by Ann Bridge
“Is it a cactus?” Julia asked, peering at it.
“No, it’s a dragon-tree. It grows now here in the world but here and in the Canaries now; it used to grow on the mainland of Europe ages ago.”
“How do they know it did?” Julia asked.
“Because it’s been found fossilised! That’s what’s so odd about this place—human-wise, it’s so relatively modern, but such an archaeological museum as regards its plants.”
Presently the mountain chain raked back from the coast, giving gentler slopes; here, in open country and surrounded by vineyards, stood the Armitages’ quinta, a big, simply built house overlooking the sea, with a large group of farm-buildings adjoining it on one side, a rather new and unfinished garden on the other. As they drew up Aglaia came out onto the steps to greet them.
“Mrs. Armitage is at the farm—she said we were to go and find her. Luzia will get someone to take the luggage in” she added, as a maid appeared. Pauline Shergold briskly threw out their cases and put the car in the shade, before they walked under a trellis of vines to the farm-yard, where hens scratched in the dust and small pigs ran about among farm implements; there was a lot of squealing, of which the most piercing emanated from a piglet which a tall dark man in shirt-sleeves was holding up and exhibiting to Mrs. Armitage, a look of deep concern on his tanned face.
“I will reflect, Manoel, and let you know presently” she told him, and turned to her guests. “There you are—good. Too bad about Mrs. H., but I know how old people get dug in!” As they walked back under the vine trellis—“Poor Manoel; he is in such a fuss” she said laughing. “You see these grapes?”—she indicated the green bunches which hung just above their heads. “They haven’t turned colour yet, and the local theory is that the young pigs shouldn’t be what he calls crustato till they do!—but he was showing me that it’s high time they were done.”
“Crustato?” Julia asked, puzzled.
“Castrato is what he means, but he always calls it ’crustato’ “ Mrs. Armitage said, still laughing. Suddenly she stopped. “Oh, I forgot to ask him about his boy. Take them in and show them their rooms, Aglaia—I won’t be a moment.” She turned back into the yard, where they heard her calling “O Manoel!”
Over drinks before lunch, on a wide verandah overlooking the sea, Pauline Shergold enquired about Manoel’s child—“Is it that nice little boy of his with the funny name, who’s such a dab with a catapult?”
“Marcusinho? Yes, that’s the one. Well, I think it’s probably only a cold, but he is wheezing frightfully, like a railway engine! —and his mother says he complains of headache. If he isn’t better tomorrow I shall send for the doctor—he’s been like this for a week now” Mrs. Armitage said, with her usual decision.
The two men arrived early, and Julia readily accepted her host’s invitation to go for a stroll before dinner. Below the garden and the vineyards they came on some plantations of trees with immense leaves—“Goodness! What on earth are those?” she exclaimed.
“Banana-trees. Have you never seen them before?” he asked, amused.
“Well, I suppose the one at Kew. But fancy their growing here! —I thought they were tropical things.”
“Did you never hear of Canary bananas?” Terence Armitage asked, now openly laughing at her. “We’re not so far from the Canaries, you know.”
“No, of course not—that current. I don’t know why I was so surprised.”
“I see Pauline hasn’t done her stuff yet about showing you the gardens here” he said. “They’re full of tropical things. At one quinta alone there are over a hundred different species from all over the world, growing well, more than half of them from the tropics.”
“How does that happen? I mean, it isn’t all that hot here” Julia said.
“It’s the steadiness of the temperature; the annual mean is between sixty-five and sixty-seven Fahrenheit, and it never falls below fifty. Plants are amazingly adaptable if they aren’t subjected to any extremes.”
“I never knew that” Julia observed—“I mean, one notices their adaptability more when they are subjected to extremes.” She was thinking of the fragile crocuses and soldanellas that she had seen in Switzerland, coming up within a yard of the winter’s melting snow. But he took her up on it in a way that surprised her.
“One does that with people, certainly” he said, turning to peer at her through his horn-rimmed glasses. “How do you find Aglaia?” he asked abruptly. “She’s been subjected to extremes lately, poor little thing.”
