5
Late on Friday afternoon, the siege was lifted. All-or-nothing Strang, he reflected, looking around the battlefield. The bedroom was in complete chaos, not one horizontal surface uncovered, not one vertical that wasn’t a prop. But he had won, only six hours later than the deadline he had set himself, which wasn’t too bad. Neither were the drawings. He looked at them again, anxiously, critically; then felt the stirring of excitement. They were all right, they were very much all right. All right, so they’re all right, he told himself sharply, all right! Keep your hat on and your overcoat buttoned, Strang. But it gave him sweet pleasure to file the finished job carefully away in the waiting compartment in his portfolio.
He looked as much a mess as the room. He had been needing a haircut for a week. Now, too, he needed some exercise and sun. But most of all he needed some empty hours, doing what he damned well wanted to do, and no more must’s, don’t forget’s, or have to’s. For two days he’d have a holiday.
He shaved and showered quickly, chose a crisp blue shirt (bless the Sicilian laundress who made a traveller’s life worth living) and a dark red tie to lend a festive touch to his grey suit. He was going to walk out, quite aimlessly, not even a sketchbook to bulge the pocket of his newly pressed coat, and look at the town and the people. For the first time in weeks, he felt free. This was the evening he had been looking forward to.
He stopped at the porter’s lodge to see if there was any message from Kladas. There was none. So Steve had not yet returned from Syracuse. That was not surprising; Steve’s sense of timing was a little haphazard. If you asked him to come round and have a drink at six, he would arrive at half past seven and think he was early.
Strang passed through the gate at the lodge into a small courtyard sloping up towards a broad street, almost a square, of quiet houses and walled gardens and a long row of empty tourist buses from practically every country in Western Europe. He closed his eyes, and turned away to open them at a more pleasing prospect: the rising tiers of old buildings and Norman towers laced together by flights of worn stone steps. He began to climb up into a compact little world of many centuries, and reached the next ledge on the hillside—a narrow, main street, broadening into a piazza: three sides for cafés and teashops, the fourth for a magnificent view towards the sea, if one could see the view for the hillocks of sun-pink shoulders and the forest of reddened thighs. It was a pity that people thought they had to start undressing when they went travelling; few were built for it.
Nothing, thought Strang as he sat down at a table and ordered a beer, would have pleased him more than to see a lot of beautiful girls with bare shoulders and pretty legs; but the beautiful girls were few and wore masses of skirt. There was a cruel twist, apparently, to the simpler enjoyments of life. He had another beer, listened to the snatches of six or seven languages drifting into one unintelligible human voice, and then decided to continue along the main street and find a barbershop.
The Corso was narrow, crowded, lined with small shops. Everything from embroidered blouses to cheese and wine, but he must have missed the barber’s. A car drove slowly past, and the pedestrians either flattened out against windows and walls or dodged into doorways. Strang was doing just that— fortunately, it was a bookshop with a good display of foreign periodicals and newspapers on the racks by the door—when a woman’s voice said, “Excuse me.” She had been coming out of the shop, with a selection of magazines under her arm, and he, trying to decide between Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, had blocked her way.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping aside. She was young, no more than twenty-four or five, dressed in cool green linen. She didn’t walk past him. She stood, her large eyes widening (almost green they were in colour, and not violet, after all) as she recognised him. She was the Englishwoman with golden hair and a perfect skin, now lightly tanned into what Italians called, not peaches and cream, but carnations, who had stood in the lobby of a Naples hotel and watched Steve Kladas cut her husband dead.
Some of the embarrassment that Strang had felt now came flooding back over his face. She noticed it. She said, “How do you do? We were nearly introduced once. Or don’t you remember?”
“Naples,” he said, recovering himself, “on a cold and empty night.”
“In a hot and glittering lobby.”
They laughed. And then there was a small silence. “I suppose” she said, “we should finish the introduction which your friend didn’t want. I am Caroline Ottway.”
