Strangers in Company

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “You can’t be serious.” Marian looked from one to the other with horror.

  “No need to look so worried, Mrs. F.” The professor had never used Stella’s nickname for her before. “Though I take it kindly. Cross my heart, I didn’t do it, and they’ll find out soon enough. But it’s damned queer whichever way you look at it.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Cairnthorpe. “Oh—Mrs. Frenche, I think you should tell the officer where you were and what you overheard.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Stella intervened rudely. “I was asleep.”

  “I see.” The policeman looked at Marian thoughtfully. “It’s crowded here, kyria. Would you mind coming out to my car?”

  “Not at all.” It should have been a relief to get away, but there was something very unpleasant about feeling the combined eyes of the party on her back. And in fact, there was little enough to tell.

  “I have it, I think,” he summed up for her. “First you heard the courier, Mr. Cairnthorpe, with, you think, the group of schoolmistresses. Very charming young ladies. Many of whom wear jeans and have long black hair. Then a lady called Mrs. Spencer, with a newly married couple. Adams, you said?”

  “Yes. They were talking about going higher up. Mrs. Adams didn’t want to: she said her feet hurt. There was something—I don’t know—odd about them.” She had a feeling she had got something wrong when telling him about them but could not think what it was.

  “Mr. Adams, too, has black hair and jeans. And so does Charles Esmond who quarrelled with his mother and left her at the palace. And then, later, two men, you think, speaking Greek. Thank you, Mrs. Frenche, you have been most helpful.”

  “But it proves nothing.” She ought to tell him about what had happened on the Palamede. Why was she so reluctant to do so? The answer was obvious. If the professor could be accused of imagining things, or worse, what chance had she of being believed? Remembering Dr. Brown, she was not even sure that she believed herself.

  “I’m afraid not.” He got out of the car and came round to open her door for her. “But here, perhaps, is something.” He was looking down the hill to where three men had just rounded the corner, talking eagerly. Mike and two others.

  “But those are the ones—” said Marian.

  “Which ones?”

  “Well,” she temporised. “I think they are. I think they own the red car over there. If so, we’ve seen them before—two or three times. We thought they must be doing more or less the same tour. They’re talking to Mike—that’s our guide—now. They might have been the ones I heard speaking Greek.”

  “Or they might be talking to him in English.”

  But the three men, surrounding the policeman, all talked to him at once in rapid Greek. He listened intently, interjecting a question from time to time. At last he turned to Marian. “Forgive us. But it’s good news for you. As good as possible in the circumstances. These two men saw it happen.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. You were quite right. They say they have visited the same sites as your tour several times and have noticed your party. They say that they wished to see Mistra alone—they had all day, you see—so they hurried to get beyond you all and up to the top. It was from there that they saw.”

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Duncan—they did not, of course, know it was she, but a middle-aged lady in a skirt and blue jacket, hurrying, they say, as if, like them, she wished to be by herself. And, turning a corner too quickly, missing the path, falling.…”

  “An accident?” Impossible to keep the relief out of her voice and impossible not to be ashamed of it.

  “Just so.”

  “But what about the professor’s story?”

  “Ah,” he said. “That is rather the question, is it not?”

  By evening the professor was the most unpopular member of the party. If he would only have admitted to a brief hallucination, a temporary aberration, anything, they could all have relaxed. As it was, the free afternoon that was to have rested them for the next day’s long drive to Olympia was spent in anxious, hard-talking groups, that broke up and re-formed, dropping their voices when a less well-known member of the party came near.

  But the police, at least, were satisfied. The bona fides of the two young men who had seen the accident had been checked by telephone with Athens. One of them had lived there all his life and worked, respectably, in a bank. The other was his cousin from northern Greece, having his first sight of the Peloponnesus. He worked in a chemist’s shop in Yannina, and his employer, interviewed by telephone, spoke highly of him. And their story, too, made sense. Having seen Mrs. Duncan fall, they had hurried down, by the shortest way, through the convent and so down to new Mistra to report the accident. Meeting Mike, they had recognised him as the guide they had seen with the party, had broken the news to him and had let him do the telephoning.

