by Mary Stewart
‘Well,’ said Mark, ‘of course,’ and he began to give me instructions as to how to reach the caique from the ruined Byzantine church. ‘And you could ask anyone the way over to the church itself, that would be quite a normal trip for an English visitor to want to make. I think that’s clear enough? Yes? But I hope it won’t be necessary for you to come.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘has been made awfully clear. Well, goodbye again. All the best.’
Lambis went first. My last glimpse of Mark was of him sitting stiffly, as if braced against the warm rock, with the empty mug beside him, and that grey look of worry still draining the youth from his face.
7
Oh mistress, by the gods, do nothing rash!
MATTHEW ARNOLD: Merope
Lambis spoke very little on the way down through the ravine. He kept a short way ahead of me, reconnoitring with some caution at the corners, but most of the time we walked as fast as the roughness of the path would allow. We met nobody, and came in good time through the tangle of young oaks above the lemon groves. Already, through the boughs, I could see the white flanks of a windmill, and the gleam of sunlight on the open water of the stream.
Lambis stopped in a patch of sunlight, and waited for me to catch up with him.
Beside the path where he stood was a little wayside shrine. This was merely a wooden box, wedged somehow back among a pile of rocks, with primitive little oil lamps burning in front of a brightly coloured plaque of the Panaghia, the Virgin who is at once Mother of God, and the Mother herself, the ancient Goddess of the earth. A beer bottle, standing to one side, held oil for the lamps. Verbena grew near, and violets.
Lambis gestured towards the lit lamps, and the small bunch of flowers that stood there in a rusty tin.
‘I will leave you here. People come this way, and I must not be seen.’
I said goodbye, wished him luck again, and, leaving him there, went down through the lemon groves towards the open sunlight with, it must be confessed, a definite lightening of the spirits.
It was about noon, and the heat of the day. The breeze had dropped, and even the silky poppyheads, and the quakergrass that bordered the path, hung motionless. The white sails of the windmills rested still and slack. A donkey browsed beside a tumbledown wall, in the shade of an ilex. Flies buzzed over the dust.
There was nobody about. People would be at home for the midday meal, or eating it in the fields, somewhere in the shade. I could see no one except a boy, sprawled sleepily in the sun while his goats cropped the vetches, and one man, working a field away, beyond a thick barrier of sugarcane. Neither looked up as I passed.
I stopped for a moment, gratefully, as I reached the spare shade of the pines at the edge of the lower valley. I looked back.
There it all lay, the hot fields, the lemon trees, the wooded gorge leading up into the silver wilderness of rock.
From here, there could be seen no sign of life in that empty landscape. Lambis had long since disappeared; the lemon trees hung without a quiver; above them the mountainside was dead, empty of all motion. But this time yesterday . . .
There was the movement of wings over the gorge. For a split second I stared, incredulous. But this time the wings weren’t white: what had caught my eye was the slow wheel of enormous brown feathers climbing the sky. An eagle? More likely a vulture, I thought; perhaps the lammergeier itself. At any other time I would have watched with excitement. Now, because the big bird had reminded me of the white egret, and of yesterday, I felt the tears rising in my throat.
I turned my back on it, and made my way down to the bridge.
When I reached it, I thought for a moment that my luck had deserted me. Two children were leaning over the parapet, spitting orange pips into the water; a boy and a girl, thin and dark and burned brown, with huge dark eyes and black hair, and the shy manners of the country children. They were spitting very close to my suitcase.
‘How do you do?’ I said formally.
They stared in silence, backing a little, like calves. I regarded them. I knew quite well that now they would never let me out of their sight until I reached the hotel, and probably not even then. I, the stranger, was their capture. I was news. Whatever I said or did, as from now, would be all over the village within the hour.
I crooked a finger at the boy. ‘What’s your name?’
He began to grin, probably at the humour of my speaking Greek. ‘Georgi.’
It always was. ‘And yours?’ I asked the little girl.
‘Ariadne.’ I could hardly hear the whisper.
