The long isthmus of Spinalongha lay ahead of us to the left, and I had some difficulty in explaining to my helmsman that I did not want him to steer into the comparative tranquillity of the waters bordering the salt-flats, but to continue along the more exposed outward shores of the isthmus bordering the open sea.
'You want to fish?' he shouted above the roar of the engine. 'You find very good fish in there,' pointing to my flats of yesterday.
'No, no,' I shouted back, 'further on along the coast.'
He shrugged. He couldn't believe I had no desire to fish, and I wondered, when we reached our destination, what possible excuse I could make for heading the boat inshore and anchoring, unless-and this seemed plausible enough-I pleaded that the motion of the boat was proving too much for me.
The hills I had climbed yesterday swung into sight above the bows, and then, rounding a neck of land, the inlet itself, the ruined shepherd's but close to the shore. -
'In there,' I pointed. 'Anchor close to the shore.'
He stared at me, puzzled, and shook his head. 'No good,' he shouted, 'too many rocks.'
'Nonsense,' I yelled. 'I saw some people from the hotel anchored here yesterday.'
Suddenly he slowed the engine, so that my voice rang out foolishly on the air. The boat danced up and down in the troughs of the short seas.
'Not a good place to anchor,' he repeated doggedly. 'Wreck there, fouling the ground.'
So there was a wreck…. I felt a mounting excitement, and I was not to be put off.
'I don't know anything about that,' I replied, with equal determination, 'but this boat did anchor here, just by the inlet, I saw it myself.'
He muttered something to himself, and made the sign of the cross.
'And if I lose the anchor?' he said. 'What do I say to my brother Nicolai?'
He was nosing the boat gently, very gently, towards the inlet, and then, cursing under his breath, he went forward to the bows and threw the anchor overboard. He waited until it held, then returned and switched off the engine.
'If you want to go in close, you must take the dinghy,' he said sulkily. 'I blow it up for you, yes?'
He went forward once again, and dragged out one of those inflatable rubber affairs they use on air-sea rescue craft.
'Very well,' I said, 'I'll take the dinghy.'
In point of fact, it suited my purpose better. I could paddle close inshore, and would not have him breathing over my shoulder. At the same time, I couldn't forbear a slight prick to his pride.
The man in charge of the boat yesterday anchored further in without mishap,' I told him.
My helmsman paused in the act of inflating the dinghy.
'If he like to risk my brother's boat that is his affair,' he said shortly. 'I have charge of it today. Other fellow not turn up for work this morning, so he lose his job. I do not want to lose mine.'
I made no reply. If the other fellow had lost his job it was probably because he had pocketed too many tips from Stoll.
The dinghy inflated and in the water, I climbed into it gingerly and began to paddle myself towards the shore. Luckily there was no run upon the spit of sand, and I was able to land successfully and pull the dinghy after me. I noticed that my helmsman was watching me with some interest from his safe anchorage, then, once he perceived that the dinghy was unlikely to come to harm, he turned his back and squatted in the bows of the boat, shoulders humped in protest, meditating, no doubt, upon the folly of English visitors.
My reason for landing was that I wanted to judge, from the shore, the exact spot where the boat had anchored yesterday. It was as I thought. Perhaps a hundred yards to the left of where we had anchored today, and closer inshore. The sea was smooth enough, I could navigate it perfectly in the rubber dinghy. I glanced towards the shepherd's hut, and saw my footprints of the day before. There were other footprints too. Fresh ones. The sand in front of the but had been disturbed. It was as though something had lain there, and then been dragged to the water's edge where I stood now. The goatherd himself, perhaps, had visited the place with his flock earlier that morning.
