Strangers in Company

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “Ecology and all that,” said Stella cheerfully. “Consider me in disgrace. So help me, I won’t pick so much as a buttercup from now on.”

  “There aren’t any buttercups,” said Mrs. Duncan, and Marian saw David and Stella exchange delighted glances behind her back.

  The schoolmistresses had clustered round to examine the rare flower, and they all moved forward together, while Marian found herself between Miss Gear and Miss Grange as they straggled along the path to the rest of the site. “Lot of nonsense,” said Miss Gear.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Miss Grange was judicious. “She had a point, of course, but there was no need to make it so rudely. And just as that poor child of yours was looking a bit better, too. Frankly, Gear and I have been a bit worried about her. Looks a bit schiz to us.”

  “Schiz?”

  “Ophrenic,” helped Miss Gear. “We’re psychiatrists, Grange and I. You can’t help noticing things when you’re in the trade. Of course, we’d rather die than interfere, but we’ve been wanting a word with you, just to offer help if it’s needed.”

  “Has she anything to take?” asked Miss Grange.

  “Take?”

  “Medicine.” Miss Grange was patient. “Tranquillisers. You take them, don’t you? If you don’t mind my mentioning it”

  Marian found that she did, very much. Her every instinct was to evade this merciless, courteous probing, but they were walking along in a kind of loose crocodile through the ruins, and escape would be impossible short of open rudeness. “Sometimes,” she admitted.

  “But you’re perfectly normal,” said Miss Geer heartily. “Anyone can see that. I’m not so sure about Miss Marten.”

  “Very odd changes of mood,” said Miss Grange.

  “We’d thought about drugs, but the symptoms aren’t right.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Marian’s tone was dry to the point of fury, but the two women were too happily launched on what was obviously a well-tried discussion to notice.

  “Naturally,” agreed Miss Grange. “But there could be worse things.” The idea appeared to give her pleasure. “You don’t share a room with her?”

  “No.”

  “That’s something. We thought you couldn’t be when we saw her sitting up to all hours last night, drinking with that young Greek.”

  “Greek?” This, Marian realised, was what they had wanted to tell her.

  “That Mike, who’s so handsome and knows it. We rather hoped she wouldn’t get—well, too involved with him.”

  Divided between being worried and annoyed by this doubtless well-intended bit of information, Marian was still searching for the right reply when Mrs. Spencer spoke briskly from behind her. “Mr. Cairnthorpe’s started to speak. Poor man; it’s the least one can do to listen.”

  “He wants us to call him David,” said Marian, gratefully following through fallen pillars to where Cairnthorpe had taken his place on a block of stone to talk of the cult of Aesculapius and the various theories about the mysterious circular ruin, or tholos, that they were about to see. She found she could not listen, could not care what the curious labyrinth under the circular building might or might not have been used for. Serpents … a very small minotaur … Cairnthorpe was enjoying himself, she thought, and so had Miss Gear and Miss Grange been. Disgusting, but true. “Power corrupts.” … “We murder to dissect.” … Quotations buzzed in her head like angry bees.… Bees. She would not let two prying women spoil this heavenly place for her. She moved a little away from the crowd, sat down on a stone, closed her eyes and tried to make her mind a blank. The cuckoo called again.… The magic of the place was coming back.… Let them go, the thought grew in her mind, unexpected, like a green shoot in the desert. Let it all go. The remembered bitterness; the terrible feeling of inadequacy, of failure; those desperate months after Mark left her, when the only thing that kept her going, kept her out of the enticing river, was the fusillade of kicks with which the unborn twins reminded her of their existence. And now—she lay back in the warm sun—now she must let the twins go, too. They had been her life for eighteen years, and then, at a nod, at a ring of the doorbell, at a brief cable from America, they had left her. Grown up. Gone. And in their place a great emptiness. A great peace? Why had she never thought of it like that before? And the cuckoo, singing of spring.

  “Daydreaming?” A heavy hand fell on her shoulder.

  “You’ll miss the museum if you don’t get a move on.” Miss Gear and Miss Grange had found her again.

