Strangers in Company

by Jane Aiken Hodge

  “Yes.” Marian had thought of this, too. “One more accident.… We don’t want a general panic, do we?” Or did they? One more accident. Could she really believe it one? Might not the safest thing for them all, be a general panic and consequent return home? But that was absurd. “This really must have been an accident.” She was not quite sure whom she was trying to convince.

  The bus, sedately parked on the quay, was filling up by the time the professor rejoined the party, wearing, to Marian’s amusement, the kind of navy blue windbreaker popular with the younger Greeks. As he had bought himself a navy blue beret the day before in Olympia, to replace the hat lost at Mistra, he now looked, as she told him, every inch a Greek.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You might call it protective colouring.”

  And what in the world had he meant by that, and why had Stella given him such a strange glance for it? But it was time to get back into the bus, for the inevitable babble of question and exclamation. David Cairnthorpe had been optimistic when he hoped to keep the news of the accident quiet. But oddly enough, it had had the opposite effect to that which he and Marian had feared. Everyone was used to accidents involving motorcars. There was nothing strange or frightening about them. From being almost ignored, the professor had become a figure of rather affectionate fun, his blue jacket a kind of prize for survival.

  But, “Odyssey with Furies,” Marian heard Pam whisper to Meg, and was inclined to agree with her.

  Andreas was driving as if he carried a load of Venetian glass, but Mike, picking up his microphone, made no reference to the near tragedy. “Now,” he said, “at last we come to the high point of your Mercury Classical Tour. Now you are to see Delphi, where, for centuries, the oracle gave counsel wise and enigmatic; Delphi, the home of Apollo and of Bacchus, of wisdom and of divine frenzy. You are now on the Sacred Way, ladies and gentlemen. Once more you are to imagine yourselves as pilgrims, coming up through the olive groves to the place of the oracle. And, by the way, these are the largest olive groves in Greece, and some of the oldest. Who knows? A few of these trees may have been bearing fruit when St. Paul preached to the Corinthians, or when the oracle returned its gloomy answer to the Emperor Julian that the bright citadel had perished and Apollo’s laurel bough was withered. The laurel may have withered, ladies and gentlemen, but the olive still thrives here in the valley of the Pleistos, and you will find that Delphi is coming alive again, with a new life, that of the International Culture Centre that is being built here, to act, as Olympia did of old, as a meeting place for the nations of the world.”

  “And very ugly it is,” said Professor Edvardson.

  It was late by the time the bus climbed up through the town’s narrow one-way streets. “You’d have thought when the French moved the old town from on top of the site, they’d have had the wits to build wider,” said Stella.

  “But that was in the nineteenth century.” The professor turned round to explain. “No one imagined this kind of tourism then. Nor the motorcar,” he added thoughtfully.

  “Still less the bus.” Stella, too, must be remembering that frightening moment at the harbour. “Oh, well, I can see this way you get a kind of compulsory tour of the high points of the place.” They were threading their way narrowly between gift shops full of the usual enticements of hand-embroidered Greek dresses and brilliantly coloured rugs. Now the bus slowed and stopped, on the right hand side of the road, outside the white-painted Hotel of the Muses.

  “It looks all right.” Stella hitched her patchwork bag over her shoulder and prepared for the slow struggle off the bus.

  A few seats ahead of them, Mrs. Esmond and her son had decided to wait it out. Sitting, as usual, by the window, she was talking to him in a kind of angry half whisper, when Stella, passing by, lost her footing in the crowded aisle and steadied herself, with an apology, by a hand on Charles’ shoulder.

  It affected him like an electric shock. Ignoring his mother, he leapt to his feet, insisting on taking Marian’s small case, which Stella had got into the habit of carrying for her. Following along behind, Marian got the full benefit of Mrs. Esmond’s look of blind fury and felt compelled, in her turn, to offer to help her with the extraordinary accumulation of paraphernalia that Charles, as a rule, dutifully loaded and unloaded from the rack. Reaching down heavy raincoat, light plastic mac, umbrella, cardigan and a coloured bag full of lumpy unidentifiable objects, Marian was grateful that they were almost the last out of the bus. Meg and Pam, still collecting themselves on the back seat, could, she thought be relied on to ignore Mrs. Esmond’s angry mutterings of “cradle snatcher” and “leaving his old mother to fend for herself.”

