Strangers in Company

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “Yes, isn’t it tiresome?”

  “Kalemera,” said Stella surprisingly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Good morning,” she explained. “And kalespera is good afternoon. It’s all in the phrase book, but it actually works. I tried it on the chambermaid.”

  Seven thirty seemed very early, and eight thirty not much better. It was a subdued party that climbed into the bus to be greeted, once again, with muddle. Someone, it seemed, had decided that they must rotate (“like crops,” whispered Stella crossly) so that everyone had his fair share of front windows and wheels. But, naturally, since not everyone had gone to Sounion the day before, there was considerable confusion about who should be sitting where. When they were finally sorted out, the schoolmistresses were sitting enmasse in front of Marian and Stella, and the professor and Mrs. Spencer behind them. She looked hotter than ever today, in another twinset, this time blue to match her eyes. Had no one told her, Marian wondered, about the Greek climate? The professor had stood in the aisle for a moment, looking puzzled. Now he sat down beside her. “Funny,” Marian heard him say, and then, “I guess I was tireder than I knew.”

  “Kyriae kai kyrii.” A new voice drew all attention to the front of the bus.

  “Wow,” said Stella.

  He was beautiful as only Mediterranean young men can be beautiful: brown skin, dark hair, flashing teeth all adding up to the glossy look of perfect health and, Marian thought, perfect self-confidence. His gleaming smile was an impartial benison. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he went on. “Let me introduce myself. I am your devoted guide, Mihailos Angelou. You will call me Mike of course; everyone does, and we will be dear friends before many days. You will help me with my English”—his accent was sometimes difficult—and I will teach you many many things about our beautiful Greece, birthplace of the gods and of democracy.” There was a challenging sparkle in his eye now. He laughed. “Do you know what one of my ladies said to me last year? ‘What is your Greek word for politics?’ she asked me. And, ‘Madam,’ I said, ‘Politics is our word. What is yours?’ And that,” he went on, “is all the politics we are going to talk. We have a proverb, here in Greece, that if you have two Greeks, you have two political parties, and if you have two of them, you have a quarrel. So, we shall not quarrel, you and I.” Once again, the warm smile embraced them. “This is a classical tour, and we have more interesting things to do. We shall talk of Zeus and his cross wife Hera, and I will tell you tales of the old days, when gods were jealous and men were heroes.” He turned and spoke rapid Greek to the bus driver. “Now we start. Our driver is Andreas, and he bids you kalemera, which is good morning. You will all say, ‘Kalemera, Andreas.’”

  They did, rather sheepishly, and Mike beamed approval. “Now our first stop is at Eleusis. Most tours, as perhaps you know, go first to the ancient Byzantine church at Daphne, but it is not ancient as we are going to think of antiquity.” The bus had pulled away from the hotel, but he still stood, swaying to its motion, the microphone in his hand. “We are going far far back into the dark past, and now, if you please, you will shut your eyes to modern Athens, and your ears to its noise, and you will imagine yourselves as pilgrims, torches in hand, walking, in the dark, the Sacred Way to Eleusis. Perhaps you are an initiate and know what is to come. Perhaps not, and you are afraid of what awaits you. And do not ask me what it is, for no one knows. The mystery of Eleusis has never been solved. The initiates swore a terrible oath not to reveal what they did and saw, and, my friends, they kept it. So this is a mystery story, if you like, with no ending. Only we know that the great goddess Demeter, the earth mother, was worshipped there, because it was there, while she searched for her lost daughter Persephone, that she taught her host, King Celeus, the art of husbandry. The first corn grew at Eleusis, ladies and gentlemen. I am afraid you will find no corn there now. The sacred site lies between an aerodrome and some very useful modern factories. But if you keep looking to your right, you will see the votive niches in the rock, where once stood statues, no doubt of gold and precious work, and presently, the sacred lakes of Rhiti. And if you look to your left, ladies and gentlemen, you will see the island of Salamis, where the Persian king sat on his golden throne to watch his fleet destroy the Greeks. As your poet says,

  He counted them at break of day—

  And when the sun set where were they?

