Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Charlotte screamed as three goats ran across the road in front of them without warning, forcing their taxi driver to slam on his brakes.
‘I don’t think they learned the Green Cross Code at goat school,’ observed Maddie. ‘None of them Stopped, Looked or Listened.’
Sofia exchanged a look in the rear mirror with the driver who had lovely green eyes.
‘At least we managed to avoid them. You’ll be talking about Tufty the Squirrel next, Mads. You’re really ageing us here.’
Maddie shook her head.
‘You’re wrong. The Green Cross Code was big when we were kids in the seventies, but apparently, it’s still used today. My daughter told me.’
‘Interesting.’
Sofia hoped the driver’s English wasn’t good enough to translate Maddie’s whole sentence, particularly the bit about being kids in the seventies.
Not that she was planning anything with this guy, one man per island was enough.
But she liked to think that people, well mainly men, thought she was in her early fifties at most, preferably late forties at a pinch.
Mentally, she was forever twenty-eight, but that didn’t count, unfortunately.
Her local pharmacy had unexpectedly come up trumps on the flattery meter recently when she’d had to pick up some antibiotics for a throat infection.
The guy had looked at the prescription and back up at her several times before saying ‘This can’t possibly be for you. It says you’re sixty-two. There’s obviously been some mistake.’ She could have jumped over the counter and kissed him, there and then.
Not that she was ashamed of her age; she just didn’t feel the need to broadcast it.
She didn’t feel sixty-two, so why should she go around admitting it?
If it was fine for men to quote the Groucho Marx line about ‘only being as old as the woman you feel’, then the same was true in reverse. Younger men kept her young too.
‘Oh look! There are more of them.’
Charlotte’s voice in her ear was very loud.
‘And there are some baby goats too. They’re so cute.’
‘You mean kids.’
Charlotte pulled her phone out.
‘Whatever. I’ve got to capture this. Look at that tiny brown and white one trying to keep up. Oh, I hope he won’t get separated from the rest. Look, he’s trying to feed from his mum as she’s going along, but the mother’s not keen. She’s pushing him away, poor little thing.’
Sofia opened her window to see better, only to be assailed by the sour smell of goats en masse. She quickly closed it again.
‘Not surprised.’
At least her friend had perked up after their row at breakfast. It felt like they were edging closer to finding out what was really going on. But Charlotte would spill when she was ready and not before.
‘The colours of the goats against the rocks are spectacular. Blacks, greys, browns and whites in all shades, like a patchwork. The subtle contrasts would give such texture and depth to any picture. It would have to be in oils.’
Sofia had considered the landscape a bit dull after the vibrant blues of the sea and the pinks of the bougainvillea down by the coast, but what did she know? At least Charlotte seemed to be talking about painting, if not actually doing it.
Maddie sighed as yet more goats wandered out into the road and eyeballed them through the windscreen, the bells round their necks tinkling away merrily.
‘Haven’t they got vegetation to munch on? We’ve got a lunch to get to.’
The driver started to move slowly through the goat gathering, and its members finally accepted the impromptu road party was over. Charlotte continued snapping away at their departing backs. Sofia waved goodbye to their animal friends and turned to face Maddie.
‘Have you got worms? Surely, you’re not hungry already?’
Maddie waggled her hand.
‘Ish.’
Charlotte held up her phone.
‘We’re nearly there! It’s a tour of the farm first, remember.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Maddie whispered to Sofia.
A younger version of Maria, named Alexa, was already waiting by the entrance with a group of around a dozen others and welcomed them at the gate.
‘Ah, our stragglers are here at last! Let’s carry on with the tour.’
Alexa herded them sheep dog style straight over to a field where the animals were having their daily feed.
‘Not more bloody goats,’ Sofia managed to say to Maddie under her breath.
‘I’m not interested in them either, per se, just what they produce. Goat’s cheese is one of my very favourite things in the world.’
Sofia picked her way delicately through the dirt, avoiding the many olive-sized black droppings.
She hadn’t worn her new and extremely expensive gold espadrilles to impress some smelly animals.
They probably wouldn’t come under Charlotte’s definition of ‘suitable shoes’, but she was damned well going to get as much wear out of them as possible.
The goats were munching away at big metal troughs of food raised up to head height. Sofia poked Maddie in the side to alert her to Charlotte’s continued interest in the animals, as she continued to photograph their every move, even crouching down to get close-ups of their faces eating.
‘At least she’s happy,’ Maddie whispered in her ear.
‘Manic more like,’ she whispered back, which earned her a strong stare from Alexa, who was giving them the detailed lowdown on goat behaviour.
Sofia pretended she had something in her shoe and pulled Maddie to the side, away from Alexa’s watchful gaze.
‘Char really went off on one at breakfast.’
‘Yeah, I wondered what that was about.’
‘Aside from me accusing her of fancying Dimitris she made an odd comment about Doug. Are things OK there?
‘As far as I know, but she’s not mentioned him much, has she? And she doesn’t seem to get any phone calls or messages from him. Not that I’m Mrs Popular, but on our previous trips away I often used to hear her chatting to him most evenings.’
Chatting to Adonis once a week would do her right now, thought Sofia, but this wasn’t about her.
‘There’s something weird going on. We need to get on it.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Everyone! Gather round.’
Alexa swept her arm in an arc around the farm.
‘Now we will show you how farming used to be, before modern machinery. Please make your way into the barn.’
