Greek Fire

by Winston Graham

  “So these things were lost. But something I believe has recently been found. Did you know that Juan Tolosa was—or used to be—a Communist?”

  “How could I?”

  “I thought he had brought something back with him to Greece.”

  “And hadn’t he?”

  “He didn’t have it with him. Otherwise the police would have found it.”

  “How do you know what they have found?”

  “I know that.”

  “So you are agreeing with his wife—that the accident was no accident?”

  “I think he was putting pressure on someone here—for private gain; and they didn’t like it.”

  After a minute she said: “ What are you saying?”

  “That’s all I have to say.”

  “You’ve said too little or too much.”

  “Too much, maybe.”

  Menelaus came back beaming hideously, his arms piled with small faggots. “ We have four hours to rest. I will make the fire up and then it will last a time. There is an old straw bed in the other hut and I will sleep there.”

  Gene looked up. “But the fire’s here.”

  “And only two places to lie.” His smile vanished. “That is how you would wish it? I will lie on the floor here if you prefer.”

  Gene looked at the girl inquiringly.

  “It’s of indifference to me,” she said. “We shall not undress, I suppose? Do whatever you wish, Menelaus.”

  “I’ll go with him if you like,” said Gene.

  “No, I do not like.”

  Menelaus said: “Don’t be afraid, I shall not oversleep. I’ll wake you at half past three.”

  There was silence while he went about the hut, building up the fire, putting away the remains of the meal. Anya got up and walked across to the window. Gene’s eyes followed her as she rubbed the window clear with on old rag and then leaned with her hand against the wall, bending to peer out. She turned suddenly and found him watching her; her eyes glinted and then moved on as if he were part of the furniture.

  “Good night, sir. Good night, Miss Stonaris.”

  When they were alone Gene got up and took a few faggots off the fire. “I think it will get too hot if we have such blaze. I’ll put more on in an hour.”

  “How lovely, the snow looks.”

  “Have the clouds gone?”

  “Yes.”

  He unfastened his own boots. “Do you want to lie down?”

  She came back slowly from the window. “When I first met you, dear Gene, I thought you were foolish. Then I thought you were very clever in disguise. Now I know that you are really a fool after all.”

  “Thank you at least for the dear Gene. It makes one’s demolition more cosy.”

  She sat on the edge of the table. “From what you have told me so far about this Spaniard, and this Anton Avra, you are suggesting that George is in some way involved in it.”

  “I’m not saying anything.”

  “But you are. You’re implying that.”

  “Anya, you wanted to know what I was doing here. I’ve told you what I’m doing here. Often I grope in the dark myself. I’ve only told you what has happened.”

  “And left me to make my own conclusions.”

  “It’s all anyone can do, yet.”

  “I can tell you that your conclusions are utterly wrong.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know what my conclusions are.”

  “Apart altogether from George, I know all the chief leaders of EMO. I meet them and mix with them more closely than any other woman does.”

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  “Well, I know that none of them could have any connection with this thing.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Well, are you suggesting that I don’t even know George Lascou?”

  “I’ve said, I’m suggesting nothing. I don’t know how much George Lascou confides in you or how much you confide in him. But I know that he’s a clever, subtle and complex man.”

  “Perhaps that is why you do not understand him.”

  “It could be.”

  She slid off the table to re-fix the clasp that bound her hair. “The trouble with you is you have too literal a mind. George puts forward some philisophical argument and you think he’s talking practical politics. You’re too ingenuous to understand the mind of a Greek.”

  “Even yours?”

  “Mine you do not even begin to know at all.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  There had been silence in the hut for some time. The first blaze of the fire had gone down but there was still some heat from it. She had been sitting quite still on her bunk staring at the fire. He squatted on the floor on the opposite side of the fireplace. About half an hour had passed.

  He said at length: “How did you first meet George Lascou? Won’t you tell me that?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing more to say.”

  “Well, say it.”

  She stretched. “ He saw me first at a concert given for Greek and English troops. Because I was young and knew both languages they asked me to sing. The next day he called to see me and asked where were my parents. I said kaput, so he went to see the priest who had sheltered me. Soon after that I was sent back to school, and then on to the university. He paid for everything. I was nearly fifteen when it began. When I was nineteen he came to see me one day and asked me to be his mistress.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Why not? We had seen a lot of each other during the previous two years. We’d read and walked together and knew each other well.”

  “Was he married then?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you said yes.”

  She yawned. “I don’t know why I talk to you.”

  “Go to sleep then.”

  “No, I will tell you because it may help you to understand him better. He was married but not happy with his wife, but with young children to think of. He said he’d watched me grow, ever since that first night. He said he’d watched and waited patiently. Which is true. It had been four years. Since you will wish to know all about it, he put it to me that there was nothing cheap or sordid about the classic women of Ancient Greece—like Phryne, who modelled for Praxiteles, or Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles: they were highly educated, intelligent women living a fuller and more balanced life than any married woman, moving in true society, which was not the society of aristocracy but the society of brains and art.”

