Nadia Wheatley — Sunday morning in Pothia

The town faces south, so at 7 am my view from the fourth-floor terrace of the Villa Melina is cut diagonally by the line of shade and sun that splits Pothia precisely at the terracotta-coloured dome of Aghios Christos.

To the west, where the neighbourhood of Aghios Nicholaos (the saint of fisher-folk) clambers the hillside, bright light warms the stacked white cubes of houses, the sky-blue lid of the parish church. By this time, Clift’s yellow house will be glowing, as its ‘four staring windows’ remember perhaps the woman who once watched from them at dawn as the town was freeze-framed in a precise moment of sheer silence. (Can she hear the mermaid singing?)

To the east, all is still in shadow.

Across the whole, there is not a prick of movement or sound. No cat explores a rubbish bin (or not in my sightline). No boat ruffles the still waters of the harbour. No moped careens up a lane that was once barely wide enough for a loaded donkey. No dynamites are thrown from the hills. The only sign of life is the sweet smell of baking (What will the cake be today?) that rises from the hotel kitchen, up, up, up (past the little landing-window, where I have been watching the two fledgelings in their nest over recent days), up to my room in this pink Italianate mansion that was built by Kyrios Vouvalis (the local Onassis) for his sister, back in the day when a sponge merchant such as he could make big money, pollá chrímata, off the backs of the divers.

 It is my final morning here.

I bring my yoghurt and watermelon out to the terrace to share the perfect stillness with me. If I had another lifetime I would buy one of the white cubes and emigrate to Kalymnos, as seventy years ago so many Kalymnians emigrated to Afstralia.

Where are you from? they all ask. Sythney or Darwin?

Sythney, I said last night to the elegant young waitress at the waterfront taverna where I ate a stuffed pepper and a lettuce-and tomato salad.

I’m from Darwin, she replied. As if those two cities, plus Pothia itself, are the only three possibilities on earth.

And on a previous visit to the island, when (on further questioning about my living arrangements) I told one of the nuns at the Argos convent that my home is in Enmore, she gave me a disdainful smile before continuing in her broad Aussie accent: Yeah. The inner west. (Pause.) I lived in Bellevue Hill for twenty years. (For those of you who don’t know Sydney: Bellevue Hill is in the eastern suburbs: far up the social and financial scale from where I live.)

By 8 am, the bells are starting.

First, Aghia Triada, Holy Trinity, which looms perilously above the hotel’s back yard, as if with a puff of wind it might topple down through the bougainvillea and into the pool.

Then — as if copy-catting the idea — back and forth across the town the chorus clangs. No fancy carillon here: just the one harsh tone, repeated over and over: one two three, one two three, one two three four five six seven…

The shadow-line shifts east in synthesis.

When I go down to the breakfast room to get my second coffee, I notice that the second of the two fledgelings has finally left the nest. Yesterday as I watched, its sibling took the leap, flutter-fluttered its wings, and was off.

At 9.00 I watch as the morning ferry departs.

In an hour I will walk to Vouvalis Beach and take my morning dip. A tiny cove on the east side of town, below the Church of Aghios Stephanos (patron saint of sponge divers), it is the place where old women (younger than me) swim singly or in twos, clad in their dresses, as Charmian Clift described Sevasti doing when the Clift-Johnston family and friends went for a beach picnic in the last chapter of Mermaid Singing.

When I get out to sit in the shade on the slatted wooden bench beneath the salt tree, a light breeze will riffle my wet, sea-matching hair, and a gurgle of tiny waves will lap shyly at my bare toes.

Then I will put on my sandals and walk to the joint where the fishermen drink (ouzo and beer already, at this time of the morning), and slowly sip an iced latte as I realise that, by this time tomorrow, I will be gone.

A beach picnic on Kalymnos in the summer of 1955. Surely the mermaid at left is Shane (aged six), and the swimmer far back doing the Australian crawl must be Charmian. And I imagine that the more modestly clad woman is Sevasti.