  The united Greeks beat him, ladies and gentlemen, and sent him back to Persia, where he belonged.” He smiled once more. “And now, remember, you are pilgrims, torch-bearing, on your way to the Great Mystery of Eleusis.”

  He sat down in his seat beside the driver, and a little buzz of conversation broke out in the bus. “I know another quote from Byron.” Marian recognied Mrs. Duncan’s brisk voice.

  The mountains look on Marathon—

  And Marathon looks on the sea;

  And musing there an hour alone,

  I dream’d that Greece might still be free.

  “Apposite,” said the professor quietly from behind Marian, “but perhaps not tactful? I reckon we’ve had our warning about politics. Let’s take it, shall we? After all, we’re here to enjoy ourselves, and I’m sure we don’t want to make trouble for anybody.”

  “No, no, of course not.” She sounded surprised at the idea, but subsided into silence.

  “How did Demeter come to lose her daughter?” asked Stella.

  “I’m sure I don’t know.” The knife twisted once more in the wound. “It does seem careless.” She made her voice light as she turned round to speak to Professor Edvardson. “Can you tell us?”

  “About Persephone? Well, there are dozens of stories, but the gist of it is that she had a loving mother who didn’t want to part with her and kept her safe in a garden, maybe on Crete; only unluckily, Hades, King of the Underworld, happened to see her, fell in love and carried her off. Poor Demeter hunted all over for her, and in the end she only got her back for part of each year. That’s why we have the seasons, you see. It’s winter when Persephone’s underground with her husband.”

  “It sounds like an awful warning to mothers,” said Stella. “But I’m not quite sure what kind.”

  Marian clenched her hands on the strap of her bag. Is it better to lose your daughter to a husband or a father? And how should one be warned? What should one have done? Her head was beginning to throb: the bad night, the hurried breakfast, the confused start, and now this.… Soon, she knew, the throb would be an ache, the ache a migraine. She closed her eyes and tried to make herself relax. “Just relax,” Dr. Brown would say. Relax? You might as well say it to someone on the rack.

  The bus was slowing down. “Here we are, ladies and gentlemen.” Mike was on his feet again, microphone in hand. “This way for the Mysteries.”

  More talk about Demeter and Persephone? About lost daughters? Viola … Sebastian … I can’t. She was in the window seat. Just stay there? Why not? Stella, surprisingly, had already pushed her way forward down the aisle to speak to Cairnthorpe. The professor and Mrs. Spencer were moving out to follow. Marian leaned forward. “I say.” She spoke to both of them. “Would you very kindly tell Miss Marten that I think I’ll sit this one out. I’ve got a bit of a head.”

  “I’ll stay with you.” Little Mrs. Spencer spoke with surprising authority.

  “No, please.… I just need to rest.… It’s very good of you.”

  “Migraine.” The professor’s eyes were kind under the bushy brows. “You’ll be much better on your own. Come along, Mrs. Spencer; we don’t want to miss young Mike on the Mysteries. I hope he’s got another genuine homegrown Greek proverb for us.” He shepherded her, firm but polite, forward down the bus. It was quiet at last Marian leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. Her conscience told her that she should have gone with Stella; her reason replied that in that case she would have been useless for the rest of the day. Traffic hummed; a factory siren sounded; voices drifted past as other buses let out their loads of tourists. It was nothing to do with her;
it was peace. For a few minutes, exquisitely, she slept.

  “You poor thing.” Mrs. Hilton’s voice jerked her back to wakefulness. “I came back the minute I heard. Fancy leaving you all on your own. Why! Anything might have happened to you. The driver’s over at that bar, drinking God knows what with a lot of friends. I had to make him unlock the bus to let me in. No Greek, mind you, but I managed. So here I am, the little nurse, and here’s a glass of water and a pill you’re going to take.”

  Not a small woman, she loomed surprisingly large in the corridor of the empty bus. “No!” It came out with a vehemence that surprised Marian. “Thank you very much. But all I need is to be quiet for a bit.”

  “Nonsense.” Mrs. Hilton sat down in the seat beside her. “I know those heads; they go on forever if you don’t take something. My doctor gives me these—” She held the pill firmly in one hand and offered the water with the other.