“Do you mean losing the baby?” Julia asked—she wanted to be sure of her ground before she went very far.
“Partly that, of course—it was tragic for her; he wanted one so much. He’s your cousin, isn’t he? Do you know him well?”
“Yes, very well” Julia said, with slow emphasis.
“Well, I’m Aglaia’s cousin” Terence Armitage went on, “but I don’t know her very well—at least not till this time. Now I think perhaps I’m beginning to.”
“Yes?” Julia said, wondering what was coming.
“Well, for some reason I think her nerve is getting broken” he said, again peering at her through his glasses in his earnest way. “I think losing the baby has to do with it, though it was in no manner of way her fault.”
Julia was a little disconcerted by this approach. She wanted to hear what he was getting at, but she wasn’t sure that she was prepared to discuss her cousin Colin and his relations with his wife, about which she in fact knew very little, with an almost total stranger, much as she was inclined to like him. To gain time—
“Is that why you were so especially nice to her last Sunday, when she was frightened?” she asked.
“Exactly—if I was nice. I don’t think being with Penelope is very good for her” he said frankly. “She’s so efficient, and so completely sure of herself, that she is apt to have a rather depressant effect on people who are unsure.”
“Yes, I can imagine that” Julia said, still hedging; what she wanted to say was “So what?”
“Well—look—I don’t quite know how to say this” he went on, looking so earnest and troubled that Julia couldn’t help warming to him a little. “I mean, your ’extreme’ is so much worse than—than anyone’s, that I don’t like even to breathe on it; and yet it comes into it, so I can’t help myself. I wondered whether she had spoken to you about her worry over Colin and—and the expedition?”
Ah—at last they were at it. Julia was rather relieved—and he had done it much more elegantly than poor Aglaia.
“Yes, she did” she said rather slowly. “She wanted to know what I expect you want to know, whether I had heard any official criticism of Colin in London; and I can only tell you what I told her—that I hadn’t.” She paused. “I only went to the Office once” she went on, “and neither then, nor beforehand, was I told what the object of the expedition was. In fact Aglaia knew more than I did; they never told me that Philip wasn’t wearing a respirator when he was shot. She seemed to think there was some connection.”
“Thank you very much—it is most good of you to tell me that. I hope you’ll forgive me for having brought it up, but I am troubled for her. She is desperately worried, and very unhappy.”
“Yes, I realise that” Julia said a little grimly, remembering her shock at the way Aglaia had spoken to her. “But I don’t quite see what we can do to help her.”
“I wondered”—Terence hesitated. “I wondered if it would be possible to find out if she is exaggerating? I mean whether this idea of hers that Colin is in some sort of disgrace is perhaps mistaken.”
“I thought of that” Julia said. “There are one or two people I do know well enough to write to. But on the whole I decided against it.”
“Should you mind telling me why? I know nothing whatever about Intelligence, you see, except that Colin works for it.”
“Not a bit” Julia said, smiling a little. “I decided that it wouldn’t be at all easy to frame any enquiry in a way that would
n’t reveal the fact that Colin, at any rate, felt that he was being blamed, and was talking about it! And that would only do him more harm. Of course if it were even guessed at that his wife was complaining about it, it would practically put paid to his career!” she ended rather sharply.
“Which is exactly what she is doing!” Terence Armitage said, with a sudden grin. “Yes—I see. It makes it a bit difficult.”
“It isn’t an easy life” Julia said. “One’s belongings are involved, willy-nilly, and have to be as discreet as the agents themselves—at least they ought to be! I don’t think she realises that. Do you think you could make her see it? Do you know if she has talked to anyone else?”
“I don’t think so—not to Penelope, anyhow—she’s not on very confidential terms with her.”
“Goodness, Mrs. H.!” Julia exclaimed suddenly.
“Mrs. Hathaway? What about her?”
“Aglaia moaned to her too about being so worried over Colin” Julia said—“I remember now; and then she—Mrs. H.— asked me about him. Oh look, Mr. Armitage, this has got to stop! You must tell her to be more careful.”
