The Potter’s House. Rosie Thomas

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      He takes my hand and helps me down into the cockpit. There are cushions on the seats and the space is shaded by an awning, and I sit down with relief to be partly out of the brooding heat. Through the cabin door I can see a neat area with narrow bunks separated by a folding table.

      ‘No wind,’ the man says, hunching his shoulders.

      ‘No.’

      ‘I don’t like moving under engine power, but I think we shall have to. Maybe we’ll pick up a breeze outside the bay.’

      I look down into the water, which is so clear that I can see the rocks ten feet beneath the surface as if they were lying under plate glass, and then up into the colourless sky.

      ‘Maybe,’ I agree. I don’t mind whether we find a breeze or not, or whatever else may be going to happen. I’m happy to be here, rocked by the water and with the shipshape little wooden cockpit around me.

      The man starts up the engine and a drift of blue smoke rises from the stern. He jumps on to the jetty and releases the bow rope, and as the prow swings outwards in a slow arc he unties the stern and leaps back to join me and the boat. A minute later we are heading out to sea. In companionable silence we watch the water, and my white hotel and its companions as they fall away behind us.

      ‘I don’t know your name,’ I say.

      He tilts his head sideways and looks at me. None of his features is distinctive, nor is the composite they make, yet the suggestion of familiarity comes back again. I know that I don’t know him, but I feel easy in his company.

      ‘Mine is Catherine Stafford. Cary.’

      ‘Andreas,’ he says. He makes a small adjustment to the tiller to bring us round parallel to the shore.

      ‘There,’ he says with satisfaction. And then, gesturing to the tiller, ‘Do you mind, just for a moment?’

      I slide across and take his place as he moves forward. He runs up a sail and at once the wind fills it. Water drums under the hull and a wake churns behind us and I tighten my grasp on the tiller. I lift my head to look at the masthead, and the wind and our quickening speed make me smile. When Andreas moves back again I start to move out of his place but he makes a sign to indicate that I should stay put.

      ‘I can’t sail.’

      ‘You are sailing.’

      And he is right, I am. Pleasure swells in me until I feel as taut as the white sail. We seem to skim over the water. I watch the coastline and the villages that run down into the bays like clusters of sugar cubes shaken in the fold of a napkin. The scenery is calm rather than beautiful, painted in shades of aquamarine and sepia. Andreas points out the places and tells me their names.

      ‘Do you live here?’ I ask.

      ‘Some of the time.’

      After a while we pass a massive outcrop of rock, where cormorants shuffle against the sky. Immediately behind the rock, hidden by it except from an oblique angle, there is a tongue of sand between two steep rock cliffs.

      ‘That’s where we are going.’

      ‘It looks beautiful.’

      He helps me to bring the boat round. In the shallows the water is brilliant turquoise. There are fish in synchronised shoals, flicking their shadows over the sand. Andreas lowers the sail and makes his boat fast to a small buoy.

      ‘Welcome to my bay.’

      I am hot, now that we are motionless again, and the water looks enticing. I pull off the shirt that covers my swimming costume and stand up too quickly so the boat rocks wildly. Andreas puts his hand out to steady me and I cling on to his bare forearm, laughing. My own hand looks chalky against his suntanned skin.

      ‘Dive,’ he says and I look over the side into the water. Deep enough. We link hands and I scramble up on to the seat feeling the rough canvas of the cushions under the balls of my feet. The boat is still rocking and we are both laughing now. He puts his hands on my shoulders to steady me while I rise on to my toes and arrow my arms in front of me. Andreas’s touch is friendly, even brotherly, with no whisper of sex in it. He is protecting me and teasing at the same time. I feel a pang of loss with Peter at the centre of it, because he was my lover and I miss him so acutely.

      ‘Dive,’ Andreas repeats and to get away from the memory of Peter I launch myself from the boat. There is a smack and sizzle of water and I stretch, letting the momentum of the dive drive me down as far as the rippled sand. Then I am rising again and the cool water strips away the roughness of the last months and it is as if I am clean and smooth and in one piece again. When I break the surface in a dazzle of light, I notice that the sky’s white haze has receded and the sun is shining. Andreas surfaces next to me and shakes a glitter of drops from his hair. We swim together to the beach and then sit in the shallows, sun-warmed, looking out to the little boat and the slice of open sea beyond the mouth of the bay.

      ‘My favourite place,’ he says lightly.

      ‘I can see why.’

      Later Andreas straps a knife to his ankle and takes a netting bag for a swim around the rocks while I lie in the sun. When he comes back the bag is full of black spiny globes.

      ‘Lunch.’

      We sit under the boat’s awning.

      There is coarse brown bread and a dish of tomatoes. Andreas cups the sea urchins one by one in his hand and twists the point of the knife into the underside. He piles them in front of me and I spoon the orange pulpy contents greedily into my mouth. The taste is pure sea and iodine.

      When we have finished eating I lie on the cabin roof, letting the sun unpin me, and Andreas puts a tiny coffeepot on the blue flame of a gas cylinder. He brings me a little tin cupful and three figs, and I gnaw the fruit off ragged slices of skin while the juice runs down my chin.

      ‘This is wonderful.’

      ‘Good.’

      ‘But I don’t know anything about you.’ I smile.

      He takes the last fig from me and neatly quarters it with the knife. ‘What do you want to know?’

      I try to frame the questions – how old are you, where do you come from, what do you know and what are you doing here – but then the points of reference fade. There is nothing I need to ask because it is enough just to be here.

      Andreas splits the flower-shape of fig segments apart, two for him and two for me. I look into his face and it is like looking into my own. As familiar as that.

      ‘Have you eaten enough?’

      I nod.

      ‘Come ashore.’

      There is shade under the east-facing cliff. We lie on the sand, facing each other, heads propped on our hands.

      ‘What are you going to do next?’ he asks quietly. It is as if he already knows about Peter. It is a relief not to have to fill in what has already happened, but to make an attempt at sketching out the future instead.

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