  “No, really. It’s very kind of you.” Marian searched wildly for an explanation for her deep, irritational reluctance to accept the kindly proferred medicine. “I’ve got an odd kind of allergy.” She found the perfect formula. “My doctor told me never to take anything without his permission. It brings me out in the most dreadful spots.”

  “Ooh, how frightful. Where?” Mrs. Hilton was putting the pill back in a little bottle.

  “All over. Ought you to take the glass back?” Anything to get rid of this friendly, intolerable woman.

  “Mr. Cairnthorpe can, when he gets back. After all, he’s supposed to be in charge of us.” She poured the water out of the window and went forward down the aisle to deposit the glass on Cairnthorpe’s seat. “That was a proper turn-up between him and your Miss Marten, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Ooh, didn’t you hear? She’s mad as fire because of this moving round business. In the bus, you know. Seems like common sense to me, but it won’t suit her nohow. So hard on the singles, she says. Stuck with the same person all the time. Proper narked she was when he stuck to his guns and said it was all settled. There’s more to that young man than meets the eye, if you ask me; I thought he was a dead loss yesterday, but I’m not so sure today. The guide chipped in, too, that Mike, and took your Miss Marten’s side, but Cairnthorpe wasn’t having any. ‘You’re the guide,’ he says, ‘but I’m the courier.’ And that was that. I don’t reckon Mike liked it overmuch, and I’m dead sure Miss Marten didn’t. Oh—here they come.”

  She moved up to her own seat, which was now two forward from Marian’s, owing to the clockwise movement of the passengers. At least, Marian thought, if they must resign themselves to the same people in front and behind them, there would be a constant change in those across the aisle.

  “Well.” Stella plumped down irritably in the aisle seat. “You didn’t miss much, Mrs. F. How’s the head?”

  “Better, thanks.” Surprisingly it was true. Equally surprisingly, and much to her relief, Stella said nothing about the argument with Cairnthorpe.

  “Corinth next,” she said. “Are you game to walk across the canal, Mrs. F.?”

  Chapter Four

  Mike was an admirable guide. By the time they reached the Corinth Canal, they knew it had been planned over and over again through the ages, by Nero amongst others. He had actually dug the first earth with a golden spade, before trouble in Rome called him home, but what with one thing and another the project had not been finished until the nineteenth century. They also knew a good deal about Corinth, city of wealth and courtesans, where the famous Lais charged ten thousand drachmae a night, but gave her favours free to ugly Diogenes, the philosopher who told Alexander the Great to get out of his sun. “‘It isn’t everyone who can afford to go to Corinth,’” Mike quoted to them, and when their visit to the Temple of Apollo was over and they were back in the bus, Stella summed up what might well have been many people’s feelings: “It isn’t everyone who’d want to. They can keep it for all of me, Doric columns and the lot. I never did go much for architectural terms.”

  “No.” Marian was happy to agree with her. “But I’m looking forward to Mycenae.”

  One last look up to the towering citadel of the Acro-Corinth, where, the professor leaned forward to tell Marian and Stella, the Turkish garrison had held out all through the Greek War of Indepedence, and the bus began to climb up out of the coastal plain.

  “God, I’m hungry,” said Stella. “Thank goodness it’s lunch first and Mycenae afterwards.”

  Lunch at the Belle Hélène was stuffed vine leaves again, and delicious. Only the professor was disappointed. “They’ve changed the place a whale of a lot since I was here last. Progress, I suppose. But I liked it the way Schliemann saw it.”

  “Schliemann?” asked Stella.

  “The man who found Mycenae and all that gold. I expect Mike will tell us about him on our way up to the site.”