“And my name’s Strang, Kenneth Strang.”
She transferred her pile of magazines (they were mostly American, he noted) to her left arm, and they shook hands formally. She was studying him. Then she seemed to come to a decision, for she nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I am going to talk with you.”
“You are?”
“Yes. After you buy your magazines.”
“They can wait.”
“They won’t. This lot will vanish in the next hour. You had better make your choice while there is still one to make.” She patted her own collection proudly.
Quickly, he selected four American magazines, Encounter, Réalités. “I was reduced to reading the travel folders,” he remarked. “Very forceful prose, too. Did you know that Taormina offers ‘revigoration of the health?’ It also ‘represents an oasis of peace in an over-anxious world.’ Isn’t that reassuring?”
She watched him, thinking: Kenneth Strang, Kenneth Strang, I’ve heard or seen that name; I’m almost sure I’ve seen it someplace. For a moment, she wondered if George would be cross about all this; he never had become accustomed to her way of reacting so instinctively to people. And she could never quite change herself, however much she tried. And she had tried, she really had tried in those last five years. Perhaps everything would ease out, just a little, now that George had this new post in Athens and felt he was useful again and could be among his beloved Greeks.
She stopped worrying about her husband, and decided, as Kenneth Strang paid for his magazines and made a couple of pleasant remarks to the nice man who ran this shop, that she was right—this time, at least—in her instinctive reactions. It wasn’t just that Kenneth Strang had the kind of face she liked. He was not so handsome as George, she thought loyally, but he was good looking, certainly: strong, even features, thoughtful grey eyes, and a smile not too frequent but quite original; in this day of polite masks and guarded emotions, it was refreshing to see a smile that seemed real, not just a forced grin or a deprecating smirk. But most of all she liked the way he had looked, back in Naples, when George had put out his hand to that dreadful Yannis who said he wasn’t Yannis, and had been met by a brick wall. Mr. Strang had looked as if he himself had felt the blow. Yes, she decided, I think he would listen to me, and help.
“Now,” Strang said as he rejoined her, “where is your favourite café, or shall we talk here and block up the doorway?”
She laughed and began walking along the Corso. “There’s a café at the end of this street, not so fashionable as those back on the piazza, but you can look at the Norman gateway and admire an Arab tower when my conversation runs low. Besides,” she added wistfully, “sometimes you do see a real native there, and one of those beguiling little donkeys.”
“I was wrong about you.”
She looked perplexed.
“You aren’t English.” She has tried hard, he thought: voice, clothes, looks, all seemed English. But she wasn’t.
“What part of America do you come from?”
She looked as if he had given her a jolt. She said, stiltedly, “I was educated in England, I married an Englishman, I live in England, most of my friends are now English. But, technically, you’re correct. I’m an American.”
“And it keeps breaking in. Beguiling.”
“What else can you say about a Sicilian donkey? Sweet, darling, amusing, enchanting? No. It’s beguiling.”
“More beguiling than most of the other donkeys wander
ing around,” he said, as he stepped aside for the fifth time in two minutes.
“You are like my husband. Tourist shy. But, you know, we are tourists, too.”
“Yes. That’s what worries me.”
She laughed. “I can’t get George to admit that. He has retreated into our room and says he has work to do. George is my husband,” she added, unnecessarily.
I should hope so, he thought, or you aren’t the girl I took you for.
“We’ve been here three weeks.”
“Three weeks?”
“Don’t look so appalled. It sounded divine when we planned it in a January London fog.” They had come to the end of the Corso, into a small square sloping down to the old town wall and its main gateway. She led the way to a little café, where icy stares greeted them from some permanent foreigners who had adopted Taormina, their refuge against materialism, as long as the cheques from home arrived on time.
“We are two more of those damned tourists,” Strang observed cheerfully. “The real natives are kinder.” The group of workmen who had gathered round a metal-topped table for small cups of bitter, black coffee were watching them, certainly, as far as Caroline Ottway was concerned, with far from disapproving eyes. “What will you have?” he asked her as the waiter approached. He smiled. “Tea?”
