by Mary Stewart
I elbowed my way through the crowd of men, with a nervously reiterated ‘Parakalo’, which, apparently, was the right word for ‘Please’. At any rate the men gave way, and I leaned anxiously over the counter.
‘Parakalo, kyrie—’
The proprietor threw me a harassed sweating glance over a pile of fried potatoes, and placed me unerringly. ‘Miss?’
‘Kyrie, I am in a difficulty. A queer thing has just happened. A man has brought that car over there – you see it, beyond the blue tables – to deliver it to someone in the café. By a mistake he appears to think I’m the person who hired it. He thinks I’m driving it up to Delphi for someone. But I know nothing about it, kyrie; it’s all a mistake, and I don’t know what to do!’
He threw a dollop of dressing over some tomatoes, pushed them towards a large man perched on a small stool at the counter, and wiped a hand over his brow. ‘Do you wish me to explain to him? Where is he?’
‘That’s the trouble, kyrie. He’s gone. He just left me the key – here it is – and then went. I tried to catch him, but he’s vanished. I wondered if you knew who was supposed to be here to collect the car?’
‘No. I know nothing.’ He picked up a large ladle, stirred something under the counter, and threw another look at the car outside. ‘Nothing. Who was the car for?’
‘Monsieur, I told you, I don’t know who—’
‘You said it was to be driven somewhere – to Delphi, was it? Did this man not say who it was for?’
‘Oh. Yes. A – a Mr Simon.’
He spooned some of the mixture – it seemed to be a sort of bouillabaisse – into a plate, handed it to a hovering waiter, and then said, with a shrug: ‘At Delphi? I have not heard of such a one. It is possible somebody here saw the man, or knows the car. If you wait a moment I will ask.’
He said something then in Greek to the men at the counter, and became on the instant the centre of an animated, even passionate discussion which lasted some four or five minutes and involved in the end every male customer in the café, and which eventually produced, with all the goodwill in the world, the information that nobody had noticed the little man with the key, nobody knew the car, nobody had ever heard of a Monsieur Simon at Delphi (this though one of the men was a native of Chrissa, only a few kilometres distant from Delphi), nobody thought it in the least likely that anyone from Delphi would hire a car in Athens, and (finally) nobody in their senses would drive it up there anyway.
‘Though,’ said the man from Chrissa, who was talking with his mouth full, ‘it is possible that this Simon is an English tourist staying at Delphi. That would explain everything.’ He didn’t say why, merely smiling with great kindness and charm through a mouthful of prawns, but I got his meaning.
I said apologetically: ‘I know it seems mad, kyrie, but I can’t help feeling one ought to do something about it. The man who brought the key said it was—’ I hesitated – ‘well, a matter of life and death.’
The Greek raised his eyebrows; then he shrugged. I got the impression that matters of life and death were everyday affairs in Athens. He said, with another charming smile: ‘Quite an adventure, mademoiselle,’ and turned back to his plate.
I looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly, ‘yes.’ I turned back to the proprietor, who was struggling to scoop olives out of one of the beautiful jars. It was apparent that the rush-hour and the heat were beginning to upset even his Athenian good manners and patience, so I merely smiled at him and said: ‘Thank you for your goodness, kyrie. I’m sorry to have troubled you. It seems to me that if the matter really is urgent, then the person who wants the car will certainly come and get it as arranged.’
‘You wish to leave the key with me? I will take it, and then you need have no more worry. No, it will be a pleasure, I assure you.’
‘I won’t trouble you yet, thanks. I must confess—’ I laughed – ‘to a little curiosity. I’ll wait here for a bit, and if this girl comes I’ll give her the key myself.’
And, to the poor man’s relief, I wriggled back out of the press and returned to my table. I sat down and ordered another coffee, then lit another cigarette, and settled down to a pretence of finishing my letter, but in reality to keep one watchful eye on the door, and the other on the shabby black car that should – surely – by now have been hurtling along the Delphi road on that matter of life and death …
I waited an hour. The waiter had begun to look askance again, so I pushed aside my untouched letter and gave an order, then sat playing with a plateful of beans and some small pink fish while I watched, in an expectancy that gradually gave way to uneasiness, the constant coming-and-going at the café door.