  “I can hear him saying that.”

  “Well, it was true!”

  “Yes, certainly. And has it been true for you?”

  “Dear Gene, even you could not expect me to come up to the standard of women like those, or expect the people I’ve associated with to have the quality of the people they knew. That is a fault of the times, not of the arrangement. I am very happy.”

  “And you love George Lascou?”

  She laughed. “ Of course. I’ve told you.”

  He leaned forward to put another couple of branches on the fire. One of them left a circle of damp in the hearth where the snow had melted. “ I’ve been through all the conventional motions myself, on all the usual occasions. So as a generalisation I’m all for the ha-ha-don’t-tell-me-fairy-tales attitude.”

  She said: “Love’s like gambling. People always play for too high stakes. They overbid their luck and never know when to cut their losses.”

  He watched her lips as she spoke. “True enough.”

  “But?” she said, noting the inflexion in his voice.

  “But once in a while, you have to admit, the bank is beaten. There’s evidence for it.”

  “In books?”

  “Sometimes in books but not only there. Trouble is, as you say, every man thinks his chick is a swan, every man believes in gambler’s luck. It isn’t till you’re broke once again, bankrupt, on your uppers, that you realise another vision splendid has fallen apart and become a shower of rusty tinsel.”

  “I’m glad at least we agree on th
at.”

  “I’m not sure we do.”

  “No?”

  “No, I’m still half inclined to believe the big show exists, even though it hasn’t existed for me.”

  “And so if it did?”

  “If it did I think it might make our present knowing talk sound like bright teenagers’ prattle. I think it might make even a war-worn type like me, who’d always taken pride in being on the outside even of his own affairs, feel as if he was shooting the rapids in a leaky canoe. I think it might stop him from ever being patronising or superior about it again because he’d know it was something that was bigger and more important than he could ever personally hope to be or begin to be.”

  She looked at him then. “Are you employing the same technique as you used to get me to climb this mountain?”

  “There’s no technique that I know of that could make the difference. Either it is or it isn’t, that’s all.”

  “I distrust you and your arguments—profoundly,” she said. “But I take it back that you are unsubtle. That was a mistake that I made.”

  “Well, it’s, healthy to revise one’s judgments. I’ve recently revised a lot of mine.”

  The fire had gone down. It was cold in the hut, and he got cautiously up and began to replace the faggots. Outside a wind was stirring, moving through the mountains, lightly playing over the snow. They had turned the lamp down, but as the fire began to crackle a fresh light flickered about the room, and by it he went cautiously to look at her.

  She was asleep. Her lips were slightly parted, her hair had curled round and was covering one ear; lashes black on cheeks; breathing hardly to be seen. She looked absurdly innocent; she had that faculty that children have of sloughing off the day‘s sins. An altar piece, an Andrea del Sarto madonna.

  He stayed a long time watching her, content and able to study at his leisure a face that held magic for him either in movement or repose. When he had talked to her just now he had talked half to convince himself. Common sense told him that there could be, for him, only the rusty tinsel here over again.

  The blanket had slipped and he lifted it to cover her shoulder. Then, thinking she would probably lose body heat in sleep, he took up his own blanket and put it over the other. She didn’t stir. He squatted down before the fire, about three or four feet from her, shook a cigarette out of a packet and lit it from a flickering splinter of wood.

  The wind was getting up. It was howling now like a distant wolf, out there among the crevasses and the lonely peaks. Perhaps tomorrow it would be too rough to go on. Perhaps it would be all they could do to get down. Down to Athens. What waited in Athens? The letter from Madrid? Not yet. But all the problems of the things he had set himself to do. They seemed to belong to a world that hadn’t a great deal of relevance up here in the snow. He moved his head again and found that she was watching him.

  She said: “What time is it?”

  “Twelve thirty.”

  “Only that?”

  “D’you want the night to go so quickly?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not specially.”

  “Why don’t you lie down?”

  “I like it like this.”

  There was silence for a time, and he thought she had gone off. Then she moved to put the palm of her hand behind her neck.

  “I don’t need your blanket.”

  “It’s better there than not being used.”

  “Were you standing over me just now?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence again. He flicked his cigarette into the heart of the fire.

  She said: “Your face is like a ship’s prow pushing forward all the time into choppy seas.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Your nature’s like that too, isn’t it. Pushing on, never letting up. Why do you not accept life as it is instead of trying to worry it with your teeth all the time, like a terrier with a bone.”

  “Is that how you see it?”

  “I wish I could tell you something about George. It would prove you wrong about him, but alas it is secret.”

  “Something about General Telechos?”

  She looked at him quickly. “Why do you say that?”

  “I know about the possible link-up politically.”

