by Desmond Cory
‘What was she doing in Cyprus, then? It said in that letter they sent me—’
‘She was Cypriot,’ Traynor said patiently. ‘Turkish Cypriot. Hence the peculiar configurations of the vowel-sound which you were earlier and vainly seeking to reproduce.’
‘Eh?’
‘That’s why she had a funny name.’
‘Seymour? What’s funny about that?’
Traynor gave it up. ‘Anyway, that’s why she was working in Cyprus. Which is what you asked me.’
‘Yes, at Sauerkraut University or whatever it’s called. In effect, I’m supposed to be her replacement.’
‘That’s my understanding of the situation also.’
‘But why isn’t she there now, is what I’m getting at? What happened to her?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
Traynor moved his head from side to side, not in negation of his previous statement but with a lugubrious motion expressive of sadness and regret. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘But that’s awful,’ Dobie said.
‘Yes.’
‘She couldn’t have been … She was so young. Couldn’t have been much more than thirty.’
‘Or thereabouts. Yes.’
‘Well, that’s terrible.’
Traynor was aware that the sudden death of attractive young women in their early thirties (as Jenny Dobie had been) had to be something of a delicate topic where his friend was concerned and sought at once unskilfully to change the subject. ‘Of course, you’ll be missed here. Sadly missed. But I intend to postpone your Physics III lectures to the Hilary term and Wain, I think, can manage to cover your other courses if Gwyn Merrick takes over the first year, which I’d planned to have him do anyway. So you needn’t have any worries on that score. Indeed you ought to find a change of scenery altogether beneficial, and I’ve every confidence you’ll return to us next term like a giant refreshed.’
‘A giant what?’
‘Refreshed. Full of get up and go.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Dobie stared for a while at the raindrops pinging happily against the staff room windows. ‘What’s the scenery going to be like there, I wonder?’
‘Delightful, John. Delightful. There’ll be … Roman ruins and so forth. Peaceful bucolic orange groves and sandy beaches and things. And an ideal climate. Or so they tell me.’
‘Aren’t the people there always shooting at each other?’
‘Good heavens, no. Not any more.’ Traynor laughed heartily. ‘It’s a former British possession, after all. No, you’ll just have the odd bomb going off, as I suppose, maybe a very small hand grenade chucked in through the window every so often. Quite like London, in fact, except that everyone there speaks English so you won’t have a language problem.’
Beyond the rain-misted window-panes a wild and stormy Welsh sky extended a gloomy overcast and a gust of seasonably violent wind rattled the window-frame.
Dobie sighed plaintively. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll think about it.’
Feeling the need for rather more exact information than that which Traynor had provided, Dobie went round to the university library and looked up Salamis in the encyclopedia. He returned to Kate’s place an hour or so later and not, as Kate couldn’t help but notice, in a particularly gruntled frame of mind.
‘It was founded,’ he said, ‘by refugees from Troy. You know the Trojan Wars? That lot.’
‘What, the university?’
‘No, no. Salamis. Then they had an earthquake and it all fell down. Then they rebuilt it and the same thing happened again. They gave up eventually as who wouldn’t? So now there’s nothing left but a lot of ruins. And the university, apparently.’
‘Some people,’ Kate said, ‘never learn.’
‘Well, the incidence of earthquakes and tidal waves seems to have diminished of late. But you’re right in principle. In fact, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Done much the same thing to Cardiff, haven’t they? Without the need for any earthquakes at all.’
Dobie was obviously as grumpy as ever. He had had to consult no reference books to perceive from the outset a very weighty drawback to Bill Traynor’s proposal. He had realised from the first that acceptance of it would of necessity involve him in all the stomach-churning horrors of a lengthy air flight, and the risks of being eventually dismembered in some major seismic disturbance affecting the eastern Cypriot coast might after all be virtually discounted if one rated one’s chances of arriving there in the first place as minimal. As Dobie did.