‘Hullo, then, Georgi and Ariadne. I’m a foreigner, English. I’ve come from Chania this morning, to stay at the hotel in Agios Georgios.’
Silence. There was no answer to this, so they didn’t make one. They stood and stared, the boy with the beginnings of that urchin grin, the girl Ariadne taking in every detail of my frock, sandals, bag, wrist-watch, hairdo . . . Even from a child of eight it was not a comfortable scrutiny: I had done my best, with comb and lipstick, before I finally left the ledge, but I would hardly, I thought, look as if I had just recently left the portals of Chania’s best hotel.
‘Georgi,’ I said, ‘do you think you could carry a case down to the hotel for me?’
He nodded, looking round him, then reached for my canvas bag. ‘This?’
‘No, no, a proper case. It’s in the bushes, hidden.’ I added, carefully: ‘I came with a car from Chania, and carried my case down from the road. I left it here, because I wanted to eat my – have my coffee, that is, in the shade further up the river. So I hid my case and left it here. Can you see it? Down there, under the bridge?’
The little girl ran to the parapet and peered over. The boy went more slowly after her. ‘You can’t see it? I hid it very well,’ I said, laughing.
A shriek from Ariadne. ‘There, there, Georgi! See!’
Georgi scrambled over the parapet, hung by his hands, and dropped some ten feet into the bushes. He could easily have gone round by the bank, but, being a boy, and a Cretan at that, he no doubt felt obliged to do it the hard way. His sister and I watched him with suitable expressions of admiration, while he dusted his hands on his seat, dived intrepidly (and quite unnecessarily) through some brambles, and finally dragged my case from its hiding place. He carried it up to the road – this time by the orthodox route – and the three of us set off for the village.
Ariadne, her shyness gone, skipped along beside me, chattering all the time, in a dialect that was too fast and in places too thick for me to follow. Georgi trudged along more slowly, concerned, I could see, to carry my case with apparent ease. Both children answered my questions readily, supplying a lively commentary of their own which I made no attempt to check.
. . . Yes, the hotel was just at this end of the village. Yes, it faced the sea; the back of it, you understand, looked right on the bay. There was a garden, a beautiful garden, right on the shore, with tables and chairs, where you could eat wonderful food, ‘real English food’, promised Ariadne, wide-eyed, while Georgi hurried to explain this magnificence. It was due to the new owner – I had heard of Stratos Alexiakis, of course, since I came from England, and so did he? He was very rich, and he came from London, which was in England, and he spoke English so that you could not tell he was a Cretan. Indeed, he—
‘How can you tell?’ I asked, laughing.
‘Tony says so.’
‘Tony? Who’s he?’
‘The bar man,’ said Georgi.
‘No, the cook,’ amended Ariadne, ‘and he waits at table, and sits at the desk, and – oh, he does everything! Mr Alexiakis is not always there, you see.’
‘A sort of manager?’ I said. I remembered what my Danish informant had told me about the new owner’s ‘friend from London’. ‘This Tony—’ I hesitated. Somehow I didn’t really want to ask the next question. ‘Did he come from England, too?’
‘He is English,’ said Georgi.
A short silence. ‘Is he?’ I said.
‘Yes,
oh yes!’ This was Ariadne. ‘Mr Alexiakis had a taverna there, a huge taverna, very splendid, and so—’
‘Are there any other English people in Agios Georgios just now?’ It would have been a natural question to ask, anyway; and the context made it doubly so. I hoped my voice sounded normal.
‘No.’ Georgi’s replies were getting shorter. His face had reddened, and there were beads of sweat on it, but I knew better than to offer to relieve him of the case. His pride as a pallikári – a man’s man – was involved. ‘No,’ he said, shifting the case from one hand to the other, ‘only Tony, and the English ladies. That is you.’ He looked doubtfully at me, and finished on a question. ‘They said there would be two ladies?’
‘My cousin’s coming later today.’ I didn’t feel like attempting to explain further, and luckily, being children, they took the statement for granted, as they had taken my apparent eccentricity over the suitcase. I was thinking furiously, and not very pleasantly. I had told Mark – had known quite well – that if the dramatis personae of his murder-play were in fact from Agios Georgios, I would be bound, in such a tiny place, to come across traces of them almost straight away. But to do so as soon as this, and in the hotel itself . . .
