Strangers in Company

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  The bus had stopped. Mike raised a hand to still the usual ensuing hubbub. “Lunch will be ready for you at once, ladies and gentlemen, and then the afternoon is yours. For those of you who plan to come to Aegina tomorrow, I recommend a taxi ride up to the Acropolis. You must not miss the greatest Greek sight of all.”

  “Badly organised,” muttered Mrs. Spencer in front, reminding Marian painfully of Mrs. Hilton. “We should have had longer in Athens.”

  But Mike had something more to say. “I would be glad, ladies and gentlemen, if you would tell me as you leave the bus, what your plans are for tomorrow. It is a question of arranging transport on Aegina.”

  Marian and Stella exchanged glances. They had not bargained for this. “I’ll cope.” Marian’s whisper was covered by the usual confused babble as people reached their accumulated loot down from the crowded luggage racks. A surprising number of people seemed to have got to Arachova the day before and now had bulky parcels of carpets added to the inevitable impedimenta of travel.

  Taking their time, Marian and Stella alighted just behind Mrs. Spencer and the professor. “I’m for Aegina, Mike,” said Edvardson.

  “Me, too,” said Mrs. Spencer. “Even if it does mean getting up at seven.”

  “It will be worth it,” Mike told her. “And you two, Mrs. Frenche?”

  “Oh, dear,” Marian hedged. “I do apologise, Mike; I hadn’t realised we’d have to decide so soon. It all depends, doesn’t it, on how much one manages to see this afternoon? Would it be terribly tiresome if we let you know this evening? Just the two of us after all can’t make that much difference?” She turned to Stella. “What do you think, dear?”

  Stella was looking mulish, as she so easily could. “I’d like to go to Aegina.”

  “Oh, well,” Marian dithered, looked back at the impatient queue behind her and smiled apologetically up at Mike. “I expect we’ll end up deciding to go.”

  “Very well, Mrs. Frenche.” Mike, who had been entering numbers in a little notebook, made an ostentatious point of writing nothing. He was, Marian thought, very angry. Which was, surely, a good sign? Must it not mean that nothing was planned for today? But then, how could she be sure that even Mike knew everything?

  She was letting herself get jumpy, and that would be fatal. She forced a cheerful smile for the professor, who had paused to wait for them. “Silly not to be able to make up one’s mind, isn’t it?” She was still in part as a fluttering middle-aged fool.

  “Not a bit of it,” he said gallantly and rather loud. “It is a difficult choice. But look, here’s a solution for you, if you don’t mind skipping lunch.”

  “What?”

  “There.” He pointed to a tourist bus that had pulled in behind theirs. “That looks like an afternoon tour to me. Of course in theory you book in advance, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be crowded. How about it?”

  “Are you going?” Marian and Stella were exchanging quick, questioning glances.

  “I guess I will. Specially if you two will come along. And you?” He turned politely to Mrs. Spencer, who had hesitated just ahead on the steps of the hotel.

  “It’s an idea, I must say. But Mike?”

  “I’ll fix him. He can have our luggage sent up. The hotel won’t break their hearts if we don’t lunch. And there’s bound to be time to get something along the way somewhere”

  “Do let’s.” Stella had made up her mind, and, really, Marian thought, it was an admirable idea. Where could they be safer than among another, innocent tourist crowd?

  Unless, of course, the professor was one of the enemy. He had left them, now, to explain their plan to Mike, and she could not help wondering if the same kind of unspoken exchange was going on between the two of them as she and Stella so constantly practised.

  “A splendid idea.” Mrs. Spencer had made up her mind. “I was feeling really sad at missing so much of Athens. I’ll just make sure that Mike understands I’m going along.”