I crossed over to the hut and looked inside. Curious… The little pile of rubble, odds and ends of pottery, had gone. The empty bottles still stood in the far corner, and three more had been added to their number, one of them half-full. It was warm inside the hut, and I was sweating. The sun had been beating down on my bare head for nearly an hour like a fool I had left my hat back in the chalet, not having prepared myself for this expedition-and I was seized with an intolerable thirst. I had acted on impulse, and was paying for it now. It was, in retrospect, an idiotic thing to have done. I might become completely dehydrated, pass out with heat-stroke. The half-bottle of beer would be better than nothing.
I did not fancy drinking from it after the goatherd, if it was indeed he who had brought it here; these fellows were none too clean. Then I remembered the jar in my pocket. Well, it would at least serve a purpose. I pulled the package out of its wrappings and poured the beer into it. It was only after I had swallowed the first draught that I realised it wasn't beer at all. It was barley-water. It was the same home-brewed stuff that Stoll had left for me in the bar. Did the locals, then, drink it too? It was innocuous enough. I knew that; the bar-tender had tasted it himself, and so had his wife.
When I had finished the bottle I examined the jar once again. I don't know how it was, but somehow the leering face no longer seemed so lewd. It had a certain dignity that had escaped me before. The beard, for instance. The beard was shaped to perfection around the base-whoever had fashioned it was a master of his craft. I wondered whether Socrates had looked thus when he strolled in the Athenian agora with his pupils and discoursed on life. He could have done. And his pupils may not necessarily have been the young men whom Plato said they were, but of a tenderer age, like my lads at school, like those youngsters of eleven and twelve who had smiled upon me in my dreams last night.
I felt the scalloped ears, the rounded nose, the full soft lips of the tutor Silenos upon the jar, the eyes no longer protruding but questioning, appealing, and even the naked horsemen on the top had grown in grace. It seemed to me now they were not strutting in conceit but dancing with linked hands, filled with a gay abandon, a pleasing, wanton joy. It must have been my fear of the midnight intruder that had made me look upon the jar with such distaste.
I put it back in my pocket, and walked out of the hut and down the spit of beach to the rubber dinghy. Supposing I went to the fellow Papitos who had connections with the local museum, and asked him to value the jar? Supposing it was worth hundreds, thousands, and he could dispose of it for me, or tell me of a contact in London? Stoll must be doing this all the time, and getting away with it. Or so the bar-tender had hinted…. I climbed into the dinghy and began to paddle away from the shore, thinking of the difference between a man like Stoll, with all his wealth, and myself. There he was, a brute with a skin so thick you couldn't pierce it with a spear, and his shelves back at home in the States loaded with loot. Whereas I… Teaching small boys on an inadequate salary, and all for what? Moralists said that money made no difference to happiness, but they were wrong. If I had a quarter of the Stolls' wealth I could retire, live abroad, on a Greek island, perhaps, and winter in some studio in Athens or Rome. A whole new way of life would open up, and just at the right moment too, before I touched middle-age.
I pulled out from the shore and made for the spot where I judged the boat to have anchored the day before. Then I let the dinghy rest, pulled in my paddles and stared down into the water. The colour was pale green, translucent, yet surely fathoms deep, for, as I looked down to the golden sands beneath, the sea-bed had all the tranquillity of another world, remote from the one I knew. A shoal of fish, silver-bright and gleaming, wriggled their way towards a tress of coral hair that might have graced Aphrodite, but was seaweed moving gently in whatever currents lapped the shore. Pebbles that on land would have been no more than rounded stones were brilliant here as jewels. Th
e breeze that rippled the gulf beyond the anchored boat would never touch these depths, but only the surface of the water, and as the dinghy floated on, circling slowly without pull of wind or tide, I wondered whether it was the motion in itself that had drawn the unhearing Mrs Stoll to underwater swimming. Treasure was the excuse, to satisfy her husband's greed, but down there, in the depths, she would escape from a way of life that must have been unbearable.
Then I looked up at the hills above the retreating spit of sand, and I saw something flash. It was a ray of sunlight upon glass, and the glass moved. Someone was watching me through field-glasses. I rested upon my paddles and stared. Two figures moved stealthily away over the brow of the hill, but I recognised them instantly. One was Mrs Stoll, the other the Greek fellow who had acted as their crew. I glanced over my shoulder to the anchored boat. My helmsman was still staring out to sea. He had seen nothing.
