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The Potter’s House
Rosie Thomas
From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl. Available on ebook for the first time.Olivia Giorgiadis has left her English roots behind. She lives on a tiny Greek island, married to a local man, mother to two small sons. Year on year, island life has followed a peaceful unchanging rhythm.Until now. An earthquake ravages the coast, its force devastating the island. In the aftermath comes a stranger: an Englishwoman, destitute but for the clothes she wears.Olivia welcomes the stranger into her home, the potter's house. But as Kitty melts into the family and the village community, so Olivia begins to sense that her mysterious visitor threatens all she holds dear…
The Potter’s House
BY ROSIE THOMAS
Copyright (#uc5fb50be-85bc-5b9a-ae6c-5df99e1d21a1)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Random House
Copyright © Rosie Thomas 2001
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © FEB 2014 ISBN: 9780007560547
Version: 2016-07-12
Contents
Cover (#uce8557cd-fb9e-590e-bbe1-85a7c8391514)
Title Page (#uce7abcce-7914-5732-bd76-59c5a6514761)
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Rosie Thomas
About the Publisher
One (#uc5fb50be-85bc-5b9a-ae6c-5df99e1d21a1)
The first time I saw the woman who later ran off with my husband she was giving directions to two removals men. They were struggling to lift a sofa round an awkward bend in the communal stairs and I was waiting to pass.
There were two flats per floor in Dunollie Mansions and this was evidently the new owner of the one directly above ours. Old widowed Mrs Bobinski had lived up there for twenty years in a fug of simmering soup fumes and mothballs, and then she died in hospital after a very brief illness and her heirs put the flat up for sale. It was on the market for months, partly because mansion flats like ours were no longer fashionable, if they ever had been, but mostly because the two nephews were asking too much money for it. I had heard from the Frasers on the top floor that the place was finally sold, but no one had any idea who our new neighbour would be.
‘Some nice, unremarkable couple just like us,’ Graham Fraser cheerfully assumed.
‘And us,’ I added, more thoughtfully.
I stood to one side to let the woman and her puffing retinue pass by. She was walking upstairs backwards and would have collided with me if I hadn’t put out my hand to steer her away. She wheeled round at once.
‘God, sorry. Can’t even look where I’m going. Hang on a sec.’ The last words were called down to the two young men. The one on the lower end hitched his shoulder under the padded arm and stared up in sweaty disbelief.
‘Don’t worry about us. We’ve got all day, Col, haven’t we?’
Ignoring him, she introduced herself to me. ‘I’m Lisa Kirk. Just moving in, number seven.’
‘Let your end down, Col.’
‘Right you are.’
I told the woman my name and pointed to our door. She was younger by far than anyone else currently living in the flats. I would have put her age at twenty-three, although I learned later that she was actually twenty-seven. Fifteen years or so younger them me. She had fair hair with blonde streaks and a soft leather rucksack slung over one shoulder. Even her combat pants had obviously come from somewhere expensive and fashionable, well away from the firing line. She looked as if she ought to be moving into a loft in Clerkenwell or a pastel-fronted little place in Notting Hill, not a flat in a stuffy red-brick block in a Kensington backwater.
‘If you need a cup of sugar. Or maybe gin …’ I said.
‘Thanks,’ she answered and smiled. An attractive smile. ‘You come and have a drink with me when I’ve got the glasses unpacked. Tell me what I should do with the place.’
I flattened myself against the wall as Col and his counterpart hoisted the sofa again. They laboured past me, with Lisa Kirk leading the way. I went out to post my letters and to the greengrocer’s down the side street to buy vegetables for dinner, then walked slowly back into the building.
The shallow stairs and the bare landings in Dunollie Mansions were kept clean and swept, and blown light bulbs always promptly replaced by Derek the caretaker who lived in the basement. There was a mahogany table to the left of the front door above which communal notices were posted, about things like holiday refuse collection, temporary interruptions to the water supply or work on the old-fashioned but effective central heating system. There was a faint scent of Derek’s floor polish and an even fainter whiff of disinfectant, and occasionally the rattle of the lift door grille followed by the hum of the machinery. It was a quiet, unflashy place.
I always liked the two solid doors on each landing, facing each other at a slight angle on either side of the stairwell, and the ornate brass door furniture worn with polishing, and the diamond panes of leaded glass on either side of the central panel. The hallways within were dark and would have been claustrophobic if the ceilings were not so high, but the rooms opening off them were bright and well-proportioned, especially the corner drawing rooms with their bay windows looking in two directions. From the top flats there was a view of the dome of the Albert Hall and a landscape of rooftops and chimneys, but in summertime our windows, lower down, framed nothing but the leafy plane trees out in the street. When there was a breeze the leaf patterns moved on the floor and furniture. Even in winter the bare branches made a screen against the walls and windows across the wide street.
I liked the sense of enclosure. And the well-ordered, dull and unimaginative sheer safety of everything.
It was not a background against which you could, for example, imagine anyone running amok. No one could chop through the three-inch thickness of the front doors. The walls and floors were solid too, and no murmur of the outside world ever penetrated. We all lived there in our separate castles, friendly enough and with Derek to sweep up: the Frasers on the top floor, and Mark and Gerard the gay couple who lived opposite Mrs Bobinski’s, and Peter and me, and the rest. But separate. There were no children in the block. The flats weren’t quite big enough for families. It was a place for small dogs, like Mark’s and Gerard’s schnauzer, and childless regret, like mine.
