Beneath the Cypress Tree

by Margaret Pemberton

  Where her own marriage was concerned, it was Helmut who had the power to wreck it and so, while Helmut was still on Crete, she wasn’t going to visit again. Exerting a great deal of willpower, she did not, in her letters to Kate and Ella, ask for news of him.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Daphs.’

  As she rose to her feet, Sholto kissed her on the cheek and then, pushing Helmut firmly to the back of her mind, Daphne slipped her hand into the crook of his arm and walked with him into the hotel’s deliciously cool, Moorish-decorated dining room.

  Ella stared at Christos in despair. ‘But a house in Archanes would be perfect for us! With two of us working, we could afford the rent and . . .’

  ‘No,’ he said emphatically for the third time. ‘No. It is customary for a man of my village to live with his wife in the family home, at least until a child is on the way. For us to move out now would be to hurt my mother’s feelings.’

  They were sitting on a large boulder a little distance from the excavation site, sharing a lunch of rolls, cold lamb and olives. A hundred yards away everyone else was taking their lunch break communally. Only if their conversation developed into a full-scale row would anyone overhear them.

  Determined not to let it develop into a full-scale row, Ella said, keeping exasperation out of her voice with difficulty, ‘I think Eleni understands that because I am English, our marriage will not always be like other local marriages. Archanes is only a fifteen-minute drive from Knossos, and it is a pretty house, Christos. It has a little courtyard and there is a cypress tree in it for shade and . . .’

  ‘No!’ He cut across her yet again, running a hand despairingly through his pelt of curls. ‘What is it you do not understand about how wives should behave? Surely even in Yorkshire wives do not argue back to their husbands?’

  Well aware that in Yorkshire there were countless wives who would have received very short shrift, if they had tried arguing back, and also knowing that there were many other wives – like her mother – whose views, reasonably expressed, often changed their husband’s way of thinking, Ella said, ‘In a good marriage, and when the wife has a sensible point to make, they do.’

  ‘That is not the case here, in Crete.’ His trousers were tucked into the tops of his knee-high boots, and beneath an unbuttoned waistcoat his shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing forearms brown and knotted with lean muscle. Christos reached into one of his waistcoat pockets for the small block of cheese he always carried with him. He broke it into pieces and offered her one of them. It was his way of being conciliatory.

  Aware of it, Ella accepted a piece and said, ‘Think how much more room your parents and Nikoleta would have, if we were to move out. Nikoleta would be pleased as Punch.’

  ‘Punch?’ Christos’s eyebrows flew together in immediate suspicion. ‘Who is this Punch? I do not know him.’

  Not wanting to be sidetracked into a long explanation, Ella said, ‘He’s a popular British seaside wooden puppet. About the house at Archanes, Christos. At least come with me to look at it.’

  ‘No.’ As mulishly stubborn as he had been about not accompanying her to Yorkshire in order that he could meet her family, he rose to his feet, saying on a note of finality, ‘And when we do move into a house of our own, I will be the one to find it. And when I find it, it will not be in Archanes.’

  He walked off, expecting her to hurry after him. Ella didn’t do so. What she would have done, if there had been a suitable object to hand, was throw something at him in utter exasperation. The little house at Archanes was perfect for them. The plumbing was basic, but she had been brought up with plumbing that was basic. It was near enough to the Kourakis family home for them to be in almost constant touch, and far enough away for them to have much-needed privacy. Making love in a room sandwiched just thin walls from where Nikoleta, Kostas and Eleni slept was so inhibiting that she felt hot with embarrassment, just thinking about it. It would all be so different in a little home of their own, and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why Christos didn’t realize that.

  She chewed the corner of her lip. Perhaps what was needed was for her to go on strike in the bedroom. If that didn’t make Christos change his mind about their having a house of their own, nothing would.

  Christos was now a good forty yards away from her and, aware that she wasn’t, as he had expected, about to run up to his side, he came to a halt and turned round, spreading his hands out expressively. ‘Why aren’t you with me?’ he shouted. ‘It’s lonely walking on my own.’

