by Mary Stewart
‘Of course! I shall be pleased!’
She looked more than pleased, she looked so delighted that I smiled to myself, presuming cynically that it was probably only pleasure at having an outing in the middle of a working morning. As it happened, I was wrong. Coming so recently from the grey depressions of London and the backstage bad tempers of failure, I wasn’t able as yet to grasp the Greek’s simple delight in doing anyone a service.
She began to pile the breakfast dishes on her tray with clattering vigour. ‘I shall not be long. A minute, only a minute …’
‘And that means half an hour,’ said my sister placidly, as the girl bustled out. ‘Anyway, what’s the hurry? You’ve all the time in the world.’
‘So I have,’ I said, in deep contentment.
The way to the beach was a shady path quilted with pine needles. It twisted through the trees, to lead out suddenly into a small clearing where a stream, trickling down to the sea, was trapped in a sunny pool under a bank of honeysuckle.
Here the path forked, one track going uphill, deeper into the woods, the other turning down steeply through pines and golden oaks towards the sea.
Miranda paused and pointed downhill. ‘That is the way you go. The other is to the Castello, and it is private. Nobody goes that way, it is only to the house, you understand.’
‘Whereabouts is the other villa, Mr Manning’s?’
‘On the other side of the bay, at the top of the cliff. You cannot see it from the beach because the trees are in the way, but there is a path going like this’ – she sketched a steep zigzag – ‘from the boat-house up the cliff. My brother works there, my brother Spiro. It is a fine house, very beautiful, like the Signora’s, though of course not so wonderful as the Castello. That is like a palace.’
‘So I believe. Does your father work on the estate, too?’
The query was no more than idle; I had completely forgotten Phyllida’s nonsense, and hadn’t believed it anyway, but to my intense embarrassment the girl hesitated, and I wondered for one horrified second if Phyllida had been right. I did not know, then, that the Greek takes the most intensely personal questions serenely for granted, just as he asks them himself, and I had begun to stammer something, but Miranda was already answering:
‘Many years ago my father left us. He went over there.’
‘Over there’ was at the moment a wall of trees laced with shrubs of myrtle, but I knew what lay beyond them; the grim, shut land of Communist Albania.
‘You mean as a prisoner?’ I asked, horrified.
She shook her head. ‘No. He was a Communist. We lived then in Argyrathes, in the south of Corfu, and in that part of the island there are many such.’ She hesitated. ‘I do not know why this is. It is different in the north, where my mother comes from.’ She spoke as if the island were four hundred miles long instead of forty, but I believed her. Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.
‘You’ve never heard from him?’
‘Never. In the old days my mother still hoped, but now, of course, the frontiers are shut to all, and no one can pass in or out. If he is still alive, he must stay there. But we do not know this either.’
‘D’you mean that no one can travel to Albania?’
‘No one.’ The black eyes suddenly glittered to life, as if something had sparked behind their placid orbs. ‘Except those who break the law.’
‘Not a law I’d care to break myself.’ Those alien snows had looked high and cold and cruel. I said awkwardly: ‘I’m sorry, Miranda. It must be an unhappy business for your mother.’
She shrugged. ‘It is a long time ago. Fourteen years. I do not even know if I remember him. And we have Spiro to look after us.’ The sparkle again. ‘He works for Mr Manning, I told you this – with the boat, and with the car, a wonderful car, very expensive – and also with the photographs that Mr Manning is taking for a book. He has said that when the book is finished – a real book that is sold in the shops – he will put Spiro’s name in it, in print. Imagine! Oh, there is nothing that Spiro cannot do! He is my twin, you understand.’
‘Is he like you?’
She looked surprised. ‘Like me? Why, no, he is a man, and have I not just told you that he is clever? Me, I am not clever, but then I am a woman, and there is no need. With men it is different. Yes?’
‘So the men say.’ I laughed. ‘Well, thanks very much for showing me the way. Will you tell my sister that I’ll be back in good time for lunch?’
I turned down the steep path under the pines. As I reached the first bend something made me glance back towards the clearing.