I wetted my lips. I might be wrong. After all, people could come and go. I tried again. ‘Do you get many visitors here?’
‘You are the first at the new hotel. The first this year.’ This was Ariadne, still intent on offering me what honour she could.
‘No,’ Georgi contradicted her, stolidly. ‘There was another, a foreigner.’
‘English?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘He was English!’ cried Ariadne.
‘The fat one who went all the way to see the old church on the mountain? And took the picture that was in the Athens News? I’m sure he wasn’t!’
‘Oh, that one! No, I don’t know what he was. I wasn’t counting him, he wasn’t a proper visitor.’ By ‘visitor’, I gathered that Ariadne meant ‘tourist’. I had already recognized my Danish friend. ‘No, I meant the one who came here the other day. Don’t you remember? Tony met him at the harbour, and we heard them talking as they went to the hotel, and you said it was English they spoke.’
‘He wasn’t a proper visitor either,’ said Georgi obstinately. ‘He came by caique one afternoon, and stayed only one night, and went away again next morning early. I think he must have gone by the road. There was no boat.’
I said: ‘When did he come?’
‘Three days ago,’ said Ariadne.
‘Saturday, it was,’ said Georgi.
‘What do you come here for, to Agios Georgios?’ asked Ariadne.
I must have gazed at her blankly for a moment, before, with an effort as great as any Georgi was making, I heaved myself back out of deep waters into the safe shallows of small-talk.
‘Oh, just for a holiday. It’s – it’s so very pretty here.’ I gestured, rather lamely, towards the flower-strewn rocks, and the glittering sea. The children looked at me blankly. It had not occurred to them that scenery could be pretty. I tried another harmless lead. ‘The vines are good this year?’
‘Yes, they are good. They are the best vines in Crete.’
Stock response; of course they were. ‘Really? We don’t have vines in England. Or olives, either.’
They looked at me, shocked. ‘Then what do you eat?’
‘Bread, meat, fish.’ I realized too late that bread and meat were a rich man’s diet, but the admiration in their eyes showed no trace of envy. If there is one thing a Greek respects above intelligence, it is riches. ‘And drink?’ asked Ariadne.
‘Tea, mostly.’
This time the look in their faces made me laugh. ‘Yes, but not Greek tea. It’s made differently, and it’s nice. We make our coffee differently, too.’
This didn’t interest them. ‘No vines!’ said Ariadne. ‘Tony at the hotel says that in England everybody has electricity and a wireless and you can have it on all day and all night as loud as you like. But also, he says, it is very cold and full of fog, and the people are silent, and London is not a healthy place to live in. He says it is better here.’
‘Does he? Well, you do get the sun, don’t you? We do see it sometimes in England, but not like this. That’s why we come here for holidays, to sit in the sun, and swim, and walk in your hills, and look at the flowers.’
‘The flowers? You like flowers?’ Ariadne, darting like a humming-bird, was already pulling up the anemones in handfuls. I had to restrain myself. To me, they were exotics as gorgeous as any I had seen at Kew: to the child, weeds. But I ate meat every day. Riches? Perhaps.
Georgi wasn’t interested in flowers. The case changed hands again, as he stumped heroically forward. ‘You like swimming?’
‘Very much. Do you?’
‘Of course. No one bathes here yet; it’s still too cold, but later it’s very good.’
I laughed. ‘It’s quite warm enough for me. Where’s the best place to swim?’
‘Oh, that way is best.’ He waved his free hand vaguely towards the west. ‘There are bays, with rocks, where you can dive.’
‘Oh yes, I remember, a friend told me that was the best way. Does one have to go far?’
‘To the Dolphins’ Bay? No, not very.’
‘It’s miles and miles!’ cried Ariadne.
‘You are only small,’ said her brother contemptuously, ‘and your legs are short. For me, or for the thespoinís, it is not far.’
