MORNING SERIAL
“I have never really been one for cooking,” he said and laughed. “They get everything from books, you know? Which I find encouragingly old-fashioned.”
“They have been homeschooled?” I said.
“Home is the only school worth a spit,” Evgeny said. “Did you learn to paint doing sums on a wet afternoon?”
I thought about explaining how mathematics had played an important part of my early development, but Evgeny was enjoying his audience, and I was allowing him to draw that energy from my poised silence.
“England is a lot like Russia,” he went on. “You really have to pull away to make a mark. Otherwise it’s all mapped out for you, no? You’re born, you serve, you die.”
“I didn’t pay enough attention at school,” I said. There was a pause. “Much to the anger of my parents.”
Evgeny looked at me side-on with a straight mouth, my reflection in his aviators bulbous, like peering into the back of a spoon.
Steaks were the order of the evening, and as they were served up with potato salad and grilled Halloumi, Evgeny pointed out just how difficult it was to get beef on the island. “Illie likes to impress us with his exotic tastes,” he said. “Exotic for Cyprus.”
“Are you staying long?” I said at one point, tucking into the food, which Dina had cooked to perfection.
The question seemed to change the mood a little, and all three of them looked at me and then each other and it seemed as though they each might have had different answers.
“It’s not really like that,” Evgeny said.
“Illie said you were visiting from Russia on holiday,” I said.
“We are here indefinitely,” said Darya.
“Eat your food,” Evgeny said to her.
“You do excellent food,” I said to Dina to break a perceptibly awkward moment. “Your father doesn’t mind you making American dishes?” I laughed as I said it, but my company showed no response.