  “Funny they didn’t come back and pick up their car,” said Marian. The four of them were sitting together at dinner; unspoken between them the fact that no one else would wish to join the professor.

  “I expect they panicked a bit,” said Cairnthorpe. “They looked pretty young to me.”

  It came comically from him, Martin thought, but, in fact, he seemed years older than the blushing young man who had not known what to do at the airport.

  “So—what next?” asked the professor.

  Now Cairnthorpe did flush. “I’m afraid you have to accept it, Professor, that the police think—” He ground uncomfortably to a halt.

  “I’m subject to delusions? Right? And the rest of the party would much rather think so.”

  “That’s about it.” Cairnthorpe was grateful to him. “Mike and I have been talking about it. After the police left. He feels, very strongly, for the sake of the rest of the party, you should—if you don’t mind my saying so—say no more about it.”

  “Until someone else gets pushed over a cliff?” The professor was not letting him off as easily as that.

  “What we thought was”—Cairnthorpe leaned forward to press his point—“that I would make a little speech when we start out tomorrow. Explaining that the matter of poor Mrs. Duncan is all cleared up, but asking that, in future, people do not wander off by themselves. For their own sakes.”

  “But what about couples,” objected Edvardson. “Suppose you picked the wrong partner?”

  “You really stand to it?”

  “I’m afraid I do. Look, David, you’ve got to face this. If something else happened, because I’d agreed to hush up, I’d never forgive myself. Now would I?”

  Cairnthorpe almost groaned. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll suggest larger groups. After all, it makes sense.” He was discussing it with himself. “If someone was to turn an ankle, there should be someone to stay with them and one to go for help.”

  “Or if they fell over a cliff.” Stella spoke for the first time, out of a silence that was becoming portentous. “Or down a flight of steps.”

  “But that was an accident,” said Marian. And then, uncertainly, “They both were.”

  “We seem to be a bit accident prone,” said the professor.

  “You could say so.” Stella turned to catch the eye of a passing waiter. “I need another drink.” She looked as if she did. “What’s happened to Mike, by the way?” she asked David. “Don’t tell me he’s got another policeman friend here?”

  “Friends anyway,” said David. “He’s staying with them as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh.” It came out curiously flat, and she drank the ouzo that had just arrived as if it were water. After that, she was totally silent, and Marian, keeping up a rather random conversation with Cairnthorpe and the professor, was not sure whether to be glad or sorry when she rose suddenly, orange in hand, to say she was exhausted and would go to bed.

  “Not a bad idea.” David smiled up at her. “It’s going to be another of our early starts in the morning, I’m afraid. I’d better pass the word round.” He rose and moved from table to table i
n the crowded dining room, where people were still talking in uncomfortably low voices.

  The professor peeled his orange and smiled at Marian. “Not afraid I’ll slip a Micky Finn in your Nescafé?”

  “No.” She meant it. “But, Professor Edvardson, I am afraid.”

  “And quite right, too.” Like everyone else, they were talking low. “Not to be afraid would be stupid, and you’re not that.”

  “Thank you.” It was years since she had blushed. Should she tell him what had happened on the Palamede? The temptation was strong. To unload the burden of her anxiety on to his capable shoulders.… But—she sipped weak coffee—might he not think her the kind of woman who made things up to draw attention to herself? Somehow she could not bear that. The time to tell her story had been earlier, when the police interviewed her. After Mike appared with the two Greeks, she had felt she could honestly let herself off. And anyway, it would be no help to the professor, who, she remembered unhappily, had been looking for birds somewhere above Nauplia when she and Mrs. Duncan had their frights. And after all, what happened to Mrs. Duncan had been proved an accident. She probably really was imagining things. The boulder an accident; Mrs. Duncan, poor woman, perhaps suffering from some kind of premonition. That must be it. In her relief, she looked up, caught the professor’s eye and smiled brilliantly.

