The house on the cliff

Prologue Villa Ánthimi Maskouládes, Corfu 1980 How accurate was my story? That it had emotional integrity I felt certain. But was it actually reliable? Reading through it, I realised I had pieced together stretches of the narrative from tales I had been told, conversations overheard (perhaps misheard), memories with a haphazard order of events, which were themselves blurred by those legends that confuse all our family histories. —Michael Holroyd Four years have gone by since I came back for the first time, and forty years since the events that obliged me to leave, and here I am again, in Corfu, in my house, Villa Ánthimi, the house with my name, which was named after my grandmother, as for that matter, was I. The house had lain empty for thirty-six years. My father had locked up and never returned, never even so much as mentioned the place. As for me, I never brought it up either, but supposed it had been sold long before. I was astonished when I learned he had left it to me in his will, and furious. So it was up to me to remove the snake from the hole, as the saying goes - like pulling pulling chestnuts out of the fire, if chestnuts had teeth. Now that everyone who had loved the place had died, now that there was no-one left but me. Though as it turns out, I’m not the only one left. I’ll get around to the others, in time. It was 1976 when I had to come back to put the house up for sale, and I ended up staying… for various reasons, and always, to be certain, just temporarily. I took the rest of the year off work. The house, thanks to the sturdiness of its construction was just about habitable, at least once winter was over. I never did sell it, in the end, and when I’m not travelling for work I come back, spending most of the year here. Not alone. My cousin lives here year-round, with her husband who is a painter and has a studio in the gardener’s old cottage, and their son, who goes to the village nursery school. Mángas, our dog, is another full-time resident. Oh, this compulsion to name our children after their grandparents! As if it wasn’t hard enough for a person to bear the load of their own, constantly evolving personal mythology, we impose on them the