The house on the cliff

backdrop, the civilised environs of the Tennis Club or the beach at Mon Repos, equipped with changing rooms and showers. She was avoiding, I concluded, not the countryside as such, but untidy, or rather untamed, Nature. In Athens, however, she was in her element. She had returned from Paris, without any warning whatsoever, and settled in - though she continually mocked Athenian society as provincial and backward. Up until then I had a led blissful life with my father and Loxándra, first in Corfu, then after Daddy returned from the war, in Athens, though only during the school year. From Loxándra I got all the warmth and love I needed, and I felt no lack of a female parent in my life. Up until then, mamá, to me, was the photograph in the silver frame on Daddy’s dresser. It showed a beautiful lady bent lovingly over the cradle of a plump, smiling, blond baby. The reason for her absence, according to Daddy, was a serious illness that followed my birth, and a sanatorium in Switzerland. There she had been cut off by the beginning of the war. The timing really didn’t quite work for this story: when the war in Europe began I was already three years old, and Greece wasn’t involved for another two yers after that. It hadn’t occurred to him I might need further explanation, and I, always willing to accommodate myself to even the subtlest of his signals, had not asked for any. Nor was I particularly interested in the question. I didn’t spin daydreams around that photographed face, nor make any effort to draw conclusions from the occasional remarks adults let drop. She was just mamá , the lady with the baby in the silver frame, as much a part of my life as the icon of the Panagía with her own baby hung over my bed. I never wondered why she didn’t write to us as Aunt Eléni did. Nor did it occur to me that the baby in the picture might not be me, even though the few other baby pictures I had seen showed me skinny and frowning, with a thick thatch of black hair. In any case, my life as I had known it ceased abruptly with her return. At first, I insisted on the conviction that she was a stepmother, and that everyone was conspiring to present her to me as my real mother, so that I would accept her more easily. This theory was based, in part, on her having a different colour hair from the lady in the picture. Since no-one had expected her to ever come back, no-one had prepared me. We returned from Corfu in the Autumn of 1946, two weeks after the beginning of the school year, exhausted and sea-wobbly after a particularly difficult journey. Arriving at the apartment on Omírou Street, we found her already installed there, smiling and relaxed, with her sheer see-through stockings and her high heels that left dents in the parquet floor, with her clouds of perfume and her hoarse, musical voice. Daddy was stunned. First he went pale, then blushed bright red.