey in sight. God, what if he’d keeled over somewhere? She cautiously scanned the ground beneath the trees and bushes but to no avail. It was perplexing really, because there was no obvious exit for a donkey, and the waist-high wall seemed much too big for The Fonz to scale. Wandering back towards the villa, she made a makeshift apron from the bottom of her T-shirt, filled it with fruit plucked from the trees and pondered the missing animal.

‘Plums, I think,’ she said, giving up the search and unloading her haul onto the big, scrubbed kitchen table where the other girls were sitting. ‘And cherries.’

Frankie picked up one of the plump apple-green plums and sniffed it. ‘Greengages,’ she said, then bit it. ‘Oh my God!’ She rolled her eyes in bliss. ‘So sweet.’

The others helped themselves, and for a few moments they all sat around the table eating fruit from their garden and feeling the welcome rush of sugar in their veins.

‘I feel like Barbara fromThe Good Life,’ Stella said. ‘Have we got any chickens I can kill?’

Frankie loaded the rest of the fruit into a wide, shallow ceramic bowl on the table. ‘You wouldn’t be Barbara. You’d be the what’s her name, the neighbour. The posh one.’

Stella considered it for a second, and then laughed. ‘You’re right. Winnie can be Barbara and kill the chickens, you can be Nigella and roast it, and I’ll be the snooty one in the kaftan who drinks G&T.’

Frankie held her hand up and high-fived Stella silently.

‘I think I could get into gardening,’ Winnie said, warming to the role of Barbara. ‘And I have some cut-off dungarees. I can pull it off.’

‘Barbara wouldn’t lose her donkey though,’ Frankie said, shaking her head.

They all jumped as someone knocked on the back door.

‘Maybe it’s the donkey,’ Stella whispered, making them all laugh as Winnie crossed the kitchen and pulled the door wide.

It wasn’t the donkey. It was a man, and by the looks of his scowl, an unimpressed one. He looked dressed for farming in breeches, braces and a loose cheesecloth shirt, and if he wasn’t scowling he’d probably be quite attractive.

‘Kalimera,’ Winnie said, hesitantly trying out her rudimentary Greek.

He let forth a torrent of fast, unintelligible Greek. When he’d finished, she frowned and shook her head regretfully.

‘Err … signomi … my Greek is awful.’

He stared at her in irate silence.

‘Signomi …’

Winnie glanced over her shoulder for help from the others, but found them both wide-eyed and tongue-tied by the arrival of the stranger in their midst.

‘Help me out here?’ she muttered.

‘Feliz navidad?’ Stella tried from her seat at the table, and the stranger lifted his eyebrows and sighed heavily.

‘You just wished me Merry Christmas in Spanish. It’s early May, and this is Greece.’

‘You speak English,’ Winnie said, thinking that he might have made that clear right away rather than let her struggle for his own amusement.

‘Better than you speak Greek, evidently,’ he said. ‘I take it you’re the new owners?’

Frankie came to stand beside Winnie. ‘We are. I’m Frankie, and this is Winnie. And you are …?’ Winnie admired her friend’s polite, cool tone.

‘I’m the guy who rescued your bloody donkey. Poor darn thing would have died in this heat without any water.’ There was an unmissable hint of an Australian twang to his pronunciation. ‘He’s in my olive grove with Chachi when you can be arsed to fetch him.’

Oh, right. Winnie felt her fists ball until her fingernails dug into her palms. ‘Look, Mr … I don’t know your name because you didn’t bother to tell us … we only arrived half an hour ago and I’ve already been out to look for the donkey. It isn’t our fault that Ajax didn’t make proper arrangements for him.’

The guy looked bored. ‘Typical women. Blame someone else and it’ll all be all right.’

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