  It was five minutes later, and they were established in the two usual pairs, but this time with the professor and Mrs. Spencer behind, as they had originally been in their own bus. It meant, Marian reminded herself, that everything she and Stella said could be overheard by the other two, and she hoped that Stella had realised this. No chance of urging that they stay as closely as possible to the rest of the party, but Stella, who had been so quick in that short conversation with Mike, would undoubtedly have thought of this, too. She was, Marian thought, a redoubtable ally. Strange to feel so little anger with her for having involved them in this danger in the first place. But then, her danger was at least as great as Marian’s own. She was increasingly sure that Andreas had paid some horrible penalty for having risked the success of the gang’s plan. What would happen to Stella?

  And when she had stopped thinking of their opponents as an “organisation,” with all the comparative respectability that the name implied, and started recognising them, frankly, as a gang? And had Stella understood this, she wondered? There was so much they had not had time to say to each other.

  The bus had been crawling this way and that through the heavy Athens traffic, picking up passengers here and there from different hotels. “It’s the one-way system,” Marian heard the professor explaining to Mrs. Spencer. “But here we are in Constitution Square. Passengers from the Hotel Grande Bretagne. How elegant.” The bus had stopped outside the expensive-looking frontage and Marian turned from craning backwards to look at the big public building at the top of the square. Stella had squeezed her hand convulsively. Two men were coming out of the hotel to join the bus. Two Greeks. The two Greeks.

  “Aren’t those the two from Mistra?” The professor, too, had recognised them as they got on the bus and took two empty seats up at the front.

  “Yes,” said Stella. “I suppose the Athenian is showing his country cousin round.” Her hand, still on Marian’s, gave it a warning squeeze.

  “It seems odd to choose an English-speaking bus,” objected Mrs. Spencer.

  Apparently, the Grande Bretagne was the last stop. The guide picked up his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this GRAT tour of Athens. We are now, as you probably know, in Syntagma, or Constitution Square, so called because of the Parliament Buildings, which were once the royal palace. I beg your pardon—” He stopped to listen to an impassioned outpouring, in Greek, from one of the two men who had just got on. He spoke at last, courteously but firmly, in Greek, then, as the man sat down again, grumbling to himself, changed back to his fluent English. “I apologise, ladies and gentlemen. These two gentlemen have found themselves on the wrong bus, but since they will have missed the right one by now, they will stay with us, and you will, I am sure, bear with me if I—how do you say it?—fill them in from time to time, in Greek.” While this was going on, the bus had got clean out of Constitution Square with its problems of democracy and of royalty, and Marian thought the guide might well be grateful for an interruption that had spared him what must be a difficult bit of his speech these days when Parliament was closed and the king in exile.

  He was silent until the bus paused across the road from a handsome triumphal arch. “Hadrian’s Arch, ladies and gentlemen, built by one of the Romans who loved Greece. And behind it, the Temple of Zeus, which you should visit if you have the time, but as you can see, our traffic problems, which are like everyone else’s, do not make it easy for buses to stop here. We are going on to the stadium and the royal palace.”

  “This is the way we came in,” said Stella.

  “Yes.” Both of them must be thinking of poor Mrs. Hilton, her grumbles and her espadrilles.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That afternoon’s tour was to remain in Marian’s mind merely as a confused jumble of impressions. The kilted Evzones stamping their sabots for the tourists outside the empty royal palace with its dismal, boarded windows … the huge modern stadium … even the Acropolis itself was merely the backdrop to terror. By tacit consent, she and Stella stayed as clos
ely as possible with the professor and Mrs. Spencer and with the rest of the party. But somehow, the two Greeks were always nearby. Did they speak English? Marian found she could not be sure but anyway was careful to talk the merest tourist chatter to Stella and the others.

  There was one moment of sudden crisis on the Acropolis, when the four of them had paused to look at the view from the far end, above the museum. She and Stella were trying to decide which was the Pnyx Hill, where the Greeks had held their public meetings, and did not notice that the professor and Mrs. Spencer had moved away to join the rest of the party.

  “We must ask Mike.” Marian looked up, saw they were alone, and saw the two Greeks approaching. The parapet was low, the drop beyond vertiginous. She, the double, was safe, but Stella? The Greeks were coming quietly towards them, one from each side of the little alcove where they were standing, closing them in. She raised her voice. “Oh, Professor, could you come here a minute?”

