A maid announced dinner, which was, as usual, a faultless meal. None of them enjoyed it much. Kate was overwhelmed with horror at her own indiscretion. Selwyn, somewhat to his surprise, felt sorry for her.
‘This business on Sunday?’ barked Dr Challoner suddenly. ‘Why don’t they go to church? They’re all Christians, aren’t they?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kate. ‘But there’s no church here.’
‘Why don’t they go to Zagros?’
‘There aren’t enough boats to take everybody. And they like to be all together.’
‘What do their priests say to that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘For hundreds of years,’ put in Selwyn, ‘they’ve had to get on without priests and churches. It’s only since the Turks cleared out that there were services on Zagros. The church there was used as a mosque before.’
‘But this affair here? Is it Pagan or Christian?’
‘Christian,’ said Kate indignantly.
‘Does any priest officiate?’
‘No. But it’s all just the same as what they do on Zagros. Only there it’s at midnight, and we wait till sunrise.’
He decided that he had better see for himself, although he did not relish an expedition before dawn and had previously asserted that nothing would induce him to join it. These two were quite capable of concealing some startling deviation from Christian practice. Their behaviour over the loss of his Patti record was monstrous.
The mere thought of it almost made him choke, nor could he decide which, of three possibilities, was the most repulsive. A valuable piece of his property had been wantonly destroyed by half-wits, for no reason at all. It had been destroyed for an outrageous reason. It had not been destroyed, but filched from him by some sly scoundrel. If such were the case it had never gone over the bridge. He might at least ascertain that. He would explore the rocks in the ravine below the bridge. With luck he might find fragments of a record which undoubtedly had gone over, since he had seen it thrown. These fragments, pieced together, might give Kate and Selwyn the lie.
This resolve put him in a slightly better temper. Remembering that the rocks might be slippery he asked if there were any sand-shoes in the house, which he could borrow.
‘Freddie had some canvas shoes with rubber soles, that he used for climbing about in the ravine,’ said Kate innocently.
‘Those would do.’
‘Do you want to climb about in the ravine?’ demanded Selwyn. ‘You’d better not. Wild bees.’
He kicked Kate under the table and she agreed hastily that there might be some wild bees down there.
‘You’ve had trouble with them?’
‘Oh yes. They’re a nuisance. Quite a lot of them all over Keritha.’
‘Cyanide guns. Two or three puffs from them and nobody need worry about wild bees. Alfred had them here?’
‘N-no …’ faltered Kate.
‘I wonder he hadn’t, if wild bees are really troublesome. Garland Becker found them a menace in Asia Minor, I believe, until he got cyanide guns.’
‘They wouldn’t be very safe here,’ protested Kate. ‘There … there might be people, children, about, who got a puff as well as the bees.’
‘Oh? Of course the local population is always warned before they are used.’
Becker and his team, thought Dr Challoner, would make short work of all this nonsense, if only they could be summoned. Was there no way of explaining, or concealing, Alfred’s concubine?
‘How much furniture,’ he asked, ‘will that woman expect to be left for her own use? Not much use her staying here, is there, if I decide to sell all the furniture?’
‘Eugenia? Oh, she’s got her own furniture. In her rooms across the courtyard. She wouldn’t expect anything to be left for her here. But she’ll take good care of anything you do leave. If you can’t make up your mind about everything this time, you could always come back. She’d look after you and cook for you. You’d always have a housekeeper.’
A housekeeper?
That word suggested an asset rather than an embarrassment: an amenity to be let with the house. He had, indeed, supposed her to be some species of housekeeper himself until he got Alfred’s fantastic letter. The whole thing was really quite simple. Becker might come tomorrow, if it were not for that gravestone.
Her bother Alfred must be removed from Keritha and there was nobody to whom such a commission could be entrusted. Nor could anything be done until Potter and Mrs Benson were off the field. He must in future keep all his intentions strictly to himself.
