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I know that I am being watched. I think that women always do know when a man is watching them. Even if they aren't sure who he is. I can feel his eyes appraising my figure, following the swirl of my skirt. I feel the heat of his glance on my arched instep, delicate, visible beneath the leather thongs of my sandals. I take off my sandals to sunbathe, but even then a pale line reinscribes their shape upon my feet. He is fascinated by my feet. I hug my knees, gazing at my unpainted toes. They are sunburnt, charming, quite straight, a fine down of hair on the first joint of my big toes. All the hair on my body is a fine, pale blonde. I have always worn sensible, comfortable clothes, which reveal my body nevertheless. I am nearly forty, but my waist is as slender as it was when I was eighteen. I want everyone to see that. I have never been pregnant. And I have never wanted to be. My body still belongs to me. Sometimes I wish that he would reveal himself. Today, as I walked back from the hotel pool across the uneven blue mosaic towards our rooms I could feel his gaze upon me. His desire warmed the nape of my neck. I felt the hairs rise slightly with the ferocity of his stare. The water was still on my back, my thighs. I turned, clutching my towel defensively across my breasts. I saw no one. But women always do know when a man is watching them. I know he was there. I have begun to interrogate the face of each man at dinner. Is it you? Or you? Or you? I do not always travel with my husband. Sometimes he is away for months over the summer and I hardly see him. This year he has earned a sabbatical and his latest dig is being sponsored by the government. So here he is on this island, early in the year, with his young team of underpaid archaeologists, all anxious to work with the famous professor. They scrape earnestly away at a crumbling wall or along the crudely bevelled edge of a barely visible trench. They stake out lines of string. They carry buckets of earth carefully around the site and sift through them for abandoned trinkets, fragments of pottery and bone. Over the central pit they have rigged up a corrugated iron shed, which creates a huge sharp square of shade. And there he sits, the great professor, the famous specialist who knows how to interpret layers of pebbles and sand, with his bifocals balanced among his freckles, peering into a flat slab of crumbling earth. This sloping site is especially interesting. It has been inhabited for millennia. My husband knows how to read the layers of time embedded in the earth. In this place the foundations have been reworked and realigned by other hands, 5,000 years ago.