Always did. The prospect of air travel invariably induced in him all the symptoms of what the psychiatrists casually refer to as ‘panic syndrome’ – the forehead moist with fever-dew, the wildly staring eyes and dishevelled locks, the tendency to leap suddenly high into the air upon the announcement of the arrival of the early morning jumbo jet from Karachi. Certain of the circumstances attendant upon the recent death of Dobie’s wife had accentuated his ingrained dislike of aircraft to the point where it now verged on the traumatic: he was still visited all too frequently by the recollection of Jenny as he had last seen her, a small figure half-turned towards him as she walked towards the waiting 727, carrying her weekend bag in one hand and waving the other in the air in cheerfully nonchalant farewell; and his occasional nightmares were these days invariably accompanied by the rising whining roar of jet engines passing overhead, to the sound of which, sweating and stiff-limbed, he would finally awake. Not feeling, be it said, particularly groovy.
‘You’ve just got to look on it as something up to which you have to face,’ Kate said. Formerly a bit of a vulgarian in grammatical matters, she had decided that she ought to pay more attention to formal syntax now that she was getting laid by a university professor, the fact that Dobie was a Professor of Mathematics being, in her opinion, beside the point and the fact that she wasn’t getting laid all that often being, also in her opinion, even more so. ‘Part of the treatment, you might say. Psychotherapeutic. Right?’
‘Wrong.’
He was being more than usually obstreperous that morning. ‘How so?’
‘My objections to flying are eminently reasonable. I regard the whole thing as anti-natural. I mean, you’ve only got to look out of that porthole thing to see that sooner or later the damned thing’s wings are going to fall off, and probably just when you least expect it. These hijacker chaps are doing a useful public service, the way I see it. Drawing attention to the … They must feel just the same way as I do about it. And besides,’ Dobie said, ‘the seats are too small and I never know where to put my feet.’
‘You never know where to put your feet anyway. You tripped over the kitchen table only yesterday.’
‘Yes, but that’s different.’
The truth of the matter was that Kate to some extent shared Dobie’s concern. Hijackers indeed represented very much less of a serious menace to any reputable airline than did Dobie himself, when in characteristic form. And this, of course, was something to be borne in mind.
She didn’t, of course, think it probable that any aircraft in which he might be briefly incarcerated would take it into its head to hurl itself incontinently downwards (or upwards, or sideways) in the way that he so trepidantly anticipated; she considered it, on the other hand, highly probable that it might transport him to Reykjavik or Addis Ababa or to practically any destination other than the one for which he had booked his ticket. Dobie’s propensity always to make for the check-in desk with the shortest queue rather than that presided over by the airline issuing his ticket made such monumental balls-ups something of a matter of course.
Convinced as she was that Dobie, like a clockwork mouse, would need to be pointed in the right direction and given a gentle nudge before proceeding on his way, Kate said, ‘Of course I’ll drive you to the airport. And see you off in the proper style. Noblesse oblige.’
‘What is the proper style?’
‘You’ll see when we get there.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that,’
Dobie said.
Having thus made all possible preparations – or more exactly taken all possible precautions – Kate was none the less further relieved to learn later that day that Dobie, once aboard the lugger, would be accompanied throughout the flight by a seemingly reliable nursemaid. The nursemaid rang their number while Dobie was taking his evening constitutional but Kate was able, with her usual competence, to relay the message to him on his return. ‘His name is Ozturk. It sounded like.’
Dobie was shaking puddles of water from his raincoat down on to the carpet. ‘Whose name is?’
‘Ozturk’s is.’
‘You can’t have got it right.’
‘Hang that damned thing up, Dobie, and listen to what I’m telling you.’
‘I am listening,’ Dobie said. Plaintively. He sat down in an armchair the better to do so.
‘You’re to call him Ozzie.’
‘I am? How? When? Where?’
‘When you meet him at the airport. He’s to be a colleague of yours. Or you’re to be a colleague of his, more exactly, since he’s working in Cyprus already.’
‘Yes, I think I follow that fine distinction. What’s he working at? I mean, in what department?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Speaks English, does he?’
