Read The Girl Under the Olive Tree for Free Online Page B

raced up the stairs to the apartment. There were shouts and a scuffle. Suddenly a man was thrown off the balcony onto the pavement. He didn’t move. Women were screaming as they rushed to shield him from further blows, and still those young people marched past staring ahead
    Penny watched in horror as the gang of ruffians dragged out any protesters, beating them round the head and marching them away. She knew she’d seen something unspeakable, far away from her peaceful world in Artimisa Villa. She felt helpless and afraid knowing she’d made a big mistake.
    As the crowd began to melt away she knew she must find her own escape route. It took all her courage and quick thinking. She covered her head with her silk scarf, swiftly bought a bag of oranges, bent her head down and, passing herself off as a busy Greek housewife as best she could, slipped down a side alley and back onto the main streets.
    When, pale and shaken, she reached the embassy and described everything, Walter was furious with her.
    ‘The sooner you’re back in England, the better, young lady. Girls of our class don’t wander around. It’s not safe, not now. There’re fascist groups on the march in the city since Metaxas’s coup, trouble brewing. I’ll be glad when Evadne returns home. Dark forces are at work and who knows where it will end?’
    She’d never heard Walter so pessimistic but she was secretly proud that she’d made it back safely without any help.
    Then, in the fourth week of her stay, something happened to change everything. On a September morning hazy with heat, Evadne woke up grumpy with backache. As the morning went on Penny noticed how pale she was, and the pain had intensified. It was when Effy tried to get out of bed and Penny was smoothing the sheets that she noticed blood had soaked into them.
    ‘How long have you been bleeding?’ she asked, trying to look calm while her pulse raced.
    ‘Am I?’ Evadne lifted back the sheet in surprise. ‘Good Lord!’ She looked up at Penny, her eyes full of fear. ‘What’s happening? It’s going to be alright, isn’t it?’
    Penny immediately summoned Kaliope, the housekeeper, to call for the doctor. By the time he arrived poor Effy was curled up in a ball, crying in pain. Penny found a case and packed some toiletries while the doctor examined Evadne briskly and then put her in his car to make for the private clinic.
    Walter arrived stony-faced as Penny sat outside Effy’s private room feeling helpless.
    Suddenly there was no honeymoon baby, no explanation, no reason for such a late miscarriage.
    ‘It’s just one of those things that happen,’ the duty doctor explained in broken English. ‘We can never know why. Your wife is healthy and she should go on to have plenty of sons for you once she has recovered.’ He meant to be reassuring but it sounded cold and heartless to Penny. If ever I was a nurse telling someone bad news, she thought, I’d sit them down in private and show some sympathy.
    Later Penny sat with her sister, seeing the light had gone out of her eyes. She looked so small, like a frightened child, not the Evadne who was a fearless horsewoman, jumping high fences, who served like a man at tennis and won with a demolishing forehand. Now she lay helpless, uncomplaining, numb.
    ‘Everything’s been taken away . . . I never even saw if it were a boy or a girl . . . I feel so empty.’ She didn’t cry, just sat staring out of the window. ‘Just get me home, Penny, please,’ she whispered.
    In those few hours it was as if a whole new world of suffering had opened up to Penny, a world of which she’d known nothing in her privileged life so far. There was nothing left of her sister’s dream. Kaliope had packed the baby’s layette away out of sight. Now there was only a terrible disappointment that no one could talk about. It hovered in the air unspoken, and all the more powerful for that. None of their crowd had been brought up to talk about feelings or intimate