  “That settles it.” He smiled back. “I was sitting here wondering if I had the gall to ask you to pass a one-woman vote of confidence and come for a walk with me. How about it?”

  “I’d love to. Will I need a coat, do you think?” It was curiously natural to turn to him for advice.

  He picked up the cardigan from the back of her chair. “This should do.” His hands, helping her into it, sent a shiver of such delight through her that she caught her breath and looked up at him, wondering if he could have felt it too, that thrill Mark’s caresses had never given her. Absurd … moonshine. Or rather, that damned imagination of hers working overtime again. He was laughing, looking back from the enrance hall into the dining room. “You should see their faces, Mrs. F. I guess they think I’m going to eat you alive?”

  “And are you?”

  “My one friend. I think not. I’m going to show you the spring that comes out of a tree and find you some decent coffee.”

  They found it, served by a black-clad woman who put chairs for them on the narrow pavement, where they sat, and watched the light fade behind the huge tree, and talked, idly, happily, about everything except the tour. Much later, lying sleepless in bed, Marian thought how little, in fact, he had said about himself, preferring to talk of world affairs, about which he was disconcertingly well informed. “For an American?” he had teased her when she said this. “It seems to me, granted we have to carry the can, we might as well know what’s in it.”

  He had not touched her again, and she told herself she was glad of it. After all the lonely years as mother, perhaps, at last, she had found a friend.

  She slept in the end, restlessly, all the old nightmares back, with a new twist. Mark, sullen, angry even, because he knew he had not satisfied her … Mark chasing her down those terrifying corridors of dream and then, horribly, turning on her with the professor’s face. She woke at first light and lay rigid for a while, cursing herself for a fool. She had let Mark blind her with glamour; was she now—at her age—going to blind herself with sex? When she got up, thirty-five felt like a hundred, and the early start almost more than she could face.

  The others seemed to feel the same. Breakfast was a silent meal, and they started off, a little late, not one but three short. Miss Gear was worse, and she and Miss Grange had decided to give up the trip. Borrowing Enter-ovioform from Marian before breakfast, Miss Grange had explained, confidentially, that it was not so much, now, the effects of the blow that were bothering her friend, but what she described as “one of those inevitable traveller’s complaints. Brought on by the shock, I expect. It’s something we don’t suffer from in the ordinary way. Gear and I. But she could no more do that long drive to Olympia.…”

  “No.” It was an obvious problem of the long drives, and Marian thought their plan of staying a few days in Sparta and then making their slow way back to Athens to join the party for the flight home a very sensible one.

  It meant that the bus, now five short of its original complement, felt rather pleasantly roomy, or should have. In fact, it made little, surreptitious whispered exchanges possible. There were nervous glances, this way and that, but nobody mentioned Mrs. Duncan, at least not aloud, not even after Cairnthorpe had made his speech about keeping together in future.

  Mrs. Duncan had sat with a middle-aged secretary who had emerged, the day before, as a very competent Miss Thompson, and, granted the professor’s general unpopularity, Marian had rather expected to see her pair off with Mrs. Spencer this morning, but, in fact, she found Mrs. Spencer already ensconced on the back seat that the four of them were to share today.

  “You get such a fine high view from here.” Had Mrs. Spencer noticed her look of surprise?

  It was a long, gloomy, tiring day and made no easier for Marian by the fact that Stella sat almost entirely silent in the window corner that she had taken without apology. There were dark circles under her eyes, and not for the first time, Marian found herself wondering whether she had really gone to bed early or stayed up till all hours with—whom? Shocking, in retrospect, to have gone out so lightheartedly with the professor. Guiltily, she looked up and down the bus and saw that David Cairnthorpe looked tired, too, and Charles Esmond and his mother appeared not to be on speaking terms, which might mean anything or nothing. The same was apparently true of the Adamses. Only Mike seemed his cheerful self. He waited awhile until they were beginning to recover from the daunting effect of Cairnthorpe’s announcement, then stood up, with his familiar, beaming smile to tell them that they had left disaster and the Furies behind in Lacedaemon. “Now we are for Olympia, ladies and gentlemen, the home of the first United Nations.”