Miranda had gone. But I thought I saw a whisk of faded scarlet, not from the direction of the Villa Forli, but higher up in the woods, on the forbidden path to the Castello.
2
Sir, I am vex’d.
IV. 1.
THE bay was small and sheltered, a sickle of pure white sand holding back the aquamarine sea, and held in its turn by the towering backdrop of cliff and pine and golden-green trees. My path led me steeply down past a knot of young oaks, straight on to the sand. I changed quickly in a sheltered corner, and walked out into the white blaze of the sun.
The bay was deserted and very quiet. To either side of it the wooded promontories thrust out into the calm, glittering water. Beyond them the sea deepened through peacock shades to a rich, dark blue, where the mountains of Epirus floated in the clear distance, less substantial than a bank of mist. The far snows of Albania seemed to drift like cloud.
After the heat of the sand, the water felt cool and silky. I let myself down into the milky calm, and began to swim idly along parallel to the shore, towards the southern arm of the bay. There was the faintest breeze blowing off the land, its heady mixture of orange-blossom and pine, sweet and sharp, coming in warm puffs through the salt smell of the sea. Soon I was nearing the promontory, where white rocks came down to the water, and a grove of pines hung out, shadowing a deep, green pool. I stayed in the sun, turning lazily on my back to float, eyes shut against the brilliance of the sky.
The pines breathed and whispered; the tranquil water made no sound at all …
A ripple rocked me, nearly turning me over. As I floundered, trying to right myself, another came, a wash like that of a small boat passing, rolling me in its wake. But I had heard neither oars nor engine; could hear nothing now except the slap of the exhausted ripples against the rock.
Treading water, I looked around me, puzzled and a little alarmed. Nothing. The sea shimmered, empty and calm, to the turquoise and blue of its horizon. I felt downwards with my feet, to find that I had drifted a little further out from shore, and could barely touch bottom with the tips of my toes. I turned back towards the shallows.
This time the wash lifted me clear off my feet, and as I plunged clumsily forward another followed it, tumbling me over, so that I struggled helplessly for a minute, swallowing water, before striking out, thoroughly alarmed now, for shore.
Beside me, suddenly, the water swirled and hissed. Something touched me – a cold, momentary graze along the thigh – as a body drove past me under water …
I gave a gasp of sheer fright, and the only reason I didn’t scream was because I gasped myself full of water, and went under. Fighting back, terrified, to the surface, I shook the salt out of my eyes, and looked wildly round – to see the bay as empty as before, but with its surface marked now by the arrowing ripples of whatever sea-creature had brushed by me. The arrow’s point was moving fast away, its wake as clear as a vapour-trail across the flat water of the bay. It tore on its way, straight for the open sea … then curved in a long arc, heading back …
I didn’t wait to see what it was. My ignorant mind, panic-stricken, screamed ‘Sharks!’ and I struck out madly for the rocks of the promontory.
It was coming fast. Thirty yards off, the surface of the water bulged, swelled, and broke to the curved thrust of a huge, silver-black back. The wa
ter parted, and poured off its sides like liquid glass. There was a gasping puff of breath; I caught the glimpse of a dark bright eye, and a dorsal fin cusped like a crescent moon, then the creature submerged again, its wash lifting me a couple of yards forward towards my rock. I found a handhold, clung, and scrambled out, gasping, and thoroughly scared.
It surely wasn’t a shark. Hundreds of adventure stories had told me that one knew a shark by the great triangular fin, and I had seen pictures of the terrible jaws and tiny, brutal eye. This creature had breathed air, and the eye had been big and dark, like a dog’s – like a seal’s, perhaps? But there were no seals in these warm waters, and besides, seals didn’t have dorsal fins. A porpoise, then? Too big …
Then I had the answer, and with it a rush of relief and delight. This was the darling of the Aegean, ‘the lad who lives before the wind’, Apollo’s beloved, ‘desire of the sea’, the dolphin … the lovely names went rippling by with him, as I drew himself up on to the warm rock in the shade of the pines, clasped my knees, and settled down to watch.