  For a moment she was horribly afraid that, deep in conversation with Mrs. Spencer, he had not heard. The next, he was coming back to them with his surprisingly fast, loping stride. One of the Greeks made way for him with a smile. It had undoubtedly all been imagination. “Which is the Pnyx?” she asked, and saw that Stella was cloth-white.

  After that, the tour changed from phantasmagoria to nightmare. Waiting for the funicular railway up to the viewpoint on Lykabetos, Marian and Stella stayed well back from the gates. At the top, they hardly looked at the view. Stella provided the excuse. “I’m starving,” she announced in a loud voice. “I thought I was going to faint back there on the Acropolis.”

  The professor and Mrs. Spencer, equally lunchless, joined them at a marble-topped table, for the most expensive sawdust sandwiches Marian had ever eaten. The ouzo was expensive, too, but it was worth it. “Tour prices,” commented the professor briefly.

  “Profiteering,” said Mrs. Spencer.

  “Profitouring,” said Stella, and got a puzzled, inimical look from Mrs. Spencer, who, presumably, did not approve of puns.

  It was a relief to find that the next section of the tour was simply a ride through modern Athens. “They will do it,” said the professor. “I’ve had the same thing in Yugoslavia. They’re so proud of their modern buildings they want you to see them.”

  “Hilton and all,” said Stella.

  “Right.”

  But it meant a blessed relaxation of tension as they listened to the guide expatiating on the thriving state of Athens and saw, indeed, the proof of this in untidy concrete buildings going up everywhere. “You do have to give it to the colonels,” said the professor, as they passed a development of small houses, each with its tiny patch of garden. “They’re building houses and roads, hand over fist.”

  “Soon there won’t be a private place in Greece,” said Stella.

  “The grave’s a fine and private place”—the quotation came, unbidden, into Marian’s mind. If the professor had not been so quick, up on the Acropolis, would Stella have found her private place by now? At least, blessed thought, this must mean that her suspicions of the professor were entirely unfounded. She had reached the point of starting at shadows and must control herself.

  The bus had plunged back into the urban thicket of central Athens and now slowed and stopped. Up front, the guide was announcing that they were to see two Byzantine churches.

  “I don’t know,” Marian said doubtfully. “What do you think, Stella? I’m tired.” Much safer, surely, in the bus.

  Unless everyone got out, which they showed signs of doing. The professor turned round. “Do come, Mrs. Frenche, the big one’s nothing in particular, but I’d like you to see the other.”

  Everyone else was moving. Marian got up. “Oh, well, in that case …” Getting off the bus, she saw the two Greeks going off in the opposite direction. Could they be leaving the tour, or were they perhaps looking for a public telephone? Of course, it might seem odd for them to visit their own churches as tourists.

  At all events, it was pleasant to be free of them, at least for a little while, and the professor had been right about the tiny church, where black-garbed old women stopped to kiss the hands of ikons, dark with centuries of just such treatment.

  “It’s not right to traipse through it like this.” Marian emerged into late-afternoon sunshine.

  “I know,” the professor agreed, “but they’ve got to live.” She had seen him slip something into the church’s collection box. “And speaking of living, are you as hungry as I am, you two? How about playing hookey and slipping off to a restaurant I know in the Plaka? It’s only a step from here, and I bet now they’re going to start the old routine of dumping us back at hotels. And we’ll be the last, or nearly.”

  Danger? Safety? Marian and Stella exchanged glances. Mrs. Spencer had got left behind, momentarily, embroiled with a postcard seller. A whole evening free of fear. If one trusted the professor.

  “Do let’s,” said Stella.

  “Yes,” said Marian.

  “Down here.” The professor led the way down an alley. Old Athens swallowed them, crowded and alive and smelling of unknown groceries.