‘He has a rather attractive husky voice with a lilt of the Mediterranean about it. I visualise him as being tall and broad-shouldered, with nice crinkly black hair and brown eyes with an exciting luminous quality. He probably has impeccable taste and wears superbly tailored charcoal-grey suits—’
‘Speaks Welsh, does he?’
‘In actual fact,’ Kate said, ‘he’s got a cockney accent you could cut with a knife but he seemed to be a pleasant enough character. And at worst he’ll be able to make sure you get off the bloody aircraft at the right stopover because you know what happened when you went on that day trip to Weston-super-Mare and that was on a bus, for heaven’s sake.’
‘I still insist the confusion was due to a simple misunderstanding —’
‘And I still say that Belgian customs officer had every right to cut up rough. Look, just suppose you were to end up on the Greek side of Cyprus by mistake … No. The mind boggles. You stick with Ozzie and you’ll be all right. I hope.’
‘The Greek side? What Greek side?’
‘I expect,’ Kate said, ‘he’ll explain all that to you when he’s got you safely on the aircraft. Someone had better.’
‘Ah, yes. Them Greeks,’ Ozzie explained. ‘Right efficacious bastards, they are.’ Yes, he spoke English all right. After a fashion. ‘You don’t want to give a second thought to that side of things, china. Don’t let it trouble you one way or the other. ’S a fact of life, like we all got to rub along with. Shouldn’t ever even mention the buggers. Only hets people up an’ to no good purpose. Got enough problems of our own these days, ain’t we, with interest rates an’ all, Gawd help us.’
‘Funny you should say that. Only the other day—’ Dobie, inadvertently glancing out of the observation window as he spoke, stopped short and closed his eyes up tightly. Unmentionably horrid things were going on down there, where a pleasantly green and perfectly respectable part of England had apparently and also to no good purpose been tilted over on its side at an angle of approximately ninety degrees. Dobie desired nothing more ardently at that moment than to be safely back there, storm clouds, interest rates and all.
‘Anything the matter?’
‘No, no. Not at all.’
‘Not too keen on air travel, right?’
‘Air travel? Who, me?’ Dobie tossed back his locks with a light-hearted gesture and giggled girlishly. ‘Oh, well. Done enough of it in my time, y’know.’ This was neither more nor less than the truth.
‘Mebbe,’ Ozzie said. ‘I got a forced impression from summink your young lady said, as led me to suppose—’
‘Ah? Oh, Kate. A notorious rumour-monger.’
‘’S all right then. We’ll be flyin’ pretty high on this trip, anyway, so’s to stay above the disturbance.’
‘Eh? What? What, what disturbance? Who said anything about a disturbance? On the weather forecast was it? No one said anything to me about a disturbance. I mean, good God, hasn’t anyone told the pilot?’
‘Pilot?’ Ozzie stared at him. ‘What pilot?’
Surely he didn’t … Ha ha! No. Of course not. A pilotless …? Ridiculous. A joke. It must be. Whoever heard of a … Though the idea of being closeted for something like seven hours in this metal coffin with a man possessed of such an appallingly perverted sense of humour was in its way almost equally disturbing. No, there’d be a pilot all right. Who presumably had been given firm instructions to turn back and head for home in the event of encountering adverse weather conditions. Lightning bolts and such. Ah, but had the instructions been firm enough? Or worse still, could he conceivably have forgotten them?
An alarming thought. Since Dobie himself almost certainly would have done.
A polite reminder, Dobie thought, would certainly do no harm. Dear Sir, or no, Dear Captain as he believed these people quaintly entitled themselves … He drew from his inside pocket a used envelope covered in abstruse mathematical squigglings and began to scrawl on it hastily. ‘Scuse me,’ he said indistinctly. ‘I’m just composing a little message.’
‘Message?’
‘For the pilot.’
‘Ah.’
‘The air-hostess seems to be an intelligent girl. I’m sure she’ll deliver it to him safely.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t give no messages to the air-hostess,’ Ozzie said. ‘Some bloke got quite seriously injured the other day. Doin’ just that.’
‘Injured? How?’