  Mike did, but Marian was not listening. She was back in her own deep past, those lonely days at school, before she met Mark, when all her life was books. A day girl at an Oxford boarding school, she had somehow belonged in neither the world of school nor that of home. The school library, and later the public one, had been her refuge, secondhand bookshops her pleasure. She would never forget discovering the tattered grey translations of Aeschylus’ three plays about the doomed House of Atreus. A cold little shiver ran down her spine. Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, to get a fair wind for his fleet to sail against Troy. He had got it, too, and conquered Troy, after ten years, by the meanest of tricks, only to come home, bringing the unlucky prophetess Cassandra with him, to his own doom, and hers. And could you blame his wife, Clytemnestra, who had sent her daughter off, as she thought, to marry the great Achilles and then learned of her death on the sacrificial alter? No wonder if she took a lover, and if the two of them, alerted by the beacon fires that announced Agamemnon’s triumphal return, planned and carried out their deed of blood. Daughters.… What was Mark doing with Viola? Sebastian would be all right. It was his nature, all too like his father’s. But Viola.… Would Mark be taking care of her properly? Or sacrificing the two of them on the publicity altar of his career? They had been a liability eighteen years ago. Now, eighteen, similar, beautiful, they had proved, suddenly, an asset. Would he even have the sense to take care of them as such? And, if not, would they be wise enough to come home? Suppose they decided to, cabled her and got no answer, because she was here, on this mad venture, in Greece?

  Mike’s voice aroused her, and she was glad of it. This kind of aimless worry was a self-indulgence she could ill afford. They had reached the gate to the inevitable wire-mesh fence, and Mike was striking an attitude by it as Cairnthorpe handed out tickets. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are here, at the entrance to the palace of the doomed Atrides. Can you hear the Furies howling up the wind?”

  “Grue,” said Stella, and then, “We actually seem to have the place to ourselves.”

  It was true; theirs was the only bus below them in the car park, but now, looking back, Marian saw a small red car being deftly parked beside it. Two young men emerged and came up the hill with the long, swift strides of practised walkers. Marian wondered for a moment if they intended to hang on the edges of their party and get the benefit of Mike’s guiding, but as they passed, they were talking in what she assumed to be Greek. Quick glances at all the younger females of the party suggested a more likely interest. They were handsome enough themselves to get several covert sideways looks as they loped past, up the hill and out of sight.

  The Mercury party, straggling more slowly up the slope, struck Marian as disgustingly cheerful. Had they no sense of history? Probably not, she thought. Even the schoolmistresses were giggling happily together, having shared their first brave bottles of wine at the Belle Hélène. Only Stella was silent, deep in her own thoughts, and Marian was glad to walk, just as silently, beside her, up the hillside resplendent in the appropriate royal purple and gold of a thousand vetches and small, strange daisies. And then, turning a corner o
f the path, she saw ahead the great gateway, with the two headless lions guarding the entrance to Agamemnon’s palace. Her first feeling was complete disappointment. She had imagined, for some reason, a kind of cross between Trafalgar Square and those extraordinary lions on Delos that turned up in all the picture books.

  Stella, too, was looking at the stone figures with less than enthusiasm. “I don’t see how their heads fitted in,” she said.

  “I think they were gryphons.” Mrs. Duncan had joined them “I never saw a gryphon.” Stella’s tone was so rude that Mrs. Duncan moved away with a quick, at once surprised and sympathetic glance for Marian.

  Mike was saying his piece about the weight of the huge stone lintel, interrupted from time to time by the necessities of the various photographers of the party. “The light’s hopeless.” One of the schoolmistresses had given it up. They moved forward raggedly through the great gate to see the rough path leading still upwards.

  “Ouch!” Mrs. Hilton, just in front of Marian and Stella, turned an ankle and swore. “These damned shoes. Hey, you, Mike!” And as he turned back towards her, “Do we come back this way? I’ve half a mind to stay here.”

  Mike shrugged. “As you please. But the shaft graves where Schliemann found the golden death masks are just at the top here. You could sit and rest there, if you like, while the rest of us go down to the hidden spring.”

  “Come on, Mrs. Hilton.” Cairnthorpe had stayed behind buying their tickets at the gate but now caught up with them and took her arm. “It’s worth the climb, I promise you.”

  “Oh, very well, if you say so.” Leaning on Cairnthorpe’s arm, she flicked a quick, spiteful glance at her husband. “That’s what I needed.”

  “We’ll get you some espadrilles in Nauplia,” said Mr. Hilton.

  Stella wanted to take a picture back through the lion gate, and Marian was glad of the excuse to let the Hiltons get on ahead. She was beginning to find Mrs. Hilton’s whining voice and perpetual grumbles an increasing irritant, and worse still, it was all too obvious that Mrs. Hilton intended to make friends with her.