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steady job, he doesn’t like to see me hanging round with my friends all day, but I like having fun all day. You do, and Rachel does, and Kiria Plum too.’
    ‘We’re in different circumstances from you.’
    ‘That’s it?’
    D’Arcy did not like the look that quite suddenly appeared on the girl’s face. Anger, the girl was brimming with it. But that didn’t faze D’Arcy in the least, she put it down to Cretan temperament and she had been dealing with that all her life. ‘That’s it,’ she repeated.
    ‘I thought you would help me because your mother was a whore like mine was and you’re a bastard like me.’
    D’Arcy could not stop herself from laughing.
    ‘Are you laughing at me?’ asked an angry Melina.
    ‘No! Oh, no, not at you. At my mother being called a whore, and me a bastard. You would have to know my mother to know how wrong you are about that, and meet my fathers to appreciate how much more than that my mother is, that I am. Though, mind you, I don’t think she would be as offended as you think she or I should be at your calling us those names. Think, Melina, if we were no more than those things, would we have the affection and respect of the people here?’
    D’Arcy walked away from the girl only to be chased after. Melina fell into step with her. ‘Please, you won’t tell Mark I called you those names?’ she begged, genuine panic in her voice.
    ‘Of course not, I’ve already forgotten it.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘You have my word on that.’ It was a little thing but D’Arcy noted that the girl did not apologise for the slurs.
    They continued to walk in silence, several people stopping to speak to them. At the end of the corniche,before D’Arcy started the climb to her house, she turned to Melina and dismissed her with, ‘I turn off here, see you around.’ Thirty yards away she had already forgotten the girl and the incident.
    The following morning was yet another glorious day of sun and sea and a leisurely breakfast on the terrace with Laurence. Arnold stopped by for a coffee and to pick up the things D’Arcy had brought for him from Chania, and to leave a loaf of bread, hot from the baker’s oven. Edgar and Bill arrived for their parcels, bickering as usual, and Rachel for her ink. No one seemed anxious to leave and so the morning slipped away in laughter and amusing conversation. Coffee was exchanged for white wine and fried haloumi cheese produced to go with the fresh bread.
    D’Arcy was sitting on the terrace wall looking down past the romantic gardens she had created in the old ruins separating her from the path that ran along the edge of the cliffs, plunging into the sea below her house. Year by year she had bought every parcel of land and crumbling ruin in the vicinity of her house, thereby managing to become one of the largest landowners in Livakia. Most everyone in the village guessed it was she who owned the land but she had been discreet when making her purchases and so few really knew the true extent of her holdings. The gardens were open to the public when she was not wanting to be alone or entertaining in them. The villagers were more proud than envious of what she owned because they knew she had not bought the land for greed or mere privacy, but to conserve it, restore it, make it a place ofbeauty for them all to appreciate. They had seen too much of their rugged and wild island eaten up by the disease of tourism: concrete hotels, busloads of transient drunks who never really saw the island or its people for what and who they were. If there was any envy it was among the foreign colony residing in Livakia and those who wanted to make their home there but had to leave. It was such a struggle to buy and restore anything in Greece that many who wanted to do so gave up in despair.
    They were remarkable gardens that would never have thrived at all in that dry and stony terrain except that D’Arcy, against all odds, had drilled for a well and found water. Beautiful and in