Page 85 of Hot Greek Summer

Even Stella seemed to draw solace from his steady, practical presence. Frankie and Gav might not be a couple any more, but they were cut from the same calm, determined cloth that made people around them feel instinctively safer.

Working methodically, they spent a quiet quarter of an hour moving the gin onto the more solid workbench and turning the newly distilled bottles of gin as required, admiring its already rose-gold hue.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ Frankie said, when they were done. ‘Tight, but all right.’

‘Fifty bottles?’ Winnie all but whimpered down the phone in reception when Panos called the next morning to place the town hall’s funeral order for gin. ‘Are you sure they’re going to need that much?’

Stella stood beside her shaking her head. ‘Too much!’ she hissed. ‘Talk him down!’

Winnie pulled a helpless shrug. How could she tell Panos that the funeral was likely to wipe out their stock of gin? The islanders were already sure their sole intention was to rid Skelidos of its tranquillity and good fortune. If she let on that they were about to run out of gin too she feared that they’d be tied together and stoned in the old square outside the town hall.

‘Fifty bottles,’ she said, hanging up the phone.

‘We’re shagged,’ Stella said, looking at the ceiling. ‘We’ll have four bottles left. We may as well book ourselves onto the next plane home. It’s that, or wait for them to come and kill us in our beds.’

‘At least we’ll have our own bottles ready in a couple of days. That’s another fifty. I reckon we should make up the whole stock from the berries we’ve got left, at least that way we’ll have some breathing space.’

Stella didn’t look convinced. ‘It’s a stay of execution at best, Win. We can’t find any more dried berries to be shipped here for love nor money, and there seems to be no one selling live plants who’s able to get them to us all the way out here.’

The mail system to Skelidos seemed to operate on a wing and a prayer, which was fine if you were attempting to order a new dress or, say, a curling iron, but inconvenient if you needed to obtain something as precious and seemingly essential to life as an arbutus plant.

Winnie stared out of the open villa doorway towards the peaceful beach and further to the glittering turquoise sea. It was such a rich, beautiful palette, jewel-bright and vivid. When they’d arrived here she’d been full of hope and sure this place would become home for ever. Now, though, she couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling that her days on the island were numbered.

Frankie sat on the shady bench outside the kitchen door, grabbing a quiet five minutes.

‘Penny for them?’

She looked up when Seth strolled through the garden gate, a bottle of water in his hand. She wasn’t able to share her inner thoughts for a penny or a million dollars, because she was too uncertain of them herself to voice them articulately.

‘Nothing really,’ she said, lifting her sunglasses onto her head as he sat down alongside her.

‘I wanted to say how sorry I am, how sorry we all are, for what Mikey did,’ he said, looking at the blackened, burnt-out part of the garden. ‘All of that stuff yesterday was pretty full on, wasn’t it?’

Frankie shrugged, trying to be philosophical. ‘Tradition is important to the people here.’

He took a long drink and slowly screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing that life in the band has taught me over the years it’s that routine and stability can be hard to come by.’

‘And are they always a good thing, do you think?’ she asked, because his words were pertinent to the questions rolling around inside her head. ‘Routine and stability, I mean?’

Seth laughed softly. ‘Can I say something?’

The gravel in his voice made her stomach drop, reminding her that this wasn’t just any man, it was Seth Manson. ‘Of course,’ she said, suddenly nervous out of nowhere.

‘My life is always moving, Frankie, and people are always moving in and out of it,’ he said. ‘Being here … being around you … I like it. There’s something about you that makes me feel, I don’t know, relaxed.’

She flushed at the compliment.

‘And I might be speaking out of turn,’ he went on, ‘and you can tell me I’m being a vain cock if so, but I think you like me too.’ He sounded for all the world like an awkward teenager.

Frankie wasn’t sure what to say. ‘I’ve had a crush on you for twenty years’ sounded a bit freaky.

‘But here’s the other thing,’ he said, laying his arm along the back of the bench. ‘I think you’re still in love with your husband.’

‘Ex,’ Frankie said, a reflex response, and then she sighed and twisted her fingers in her lap.

‘And,’ he carried on, ‘I’m damn sure that your husband still loves you like crazy. Why else would he be here?’

‘Ex,’ Frankie said again, surprised by the lump in her throat. Seth had managed to cut right to the heart of the knotty issue she’d been weighing up in her head on the bench before he came. Gav.

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