“I’ll have American coffee just to disappoint you.”
“They’ll bring you a can of that make-it-yourself-with-a-spoon stuff,” he warned her. “We’d better play safe and order Cinzano. Okay?”
She nodded. She was frowning at the table, not so much at the overfriendly flies enjoying the last customer’s beer rings, as at some problem shaping up in her mind.
“You know,” he said, watching her, “I think it has been so long since you had a good cup of coffee that you’ve forgotten its taste.”
“Possibly,” she admitted. But she was thinking of something other than coffee, or café tables, or people passing by.
“He tried again. “When did you leave America?”
“I only lived there during the war.” And there was one of her beguiling little donkeys, but she did not even see it.
“So it has its uses,” he suggested.
She looked at him indignantly, stung into attention. “I was a child then. My father was Peter Drew Martinson.” Silence again, with a frown from the beautiful dark brows to underline it.
“Oh?” he asked politely. I’m ready to give up, he thought; this isn’t exactly the pleasant talk it promised to be. You’ve got another wrong number, Strang.
“He was a news correspondent in Europe. Mother and I trekked around with him. Until the war. After that—Mother had died—I joined him again. I was brought up all over the place. England for school, Paris and Geneva for the hols.” A little smile came back into her face. “Sorry. For vacations.”
“Keep that smile,” he said.
She blushed a little. “I didn’t become uprooted through choice,” she said. “It just happened.”
Peter Martinson, he remembered. “Oh, yes,” he said, remembering, too, Martinson’s death in a car crash outside of London five or six years ago. “I saw your father once. At the bar in the Grande Bretagne, in Athens.” She looked puzzled. “Christmas, 1944,” he explained. “He was arguing with a crowd of other reporters who were all preparing to shoot poisoned darts into Churchill. The old boy had just arrived to see for himself what was going on. Your father was trying to get them to ask a few questions and listen to a few answers before they started aiming for Churchill’s heart.”
“Aiming for his back, you mean,” she said bitterly. “Did you ever see so much one-sided reporting as was done then? How could it happen? How?”
“Those were the days before the pattern of political takeover became clear,” he reminded her.
“So you excuse people who had to have a blood bath in Hungary before they could see the pattern?”
“I’m not excusing. Just explaining,” he said patiently. “We’ve all learned a little since then.”
“My father didn’t need the example of Hungary.”
“No,” he agreed quietly. “I expect he didn’t.”
She dropped the edge in her voice. “Sorry. But if you knew how my father was cold-shouldered for years! Oh, well—” For a moment, she was silent. “And what on earth took you to Athens, just then?”
“Sulfa drugs and powdered milk. A sort of special express job from the Piraeus docks.”
“Were you Red Cross, or what?”
“Strictly Navy. We unloaded the stuff from one of the supply ships we had convoyed to the Piraeus—there was an emergency call for it, you see. And then we couldn’t get anyone to run the stuff up to Athens, either, so we borrowed a bus and did that job, too.”
“Was that when you met Yannis?” she asked. She was completely and intensely interested.
He looked at her for a long moment. He began to laugh.
“Now why?” she wanted to know.
“Just a little joke against myself.” And the second one today, he thought. First, Alexander Christophorou. Now you. What secret charms has Steve Kladas got that I haven’t? He glanced at his watch, and counted out enough life to take care of the drinks and the tip. Then, as she stared at him in astonishment, he said, “I’d suggest another Cinzano, but your husband is probably beginning to think you’ve been kidnapped on a beguiling donkey to the upper slopes of Etna.”
“So you did meet Yannis in Athens,” she said slowly.
“I never met any Yannis,” he said shortly. “My friend in Naples is an American. I met him in New York. His name is not Yannis. It’s Steve—” He stopped there. He would leave it to Steve himself to broadcast Kladas.