Here he came again, in a great curve, smooth and glistening, dark-backed and light-bellied, and as graceful as a racing yacht. This time he came right out, to lie on the surface watching me.
He was large, as dolphins go, something over eight feet long. He lay rocking gently, with the powerful shoulders waiting curved for the plunge below, and the tail – crescent-shaped, and quite unlike a fish’s upright rudder – hugging the water flatly, holding the big body level. The dark-ringed eye watched me steadily, with what I could have sworn was a friendly and interested light. The smooth muzzle was curved into the perpetual dolphin-smile.
Excitement and pleasure made me light-headed. ‘Oh, you darling!’ I said foolishly, and put out a hand, rather as one puts it out to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
The dolphin, naturally, ignored it, but lay there placidly smiling, rocking a little closer, and watching me, entirely unafraid.
So they were true, those stories … I knew of the legends, of course – ancient literature was studded with stories of dolphins who had befriended man; and while one couldn’t quite accept all the miraculous dolphins of legend, there were also many more recent tales, sworn to with every kind of modern proof. There was the dolphin called Pelorus Jack, fifty years ago in New Zealand, who saw the ships through Cook Straight for twenty years; the Opononi dolphin of the fifties, who entertained the holiday-makers in the bay; the one more recently in Italy, who played with the children near the shore, attracting such large crowds that eventually a little group of business-men from a nearby resort, whose custom was being drawn away, lay in wait for the dolphin, and shot her dead as she came in to play. These, and others, gave the old legends rather more than the benefit of the doubt.
And here, indeed, was the living proof. Here was I, Lucy Waring, being asked into the water for a game. The dolphin couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d been carrying a placard on that lovely moon’s-horn fin of his. He rocked himself, watching me, then half-turned, rolled, and came up again, nearer still …
A stray breeze moved the pines, and I heard a bee go past my cheek, travelling like a bullet. The dolphin arched suddenly away in a deep dive. The sea sucked, swirled, and settled, rocking, back to emptiness.
So that was that. With a disappointment so sharp that it felt like a bereavement, I turned my head to watch for him moving out to sea, when suddenly, not far from my rock, the sea burst apart as if it had been shelled, and the dolphin shot upwards on a steep slant that took him out of the water in a yard-high leap, and down again with a smack of the tail as loud as a cannon-shot. He tore by like a torpedo, to fetch up all standing twenty yards out from my rock, and fix me once again with that bright, humorous eye.
It was an enchanting piece of show-off, and it did the trick. ‘All right,’ I said softly, ‘I’ll come in. But if you knock me over again, I’ll drown you, my lad, see if I don’t!’
I lowered my legs into the water, ready to slide down off the rock. Another bee shot past above me, seawards, with a curious, high humming. Something – some small fish, I supposed – splashed a white jet of water just beyond the dolphin. Even as I wondered, vaguely, what it was, the humming came again, nearer … and then another white spurt of water, and a curious thin, curving whine, like singing wire.
I understood then. I’d heard that sound before. These were neither bees nor fish. They were bullets, presumably from a silenced rifle, and one of them had ricocheted off the surface of the sea. Someone was shooting at the dolphin from the woods above the bay.
That I was in some danger from the ricochets myself didn’t at first enter my head. I was merely furious, and concerned to do something quickly. There lay the dolphin, smiling at me on the water, while some murderous ‘sportsman’ was no doubt taking aim yet again …
Presumably he hadn’t yet seen me in the shadow of the pines. I shouted at the top of my voice: ‘Stop that shooting! Stop it at once!’ and thrust myself forward into the water.
Nobody, surely, would fire at the beast when there was the chance of hitting me? I plunged straight out into the sunlight, clumsily breasting the water, hoping that my rough approach would scare the dolphin away from the danger.
It did. He allowed me to come within a few feet, but as I lunged further, with a hand out as if to touch him, he rolled gently away from me, submerged, and vanished.
I stood breast-deep, watching the sea. Nothing. It stretched silent and empty towards the tranquil, floating hills of the mainland. The ripples ran back to the shore, and flattened, whispering. The dolphin had gone. And the magic had gone with him. This was only a small – and lonely – bathing-place, above which waited an unpleasant and frustrated character with a gun.