The footsteps outside the hut were now explained. Mrs Stoll, the boatman in tow, had paid a final visit to the hut to clear the rubble, and now, their mission accomplished, they would drive on to the airport to catch the afternoon 'plane to Athens, their journey made several miles longer by the detour along the coast-road. And Stoll himself? Asleep, no doubt, at the back of the car upon the salt-flats, awaiting their return.
The sight of that woman once again gave me a profound distaste for my expedition. I wished I had not come. And my helmsman had spoken the truth; the dinghy was now floating above rock. A ridge must run out here from the shore in a single reef. The sand had darkened, changed in texture, become grey. I peered closer into the water, cupping my eyes with my hands, and suddenly I saw the vast encrusted anchor, the shells and barnacles of centuries upon its spikes, and as the dinghy drifted on the bones of the long-buried craft itself appeared, broken, sparless, her decks, if decks there had been, long since dismembered or destroyed.
Stoll had been right: her bones had been picked clean. Nothing of any value could now remain upon that skeleton. No pitchers, no jars, no gleaming coins. A momentary breeze rippled the water, and when it became clear again and all was still I saw the second anchor by the skeleton bows, and a body, arms outstretched, legs imprisoned in the anchor's jaws. The motion of the water gave the body life, as though, in some desperate fashion, it still struggled for release, but, trapped as it was, escape would never come. The days and nights would follow, months and years, and slowly the flesh would dissolve, leaving the frame impaled upon the spikes.
The body was Stoll's, head, trunk, limbs grotesque, inhuman. as they swayed backwards and forwards at the bidding of the current.
I looked up once more to the crest of the hill, but the two figures had long since vanished, and in an appalling flash of intuition a picture of what had happened became vivid: Stoll strutting on the spit of sand, the half-bottle raised to his lips, and then they struck him down and dragged him to the water's edge, and it was his wife who towed him, drowning, to his final resting-place beneath the surface, there below me, impaled on the crusted anchor. I was sole witness to his fate, and no matter what lies she told to account for his disappearance I would remain silent; it was not my responsibility; guilt might increasingly haunt me, but I must never become involved.
I heard the sound of something choking beside me I realise now it was myself, in horror and in fear and I struck at the water with my paddles and started pulling away from the wreck back to the boat. As I did so my arm brushed against the jar in my pocket, and in sudden panic I dragged it forth and flung it overboard. Even as I did so, I knew the gesture was in vain. It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil. stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim before long. The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well, as I should see them soon reflected in a mirror. They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair.
A Border-Line Case
HE HAD BEEN asleep for about ten minutes. Certainly no longer. Shelagh had brought up some of the old photograph albums from the study to amuse her father, and they had been laughing and going through them together. He seemed so much better. The nurse had felt free to go off duty for the afternoon and take a walk, leaving her patient in the care of his daughter, while Mrs Money herself had slipped off in the car to the village to have her hair done. The doctor had reassured them all that the crisis was past; it was just a matter of rest and quiet, and taking things easy.
Shelagh was standing by the window looking down into the garden. She would remain at home, of course, as long as her father wanted her-indeed, she could not bear to leave him if there was any doubt about his condition. It was only that, if she turned down the offer the Theatre Group had made to her of playing the lead in their forthcoming series of Shakespeare plays, the chance might not come her way again. Rosalind… Portia… Viola-Viola surely the greatest fun of all. The yearning heart concealed beneath a cloak of dissimulation, the whole business of deception whetting appetite.
