Page 87 of Hot Greek Summer

‘I’ve been for a drive up that viewpoint on the hill,’ Gav said, pulling away from the kerb. ‘Spectacular up there, it is.’

Winnie nodded and turned her face to look out at the passing buildings, glad of the breeze. She couldn’t think about the viewpoint without thinking of Jesse, who’d gone and confused her all over again today with his solid, comforting presence in church. Just knowing he was there if she needed him had been enough to steel her nerves. At the end of the day she, Frankie and Stella hadn’t actually done anything wrong, but they’d been made to feel hideous nonetheless and his open display of friendship had said as much about him as it had about their bond.

Back at the villa, they piled out of the car and made a beeline for the door.

‘I need to get out of these clothes and under a cold shower.’ Stella kicked off her high heels as soon as they stepped through the front door onto the cool tiles.

‘Me too,’ Winnie said. ‘I might go and lie on the beach in a while and read a book. We never do that, do we?’

It was true. Their time was always taken up with the villa, the gin, Tryx and a million and one other things that didn’t involve lying in the sunshine and enjoying the new life that they were building. Or at least theyhadbeen building, before the fire. Nothing felt as definite any more.

‘Coffee, Gav?’ Frankie said, drawing a nod and a shy grin from her ex-husband as he dropped the car keys in the drawer at reception. Winnie didn’t miss the lingering look that passed between them, and made a mental note to ask Frankie what, if anything, was happening.

Stella and Winnie made it as far as the top landing before they heard Frankie yell out for them, and the panic in her voice had them taking the stairs two at a time to get to her. The kitchen was ominously empty and the cellar door even more ominously open, and as they headed down the stone steps they could see exactly what had made Frankie shout.

The cellar had been trashed, and Mikey Miller was lying face-down amongst the broken glass.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘Jesus, I’m so sorry.’

Seth stood in the cellar with them a little while later and surveyed the mess. He and Jamie had been out on a hike into the hills that morning, leaving Mikey snoring like a donkey in bed. They hadn’t expected him to even surface before they returned, and they hadn’t known that Gav had driven the women to the funeral, leaving Villa Valentina in the unreliable hands of Mikey Miller. He’d probably gone to the kitchen in search of food, and while he was about it he’d evidently ambled down the cellar and realised he’d hit drinkers’ paradise.

‘It’s my fault,’ Stella said. ‘I don’t think I closed the cellar door after Panos came and collected the gin for the wake.’

‘It’s not your bloody fault at all,’ Frankie said, in a rare display of temper. They’d been hanging on to the hope that by some miracle they’d be able to limp through the next couple of months on the gin and berries they had left, and that by further extraordinary good luck they’d strike a new source of berries in time for the island’s supply not to dry up altogether. It was a whole lot of maybes and if onlys, but thanks to Mikey Miller’s solitary, spectacular piss-up, all of that had gone out of the window in the space of a few short hours. He’d drunk at least one full bottle of gin, opened a second, and stumbled into the rest, sending bottles flying in all directions. The floor was strewn with broken glass and scattered botanicals from the Bad Fairy bottles they’d made up themselves a few days earlier. The only thing missing from the scene was Mikey Miller himself, who’d been blue-lighted across to Skiathos by water ambulance to have the contents of his stomach pumped and his cuts sewn up. He was lucky to be alive.

‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ Winnie whispered.

‘I do,’ Gav said. ‘Go back upstairs. I’ll clean this lot up.’

‘Gav, no,’ Frankie protested. ‘It’s all right, between us we can –’

‘Gav’s right,’ Seth interrupted. ‘You three go up and have a cup of tea, or a whisky, or whatever you need to make you feel better. We can do this between us.’ He nodded towards Gav, and they both looked as if they weren’t going to take no for an answer.

Because it would have seemed churlish to refuse, but also because it had been such a trying couple of days and they were worn out, Frankie, Stella and Winnie accepted the offer of help and filed quietly back upstairs to get out of their funeral clothes. It crossed all of their minds that the curse of the arbutus bush might be more real than they’d given it credit for.

In the cellar, the two men swept, mopped, bagged and straightened, clearing up all traces of the disaster.

Every now and then, Gav threw a look at Seth’s back, wondering how the hell he was ever supposed to compete with a guy like that.

And every now and then, Seth studied Gav as he swept, wondering if he knew how lucky he was to have someone like Frankie. Gav swept a pile of glass into the dustpan, and Seth held an open bin-liner out for him to tip the shards into.

‘Do you know what colour Frankie’s eyes are?’ he asked suddenly.

Gav paused, the empty dustpan in his hand. ‘They’re brown,’ he said, eventually. ‘Coppery brown, like English pennies, and when the sun catches her face you can see shards of gold in them, like tiger stripes.’ He stopped short and huffed, embarrassed. ‘We can’t all be clever with words, can we?’

Seth laid the bag down. ‘It sounded pretty clever to me.’

Gav looked as if he might say something more, and then he bent to pick up a jar that had rolled beneath the bench.

‘Shit.’ He turned the empty jar over in his hands.

‘What is it?’ Seth asked, but the pained look on his face suggested that he already knew what Gav was about to say.

Gav turned the jar around so Seth could read the handwritten label.

Arbutus berries.

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