“I can try” he said rather doubtfully. “But on the whole, do you think it might be an exaggeration on her part?”
“That depends, surely, on whether Aglaia is a person who does exaggerate” Julia said. “And that I simply don’t know. Do you?”
“She takes things hard” Terence Armitage said. “Anyhow, it’s something that you got no impression that Colin was being blamed. Did you tell her that?”
“Not in so many words, no” Julia said. “When she mentioned the respirator business, we talked about that.”
“Don’t you think it might help her if you did?”
Julia considered.
“No—I mean, it might help her, but I think it would be better if you told her that yourself, as coming from me. That will give you an opportunity to rub into her how unwise it is for her to go on talking about Colin being blown upon, to all and sundry.”
“You and I are hardly all and sundry” Terence objected mildly.
“Perhaps not.” Julia laughed a little, reluctantly. “But in this context Mrs. Hathaway is” she added firmly. “If Aglaia really wanted to injure Colin, this is the way to go about it! The Office would certainly blame him for having talked, whether they are blaming him for anything else or not.”
“All right—I’ll have a talk to her. Thank you very much” he said again.
They had left the banana plantation behind and were now out among the vineyards again, so that they had an unobstructed view of the sea. Their path followed the indentations of the coast, and as they rounded a small headland they saw a smallish ship whose superstructure was garnished with the same sort of peculiar objects as the trawler whose presence had so annoyed the Captain as Julia’s boat approached Funchal.
“Oh, look at that!” Julia exclaimed. “Can you see its number?”
“I’m not sure.” He stopped, and fumbled in his jacket pocket. “Yes—I’ve got it” he said, pulling out a small telescope; he adjusted this, pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead, and put the thing to his eye.
“Is it 0263?” Julia asked, quite eagerly, for her.
“Yes, it is” Terence Armitage said. He took the telescope down, pulled his spectacles back into position, and turned and stared at her. “How on earth did you know that?”
“We saw her when I was coming in on the boat—Captain Almeida knew her number, and he lent me his field-glasses, so I saw it myself. He was furious with the Russians for prowling about here like that.”
“Had he seen her before?”
“Yes; more than once, he said. Have you seen her before?” Julia enquired.
“Yes—also more than once.”
“But what on earth is she up to, now that there’s no NATO performance going on?”
“I don’t know. No one seems to know. Of course she might really be fishing.”
“Don’t the Portuguese mind?—the authorities here, I mean?”
“There’s not a great deal they can do about it, however much they mind, so long as she keeps outside territorial waters” Terence Armitage said, in his slow, calm way, amusing Julia. She looked out at the sea again.
“Would you say she’s outside territorial waters now?” she asked. “She looks pretty close in to me.”
“I don’t suppose the Russians bother a lot, down here” he replied. “There’s no one to take any notice, except the village policeman, and he only carries a truncheon, which has a rather short range! Come on—we shall be late for dinner.”
“Does no one ever report her?” Julia asked.
“I shouldn’t think so. I think she probably is fishing—what else could she be after?”
“You never had any satellite-trackers planted here?” Julia persisted.
“Satellite-trackers? Whatever put that idea into your head?”
“Oh well, we found quite a lot in the Hebrides, and off Ireland, and in the Scillies” Julia replied offhandly; “and it was a Russian trawler who planted those. We met her; only she wasn’t carrying any of these peculiar doings in her rigging. She scuttled herself in the end,” she added.
“What happened to the crew?”
“They were picked up. Anyhow, I shall recognise a satellite-tracker if I see one up on that place we’re going to” she added gaily. “Oh, what is that bird?”
“That’s one of our specialities—it’s a wagtail.”
“But it’s all chestnut-coloured—how very odd!”
“Yes, it’s only found here—and occasionally in the Canaries.”
“I wonder if that got fossilised, like that tree. Oh well, the colour wouldn’t show in rock, I suppose, so one would never know.”