The thought of Tipton in Athens suggested a possible line of action. Tipton, for the next ten days, would be at the Acropolis Hotel. He might know of some firm in Athens which would supply a cross, suitably inscribed, transport it to Keritha, set it up, and throw its predecessor into the sea. A pause in Athens, on the way home, and a consultation with Tipton might be well worth while, so long as he need not tell Tipton exactly what was wrong with the original stone. The fellow would dine out on it for years. No ridicule must be attached to the name of Challoner.
Could this difficulty be settled nothing need prevent an invitation to Becker at which all respectable academics would rejoice, since it meant one in the eye for Spaulding. Somebody else could also get one in the eye. No island could presume to thumb its nose at Becker. The prospect was so attractive that Kate had to ask a question three times before she got an answer. Rousing himself at last he said that he could not imagine what epitaph on a dead city Alfred had quoted.
‘Unless,’ he added, ‘it was a couple of lines of Berytus.’
‘Beirut,’ murmured Selwyn. ‘It had a nasty earthquake in the time of Justinian.’
‘But who wrote them?’ asked Kate.
‘They’ve been ascribed to Palladas. But that earthquake, it’s mentioned by Theophanes, is at least a hundred years too late for him. They had an earlier one, though, I believe. Somewhere round about 350.’
‘A.D.,’ supplemented Selwyn.
‘Earthquakes?’ repeated Kate in relieved tones, as though earthquakes were a minor calamity.
‘I don’t believe Palladas would have objected to an earthquake,’ said Selwyn. ‘He was a glum type. A born Has-Been.’
‘Then perhaps he meant something else.’
‘Oh no. Too glum to be subtle. What really got in his hair was the doctrine of the Resurrection. He thought everybody was getting soft. As for the Athanasian Creed!’
‘There is no evidence whatever,’ barked Challoner, ‘that he took the slightest interest in the Athanasian Creed.’
‘I should think not. The Christians were daft. The Neo-Platonists were daft. Anybody who made a fuss about anything was daft.’
Selwyn leant back in his chair and after a while he growled:
‘Once I had a vote, dentures, a neurosis and an electric razor. Now I, Potter, lie here having nothing at all! That’s what Palladas had to say about people who make a fuss.’
This foolish quip got the reception which it deserved. Neither of his companions was listening.
Kate was wondering whether she had ever, herself, assisted at the funeral of a city, in Freddie’s interpretation of the word. Then she remembered the Wardens’ Reunions in the late 1940s. For some time after the end of the war these had been held annually in a studio just off Edwardes Square. A miscellaneous rabble of neighbours – women and elderly men for the most part – housewives, chimney-sweeps, schoolteachers, grocers, judges – had met to drink sherry and to spend an hour in synthetic geniality. They had nothing in common save an astonished memory. Once, amidst terror and destruction, they had been so closely united that each had been able to draw upon the strength of all. Now they had fallen apart again into isolated entities. The old jokes were no longer funny, the mutual gratitude had been spent, the tolerant sympathy had flickered out. They wished one another well, but that which they had once been was no more. Had they, over the sherry glasses, silently mourned for it? She thought that they had. It had
been a seemlier funeral than some. Brian’s prophecy of giggling children at the waterfall crossed her mind and she did what Eugenia would have done: furtively she threw a pinch of salt over her shoulder.
Dr Challoner was brooding upon his private delenda est Carthago. Bees! Becker must be cautioned about that and so must the people who put up the cross. A few puffs of cyanide and little more would be heard of a minute citadel which had, throughout the ages, defied the Turks, the Genoese, the Venetians, the Franks, the Romans, which might, if ever the Minoans came so far, have thumbed its nose at Crete.
2
Upon the next day, and the next, no meals were served to the new Lord of Keritha. He had been warned that this would happen, but he had not wholly believed it. Kate, smuggling trays up to his room, could only assure him that it had always been so. For some thousands of years nobody had ever eaten anything upon these two days.
