"The dirtiest old man in history emerges”

HOME from Greece. The normal rules of life, suspended for a fortnight, reinstate themselves.

I’m standing by the washing-line. The ground is sodden, the sky its usual colour, but today there’s a big blue gap in it. A well-meaning sky, I’ve decided with bitter optimism. I start to peg out wet laundry: knickers, peg, pants, peg, sock. Pause. Deep breath, shoulder slump and… resume: jeans, peg, shirt, peg, bra.

Bored? No? Good. To continue then: sheet, peg, sock, peg, towel. The pegs are going on hard now, for I am feeling petulant; it looks like the big blue gap is closing, (sock, peg, sock). I stare up at the sky.

If the weather was to suddenly personify itself, I fantasise (duvet, peg), if the wet misery was to assume a human form and stand before me (sheet, peg), as a solid person (jumper, peg), I’d hurt it.

Done. I hoist the line up into the air and slosh through puddles into the shed, start pegging on the line in there. Yes, I think (sheet, peg, dress), that’s exactly what I’d do if the weather personified itself — I’d hurt it. But how, exactly, would I hurt it? I think about this while I plod back to the front door where my daughter stands chatting on the phone.

“Bye,” she says into the phone, and then, handing it to me, “it’s your brother.” I take the phone. She asks me if I’ve seen her really nice knickers, the frilly ones from Accessorize, because she’s worried they’re going to disappear, “like all my knickers do when they go in the wash.”

My daughter believes this phenomenon is avoidable and, moreover, unique to this house. I’d like to kill her with one sentence. I have it in mind but cannot assemble it right now because my brother’s up in my ear, asking me how I am and whether Greece was as wonderful as I’d anticipated.

How to begin? Perhaps I should start with the anticipation, which wasn’t anticipation at all but a desperation so intense that it wreaked havoc on my subconscious, wresting dreams of broken limbs and aborted flights out of it.

Where to start then? What moments shall I describe to my brother? Maybe he’d enjoy the cartoonish inevitability of our getting lost for half a day in the Pelepponese, en route to our destination:

Day one, lunchtime. My husband’s empty stomach compels him to pull up suddenly outside a forlorn building on the side of the road. He stalls the engine and points hopefully at a dilapidated sign which says “Taverna.”

“It’s an old dog kennels,” I say. “This looks nice,” he says. “You’re blinded by hunger,” I say, “drive on.” “Why?” he protests, “it says Taverna.” The dirtiest old man in history emerges from the dog kennels and approaches our car.

“That’s why,” I say, pointing at the man, who walks towards us with an unusual gait. An old woman appears, hovering behind the old man. She has a wheelbarrow and few teeth. Pointing her out to my husband, I say, “they’re the proprietors. They will be cooking your moussaka. Go, go, go.”

But I don’t start with this moment. Instead I begin to describe a moment which arrived towards the end of the second week.

Late afternoon. I wake from sleep and emerge outside into the fearsome heat. I sit on the steps under the canopy of a tree and look at the sea. Listening to cicadas that sound like they’ve finally driven themselves crazy with their own buzzing, a stillness creeps up on me, an alluring inertia.

It seems as if all the natural elements in the world — the light and warmth, the breeze and fallen lemons — are conspiring quietly to create a perfect stasis. Time seems to stop.

On the phone to my brother, I get as far as “listening to cicadas,” and break off; the rain is now thumping down, the wind whipping up.

“Go on,” my brother says. A sheet is about to blow off the line. “You know what?” I say. “What?” he says. “I’ve decided that if the weather was ever to become flesh and blood,” I say, “and stand in front of me as a person, then I’d punch it — a real haymaker — very, very hard in the face.”