The house on the cliff

sense - even I, as a child, was to some extent aware of it when they resumed their lives as a married couple on her return. If you don’t mind, however, I will refrain from examining that aspect of my family history. There are limits to researching one’s past. Leaving sex out of it, then, we must acknowledge that Dóra would have found it very appealing that he was, by birth, a fully paid-up member of the Athenian ruling class, and more, that it was generally agreed he was destined to a lofty position in the country’s future. Oddly perhaps, his years of hard labour had failed to dent the self-confidence (verging on arrogance) that was his birthright. What they had done was added to his frame a muscular bulk atypical of his class. As he once said to me himself, he had muscles in all the wrong places. The experience had also shadowed his eyes and the lines of his face with something like pain, shadows that gave him a rare and mysterious appeal - this was a young man with a future, but also with a past. These kept bringing her back. What kept sending her away was his stubborn insistence on finishing Law School in record time through endless hours of study and, even more, the inevitable truth that he was perpetually short of funds. At first she didn’t take his references to economic difficulties at all seriously. It seemed to her impossible that a young man with a famous name, with his elegance and good manners and his social circle, one who was welcomed behind all the closed doors of the capital, could be without the fortune that in Cairo would have made such a thing possible. He refused to borrow money, and this she put down to pride. As for what drew him…the obvious, of course: the clarity of her fair skin, the violet eyes with their dark lashes, the thick, glossy brown hair shot through with golden highlights - though by the time I met her she was blonde, and so remained to the end of her days - her slender, dancer’s body, and the famously musical voice, deep and slightly hoarse. The obvious aside, Dóra Mánou was tough. She never gave in, she fought and would, at all costs, survive. She had a sense of humour that was subtle, barely perceptible. It must have disturbed and irritated him, for his own idea of humour ran to coarse jokes about the size of genitals and the workings of the digestive system. In comparison with such ‘flappers’ as provincial Athens offered, she must have seemed a sophisticated fantasy, every man’s ideal of a woman. What enraged him was her flirtatious, even lascivious behaviour around men, and her absolute refusal to behave modestly, like a proper fiancée, instead pursuing a singing career. Her constant reply to his protestations being that one of them, at least ought, to earn enough money to keep them in style. In 1930, Daddy, having scraped together the funds from his earnings as a junior lawyer and by selling off nearly 40 acres’ worth of olive grove in Corfu, bought the apartment on Omírou Street and asked her to marry him. She told him she would have to think about it, and, taking what remained from the sale of the olive grove with her, went off to Paris to do so in peace.