“Please—” she said, gathering up her magazines, letting them slip. “Oh thank you, I’m so sorry to be such a nuisance. Please—” She looked up at him in utter confusion. She was close to tears. “It’s all so very important to me,” she finished lamely, her voice dragging.
“All right,” he said more gently. “We’ll find another café and begin all over again.”
“Perhaps I ought to go back to the hotel,” she said doubtfully. “It’s later than I thought.”
Women, he thought, women... If they were all ugly and dull and stupid, they would be easier to bear.
“All right,” he said again.
“And walk with me,” she said almost pleadingly. “I must explain a little.”
That, he decided, was much needed.
“Because you really have been so very nice,” she added.
“And may I carry your schoolbooks, ma’am?” He took the load of magazines under his arm. “Which way?”
“This street, just here. Our hotel is almost at the end of it.” They began walking up the long, gradual hill. “It’s rather a sweet little place. We stayed there five years ago, just after we were married. George was terribly ill in London last winter. Pleurisy. I thought it would be a marvellous idea to spend a holiday here, before we went on to Athens.” She sounded as if she had doubts now about that idea. Perhaps a honeymoon was not easily recaptured.
“Athens? I am headed that way, too.”
“Are you? George has been given a post at the embassy there. That is, he is sort of attached to the embassy. He is an expert on Greek affairs, you know. He has spent so much of his life, or rather the most important part of his life, with the Greeks.”
Strang hid his astonishment. If I had a wife who looked like this, he thought, the most important part of my life would damned sure not be spent with other people.
“You see,” she was saying, “George knows so many Greeks. He spent two years with them in the mountains during the war. A number of British officers were smuggled in, you know, to join the bigger resistance groups as liaison between them and headquarters in Cairo.”
“I’ve heard about that.” And he was remembering an empty restaurant in Naples, and Steve Kladas talking.
(Steve was saying, “Oh, yes, there were Englishmen in the mountains
with us, types who, learned classical Greek at school and came to visit the ruins and sail among the islands in peacetime—just the same kind of romantic idiots as you, Ken, who thought we were all Homeric heroes. They grew beards like us; slept on cold mountainsides, hid in peasants’ houses with us; starved like us; marched with us; fought with us against the Germans... God, did they have a rough awakening! But no rougher than I had, and thousands like me.”)
She had been talking about George’s experiences with the guerrilla forces. Blowing up bridges became his speciality. That wasn’t so easy in the last year of the Nazi occupation, because the leaders of George’s group became more evasive about taking orders from Cairo or London.
“What group was that?” Strang asked quickly.
“The biggest of all. To begin with, there were many groups of resistance fighters, but George’s group had good organisers. So it grew. In the end, it was an army.”
(And Steve was saying, “Our group was getting bigger and bigger, and some of these ways of getting bigger were not so pretty. We would surround a resistance group who did not share our leaders’ politics: either they joined us or they were wiped out. Very simple. Same rule with villages and the peasants: give no help to any other guerrilla bands, or watch your men be killed. And I’m not talking about collaborators; I shed no tears for them. I am talking about how to deal with the opposition, how to wipe it out before peace comes, and the elections. Sometimes the killing was not so pretty, either. Have you seen a man flayed? Have you seen a man crucified? There was one of our leaders, Ares, he called himself, the god of war. He used to boast he had killed two thousand men with his own hands. He was always a braggart, but cut that estimate in half and you still could not overestimate him. He had a special band of followers, a punitive force, about fifty of them; they liked to wear astrakhan hats and beards—by God, I never want to see their like again come upon any poor pitiful village. What’s the matter, Ken? Isn’t this your idea of underground resistance? You look just like the Englishmen, unable to believe or understand. Later, they did believe the truth, but I doubt if they ever understood it. Sure, they were good men, most of them, but they kept stumbling over their schoolboy learning. What did they think the ancient Greeks were, anyway? Only a set of handsome profiles on a high frieze?”)
Decision at Delphi Page 7