  She said: “You know too much.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think perhaps after tonight we shall both know too much of each other.”

  “Except the vital thing.”

  “What is that?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  Just before two he again built up the fire. It was the last of the wood, and when this went they would have to shiver for a while. He lit another cigarette.

  She said: “Can I have one?”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I have been. Light it for me, will you?”

  He lit it and passed it to here and for a bit they smoked without speaking.

  “Have your blanket.”

  “No.”

  “Lean back on something.”

  He looked around and then moved back against her trestle, so that he was sitting with his shoulders near to her waist. He said: “I detect a mother instinct.”

  “You are the worst detector I have ever met.”

  Her hand was lying beside him and he took it. The fingers curved round his and then relaxed. They finished their cigarettes and threw them away. But he continued to hold her hand. So Menelaus found them when he came in at three-thirty. Only this time Gene was asleep and Anya was awake, staring with rather terrible eyes at the dying embers of the fire.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They drank the rest of the coffee and swallowed a few mouthfuls of bread and honey. The wind was still blowing but the night was clear. When they opened the door of the hut it was bitterly cold, but by the time they had been on the move for half an hour, the bite had gone out of the air. The going was dangerous because the snow was loose and treacherous and much of the ground underneath was rubble and loose stones. Then after a time they went down into a declivity between the two humps of the mountain which stood out on each side of them against the starlit sky. “That is Old Man Rock,” muttered Menelaus, as if afraid of being overheard. “This is Wolf Mountain. It is a bad place to be caught in a storm.”

  They stopped for a few minutes and then attacked the Wolf, climbing round its side and up to its great white head.

  When they got to the top after another hour the sky was paling slightly but it was still dark. Menelaus switched off his torch and ploughed across to where a wooden cross was half hidden in the snow. “This is the place to be. If you stand here you are out of the wind.…”

  For a few minutes he stayed with them, talking at a great rate, then he went off and stood by himself staring out over the mountains, his tall, gaunt, short-coated figure outlined like an Evzone against the lightening sky.

  Since they woke they had hardly talked together at all; Menelaus had been with them all the time and they had been strangers. They stood together now, staring and unspeaking. Then Anya said harshly:

  “Without enmity—without bitterness—I think this is the last time we can ever meet.”

  He didn’t look at her. “ If you give me your reasons I shall probably agree with them.”

  “We are on opposite sides in all this. I am not a traitor to the people I care for. You are against them and therefore I am against you. Nothing we can do can alter that—even if we wished to do it.”

  “Is that your reason?”

  “We come from different civilisations—what is the word?—irreconcilable. Everything we do and think is referred back to different principles, different sets of values. You cannot build a bridge across two thousand years.”

  “Is that your reason?”

  She didn’t say any more. The wind was dropping, as it so often does at dawn. The light came very quickly. One moment day was over the horizon, then it was in the sky, then suddenly it had fallen on them. One moment the land all about them was
secret and unknown, then it was suddenly all in place, assembled, a crag here, a heap of boulders there, a ravine, a waste of snow.

  And as the light came the view fled away from them for endless distances through the crystal air. Mountains and forests, land-locked bays, arid plains, tiny villages. Sea beyond land and land beyond the sea and sea beyond the land again; and then the sun came up a wild cadmium colour and the yellow feathers in the sky crimsoned and preened themselves and the washed green streaks faded and disappeared.

  “You are lucky,” said Menelaus, coming back to them and baring his broken teeth. “ It is good today. It is very good. See over there Mount Timfristos. That is seventy kilometres away. Could you believe it! And over there to the north—see, that way and much further—is Pelion; and beyond and behind it—to the left—is Ossa. And more to the right, far beyond the sea, that grey mass, I don’t know what it is but they say that is still Greece. Imagine it! And that, looking right into the sun, that is an island, I have forgotten its name. South, those are the mountains where you came from. And here, here in front of us is the Gulf of Corinth. And behind that the mountains of the Peloponnesus, see the peaks like teeth. It is good after all that we came this morning.”

  “It is good,” said Gene. Anya didn’t speak.

  They stood in silence for a time. Menelaus went over and began energetically to kick away the snow from round the cross.

  She said: “To find that cross on the top of a mountain dedicated to the Old Gods … One would say it would have been better to have left at least this little part of the earth to them.”

  “It could be that the old and the new gods are not so different.”

  She shook back her head as if there was a wisp of hair in her eyes. “Could that be Mount Athos—that Menelaus said was ‘ still Greece’? It is surely too far.”

  “Anyway, it’s going. It’s not as clear as five minutes ago. The miracle’s nearly over.”

  She said: “ Miracle? Yes, it is almost that. A pity, when the eyes can see so far …” She didn’t finish.

  He said: “Were those your real reasons why you felt we should not meet again?”

  “Would they be yours?”

  “Not altogether.”