  This time it was Stella who rescued her. “There you are!” She hurried towards them, picking her way nimbly among fallen stones. “Come along, Mrs. F., you have to help me make my offering to Aesculapius. In the tholos, don’t you think? It’s the most magic place.”

  “The museum closes at one.” Miss Gear looked at her watch.

  “We wouldn’t keep you for anything.” Stella’s voice was honey-sweet.

  “The carvings are supposed to be quite extraordinary,” said Miss Grange.

  “So is this place.” Stella watched them move away, then hurry to catch up with the rest of the party, talking eagerly together as they went. “Prying old pussies.” She reached down a hand to pull Marian to her feet. “What did they say about me?”

  “They don’t think you’re on drugs.” Marian surprised herself with her answer.

  Stella threw back her head and laughed. “Handsome of them. I’m just mad, I suppose. Come on, Mrs. F. Let’s behave like the lunatics we are and leave our gift for Aesculapius.”

  She insisted on climbing down into the ditch that surrounded the little circular building and working her way into the centre of the labyrinth, where, she reported, coming back flushed and smiling, she had left her offering on a most suitable stone. She looked, Marian thought, rather like a child who knows it has been naughty, as she reached up a hand to be helped out of the deep ditch. “Now, Mrs. F., must it be the museum, or shall we cheat and go and have an ouzo? I liked the look of that café.”

  “So did I.” Marian was hardly paying attention. When she had thought of Stella as looking like a child, she had just thought of children, not of her own children. I’m free, she thought. I’m free of them. “Wait a minute.” She stopped. “Oh, yes, the café, of course. But I want to leave something, too.” She looked about her. No pine cones here. Only the ordinary flowers. “It’s the thought that counts.” The trite words mocked her. She opened her bag. “Stella?”

  “Yes?” Something in her tone had brought Stella’s attention full on her.

  “Could you bear to go back and leave something for me?”

  “Of course.” But she looked up swiftly from the photograph Marian handed her. “Your children? Are you sure, Mrs. F.?”

  “Quite sure.” Don’t let her say anything. Not anything at all.

  Stella said nothing. She climbed quietly down into the ditch again, vanished into the labyrinth, and returned, after a surprisingly short time, to hold up a hand once more, for help, and say, “They’re there, Mrs. F. Under my flower. Aesculapius has had a good day. And now, how about that drink?” She took Marian’s arm, in a curiously protective gesture. “I think we could get across this way.”

  They could. Emerging from a lower entrance to the site, they found Andreas leaning comfortably against his bus. “Kalemera, Andreas,” said Stella.

  “Kalespera, kyria,” corrected Andreas, with his beaming smile.

  “Crushed again,” said Stella cheerfully, leading the way up to the shady terrace of the café. “Ouzo, Mrs. F.?”

  “Yes, but it’s my turn.” She handed Stella her purse. “You’re spoiling me abominably, bless you. I can’t tell you how restful it is to have you to do all the coping.”

  “Even to making your offerings for you?” Stella had ordered their ouzos from a hovering waiter by the simple expedient of raising two fingers and uttering the one essential word. “Seriously, Mrs. F., are you sure about that? The photo? I could easily go and get it back for you?”

&
nbsp; “You’re an angel.” Marian was enormously touched. “But it’s not absolutely the gesture it may seem. I’ve got a bigger one at the hotel, and the negative at home.”

  “Oh, well, in that case.” Stella smiled and raised the glass that had just been set before her. “To Aesculapius,” she said. “And to your children. Do you feel like telling me about them, Mrs. F.?”

  “Yes.” Surprisingly, now, she did. “They’re a bit younger than you. Eighteen. Twins. They took their A levels last summer. Not very brilliantly, I’m afraid. Personally, I thought the school pushed them too hard.… That they’d have been better to have taken another year. But I suppose that’s the kind of thing mothers do think. Anyway, they were mad to get out of there.… They’d had it, they said. And of course no university would look at them: not with their A levels.”

  “And they wouldn’t try again?”

  “No.” In retrospect, the bitter, useless argument seemed a complete waste of time and strength. “Viola had had all kinds of holiday jobs. Well, he wanted the money.” Had Mark been mean on purpose?