  At least Charles was waiting to help his mother down the steep step, but Stella was waiting with him. Marian had never seen an understanding arrived at so swiftly and was forced to the conclusion that this was some manoeuvre in Stella’s complex, underground relationship with Mike. At all events, it seemed already to have been settled that the four of them would dine together that night. “I hope you don’t mind, Mrs. F.,” Stella had the grace to look conscience-stricken when they were alone at last outside their rooms, which proved to be in an annexe a little farther down the steep hillside on which the hotel was built. “I thought we were due for a change.”

  “It’s not so much a question of my minding. I just hope Mrs. Esmond doesn’t poison you. You should have heard her.” And then, “What’s the matter, child?” Stella was white as a sheet

  “Nothing.” Stella put the key in her lock. “I’m tired, aren’t you? Early bed tonight.”

  It had an all-too-familiar ring, and Marian, opening her own door, resolved that tonight she would stay up, however much it went against the grain, both physical and psychological.

  No use wondering what kind of words were being exchanged by the Esmonds, but at least when Marian and Stella entered the dining room, Mrs. Esmond greeted them with stiff civility. She and her son were established at a table by the window, commanding an immense view of the olive-silver valley, and Marian could only assume that Charles had dragooned his mother into a very early position in the inevitable dinner queue. There was, perhaps, more in Charles than met the eye.

  Mrs. Esmond was looking sourly round the dining room. “That professor’s out on the tiles again. He’s an odd one if you like. In every sense of the word. Fancy frightening us all like that!”

  “He was nearly killed.” Marian was frightened herself at hearing her own voice shake with anger. Had she been planning to stay up for Stella’s sake or her own? Had she really meant to sit in the hotel’s tiny entrance lounge until Edvardson was safely returned? If she had, she changed her mind. “I’m going to bed.” To her amusement, she sounded almost as curt as Stella.

  Chapter Eleven

  Stella looked more hagridden than ever over breakfast next morning, and Marian could only assume, gloomily, that Charles had proved unsatisfactory as a substitute for Mike. Or had the three perhaps met up somewhere in the small town? Granted the scene she had witnessed between Stella and Mike at Olympia, this could have all kinds of unpleasant possibilities. But she soon learned that Mike had gone down to Itea the night before in the bus with Andreas, who had met friends there and decided to stay the night. Mike had returned in a flaming temper and a hired car, and so far Andreas and the bus had not returned at all.

  “I’m so sorry.” Cairnthorpe was passing the word round the dining room, where the members of the party were drinking unusually good coffee. “I’m afraid it means we are going to have to walk both ways to the site. Andreas is still not back.” He looked anxiously at his watch. “Naturally, if anyone really doesn’t feel up to it, Mercury Tours will be glad to provide taxis. Or”—more hopefully—“if we walk there—it’s downhill all the way—I expect Andreas will turn up in time to bring us back. Mike’s down in Itea looking for him now, so I’m afraid you will have to make do with me as a guide.”

  It was an uncomfortable, straggling walk, over large paving stones apparently lai
d with complete disregard to the needs of the human foot, and they were a rather irritable party by the time they reached the Castalian Spring. There, Cairnthorpe surprised both them and, perhaps, himself. Mistra and Byzantine art had meant nothing to him, and he had by all reports been merely a parrot there, dutifully reciting the high points of the guidebook. Delphi was a different matter. Delighted to be spared Mike’s glib talk about being pilgrims on the Sacred Way, Marian listened with quickening interest as David took them back to the first, conjectural origins of this place of sacred prophecy. She had not known that it had originally been dedicated to a goddess, the earth mother, who had been deposed, back in the dark ages of myth, by the brilliant young sun-god, Apollo.