  “But won’t they wait for us?” Marian paused outside a shop that actually sold real espadrilles, thought for a moment of Mrs. Hilton, and shivered.

  “Not for long,” said the professor comfortably. “They know we’re not far from home. People are always doing it. And I’d like you to have one real Greek meal before we go.” He looked at his watch. “It’s a bit early yet, so we’ll go to a café first, shall we?”

  “Do let’s.” Stella had entered into the spirit of this escape.

  “Keep close to me,” the professor warned, as he guided them through a network of small, incredibly crowded streets. “It might not be just the place for ladies alone.” He steered them round a corner past a shop full of extraordinary metal implements.

  Ladies alone. Marian almost laughed. If that was only the worst of their troubles. “I thought a woman was supposed to be able to walk right through Athens with a gold bar on her head.”

  “A woman, perhaps,” he said. “A foreign lady?” He left it doubtful. “Ah, here it is.” They were in an alley that sloped slightly upwards, and he turned through a wrought-iron gate into a little courtyard, with a vine-covered trellis and small tables. It was half empty at this early hour, the proprietor lounging, hands in pockets, against the trunk of the vine. At sight of Edvardson, his face lit into a smile of extraordinary sweetness.

  “Thor!” He came forward with both hands outstretched, took Edvardson in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks. A flood of Greek followed, and Marian was amazed and appalled to hear the professor answer in kind.

  “But you don’t speak Greek!” They were being settled at the best table. Should she and Stella run for it? Were all her suspicions correct after all?

  “Come now, Mrs. F.,” said the professor comfortably, pulling out Stella’s chair as the owner did Marian’s. “You must have realised that was just my laziness.”

  “Laziness?” She seemed to be sitting down. If there had been a moment for escape, it had passed.

  “Well, yes. Just think back.… If I’d admitted knowing Greek, at the start there, when poor young Cairnthorpe was having such trouble, I’d have ended up running the tour. And what kind of holiday would that have been? I must admit, I had a kind of a battle with myself when the trouble started. But I was so far in by then, and young Cairnthorpe was coping pretty well, I thought. And then there was your French, Mrs. Frenche.”

  “Yes.” Had they been mad to come? Had the professor his own, sinister reasons for refusing to admit that he understood Greek? She looked across, a quick question, at Stella.

  She seemed calm enough. “I must say,” she said, “I did think it a bit odd. Someone like you.” If she was considering flight, she showed no sign of it.

  “Right. Anyone in my position would be bound to learn at least enough to get by with. I’m quite good, in fact. Stavros will tell you.” He spo
ke now, rapidly, in Greek.

  It made the proprietor, Stavros, roar with laughter. “You Thor.” His English was as good as Mike’s. “You were always the joker. So you have left this poor young man to struggle on alone, you who speak like a native. He is a wicked one, this.” His smile asked for sympathy from Marian and Stella and got it.

  “Nothing of the kind,” said Edvardson. “I interpreted for him, in German.”

  “Pah.” It was an extraordinary sound. “We had best drink on that, Thor, my old friend. It is a long time—” He showed signs of reckoning it up.

  “A very long time,” Edvardson interrupted him. “And a long time for us, Stavros, without a drink. Except what you get on Lykabetos.”

  “Oh!” He made a comic face. “Then you are sufferers indeed. But not for long.” He was gone, to return with glasses of ouzo and the most elaborate mezes, or hors d’oeuvres, that Marian had ever seen.

  Starting hungrily on the lumps of cheese that nestled among olives, garlic sausage and improbable cold fried potato, she wondered what she ought to be thinking, what doing. But what was there to do except sit, and eat, and drink, and feel, extraordinarily, safe?

  Two ouzos later, she and Stella retired to the surprisingly elegant ladies’ and conferred, briefly. “He saved me, up top there,” Stella summed it up in a quick whisper. “I don’t suppose he knew it, but he did. I’m inclined to trust him. For several reasons.” A wicked look for Marian. “Besides, what else can we do?”