Keritha was mourning the dead. The wind sighed in the pine trees. Even the waterfall sang with a mournful cadence. All the maids had gone home to weep with their families. Eugenia, in her own quarters across the court, was lamenting for her children and their father, gone down into silence.
‘Why suddenly now?’ demanded Dr Challoner, when his final jug of cocoa was brought to him on Saturday night. ‘Those sons of hers! They’ve been dead for years. Is it in actual fact some kind of holiday?’
‘No,’ said Kate patiently, ‘it’s the time to mourn. The people here get over things, in a way, very quickly. They have to. You bury your dead and you go out to milk the goats. But then, in a way, the dead are remembered longer. Everybody cries for them once a year, and nobody cries alone.’
‘Where’s Potter? Is he crying?’
‘No. He’s helping me with the eggs. Several hundred of them. All to be boiled hard and dyed red. I must go back. There’s a lot to be done before tomorrow.’
She went downstairs, thinking that it might be better for Selwyn if he did cry. The kitchen was empty. He had finished the eggs and left them ready piled in large baskets. Now she could hear him out on the terrace, banging about and whistling. He was putting up the trestle tables for her, and adjusting the roasting spits further down the slope.
Although grateful for his help she wished that he would not persist in this role of a man to whom nothing in particular can happen. It was glaringly out of place on Keritha, at this season when everybody else was openly acknowledging a common burden of grief. That Dr Challoner should dissociate himself from this general impulse was unseemly but not surprising; by Keritha standards he was a gross barbarian. Selwyn was not. He must know very well what was going on yet dared not take part in it. For two days now he had been proclaiming himself as something less than a man – a creature immune from change, chance, and loss.
She wished too that the lambs, bleating in the kitchen court, did not sound so pathetic. That was one of the local customs which she found revolting. These poor little bleating creatures, who would tomorrow be killed and eaten, always wrung her heart.
This was the last time that she must hear them. Next week she would be gone, for she had no further excuse for staying. They had all said as much in their last batch of letters. She must come back to them. She was needed. Poor Douglas was getting nothing to eat save tinned baked beans, since a successor for Mrs McKintosh had been difficult to find. That fabled treasure had nearly burnt her gentlemen in their beds, setting fire to the flat when the worse for drink. She had now joined Pamela Shelmerdine in the limbo set up for women who might never be mentioned because they had let Douglas down.
To find a housekeeper willing to endure Ronnie’s manners was clearly a task for Kate, since Judith, Hazel and Bridie had all of them tried in vain. If Kate came home and saw to it nobody, not even Brian, would again dismiss her to exile. Brian must have been even more tactless than usual. He had misinterpreted their anxiety for her health. Two or three months, in a warm climate, had been all that they had in mind.
They were perfectly reasonable, and the worst embarrassments of that earlier return would not, at least, recur. She was no longer an angel. She might go back, although she could not imagine what she was to do with herself for the rest of her life.
Had the fatal break never occurred she might have continued to do as she had always done, dwindling imperceptibly through her seventh decade. She would have seen to it that Douglas lived in comfort, have visited a few old friends, served on a few committees, treated herself to an occasional play or concert, and lent a hand with her grandchildren. Each year she would have done a little less, have become a less essential person in the community, until she had respectably earned the right to figure as ‘Old Mrs Benson’.
Several years must now be filled before she could reach that haven. She was not old yet, and her health was robust, since the pneumonia had left no lasting weakness. How the gap was to be filled she knew not. Those commonplace activities, natural enough had they never been discontinued, could not be resumed quite spontaneously. She must make some kind of life for herself, inch her way into a seat by the hearth, form a few ties which needed no nourishment from the past, collect a little junk as evidence that she was a person. The prospect daunted her. She would rather have stayed on Keritha, although it was now a banquet hall deserted. A banquet in full swing, from which her own place had been removed, promised little.