  He looked so bewildered that much as she would like to have held on to her exasperation, she couldn’t do so. Brushing crumbs from her lap, she rose to her feet.

  His face split into a wide grin.

  The fact that, after they had been at odds with each other, his sunny nature always reasserted itself so speedily was one of the things Ella most loved about him. Exasperating as he was, she loved him in a way she knew she could never love anyone else, and she could no more imagine living without Christos than she could imagine flying to the moon.

  She broke into a run. Making love in the Kourakis family home wasn’t ideal, but it was a thousand times better than their not making love at all. As she hurtled into his arms, she was confident that it wouldn’t be long before he saw the sense of having a home of their own. The bedroom regime she was about to instigate would see to that.

  Together with Kate, Lewis walked out of the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion and across to the side street where he had parked the truck. Their meeting with the museum’s curator and board of directors had gone well. With Europe so clearly on the verge of being set to the torch, they were just as passionately anxious as he and Kate that all the artefacts found at Kalamata, both at the palace and in the cave, should be stored in absolute safety.

  Kate opened the passenger door of the truck, saying, ‘Now Hitler has marched into Czechoslovakia without a finger being lifted to prevent him, is he likely to believe that Poland will be any different, if he attempts the same thing there?’

  ‘He may hope so. Why shouldn’t he, when Britain and France have let him get away with so much?’ He put the truck into gear and pulled away from the kerb. ‘Where Poland is concerned, though, he’ll be making a huge mistake. Even Chamberlain has realized that no further compromises are possible. The pledge to defend Poland is a pledge Britain will keep.’

  He had come to value the occasions when she accompanied him on site business. He enjoyed the conversations they had on archaeology and the disastrous state of world politics. Their conversation never turned to anything personal. The fierce physical attraction he felt for her was something he kept under tight control. He’d had one rebuff, although as he’d been drunk when he’d kissed her, it was a rebuff he’d deserved; and, until he’d resolved the awkward nature of his relationship with Nikoleta, he was in no position to try his luck with Kate a second time.

  He drove down the street named after Sir Arthur Evans and through the gate in the city walls leading out on to the Knossos road. When he came to the Fortetsa turn-off he took it, saying, ‘Kit will be at the new tomb site and I want to have a word with him. I’m interested in what his plans are, for when the balloon goes up.’

  What he really wanted to know was whether, as Kit Shelton’s knowledge of Greek was equal to his own, he too had been interviewed by Julian Kermode, in an unprepossessing Whitehall room.

  The new necropolis site, still only in its early stages, was a couple of miles south-west of Fortetsa village and as they bumped over rough ground towards it, they could see against the banked earth a giant chamber tomb completely exposed and, a little distance from it, a handful of men shovelling and sifting earth as they dug down towards another one.

  Kit was overseeing the dig, with a small scruffy dog of indeterminate parentage by his side. Further away, near where the Sally was parked, Nikoleta was perched on a camp stool, brushing three thousand years of compacted earth from a large burial jar. It was a task that need
ed carrying out with great care. By the look of it, that was exactly what Nikoleta was doing, but it still disturbed him that Kit was allowing her to be so hands-on with a jar that only a qualified archaeologist should have been handling.

  As they come to a dusty halt, Kit turned his head towards them, Nikoleta dropped the brush she had been using and jumped to her feet, and the dog bounded towards them, barking furiously.

  ‘Tinker’s okay,’ Kit called out, walking up to them. ‘It’s happy barking. He likes visitors.’

  Lewis hadn’t thought the barking to be anything other than happy, especially as the dog was now licking the back of his hand.

  ‘Who does Tinker belong to?’ He put an end to the licking by giving the dog a friendly pat.

  ‘No one.’ Nikoleta had joined them. ‘He’s a stray. He comes here because there’s food.’

  Her disparaging tone of voice reminded him that the British attitude to dogs was far more indulgent than that of the average Cretan. ‘Sensible dog,’ Lewis said, knowing it was only due to Kit that Tinker wasn’t scavenging Fortetsa’s waste tips in order to stay alive; and then, to Kit, ‘Kate and I have just left the museum. The curator went to great lengths to assure us the building is relatively earthquake-proof. Hopefully that might go for bombs too, should there be any.’

