The house on the cliff

“What a surprise”, he said, then repeated, twice, mechanically, as he took off his glasses to clean them, and immediately put them back on again. He made not a move in her direction but she ran to him and flung her arms around him as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She was laughing and talking unceasingly, and now and again would throw a glance at me, when she thought I wasn’t looking.She had brought me a doll dressed in a lacy gown, that made silly little cries when you shook it. I was twelve years old, for heaven’s sake! Up until she sailed so unexpectedly into my life, that day in 1946, I’d had no cause to complain of my motherlessness. At first, I made an effort to accept her. At least, so I believed, and I suppose she did the same. What I interpreted as her rejection of me and everything I held dear, she, no doubt, saw as the rescue of a neglected child, or the taming of a wild beast. I was the Mowgli of Omírou Street and didn’t know it! All this upheaval was not helped by coinciding with the beginning of the new school year (delayed as it had been for weeks by stormy seas) in my new school. The Peiramatikó School did not take girls except in the primary years and I would now be attending a private school for “young ladies” and wear a black pinafore. The headmistress was plump and wore gold-rimmed pince-nez, and for some unfathomable reason was an object of worship by pupils and teachers alike. At recess, instead of playing in the school yard, the girls processed around it in pairs, arm in arm and giggling. I keep evading the topic of my mother. Maybe I should start at the beginning. It won’t take long, so assiduously has she erased her origins. DÓRA’S STORY Theodóra Mánou Verissári Andronídi Cairo 1910 - Montreux 1966 According to the profile of her in People Magazine a few years ago (her second marriage, to the magnate, made her a public figure on an international scale) her father was an archaeologist and her mother anAlexandrian heiress of Coptic and Sephardic descent (nothing could have been more exotic. It is worth mentioning that story must first have emerged when Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet was all the rage). She had grown up on a remote estate on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt and then been educated by nuns in Paris with the daughters of the aristocracy.