‘Beaten up by the security guys. Thought he was a hijacker, ha ha ha. Turned out he was only inquirin’ as to his prospecks for a quickie on the stopover but there you go, shows you can’t be too careful. Reassurin’, though, innit, when you know that any geezer steppin’ out of line is goin’ to get his toes stamped on? An’ his skull beaten in, like as not.’
Dobie unobtrusively tucked his feet even further underneath the aircraft seat. Good heavens, what a narrow escape. He had always known that overseas travel would inevitably be fraught with peril, but … He slid the envelope back into his pocket and sat back, breathing deeply, or as deeply as an over-tightened safety belt permitted.
‘Not to worry, old chum,’ Ozzie said. ‘We don’t let the Greeks get hold of you on this trip, ho ho ho ho.’
Dobie shrank yet further back into his cushioned recess. As far as he was concerned, carefree laughter had no takers today. He hadn’t yet arrived at anything like a settled opinion with regard to his present companion, settled opinions being (in his case) invariably slowly arrived at. Ozturk might well be regarded in the circles he normally frequented as an inveterate prankster and great old josher or there again, he might not. Dobie had, as yet, no idea at all what circles Ozzie normally did inhabit. Kate had in fact hit the bell in hypothesising a charcoal-grey suit of irreproachable cut; Ozzie’s outward appearance conformed in every way to that of your average umbrella-swinging City commuter, but then, Dobie thought, quite a high percentage of pillars of the Stock Exchange have to be of Levantine extraction. ‘Forgive my asking but … you are a Cypriot?’
‘Not really. No, I’m from Bethnal Green.’
‘Oh, I see. It’s just that—’
‘Lived in the Smoke all my life. Look, I’m only workin’ on the island now because duty calls, no other reason. Certainly not for the lolly. Bloody ’ell, they pay me twenty per cent of what I was makin’ with Snow Electronics and that’s in Mickey Mouse money. Turkish lira. But my parents are living in Cyprus now the old man’s retired and what with one thing and another, that’s how it is.’
Dobie nodded sagely. He was, of course, aware that Britishness was an outmoded ethnic concept and especially in London; this, in fact, was the chief reason why he never went near the place if he could help it, though probably this admissio
n was not one to be appropriately made at the present juncture. ‘So you’ve been visiting London? I mean, on holiday?’
‘Just calling on my ex, really. And seeing the kids. Looking up a few old pals. That sort of thing.’
‘I see. Yes. At least—’
‘Wife didn’t fancy life in Cyprus all that rotten. Well, it’s a bit strange to a London girl, you can understand that. So she went back home. No hard feelings, though. Nothing like that.’
‘Well, but couldn’t you have—’
‘I know what you’re thinking. Well, we had other problems besides but I won’t go into that. Troof of the matter is,’ Ozzie said, sighing deeply, ‘I’m pretty well stuck with this job in Cyprus for a bit; it’s like I said … duty calls. Or old Arkin does, anyway. Which puts me on the spot, so to speak.’
He seemed, Dobie thought, to be a garrulous sort of a chap. And while his English was perfectly comprehensible, not all of his utterances seemed to be so. Soon the air-hostess would be serving them with drinks and such. Dobie needed one. ‘In what way, on the spot? I’m afraid I don’t—’
‘Called me up on the dog an’ bone he did, a couple of years ago. Old Arkin did. In person. Asked me if I felt like doing something for the yoof of the country, was how he put it. So, well, I just felt I couldn’t refuse. I mean, if someone like Arkin makes that sort of an appeal to you, talkin’ man to man, it ain’t easy to say no. So I didn’t. I said OK, I’ll give it a whirl an’ he said ta very much and there you go, that’s how it was. In a nutshell.’
‘Arkin?’
‘No one else but.’
‘Who’s he?’
Ozzie, who had been nodding portentously, paused in mid-nod, his eyes – which were slightly bulbous anyway – starting from their spheres with a stupefied incredulity. ‘Who’s he? You mean who’s Arkin? Mean to say you’ve never heard of Tolga Arkin? Nobel Prize a few years back? ’85, I think it was. Only Cypriot ever to win it. It was in all the papers. Like, he’s famous.’