My motive in waiting hadn’t been quite as straightforward as I had suggested to the proprietor of the café. It had occurred to me that, since I had become involved in the affair through no fault of my own, I might be able to turn it to advantage. When ‘Simon’s girl’ arrived to claim the car, it might surely be possible to suggest – or even to ask outright – that I might be her passenger as far as Delphi. And the possibility of getting a lift up to Delphi was not the only one which had occurred to me …
So the minutes dragged by, and still no one came, and somehow, the longer I waited, the less possible it seemed to walk out of the café and leave everything to settle itself without me, and the more insidiously did that other possibility begin to present itself. Dry-mouthed, I pushed it aside, but there it was, a challenge, a gift, a dare from the gods …
At twelve o’clock, when nobody had appeared to claim the car, I thrust my plate aside, and set myself to consider that other possibility as coolly as I could.
It was, simply, to drive the car up to Delphi myself.
It was apparent that, for whatever reason, the girl wasn’t coming. Something must have prevented her, for otherwise she would simply have telephoned the garage to cancel the order. But the car – the urgently wanted car – was still there, already an hour and a half late in starting. I, on the other hand, wanted very badly to go to Delphi, and could start straight away. I had come straight up from Piraeus off the Crete steamer, and had everything with me that I needed for a short stay in Delphi. I could go up today, deliver the car, have two days there with the money saved on the bus-fare, and come back with the tourist bus on Thursday. The thing was simple, obvious and a direct intervention of providence.
I picked up the key with fingers that felt as if they didn’t belong to me, and reached slowly for my only luggage – the big brightly-coloured hold-all of Mykonos weaving – that hung on the back of a chair.
I hesitated with my hand touching it. Then I let the hand drop, and sat, twisting the key over and over, watching with unseeing eyes the way the sun glinted on it as it turned.
It couldn’t be done. It was just one of those things that couldn’t be done. I must have been mad even to consider doing it. All that had happened was that Simon’s girl had forgotten to cancel the order for the car and claim the deposit. It was nothing to do with me. No one would thank me for intervening in an affair that, in spite of my silly mistake, had nothing whatever to do with me. That phrase a matter of life and death – so glib a chorus, so persuasive an excuse to interfere – was only a phrase, after all, a phrase from which I had built up this feeling of urgency which gave me (I pretended) the excuse to act. In any case, it had nothing to do with me. The obvious – the only – thing to do was to leave the car standing there, hand over the key, and go away.
The decision brought with it a sense of relief so vivid, so physical almost, that it startled me. On the wave of it I stood up, picked up the car key, and swung my hold all up to my shoulder. The unfinished letter to Elizabeth lay on the table. I reached for it, and as I folded it over to thrust it into my bag, the sentence caught my eye again. Nothing ever happens to me.
The paper crackled suddenly as my fingers tightened. I suppose moments of self-knowledge come at all sorts of odd times. I have often wondered if they are ever pleasant. I
had one such moment now.
It didn’t last long. I didn’t let it. It was with a sort of resigned surprise that I found myself once more at the counter, handing a slip of paper across it to the proprietor.
‘My name and address,’ I said rather breathlessly, ‘just in case someone does come for the car later on. Miss Camilla Haven, the Olympias Hotel, Rue Marnis … Tell them I – I’ll take care of the car. Tell them I did it for the best.’
I was out in the street and getting into the car before it occurred to me that my last words had sounded uncommonly like an epitaph.
2
It’s a long way to Delphi.
EURIPIDES: Ion.
(tr. Philip Vellacott.)
EVEN if it wasn’t Hermes himself who had brought me the key, the hand of every god in Hellas must have been over me that day, because I got out of Athens alive. More, unscathed.
