Under a Croatian Sun Read Online Free PDF

distant island with nowhere for clothes, you’ve got another think coming.’
    I’d pictured our life here in terms of sandals and shorts, but I should have known my wife better.
    Tonko didn’t speak English, but Ivana’s look crossed language barriers and he clearly got the drift of it.
    Once back on the street, Tonko enthused about the second house. He was sure Ivana would like it. Spacious, modernised and well maintained, he assured her. But it was dismal. The communist vogue for concrete had turned what might once have been a charming house into something that had all the appeal of a dental clinic. We shook our heads and, feeling like Goldilocks running out of options, we followed Tonko in silence. Emerging into the square at the end of the village, he stopped and gestured to a derelict building on the water, almost falling into the sea. We stopped in our tracks. There in front of us stood the most magnificent tumbledown affair I had ever seen. Ramshackle and unkempt, it stretched from the water to the next street; an entire block of magnificently dilapidated sixteenth-century Venetian architecture. The shutters hung lopsided on their hinges, the roof sagged and parts of the balconies had fallen off, but, as I looked up at the crumbling façade with the afternoon sunlight bouncing off the weathered stone, I wanted it to be mine.
    We went through the derelict courtyard and found a complete mess inside. The plumbing hadn’t been touched since the thirties, there was one bathroom for the six bedrooms and in the kitchen was a single dribbling tap, a cracked lino floor and someterrifying electric cables with wire sticking out of the crumbling cord casing. The place needed complete renovation – roof, floors, plumbing, electrics – and it certainly needed a few more bathrooms – but there was an air of magic about it that made all other considerations immaterial.
    It was much bigger than we needed, but, according to Tonko, all this could be ours for the cost of a garage in Fulham. I totted up the rough cost of the works and it came to as much again, but I’d already made my decision. This was the one for us.
    Tonko went off to get the papers and left us on the terrace. It was that magical hour somewhere between teatime and drink time when nature slips into torpor. The late-afternoon sun was streaming down, the bees were humming in the mimosa and the sweet, heavy scent of jasmine floated up from the courtyard. Ivana put her arm around me.
    ‘Well, here you are at last with your own tumbledown house on a distant island. Isn’t this what you always dreamed of?’
    ‘But there’s a hell of a lot of work to do, and we can’t possibly afford to do it all in one go. We’ll have to do it up in stages, and you know what that means. Living with the builders; like after we got married. Remember?’
    There was a slight hesitation as she recalled the first months of newly wedded bliss that we’d shared with half a dozen Irish builders and a lot of rubble.
    I willed her to say yes.
    ‘Well, I suppose we’ll have to do it again.’
    ‘Are you sure? We can still tell Tonko we’ve changed our minds…’
    I was flashed a heart-stopping smile. ‘I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to be very happy here. Particularly you.’
    I hugged her.
    Standing there, drenched in the late sunshine and listeningto Ivana enthusing about what we’d do to the house, my whole being drooped with happiness like one of the mimosa branches in the courtyard weighed down by the weight of its soft pink flowers.

CHAPTER 5
TRYING TO FIT IN
    O nce we were back in London, I wondered if this urge of mine to go and live on a distant island was something deep-seated in me or only just part of the new-found travel preoccupation that now affects the middle classes. It used to be the young and intrepid who went off to far-distant places, but it seemed to have become the prerogative of the middle-aged. Our local Waterstones was full of those ‘A Hundred