Unconsciously she smiled, pushing her hair behind her ears, tilting her head, one hand on her hip, apeing Cesario, and she heard a sudden movement from the bed and saw her father struggling to sit upright. He was staring at her, an expression of horror and disbelief upon his face, and he cried out, 'Oh no… Oh, Jinnie… Oh my God!', and as she ran to his side, saying to him, 'What is it, darling, what's wrong?' he tried to wave her aside, shaking his head, and then he collapsed backwards on his pillows, and she knew that he was dead.
She ran out of the room, calling for the nurse, then remembered that she had gone for a walk. She could have gone across the fields, anywhere. Shelagh rushed downstairs to find her mother, but the house was empty, and the garage doors were wide open-her mother must have gone somewhere in the car. Why? What for? She had never said she was going out. Shelagh seized the telephone in the hall with shaking hands and dialled the doctor's number, but when the answering click came it was not the doctor himself but his recorded voice, toneless, automatic, saying, 'This is Doctor Dray speaking. I shall not be available until five o'clock. Your message will be recorded. Please start now…', and there was a ticking sound, just as when one rang to know the time and the voice said, 'At the third stroke it will be two, forty-two, and twenty seconds…'
Shelagh flung down the receiver and began to search the telephone directory feverishly for the number of Doctor Dray's partner, a young man lately joined the practice-she did not know him-and this time a live voice answered, a woman. There was the sound of a child crying in the distance and a radio blaring, and she heard the woman shout impatiently at the child to be quiet.
'This is Shelagh Money speaking, of Whitegates, Great Marsden. Please ask the doctor to come at once, I think my father has just died. The nurse is out and I'm alone in the house. I can't get Doctor Dray.'
She heard her own voice break, and the woman's reply, swift, sympathetic, 'I'll contact my husband immediately', made further explanation impossible. She couldn't speak, but turned away blindly from the telephone and ran up the stairs again into the bedroom. He was lying as she had left him, the expression of horror still on his face, and she went and knelt beside him and kissed his hand, the tears pouring down her cheeks. 'Why?' she asked herself. 'What happened? What did I do?' Because when he cried out, using her pet name Jinnie, it was not as if he had been seized with sudden pain on waking from sleep. It did not seem like that at all, but more as though his cry was one of accusation, that she had done something so appalling that it suspended all belief. 'Oh no… Oh, Jinnie… Oh my God…!' Then trying to ward her off as she ran to his side, and dying instantly.
I can't bear it, I can't bear it, she thought, what did I do? She got up, still blinded by tears, and went and stood by the open window and looked ba
ck over her shoulder to the bed, but it was no longer the same. He was not staring at her any more. He was still. He had gone. The moment of truth had vanished for ever, and she would never know. What had happened was Then, was already past, in some other dimension of time, and the present was Now, part of a future he could not share. This present, this future, was all blank to him, like the empty spaces in the photograph album beside the bed, waiting to be filled. Even, she thought, if he had read my mind, which he often did, he would not have cared. He knew I wanted to play those parts with the Theatre Group, he encouraged me, he was delighted. It was not as though I were planning to go off at any moment and leave him…. Why the expression of horror, of disbelief? Why? Why?
She stared out of the window, and the carpet of autumn leaves scattered here and there on the lawn was suddenly blown in a gust of wind up into the air like birds and tossed in all directions, only to drift apart, and tumble, and fall. The leaves that had once budded tight and close upon the parent tree, to glisten thick and green throughout the summer, had no more life. The tree disowned them, and they had become the sport of any idle wind that chanced to blow. Even the burnished gold was reflected sunlight, lost when the sun had set, so that in shadow they became crinkled, barren, dry.
Shelagh heard the sound of a car coming down the drive, and she went out of the room and stood at the top of the stairs. It was not the doctor, though, it was her mother. She came through the front door to the hall, peeling off her gloves, her hair bunched high on her head, gleaming and crisp from the drier. Unconscious of her daughter's eyes she hovered a moment before the mirror, patting a stray curl into place. Then she took her lipstick from her bag and made up her mouth. A door banging in the direction of the kitchen made her turn her head.
Not After Midnight & Other Stories Page 11