It was a few days before I saw Lisa Kirk again. I told Peter about her that evening, when he came home from work. I remember him sitting in the armchair against the Chinese yellow wall of the drawing room, with a drink on the stool beside him. It was September, and the leaves of the plane trees were just beginning to brown and crisp around the margins.
‘How old?’ he asked and I told him – underestimating by about four years as it later turned out.
‘Oh, God. It will be techno music at all hours and impossible parties, and people running up and down the stairs. We should operate on a co-op system, like the Americans. Nobody admitted unless approved by the committee.’
Peter affected fogeyishness, sometimes. It was one of the ways he tried to look after me, by pretending to be staider and more reliable and conservative than he really was. It was one of those unspoken contracts that long-standing couples make, knowing their partner’s needs and histories. In fact, he was a tolerant man, with a remarkable capacity to overlook other people’s foibles and most of the irritations generated by them.
‘We’ll see,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say, and moved on to the other snippets of the day’s news. I wasn’t working, then, and it was sometimes difficult to think of anything at all to relate. Lisa Kirk’s arrival was a welcome new topic.
When I met her for the second time we were both coming in with Safeway carrier bags, at the end of a damp afternoon with the smell of autumn thick under the plane trees.
She rested her bags on the stairs beyond our front door and looked down at me.
‘Come up and have a cup of tea. Have you got time?’
A commodity in abundant supply, as it happened. I pushed my own shopping into our hallway and followed her up, curious to see and know more.
Old Mrs Bobinski’s decor was mostly still in place: Regency striped wallpaper with darker rectangles outlined in grime where murky pictures had once hung, fluted wooden pelmets, central light fittings hideous in gilt and smoked glass. Against this backdrop Lisa had partially arranged her modishly beaten-up brown leather sofa, CD tower and two tall glass urns filled with coiled snakes of twinkling little lights.
‘It’s all a bit of a tip.’ She sighed. ‘I haven’t had time to think, let alone get anything done to it. I needed to move quickly after I split with Baz. And I really liked this place. Lofts are a bit done-that and Dunollie Mansions is so …’
She eyed me, transparently wondering which word to use in order not to offend me. ‘… Neutral,’ she concluded. ‘You know. I reckoned you could do anything here, make it into anything you wanted, without it being a statement.’
‘Really?’
I felt a twitch of dismay. This refuge, my safe haven, was about to teeter out on to some cutting edge of style. I didn’t want it to be invaded or to have its sagging face lifted.
‘If I ever get time. Come in the kitchen, I’ll make us some tea.’
There was the same schizophrenia in there. A maplewood butcher’s block on wheels, an espresso machine and Philippe Starck knick-knacks disposed against Mrs Bobinski’s yellow Formica, and one of those American refrigerators with an ice dispenser in the front, finished in pillar-box red. This monster fitted into none of the available spaces and hummed in the corner of the room next to the door like a TARDIS waiting to dematerialise. I found myself touching the polished metal handle, wondering where I would end up if I stepped inside and let it take me along.
‘Are you hungry?’ Lisa was asking, watching my hand hovering. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot in there, I’m not much of a kitchen person really, it’s just that we bought it jointly and I didn’t want Baz to end up with it. He only used it to keep those little vodka or champagne bottles in, you know, from when everyone used to stand at parties drinking through straws. But I’ve just got some stuff from the supermarket if you’d like …’
‘No. I’m not hungry.’ I withdrew my hand. ‘But I would like a cup of tea.’
She went on chattering and rummaging in cupboards for cups and tea bags.
‘Raspberry? Lemon and ginger? Peppermint?’
Gooseberry and leek. Tamarillo. Artichoke leaf.
‘Or there’s some ordinary.’
‘Ordinary would be good, thanks.’
When she opened the door of the TARDIS to take out the milk, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of champagne and one of those pre-mixed packets of artful salad. We settled ourselves on a pair of steel-and-leather chairs at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Lisa lifted her cup, smiling at me again. She had grey eyes, neat features and lovely skin that seemed to have light shining through it like tissue paper stretched over a spotlight tube. I felt tired and colourless, and touched with envy. There was no point in envying youth, I reminded myself. It was a fact, vivid but perishable. You might as well be jealous of oranges.
‘Here’s to new neighbours,’ she said.
We drank to each other and then Lisa hitched her chin at our surroundings.
‘What do you think I should do with it?’
‘You could paint it all white.’
She gave this suggestion careful consideration, as if it was the most imaginative proposal she had ever heard.
‘Could do, yes.’ And then, with an abrupt switch of focus, ‘Are you married?’
I told her that I was and for how long, and that we had no children.
Lisa fixed her gaze on mine.
‘Do you mind not having children?’
‘I have learned to live with it.’
She stood up from the table and went to lean against one of the cupboards, and the TARDIS began a low humming as if preparing to relocate. When she moved, the curved wings of her shoulder blades shifted beneath her T-shirt and poignant knobs of bone showed under the skin at the nape of her neck. Her hair was pinned up today with a butterfly clip. She stood not quite looking at me, hesitating, and I waited for what she wanted to say. It was warm in the kitchen; Derek had this week fired up the big central heating boiler. We were snug in here. The heat and the hum of the refrigerator and the sense of enclosure that Dunollie Mansions always gave bred an impression of intimacy, as though Lisa and I were old friends who had momentarily lapsed into thoughtful silence.
‘I suppose that’s what you do. Learn to live with things, I mean. I wish I was any good at it. Can you learn?’