When Edith died she had meant to stay with Freddie, whatever they said at home. They had stood together at the grave and when they turned away to walk home he had taken her arm affectionately. She pictured his old age, the slow loss of vigour and power, never dreaming that he would follow Edith so quickly. As if divining her thought he said suddenly:
‘Maybe not. We don’t know, Kate, my dear. Nobody knows what the Visitors have written on his face. I may go tomorrow. And you may tumble unexpectedly into something quite new and strenuous.’
‘You mean it’s wrong of me to stay?’ she asked. ‘I ought to go home and chase a job?’
‘Oh no. Stay! If They chalked up a job for you, it will come here chasing you.’
Now he was gone and the only job provided by Them, so far as she could see, was to engage a cook-housekeeper.
All the plates had to be piled in readiness on the kitchen table. She had done this last year and then gone to Eugenia’s room to ask if seventy would be enough. Freddie and Edith were sitting there, both in tears. This year poor Eugenia would be weeping all alone. Kate left the plates and hurried across the kitchen court, past the bleating lambs, to where a light burned in a window and Eugenia sat, small and withered, amidst lace curtains and solid Victorian furniture. The ikon of the Saviour lay on a bier, surrounded by candles and covered with a muslin cloth on which were strewn fresh rose leaves. With tears pouring down her face Eugenia handed a faded photograph to Kate. The little dead daughter could not have been a pretty child. She had Freddie’s thin sharp features. Clad in many frills, posed in a photographer’s landscape, she stood as though already lost amongst the shades.
‘Bebbies,’ moaned Eugenia.
There was no self pity in her grief. She wept for a motherless child, rather than for a childless mother.
When Stephanie died, remembered Kate, Judith cried and said: Poor Aunt Stephanie! And I said: No! Poor us, to be living without her. And she said: But it’s much worse to be dead than to be alive. She was only ten, but she was right. Ah, but why can’t Selwyn mourn as they do here? If he could think of that poor girl, torn away from her children, crying for them, then … oh, then he would be so sorry for her, he would exert himself. He’d never leave them in that … he’d make a home for them again, in Stockholm where his friends are …
‘Bebbies,’ repeated Eugenia, taking another picture, a snapshot of two boys playing with a puppy. ‘Ai! Ai!’
Ai! Ai! Oh dear! The parsley is all withered in the garden. Suddenly Kate recalled Freddie’s voice saying that, as though he had just walked into the room. It returned to her with a clarity only possible, perhaps, in this haven where the dea
d were never sentimentalized. She saw Freddie again, pale, quiet, and saw the strange, sharp firmness of his smile. She began to cry too, with her head on Eugenia’s shoulder.
‘Ah, Freddie! Freddie!’
‘He was a man,’ wailed Eugenia. ‘A great rich man. He lived in this fine house and he ate what he pleased and he did what he pleased. He took great pleasure in his life. In the morning he would come downstairs in his beautiful dressing gown, and call for this and for that, as the fancy took him, and I would bring it to him very quickly. And now … now … he lies there and never knows if it’s night or morning.’
‘Heaven?’ sobbed Kate.
‘The soul goes to Heaven. But who wants to be nothing but a soul? No pleasure in it. A thin life, that, for a man. Ai! Ai! Have they brought down the cheese for tomorrow?’
‘I don’t think they have.’
‘The lazy scamps. They’ve forgotten it again.’
‘I’ll go and see.’
Kate went up to her room for a coat and a torch. Midnight was gone, but they would be awake up at the home farm. Nobody on the island slept that night.
She felt her way up the track, listening to the sigh of the wind in the trees. It was clear and warm. The moon, which would be full tomorrow, had already vanished behind the mountain, but the sky was full of its light and there was a sheen of moonshine on the sea.
At the farm there were lights and voices and the same universal ceaseless wailing. As she drew nearer a chant arose; it was one of those laments which Freddie had collected and translated for her. She waited on the threshold listening. A woman sang a verse or two so sadly that it seemed indecent to break in with demands for cheese. But then the voice broke off to inquire negligently about a button which was to be sewn onto somebody’s coat.
The Forgotten Smile Page 21