  ‘It needs to be earthquake-resilient in a country as earthquake-prone as Crete, but why should Heraklion be bombed? It’s Poland Hitler is threatening. Not Greece.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said easily. ‘There’s no sense my making the scenario worse than it already is.’ He was no longer wondering if Kit had had an interview with Julian Kermode, for he so very clearly hadn’t. ‘What will you do, when push comes to shove? Stay on here, or join up?’

  ‘I shall join up.’ They began walking in the direction of the camp kitchen, where folding canvas chairs were conveniently scattered. Tinker saw a rabbit and, his welcome duties at an end, raced excitedly after it. ‘As I have a background of Eton and Oxford, I imagine I’ll be earmarked for officers’ training. What about you?’

  ‘Pretty much the same thing.’ Having found out what he’d wanted to find out, Lewis changed the subject. ‘Is the cemetery here the same age as the one at Fortetsa?’

  ‘No. The tomb we’ve found is much earlier.’ Just as Kit began explaining his reasons for thinking so, there came noise of a disturbance from the far side of the site where the ground rose into a rocky hillock.

  Glad of the distraction, Lewis said, ‘I think someone’s found something.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so – not there.’ Kit shaded his eyes against the sun. Some of the men, all of whom had been standing in a circle looking down at the ground, began walking back to the tomb they’d been in the process of uncovering. One of them called out, ‘It’s no problem, Kyrie Shelton! The dog has fallen down a hole – that is all!’

  Kit rose to his feet in alarm. ‘Is he still in it?’

  The man nodded. ‘Yes! A long way down. Too far to be reached.’

  Kit swore and broke into a sprint, Lewis and Kate hard behind him.

  The boulder-strewn hillock was deceptive, for though on the near side the rise was gentle, the far side plunged steeply. Beyond the plunge were the olive groves and vineyards of the people of Fortetsa. At any other time it would have been a view to be enjoyed. Now, though, all Lewis had eyes for was the gap running part of the way between the base of one of the giant boulders and the ground. Coming from it was faint, frantic barking.

  Kit fell on his knees, thrusting his arms as far inside the gap as he could reach. ‘I can’t feel anything. Just empty space!’

  One of the workmen said unhelpfully, ‘It is always the same, when dogs fall into holes such as this one. They go straight down and the dogs cannot scramble out. There is nothing that can be done.’

  ‘There must be!’ Kate’s eyes were wide with horror. ‘We can’t leave him to starve to death in the dark.’

  ‘What else is there to do?’ Nikoleta had joined them. ‘This kind of thing happens. Dogs chase rabbits into holes, and sometimes the hole is not a rabbit-hole.’

  Still on his knees, Kit turned a white face to where Lewis was standing, a foot or so away from him. ‘What can we do, Lewis? How the hell are we going to get him out?’

  It was something Lewis had been thinking about ever since they had reached the boulder. Turning to one of the workmen, he said, ‘When a sheep gets trapped, can the shepherd judge how far it’s fallen by the faintness of its bleat?’

  ‘Of course, Kyrie. My father is a shepherd and always he can tell.’

  ‘Can you tell? From the sound of its barking, can you tell how far down the dog is?’

  The man listened to Tinker’s pathetic barking attentively and then said, ‘Fifty feet, Kyrie. Maybe a little more.’

  Lewis turned back to Kit. ‘Do you have cordoning-off rope on-site?’

  ‘Yes, but . . . ?’

  ‘Then get it. I’ll slide through the gap and you can lower me down to him.’

  Kit clambered to his feet, dizzy with relief at having a plan of action. ‘Let me go down! My shoulders are narrower than yours. Getting through the gap will be easier for me than for you.’ He took off his horn-rimmed glasses, signalling how ready he was to launch himself on a rescue mission.

  Hideous as the situation was, Lewis felt a flash of amusement. Kit possessed a lot of admirable qualities, but gung-ho recklessness wasn’t one of them. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I don’t imagine you’ve done much potholing or mountain-climbing. I have.’