  “For clothes.” Stella was quick. “I suppose she’s pretty, like you?”

  “Me!” Marian did not quite like the sound of her own laugh. How many light-years was it since Mark had called her beautiful? And of course Viola had wanted clothes, had gone to work in a big shop where she could get them cheap. Easier to talk of Sebastian. “My son never meant to go to college,” she explained. “He said it was the tyranny of the mediocre. Or something like that.” How long ago it seemed.

  “So they got jobs?”

  “Yes.” How they hated them. “Not very good ones, I’m afraid. And—different firms. They’d never been separated. They were wretched. But what could I do?”

  “Nothing. They’re grown up, aren’t they? Eighteen. Voters.”

  “I know. But just the same.…”

  “You feel it’s all your fault, of course.” Stella’s voice was tolerant. “Really, mothers! And then?” She was a child, wanting the end of the story, and Marian, who had meant to, found she could not deny it to her.

  “Their father sent for them. He’s in America, doing very well. He left me before they were born.”

  “Rugged.”

  “Well, it was a bit. But he supported us. Lavishly. For a while.”

  “Past tense?” Stella was too quick for comfort.

  “It got less … and stopped when they left. They don’t know, of course. I can tell from their letters.”

  “They’re happy?”

  “Blissfully. So far.” She looked anxiously into the future. “He lives a very interesting life,” she said fairly.

  “And you were just little mother?”

  “I suppose so. My fault.”

  “Your job.”

  “Actually”—Marian was amazed to find herself ready to probe this old, old wound—“I didn’t do it. Not properly. I failed them when it mattered most. At least that’s what I think now. You see, when we met—their father and I—I was just going up to Oxford. It was September.” Could the sun really have shone all the time? It certainly had at the fête in that green village whose name she could never remember. She had gone, unwillingly, with her mother, who was on a committee—several committees? Certainly, having got her there, her mother had abandoned her to drift round, aimlessly, from stall to stall. And then—Mark. Mark, coming suddenly up from behind her and taking her hand. “All alone, beautiful?” Trite enough words, if one had ever thought of oneself as beautiful.

  But from Mark, beauty personified, they had been the incantation that woke the sleeping princess. The mad, ecstatic weeks that followed were preordained from that moment. Why was it only now, recollecting it all, for the first time, in tranquillity, that she recognised that Mark that day, had not been his normal self? He had been ruffled—frightened? Certainly in what he would later, in their brief married life, refer to as “one of my states.”

  “So you never got to Oxford?” Stella’s question brought her back from the lost, baffling past.

  “Well, yes, actually, I did.” She was proud of the casual note she struck. “When he left me, next spring, they offered me my place again. We lived in Oxford,” she explained. “My mother helped with the twins. I think half the time they didn’t know which of us was which.”

  “So they had a mother and a grandmother, and your heart is bleeding because they were so deprived! Honestly, Mrs. F., I would have thought you’d have had more sense. No grandfather?”

  “No. That’s why my mother was so glad to have us. The trouble was, all our ideas were so different. I read Dr. Spock.” She said it as if it explained everything.

  “I know. And your mother believed in discipline? They sure must have been two crazy mixed-up kids. And if you say it’s all your fault, Mrs. F., I’ll clonk you. You managed to raise them, didn’t you? You didn’t leave two tiny bundles in the snow anywhere? You did the best you could. Right?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “Then, for God’s sake, stop suffering about it. You’ve done your best; now you can relax and enjoy yourself. You never thought of remarrying?”

  “No.” After Mark? But was that all the explanation? “I was too busy. I got quite a good degree,” she explained. “Mother thought I ought to go on to a D. Phil.”

  “Mother liked having the twins.” Stella summed it up with her usual devastating accuracy.

  “I suppose so. Well, she was better with them than I was. It was hell for a while after she died.”

  “When was that?”

  “Halfway through my D. Phil. Suddenly. Overstrain, the doctor said. She hadn’t told me anything.”

  “So you’re carrying round a great load of guilt about that, too? Honestly, Mrs. F., you need a psychiatrist.”