I turned to look up at the enclosing cliffs.
The first thing I saw, high up above the bay’s centre, was what must be the upper storeys of the Castello dei Fiori, rearing their incongruously embattled turrets against a background of holm-oak and cedar and Mediterranean cypress. The house was set well back, so that I could not see the ground-floor windows, but a wide balcony, or terrace, edged with a stone balustrade, jutted forward right to the cliff’s edge over the bay. From the beach directly below nothing of this would be visible through the tangle of flowering shrubs that curtained the steep, broken cliff, but from where I stood I could see the full length of the balustrade with its moss-grown statues at the corners, a stone jar or two full of flowers showing bright against the dark background of cypress, and, a little way back from the balustrade, a table and chairs set in the shadow of a stone-pine.
And a man standing, half invisible in the shade of the pine, watching me.
A moment’s study convinced me that it could not be Sir Julian Gale. This man was too dark, and even from this distance looked quite unfamiliar – too casual in his bearing, perhaps, and certainly too young. The gardener, probably; the one who threw the trespassers over the cliff. Well, if Sir Julian’s gardener had the habit of amusing himself with a bit of shooting-practice, it was high time he was stopped.
I was out of the water before even the dolphin could have dived twice, had snatched up shoes and wrap, and was making for a dilapidated flight of steps near the cliff which, I assumed, led up to the terrace.
From above I heard a shout, and looked up. He had come forward to the balustrade, and was leaning over. I could barely see him through the thick screen of hibiscus and bramble, but he didn’t look like a Greek, and as I paused, he shouted in English: ‘That way, please!’ and his arm went out in a gesture towards the southern end of the bay.
I ignored it. Whoever he was – some guest of Julian Gale’s, presumably – I was going to have this out with him here and now, while I was hot with temper; not wait until I had to meet him at some polite bun-fight of Phyllida’s … ‘But you really mustn’t shoot at dolphins, Mr. Whosit, they do no harm …’ The same old polite spiel, gone through a thousand times with stupid, trigger-happy men who shot or trapped badgers, otters, ke
strels – harmless creatures, killed because some man wanted a walk out with his dog on a fine day. No, this time I was white-hot, and brave with it, and I was going to say my piece.
I went up those steps like a rocket leaving the launching-pad.
They were steep and crooked, and wound up through the thickest of the wood. They skirted the roots of the cliff, flicked up and round thickets of myrtle and summer jasmine, and emerged into a sloping glade full of dappled sunlight.
He was there, looking annoyed, having apparently come down from the terrace to intercept me. I only realised, when I stopped to face him, how very much at a disadvantage I was. He had come down some fifty feet; I had hurtled up a hundred or so. He presumably had a right to be where he was; I had not. He was also minding his own business, which was emphatically none of mine. Moreover, he was fully dressed, and I was in swimming costume, with a wet wrap flying loose round me. I clutched it to me, and fought for breath, feeling angrier than ever, but now this didn’t help at all, as I couldn’t get a word out.
He said, not aggressively but not politely: ‘This is private ground, you know. Perhaps you’d be good enough to leave by the way you came? This only takes you up to the terrace, and then more or less through the house.’
I got enough breath to speak, and wasted neither time nor words. ‘Why were you shooting at that dolphin?’
He looked as blank as if I had suddenly slapped his face. ‘Why was I what?’
‘That was you just now, wasn’t it, shooting at the dolphin down in the bay?’
‘My dear g—’ He checked himself, and said, like someone dealing with a lunatic: ‘Just what are you talking about?’
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know! It must have been you! If you’re such death on trespassers, who else would be there?’ I was panting hard, and my hands were shaking as I clutched the wrap to me clumsily. ‘Someone took a couple of pot-shots at it, just a few minutes ago. I was down there, and I saw you on the terrace.’
‘I certainly saw a dolphin there. I didn’t see you, until you shouted and came jumping out from under the trees. But you must be mistaken. There was no shooting. I’d have been bound to hear it if there was.’