  “Women’s Lib,” muttered Stella beside her, as they began the slow climb up from the sacred spring to the first of the ruins that marked the steady upward sweep of the Sacred Way. “I think he’s better than Mike, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” David had stopped to tell them that the little temple on their left was a reconstruction of the original treasury of the Athenians, built after the victory of Marathon, and Marian heard Edvardson, behind her, give a little grunt of approval as David went on to describe the competitive way in which the various city-states had put up statues. “Served them right when Nero went off with five hundred of them,” said the professor. “But it must have been an awe-inspiring place just the same. In a vulgar kind of way.”

  “Vulgar?” Marian was amazed.

  “Painted,” said Edvardson. “It’s what you always have to remember. The ancient Greeks liked bright colours just as much as the modern ones. Think of those hand-woven rugs back in the village; imagine that kind of colour painted on to the temples, outside and in, and then think what it would have been like.”

  “Claustrophobic.” Marian could not help a shudder at the word.

  They were up at the great ruined base of the Temple of Apollo now, and David was telling them about the famous ambiguity of the oracle. “Talk about having it both ways,” said Stella. “It sounds like a modern psychoanalyst to me. You know: If you dream, it’s terrible; and if you don’t, it’s worse.”

  “Give me Aesculapius any day,” said Marian, and then, by a logical transition, “I do hope Miss Gear is better.”

  “I’m sure she is.” Something odd about Stella’s tone? But they were climbing again, up the narrow, difficult path to the theatre, and it needed all one’s concentration to get safely from stone to stone, without cannoning into another member of the party or, worse still perhaps, a stranger.

  And there, in fact, were two men who were not strangers, the Greeks from Mistra, and Marian had a sudden superstitious qualm and chided herself for a fool. Naturally, as she herself had said, since they were apparently doing much the same tour, they would constantly meet each other, but, passionately, she wished them away and turned, for a moment, to watch with relief as their blue-jacketed backs vanished down the rocky path.

  Beside her, Stella had drawn a sharp breath. Was she, perhaps, thinking much the same thing? There had certainly been no exchange of broken compliments here as there had been at their second meeting—how long ago it seemed—at Tiryns. “Come on,” she said now, impatiently. “I want to hear what David says about the theatre. He’s really good.” It had obviously surprised her.

  In the theatre, David was speaking already. It could not compare, he said, with the one at Epidaurus, except in its extraordinary position between the shining peaks of Parnassus and the olive-green valley. The stadium was higher up still, but—he looked at his watch—the walk down from the village had delayed them; he thought those of the party who wished had better come back independently in the afternoon. There was an upper entrance which could be reached by climbing one of the step streets up out of the town. For now, they would retrace their steps and visit the little tholos of Diana, below the main road. And perhaps, hopefully, they would find Andreas and the bus awaiting them there.

  When they emerged from the lower entrance to the site, it was a curiously domestic scene. By now several other tours had arrived, and their buses were parked along the side of the road, being busily washed by their drivers in the stream that ran down from the Castalian Spring.

  “Practical people, the Greeks,” said Marian.

  And, “No Andreas.” Stella was looking worse than ever, the dark shadows heavy under her eyes and, something Marian had never seen before, a small, involuntary twitch cracking this morning’s unusually heavy makeup on her left cheek. Had she, perhaps, waited up in vain for Mike after parting with Charles the night before? Or—not in vain? She certainly looked as if she had had far too little sleep. Suggest that she rest this afternoon? But it seemed a pity—here at Delphi.

  “Shall we go up to the stadium this afternoon?” Stella’s question chimed in with Marian’s thoughts. “It’s too crowded to be borne down here.” The little Temple of Diana was open free to the public, and the public was making the most of it, complete with screaming children and transistor radios.

  “Yes, do let’s. And start soon after lunch. Maybe before the crowds?” Up there, with luck, there would be enough privacy so that she could at least make an attempt to find out what was the matter with Stella.

  “Let’s go on our own.” Once again, Stella anticipated Marian’s own thinking. “I’m sick of people.”