Maddie and Sofia hung back while Charlotte rushed to the front.
‘It’s like a school trip,’ Maddie said behind her hand, ‘with Good Charlotte as our poster girl.’
‘Isn’t that a band?’
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
Crammed into a tiny timber-beamed space with a dirt floor and lots of large wooden equipment, the others had fallen silent.
Sofia tripped over a rake in the gloom and pitched forward.
‘Shit!’
Alexa raised her head.
‘So, if we’re ready at the back there.’
‘So ready.’
Sofia held back a giggle at Maddie’s reply. At school they’d been sent to the headmaster for giggling in assembly more than once, and things hadn’t moved on hugely in the following fifty years.
Charlotte had always been up the front at all school events, surrounded by her fellow senior prefects.
It still rankled with Sofia that she’d never been made a prefect, although Charlotte had allowed her and Maddie to sneak into the cupboard-sized senior prefects room at breaktimes and share their one jar of Nescafé.
When she’d asked Charlotte to look into the prefect oversight, her friend had somewhat too gleefully reported back that she and Maddie were considered subversive, and it was never going to happen. Bloody cheek.
‘So, any questions?’
Sofia hadn’t listened to a word the woman had said about how the goat’s cheese was made in the olden days and what the various wooden barrels and paddles did. She was too busy worrying about Charlotte and whether Adonis could finally take a break to speak to her.
After a few queries from the American contingent about how the islanders managed to do all this without electricity and running water, and one from Charlotte about hygiene, Alexa looked around the room.
‘Any last questions?’
Maddie put up her hand.
‘Are we going for lunch now?’
Alexa’s face fell.
‘Yes, follow me.’
The covered terrace with its rough stone floor, gleaming farm machinery and tools placed at apparently random points, had been cleverly put together, thought Sofia.
Tables covered in blue and white checked tablecloths, with vases of fresh greenery were matched with white painted chairs and there was even the odd chicken clucking in between the tables.
Sofia wondered if they’d been let out only five minutes earlier solely for their pleasure.
Since when had she become quite so cynical?
The Americans were oohing and aahing away like crazy, cameras at the ready.
Alexa beckoned them all in out of the sun.
‘Choose a table, please, and sit down.’
Sofia made for one laid for three in the corner, next to a large terracotta pot overflowing with blue flowers and a view of the hills behind. There was bread on the table along with a jug of wine. It was a loaf of the yellow corn bread that they’d had at quite a few of the local restaurants.
She’d already broken her no bread rule for the good stuff several times. There was bread and then there was Greek psomi. So fresh and springy. Maddie broke off the end of the loaf and stuffed it in her mouth as Alexa spoke again.
‘In a moment you will each be given an individual cheeseboard, which has on it three different goat’s cheeses, all made here with milk from our own goats.
One has been matured for a year, another for two years and another for five years, and it will be very interesting for you to taste the difference. ’
Alexa raised her voice a notch.
‘Accompanying the cheeses will be three different types of honey, again from our own hives. It has been said that our thyme honey…’
‘…is the best on the island,’ the three friends chorused together in time with Alexa, confident she couldn’t hear them from where she was.
‘Definitely related to Maria,’ said Maddie as she poured out three large glasses of the white wine and clinked glasses with both of them.
‘Yamas!’
Charlotte looked in Alexa’s direction.
‘Aren’t we supposed to wait for the food?’
‘Bollocks to that.’
Maddie was already on her second glass by the time the rectangular wooden boards were brought out and laid before them.
The three selections of cheese were cut into triangles, fanned out and placed at regular intervals along the wooden board, interspersed with little white china dishes of honey as well as grapes, apricots and nuts, with big bowls of diced tomatoes and olives to share on the side.
Charlotte whipped out her phone.
‘Oh, isn’t it pretty, like a still life. This is great for the blog. You can see the variations in colour in the cheeses. The older one is darker and creamier and has a rougher surface.’
‘Gold star for the blonde in the corner,’ said Maddie, breaking off another hunk of bread.
‘Are you finished, Char? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of just looking at it.’
Everything else was forgotten for an hour or so as they nibbled away at the various cheeses, discussed the different intensities of flavour, took guesses at what the bees had been feeding on when they made the honeys, and refreshed their palates with the sweet juicy tomatoes and plump olives.
Maddie’s call for another jug of wine and more bread was treated with slight surprise by their waitress who nevertheless recovered herself quickly and went off to fetch them.
‘That was absolutely stunning.’ Charlotte put down her napkin. ‘But I’m beat. I really can’t manage those last few bits of cheese.’
‘Hand them over.’ Maddie rubbed her stomach. ‘I’ve still got a little corner left I can tuck them into.’
Sofia leant back in her chair.
‘I’ve eaten more today than the whole of the past week. There’s no way that could be described as a simple lunch.’
A glance over at the entrance told Sofia that hunky taxi guy was back.
‘Who fancies an afternoon at the pool with Dimitris waiting on us hand and foot?’
‘Me!’
Maddie’s voice was a little too loud in the still air and people at the other tables turned in their direction. She’d drunk most of the second jug of wine herself. Drinking in the daytime never ended well. Sofia had suggested the pool so her friend could sleep it off.
‘Char?’
‘What?’
Her friend seemed far away again.
‘Are you up for an afternoon with Dimitris tending to our every need?’
Sofia tried to keep any hint of suggestion out of her voice, but she needn’t have worried as Charlotte just looked blankly ahead.
‘Fine.’