  “And about time Greece was thrown out of the present one,” said a muted, unidentifiable female voice from somewhere halfway up the bus.

  Very sensibly, Mike pretended not to hear. “I have told you already how much that is political we Greeks have invented. Professor Edvardson at the back there would tell you much, I am sure, about the Politics of Aristotle, but I am only an ignorant modern Greek, so I will tell you how, when the great Olympian Games were held, every four years, it meant a truce to all fighting between the competing states. Peace for their time, ladies and gentlemen. The heralds went out, far, far afield … to Asia Minor, to Egypt, to Sicily, proclaiming the Olympic truce. All fighting stopped while the athletes prepared for the great competition. They had to train for ten months, I must tell you, at Olympia itself, and all this time the truce continued, the crops could be harvested, men could walk abroad freely. And then, when the time of the games themselves came, more permanent truces could be signed. It was a chance, ladies and gentlemen, a chance for peace and a greater Greece.”

  “Like you’ve got now,” said that same female, anonymous whisper.

  And beyond Mrs. Spencer, Marian was aware of Professor Edvardson, muttering something to himself. “I’m looking forward to Olympia,” said Mrs. Spencer brightly. “I’ve never been there. Have you, Mrs. Frenche?”

  “No.” Marian rather hoped that the monosyllable would end the conversation, but once started, Mrs. Spencer went comfortably on and on. Her first trip to Greece. Marian’s first trip to Greece? Her unsuitable clothes. “If only someone had told me!” And then, inevitably, poor Mrs. Hilton, poor Mrs. Duncan. Did Marian think they ought to get up a collection? For wreaths? Marian, explosively, did not, but wrenched her thoughts away from yesterday’s disaster, from the arrangements Mike had made last night for sending home the poor, battered body, to listen to Mrs. Spencer, who had reached the subject of her children. “A bit young to be left alone, but such competent young things. I expect they’ll enjoy themselves with old mum away. You
have children, Mrs. Frenche?”

  “Two.”

  Once again, the intended conversation stopper had no effect. “So have I. Very respectable these days. Avant-garde, that’s us. You know: population control and all that.”

  “Quite.”

  “‘Hostages to fortune,’” said the professor, and earned a puzzled look, and silence at last, from Mrs. Spencer.

  As the long day dragged on, the bus grew more and more silent. Once the schoolmistresses tried to sing, but faltered into silence when an anonymous voice said, “Poor Mrs. Duncan.” Mike seemed to have given them up. He was engaged in a rapid Greek conversation with the driver. Tomorrow, presumably, would be time enough to tell them more about Olympia.

  But next day it was raining.

  Chapter Ten

  Waking to the sound of steady rain on her window, Marian was tempted to turn over and fall asleep again; and, later in the day, trudging dutifully behind Mike through the Altis, or sacred grove, listening to him talk of altars made of burned bones, of races won and lost, of cheats and the penalties they paid, she rather wished she had.

  Stella was in the blackest mood Marian had yet seen, and for the first time she found herself thinking that Miss Oakland had been right. If things went on like this, she would indeed earn her high pay. With Stella beside her, silent, shoulders hunched, hands in raincoat pockets, how could she take an interest in the story Mike was telling about Nero and the Olympic Games? Did she dare ask what was the matter? She thought not, and as they trailed farther and farther behind the rest of the party, her own spirits sank to match Stella’s. It was a curious thing; this morning she did not feel haunted or spied on, as she had so often, so desperately, in the past. Instead, she felt, quite simply, afraid. In sunshine, perhaps, it would have been possible to shrug off that chapter of accidents as—just accidents. Today, in the rain and after what Edvardson had said, she could not do it, nor, she suspected, could the rest of the party. They clung together in groups, as David Cairnthorpe had advised, and few of them looked as if they were enjoying themselves.