  It turned out to be surprisingly easy. The professor said he was going up to the higher slopes to look for bearded vultures, and Mrs. Esmond had dragooned Charles into a taxi drive to Arachova, famous for its handmade carpets. “And for a Greek victory in their War of Independence.” The professor had provided the gloss, and Stella had come in with an odd non sequitur. “You’ll watch how you go, up there?”

  “I always watch how I go.” He had found a sandalmaker to repair the broken strap of his binoculars. “I’ve still got my surprise weapon.” He turned to Marian. “It’s odd about this place. Do you feel it haunted by more than the ghost of Apollo? I do. It’s on one of the vital passes into southern Greece, you see. If the Greeks hadn’t beaten the Turks down the road at Aarachova, that bloody December day in 1826, it might have been curtains for them.”

  “I doubt that,” said Stella. “They meant to win.”

  “And very bloodily they set about it. But I think you’re likely right. They did mean to win.” He turned back to Marian. “And that wasn’t the end of the fighting here by a long way. This was a great Communist hangout when they rebelled after the war. It was pretty rugged up here then. The caves of Parnassus made an ideal hideout for them, with the way open to Yugoslavia if they needed it. That was before Tito split with Moscow, of course.”

  “Oh.” Marian was ashamed of her ignorance. “Did that make a difference?”

  “It sure did. It meant their escape route was closed. Well, Albania, of course, but that’s something else again. No, I guess Tito’s move was the end for Communism in Greece. And a damned good thing too. It was touch-and-go for a while after the war.”

  “I didn’t know,” Marian confessed.

  “You’d have been in the nursery. But, I tell you, when the Communist guerillas took to the hills, with those bloodthirsty leaders of theirs, and their classical names, Odysseus and Ares … and women too.” He stopped for an odd, charged moment, then went on. ‘They used to come down from their hideouts, shoot it out with the government guards here at Delphi, and, frankly, for a while, no one knew what was going to come of it.”

  “No,” said Stella, “but the peasants knew that whatever happened they would suffer.”

  It won her a look of surprised respect. “Right And that’s just why”—he looked quickly round—“the colonels stay in power. No one—absolutely no right-minded Greek—can bear the thought of another civil war.”

  “It was so bad?” asked Marian.

  “It was unspeakable. Well, I must get after my vultures. Don’t go too near the edge, you two.”

  “No, indeed. And you watch out for the Communist ghosts up top there.”


  “I certainly will.” What did that strange look mean?

  “Have you noticed,” asked Stella, as they started up the long, sloping steps of one of the side streets, “that people really are sticking together the way David told them to?”

  “We aren’t,” said Marian.

  Stella laughed. “Nor we are. Well, I won’t attack you, if you don’t attack me.”

  “It’s a bargain.” But it was, somehow, not quite a comic one.

  Climbing up through the last straggle of cottages, Marian gasped with pleasure. “Look! It might be the Alps.” The spring flowers had been ravishing everywhere, or so she had thought, but they had been nothing to this brilliant close petit point of purple, white and gold.

  “We’ve got out of the tourist zone,” Stella said. “They go in at the lower gates. We’re in Greece now.”

  “Yes.” A donkey, tethered by the roadside and busy eating unidentifiable flowers, bayed its approval. “And I like it”

  “Do you?” One of Stella’s strange looks. “I suppose this must be the path.”

  Sloping gently downwards and along the side of the hill, it led them to a gate where a custodian beamed approval at Stella and let them in for nothing. But Marian, walking beside her, noticed that the twitch was more pronounced than ever in the side of her face.

  “There’s your peaceful classical stadium.” Stella threw back her head and laughed harshly.

  “Well,” said Marian mildly, “it’s what it was built for after all.” The long stretch of surprisingly green grass was the scene of a cheerful and violent game of teen-age boys’ football. “I imagine it’s the only flat place for miles. I told you the Greeks were practical people.”

  “I wonder,” said Stella dourly. Then, “Mrs. F., I must talk to you.”

  Thank God, thought Marian. “Yes,” she agreed. “I’ve thought that, too.”