There were some sticky moments. There was the shoeblack who was so urgent to clean my shoes that he followed me to the car and clung to the side and would certainly have been hurt when I started off, if only I’d remembered to put the car into gear. There was the moment when I turned – at a cautious ten miles per hour and hugging the left-hand pavement – out of Omonia Square into St Constantine Street, and met a taxi almost head-on on what I thought was his wrong side, till the volume and fervour of his abuse shocked me back on to my own right. Then there was the encounter in the narrow alley with two furious pedestrians who stepped off the pavement without a single glance in my direction. How was I to know it was a one-way street? I was lucky with my brakes that time. I wasn’t so lucky with the flower-donkey, but it was only the flowers I touched, and the driver was charming about it. He refused the note I hastily held out to him and he actually gave me the flowers I’d knocked out of the donkey’s pannier.
All things considered, people were very forgiving. The only really unpleasant person was the man who spat on the bonnet as I came hesitatingly out from behind a stationary bus. There was no need for such a display of temper. I’d hardly touched him.
By the time I got to the main road that leads out of Athens along the Sacred Way I’d found out two things. One was that a few weeks spent in punting around the English country roads in Elizabeth’s old Hillman (Philip, understandably, had never let me touch his car) was not really an adequate preparation for driving through Athens in a strange car with a left-hand drive. The other was that the shabby black car had an unexpectedly powerful engine. If it had been less shabby and ancient-looking – if it had been one of the sleek-winged transatlantic monsters commonly used as taxis in Athens – I should never have dared myself to drive it, but its shabby façade had reassured me. Almost it could have been the old Hillman I’d learned on. Almost. I hadn’t been in it three minutes before I discovered that it had an acceleration like the kick of a jet, and by the time I’d assessed its possibilities as a lethal weapon – which were limitless – it was too late. I was out in the traffic, and it seemed safer to stay there. So I hung on grimly to the wheel, changing hands now and again as I remembered that the gear levers were on the right, and prayed to the whole Olympian hierarchy as we jerked and nudged our terrified and apologetic way out through the city suburbs, turning at length into the great double road that runs along the coast towards Eleusis and Corinth.
After the packed and flashing streets, the road seemed open and comparatively empty. This was the Sacred Way: down this wide sea-bordered road the ancient pilgrims had gone with songs and torches to celebrate the Mysteries at Eleusis. This lake now lying to the right was the holy lake of Demeter. Across that bay on the left the island of Salamis lay like a drowned dragon, and there – there – Themistocles had smashed the Persian fleet …
But I looked neither to right nor left as I drove. I had been this way before, and had got the first sharp disillusion over. There was no need, here, to leave oneself open to the ghosts; they had long since gone. Now, the Sacred Way ran straight and wide (the tar sweating a little in the sun) between the cement factories and the ironworks; the holy lake was silted up with weeds and slag; in the bay of Salamis lay the rusty hulks of tankers, and the wine-dark water reflected the aluminium towers of the refinery. At the other side of the bay belched the chimneys of Megara, and above them a trio of Vampire jets wheeled, screaming, against the ineffable Greek sky. And this was Eleusis itself, this dirty village almost hidden in the choking clouds of ochreous smoke from the cement works.
I kept my eyes on the road, my attention on the car, and drove as fast as I dared. Soon the industrial country was behind us, and the road, narrower now and whitening with dust under the pitiless September sun, lifted itself away from the shore and wound up between fields of red earth set with olives, where small box-like houses squatted, haphazardly it seemed, among the trees. Children, ragged and brown and thin, stood in the dust to stare as I went by. A woman, black-clad, and veiled like a Moslem, bent to lift bread from the white beehive oven that stood under an olive tree. Scrawny hens scratched about, and a dog hurled itself yelling after the car. Donkeys plodded along in the deep dust at the road’s edge, half hidden under their top-heavy loads of brushwood. A high cart swayed along a track towards the road; it was piled with grapes gleaming waxily, cloudy-green. The flanks of the mule were glossy, and bloomy as dark grapes. The air smelt of heat and dung and dust and the lees of the grape harvest.