‘My legs are not much shorter than yours!’ Ariadne bristled, with every intention, I saw, of doing instant battle. I intervened hastily, wondering, with some pity, at what age the Cretan girls are actually taught their place in the masculine scheme of things: ‘Why do you call it Dolphins’ Bay? Do you really see dolphins there?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Georgi.
‘Sometimes they come amongst the swimmers!’ cried Ariadne, happily diverted. ‘There was a boy once, who used to ride on them!’
‘Was there?’ What ancient story was this, still surviving here among the children? Pliny’s boy from Baiae? Arion on the dolphin’s back? Telemachus, the son of Odysseus? I smiled down at her. ‘Well, I’ve never even seen a dolphin. Do you suppose they’d come and play with me?’
Truth struggled in her face with the Greek’s desire to please the stranger at all costs. ‘Perhaps . . . but it is a long time since they did this . . . I am eight years old, but it was before I was born, thespoinís. People tell stories . . .’
‘But you’ll see them,’ promised Georgi, confidently, ‘if the weather stays warm. It’s best if you go out in a caique, into deeper water. Sometimes, when I have been out fishing, we have seen them, swimming near the boat, sometimes with their young ones . . .’
And, my earlier questions forgotten, he embarked happily on the Cretan version of the fisherman’s yarn, until he was interrupted by his sister, who pushed into my arms an enormous bunch of slim, purple-red gladioli, the sort that are called ‘Byzantine’ in our seedsmen’s catalogues, where the corms retail at about fivepence each. In Crete, they grow wild in the corn. The bundle was shaggy with lilac anemones, dragged up anyhow, and scarlet tulips with pointed petals – a variety that rates at least sevenpence apiece in Frances’ nurseries.
‘For you, thespoinís!’
My delighted thanks took us round the last bend in the track, and there was the hotel.
This was, at first sight, hardly deserving of the name.
Originally, there had been two houses, square-built and two storeyed, joined to make one long, lowish building. The one on the right had been an ordinary dwelling house – large, as village standards went – of perhaps five rooms in all. The other had been the village kafenéion or coffee-shop: its big ground-floor room, with shutters pulled back, was open to the street, and played, now, the dual role of village kafenéion and hotel dining-room. Across one corner of this room was a curved counter, stacked with crockery and glasses, and with shelves of
bottles behind it. Between the coffee-making apparatus, and the stove for loukoumáthes, were some sophisticated looking pyramids of fruit. A door at the back of the room led, presumably, to the kitchen premises. The restaurant still had the scrubbed board floor and whitewashed walls of the village coffee shop, but the white cloths on the tables were of starched linen, and on some of them were flowers.
At the end of the building, against the outer wall of the restaurant, was an outside stairway, built of stone, leading to the rooms above. This was still in use, it appeared; each worn step was whitened at the edge; and on every one stood a flowering plant, blue convolvulus with long belled strands looping down the wall below; scarlet geraniums; and carnations of every shade from deep flame to the mother-of-pearl flush of a Pacific shell. The walls of the building were newly whitewashed, and the paintwork blue.
The effect was simple, fresh, and – with the flowers, and the tamarisk trees at the back, and the glimpse of the sea beyond – delightful.
Georgi dumped my case with a flourish that effectively hid his relief, and was persuaded, without much difficulty, to accept five drachmae. His pallikarás dignity concealing his delight, he went staidly off, with Ariadne scampering beside him. But just before he was out of sight past the first cottage wall, I saw him break into a run. The news was on the wing already.
Georgi had abandoned me at the edge of a covered terrace which had been built right along the front of the hotel. In the shade of its trellised roof were set a few little metal tables, where the elders of the village sat. This morning three of them were there, two playing backgammon, the third watching in motionless appraisal. A youth sat on a table near them, swinging his legs and smoking; he looked up, and watched me with some interest, but the old men never even gave me a glance.
As I turned towards the main door – it had been that of the house on the right – the youth turned his head, and called something, and a man who had been busying himself somewhere at the back of the dining-room came hurrying out past the backgammon players.
‘You must be Miss Ferris?’