  “Miss Gear and Miss Grange?” She looked quickly around, but their party must still be in the museum. “No, thanks. I’ve tried that. To tell you the truth, they were the ones who made me feel it was all my fault.”

  “Don’t they!” Something absolutely basic had changed in Stella’s face. She leaned forward eagerly. “Just because you’re what they’ve got to work on, they want to find the root of all the trouble in you. And if it’s not there, why, then they plant it and sit back and watch it grow. I’ll tell you about me some time, Mrs. F., and that’s a promise. But just now I can see the others coming down like a wolf on the fold. Shall we nip back and do a quick tour of the museum while they’re having their elevenses? The carvings really are rather super, I believe.”

  “But the museum will be closed.” Marian looked at her watch. “More lunch than elevenses. I imagine David will be rounding us up pretty smartly to get us back to the hotel.”

  “Oh, Lord, yes. I don’t imagine them tenderly keeping it warm for us. Well then, let’s just go sit in the sun, shall we? And listen to the cuckoo?” While they were talking, she had competently paid and tipped the young waiter. “Remember, Mrs. F., ‘Privacy is the last resort of the human spirit.’”

  “The trouble is, it’s true.” Marian rose and walked across the café’s terrace with her, wondering what it was that nagged at her about Stella’s quotation of Miss Grange. Or had it been Miss Gear?

  Lunch was cold, and so was their welcome. David Cairnthorpe, marshalling them like an anxious hen, urged them straight to the ground-floor cloakrooms at the hotel and so into the dining room. “The staff must have their afternoon off,” he explained. “It’s all my fault. We took a bit longer than was planned.”

  “And enjoyed it enormously.” Marian followed him into the dining room. She had meant to ask Stella, in the relaxed atmosphere that had followed their talk about the twins, which of the various combinations of table partners she looked on as the lesser evil, but David Cairnthorpe had rounded them up so smartly for the bus that she never got round to it. She hung back a little to let Stella lead the way and was surprised and pleased when she crossed the floor to join Cairnthorpe and the professor, already settled in an inconspicuous corner.<
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  “May we?” Stella pulled out a chair as she spoke.

  “Delighted.” Cairnthorpe was on his feet to help Marian. “I’m sorry you two missed the museum.”

  “We’ll have to come back someday.” Marian was impressed that he had noticed. For all his casual air, he must be contriving to keep a closer eye on his charges than she had realised.

  His next question confirmed this. “And what are your wild plans for the afternoon?”

  “The Palamede for me. Mrs. Duncan says we have to climb more than eight hundred steps.”

  “And I’m swimming,” said Stella. “But I still wish you’d rest, Mrs. F. Don’t you think she looks tired, David?”

  He flushed with pleasure at her use of his first name but refused the gambit. “It’s too fine a day to stay indoors. Just don’t be tempted to go to the other fort, Mrs. Frenche. I’m told they’re dynamiting there. You’re a strong swimmer, I hope, Miss—Stella? It’s pretty rough down in the bay.”

  “I know. That’s how I like it.”

  Eight hundred steps were too many. Mrs. Duncan seemed made of entirely muscle and went up without pause, while Marian panted after, stopping obstinately from time to time to admire the developing view. But Mrs. Duncan, pausing irritably a little higher up to wait, made it imposible to enjoy it At last, reaching a corner where the steps turned away from the sea for what looked like a last steep ascent, Marian jibbed. “You go on.” She settled on a convenient parapet. “I’ve had enough. I’ll wait here.”

  “But we can’t be any distance from the top.”

  “I don’t care.” At least, alone, she could enjoy such view as she had.

  “Oh, very well.” No doubt Mrs. Duncan was delighted to be able to go at her own ruthless pace. Marian sat peacefully for a while, enjoying sun, and breeze and small birds the professor would have identified. She had picked, in fact, a point with a sea view and ramparts rising steeply behind her on the landward side and wondered whether to climb a little higher, in the hope of a landward prospect. But the backs of her legs, already aching, decided her against it. This was quite far enough for anyone not made of steel like Mrs. Duncan.