The sun beat down. Wherever the trees stood near the road the shade fell like a blessing. It was not long past noon, and the heat was terrific. The only relief was the breeze of the car’s movement, and the cloudy heads of the great olives sailing between the road and the great brazen bowl of the sky.
There was very little traffic out in the heat of the day, and I was determined to take full advantage of the afternoon lull, so I drove on through the hot bright minutes, feeling confident now, and even secure. I had got the feel of the car, and I was still steadfastly refusing to think about what I had done. I had taken a ‘dare’ from the gods, and the results would wait till I got – if I got – to Delphi.
If I got to Delphi.
My confidence in myself had been steadily growing as I drove on through an empty landscape, through country that grew wilder and more beautiful as the road shook itself clear of the olive groves and climbed the hills that lie to the north of Attica. It even survived the series of frightening hairpin bends that sink from the summit of these hills towards the flat fields of the Boeotian plain. But it didn’t survive the bus.
This was the service bus from Athens, and I caught up with it halfway along the dead-straight road that bisects the plain. It was small, evil-looking, and smelly. It also seemed to be packed to the doors with people, boxes, and various livestock, including hens and at least one small goat. It was roaring along in a fifty-yard trail of dust. I drew carefully out to the left, and pressed forward to pass.
The bus, which was already in the middle of the road, swung over promptly to the left and accelerated slightly. I moved back, swallowing dust. The bus went back to the crown of the road and settled back to its rackety thirty miles an hour.
I waited half a minute, and tried again. I crept cautiously up to its rear wheel and hoped the driver would see me.
He did. Accelerating madly, he surged once again into my path, got me well and truly behind him, then settled back complacently into the centre of the road. I went back once more into the choking dust-train. I was trying not to mind, to tell myself that when he had had his joke he would let me safely by, but I could feel my hands beginning to tighten on the wheel, and a nerve was jumping somewhere in my throat. If Philip had been driving … but then, I told myself, if Philip had been driving, it wouldn’t have happened. Women drivers are fair game on the roads of Greece.
Here we passed a board which said, in Greek and English letters: THEBES 4 km., DELPHI 77 km. If I had to stay behind the bus all the way to Delphi …
I tried again. This time as I pulled out to approach him I sounded the horn decisively. To my surprise and
gratitude he drew over promptly to the right, and slowed down. I made for the gap. There was just room, no more, between the bus and the verge, which was of deep, crumbling dry soil. Taut with nervous concentration, I pressed forward and accelerated. The bus rocked and roared alongside.
I wasn’t getting past. He was travelling faster, keeping pace with me. My car had the speed of him, but the gap was narrowing and I wasn’t sure of my judgment to force the big car past. He closed in more sharply. I don’t know if he would actually have forced me off the road, but as the swaying dirty-green enamel rocked nearer, I lost my nerve, as he had known I would. I stood on the brakes. The bus roared on. I was left once more in the dust.
We were getting near the outskirts of Thebes when I realised that of course a service bus would have to stop for passengers. The thought steadied me. I dropped back out of the dust-cloud, and drove slowly in his wake, waiting.
Ahead of us I could see the first scattered houses of Thebes, the legendary city that, I knew, was gone even more irrecoverably than Eleusis. Where Antigone led the blind Oedipus out into exile, the old men of Thebes sit on the concrete pavements in the sun, beside the petrol-pumps. The game of tric-trac that they sit over, hour after hour, is probably the oldest thing in Thebes. There is a fountain somewhere, beloved of the nymphs. That’s all. But I had no time then to mourn the passing of the legends. I wasn’t thinking about Oedipus or Antigone, or even about Philip or Simon or my own miserable prelude to adventure. I just drove on towards Thebes with my eyes fixed in hatred ahead of me. There was nothing left in life at that moment but the desire to pass that filthy bus.