  Nikoleta stared at Lewis as if he had lost his mind. ‘You cannot mean to do this thing! You may become trapped. The rope may break. To risk your life for a dog is craziness. It is not even your dog. It is no one’s dog.’

  He looked at her for a long moment, aware that something had finally ended for him, and then he said, his voice raw, ‘It is a dog that doesn’t deserve a long, terrifying death, if he can be saved from it. That’s why I’m doing it, Nikoleta. And I’m sorry you don’t understand that.’

  To Kit he said, ‘Fetch the cordoning-off rope and a torch – and get the other workmen back here.’

  To Kate, he said, ‘Find a sack Tinker can be hauled up in.’

  As Kit and Kate set off at a run to do as he’d asked, Nikoleta said yet again, ‘But the dog isn’t yours, Lewis! And although Kit is happy for it to run around on the site, it isn’t his dog, either. It has no value – not even the value of a sheep or a goat. Why are you and Kit and Kate making so much fuss about it?’

  It was a question he had answered once and had no intention of answering again.

  Aware that he was no longer listening to her, Nikoleta erupted explosively, ‘A Cretan would not do what you are going to do. A Cretan would have more sense.’ And she spun on her heel, heading in the direction of the Sally.

  He didn’t go after her.

  Thirty minutes later, Lewis was being lowered into the hole. He had a torch in one of his pockets, and a sack to put Tinker in was shoved down his shirt front. One end of a long coil of rope was attached to his right wrist; the end of another coil of rope was knotted around his waist. The rope attached to his wrist was held at the other end by Kit’s foreman and was the rope Tinker would be hauled up by. The rope around his waist was the one that was his lifeline, and which Kit and his workmen were paying out, inch by inch.

  With movement above him, Tinker’s barking grew enthusiastic.

  Lewis fervently hoped Tinker’s expectations were going to be justified, for the hole, small at the outset, was growing increasingly narrow. His shoulder hit the side and a scattering of loose stone and earth showered down. Fearful of causing an avalanche that would bury Tinker, and might cause the upper sides of the hole to weaken and cave in on top of both of them, Lewis gave a jerk on the rope, indicating that he wanted a temporary halt.

  ‘Are you okay, Lewis?’ Kit’s voice was fraught with tension.

  ‘Yes!’ he shouted back. ‘Just give it a min
ute.’

  Tinker was now yelping, but as far as Lewis was concerned, a sound of any kind from the dog was a good sign.

  There was no further fall of loose stone and he gave another jerk on the rope to signal that lowering could start again.

  Slowly but surely he neared Tinker; then finally, with swamping relief, his feet touched damp solidity and, in the inky blackness, Tinker jumped into his arms, licking his face, overjoyed at having company.

  Lewis got his torch out of his pocket and, by its light, managed to get an uncooperative Tinker into the sack and tie the top tightly, with the length of rope that had been attached to his wrist. He then gave the rope a tug to indicate that Tinker was ready for his journey to the surface.

  Tinker went up a lot more quickly than he, Lewis, had come down.

  When he heard cheering, he stuffed the torch back into his pocket and gave a sharp tug on the rope.

  ‘Ready, Lewis?’ Kit yelled down to him.

  ‘Ready!’ he shouted back.

  Fifteen minutes later, several pairs of hands were hauling him through the gap into brilliant sunshine. He stood up, pushing the hair out of his eyes, his face and clothes streaked with sweat and dirt. A miraculously unhurt Tinker raced towards him, skittering around his ankles. Kit threw an arm around his shoulders. Members of the work team – all of whom had earlier shown little interest in Tinker’s plight – clustered around him, shaking his hand and slapping him on the back.

  Only one person remained outside the congratulatory circle, and that was Kate.

  And Kate was the only person he wanted to be with.

  Pausing only to say to Kit, ‘Get the men to block the gap’, Lewis broke free of the crush and walked swiftly towards her. The agonizing tension she had been under still showed on her face and he felt his heart tighten within his chest. She had cared about his safety; had cared about it to the extent that, although now vastly relieved, her face was still drained of colour.