“You are absurd” Terence said laughing. “Now, tell me about your satellite-trackers.”
They left early the following morning for their expedition. The men carried haversacks with lunch, and Penelope insisted on everyone’s taking a torch. “For going through the tunnel” she explained. “It’s rather slippery, so it’s much easier if everyone has their own light.” She produced a whole drawerful of torches, and tested each one before handing them out; Julia and Aglaia were a little puzzled by this mention of a tunnel, but Penelope Armitage wasn’t a person one argued with, and they obediently pocketed their allotted torches. They drove for some miles across open country to a village on the slopes of the central range; here they paused while Penelope left a message summoning the doctor to see Manoel’s boy, and drove on up onto the Lombo do Salão to a place where one could turn a car—always an important consideration in Madeira. A smaller track led on up a broad ridge, which they followed for some distance till it merged into the hillside; here a large levada appeared suddenly from the face of the mountain, out of a dark hole, and wound away across the sunlit slopes. They followed the water into the hill by a path channelled out of the solid rock, but Julia and Aglaia soon saw why it was desirable for each person to have a torch; the surface of the path was uneven and, like the walls and roof of the tunnel, dripping wet; the noise of the water, dashing and roaring along in the darkness close beside them was deafeningly loud in that enclosed space—so loud that it quite confused the senses. It was all rather strange, and, after the heat and sunshine outside, very cold; Aglaia clutched Terence’s arm. “May I hold on to you?” she shouted—“Yes” he bellowed back. That tunnel is half-a-mile long, and to Aglaia it seemed interminable; presently, far far ahead of them, they saw a minute speck, a literal pin-point of light. It grew and grew as they approached, until at last, now facing the daylight, they could see their surroundings clearly—the dripping rocks of walls and roof, the wet path, the bright racing water beside it.
“Splendid bit of engineering, isn’t it?” Gerald Shergold said to Julia, as they came out into the open air.
“Yes, marvellous. Rather gruesome, though” she said, pocketing her torch and shaking the drops of water out of her tawny hair. “I’m frozen!”
The tunnel had led them through right into the heart of the central range, which forms a sort of backbone to the island; where the levada entered the tunnel was a different world from where it left it. Instead of the hot, dry, southward-facing slopes they found themselves in a confusion of mountains with streams and waterfalls on all sides, among vegetation even richer than what they had seen down near Santa Ana a week before, with immense ferns above soft mosses among which cinerarias, silver-leaved and pale mauve, bloomed freely. “Goodness, who planted those, right up here?” Julia exclaimed.
“No one—they’re wild” Pauline Shergold said laughing. They struck eastward along a rather indistinct track, rising all the time; soon they were above the dense vegetation and out on grassy slopes interspersed with screes and boulders, above which rose a pale silvery wall of apparently vertical rock.
“The Serra’s at the top of that” Penelope Armitage said to Julia.
“How on earth do we get up it?” Julia asked, glancing at Aglaia, whose small face already wore an alarmed expression.
“I’ve ordered hammocks for you and Ag; I thought you might prefer it. We shall climb” Penelope said calmly. “I hope to goodness the men have come.”
They had. As the party approached the foot of the rock wall a group of wild-looking men got up out of a patch of shade and came towards them, holding out a pair of light string hammocks, like fishing-nets; while two men held the ends Julia and Aglaia obediently lay in these, and other men wrapped the nets tightly round them, fastening them with bits of twig thrust through.
“I feel like a parcel” Aglaia said, with a nervous giggle.
Julia felt like one too when her hammock-bearers tackled the rock face. It was broken by shallow gullies and small chimneys, up which the rest of the party climbed, using hands as well as feet; Julia and Aglaia were slung across the gullies and hauled up the chimneys with what Julia, at any rate, recognised as considerable skill and great strength. But the laughing men who carried her seemed indifferent as to whether the bundle she had become was right-side up or not, and to be dangled head downwards over space gave her the most complete feeling of physical helplessness she had ever experienced—she was distinctly relieved when they reached level ground at the top and, still parcellike, she was undone and set free.