The Summer House – Part 1: Dust Sheets

The shutters hadn't been opened in ten years, and the first one fell off.

"It's fine," said Dimitri, standing in a cloud of dust. "It's charming."

"It's a hazard."

"It's character."

Katerina looked around the whitewashed room. Dust sheets draped the furniture like ghosts. The tiles were cracked. A lizard watched from the beam. Light poured through the empty window frame, silver and blinding, with the Aegean sparkling beyond. She was forty-three, a lawyer from Athens, in a faded T-shirt and a scarf. He was forty-six, a civil engineer, big and cheerful, covered in cobwebs.

Dimitri's grandmother had left the house to him, on a small island at the edge of the Cyclades. They had never had time to visit. For a decade, it had slept. Now, with the children at summer camp and a week stretching before them, they had finally come.

"Where do we begin?" she asked.

"The bed."

"The bed?"

"It's the most important."

They dragged the old iron bedstead out onto the terrace and scrubbed it down. They beat the mattress with a broom. They hung sheets on a line, washed the windows, swept out a decade of dust. By evening, the house smelled of soap and lemon and sea. Light fell through the clean glass in golden bars.

They ate on the terrace: bread, olives, tomatoes, feta, a bottle of cold retsina they'd found in the pantry. The bougainvillea spilled over the wall in drifts of magenta. A donkey brayed on the hillside, and a cat appeared from nowhere to sit at their feet.

"I love it," said Katerina, surprised.

"You do?"

"It feels like us. Before everything."

Dimitri reached across and took her hand. "I've been wanting to say that for years."

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Yes."

"Why did we wait ten years?"

"Because we were busy being sensible," said Dimitri. "I'm tired of it."

"Green?" she said, a shutter, a smile.

"Green," said Dimitri, softly. "Very green. Come to bed. It squeaks."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Squeaky Bed.