by Mary Stewart
Presently it happened. A knot of women, waiting by the roadside, signalled him to stop, and he slowed down. I closed up behind him, my eyes on the strip to the left of him, my hands slippery on the wheel, and that nerve beginning to jump again.
He stopped, right in the centre of the road. There was no possible space to pass. I stopped behind him and waited, then, as he drew away from me again, and I let in the clutch, I stalled the engine. My hand shook on the ignition. The engine wouldn’t start. At the edge of my vision I caught sight of a face at the rear window of the withdrawing bus, a dark young face, split in a wide grin. As I started the car and followed I saw the youth turn as if to nudge someone on the back seat beside him. Another face turned to stare and grin. And another.
Then, close behind me – so close that it nearly sent me into the ditch with fright – I heard a horn. As I swerved automatically to the right a jeep, driven fast on its wrong side, roared up from behind, overtook me rather too wide, with the nearside wheels churning dust, and charged straight, at the same head-long pace, for the rear of the bus, with its horn still blasting like a siren. I caught a glimpse of a girl driving, a young, dark face, with lashes drooping over her eyes and a bored, sulky mouth. She was lounging back in her seat, handling the jeep with casual, almost insolent, expertise. And, woman driver or no, the bus made way for her, whipping smartly over to the right and staying there respectfully while she tore by. I didn’t consciously decide to follow her; in fact I’m not sure yet whether I trod on the accelerator deliberately, or whether I was feeling for the brake, but something hit me in the small of the back, and the big car shot forward, missed the bus by inches, and stormed past in the wake of the jeep, with two wheels on the crown of the road and the other two churning up enough dust to have guided the children of Israel straight into Thebes. Where the bus had its offside wheels I neither knew or cared. I didn’t even look in the mirror.
I swept into Thebes and dived smartly down the wrong side of the dual carriageway which is the road through to Levadia and Delphi.
The hand of Hermes, god of wayfarers, was over me still. There was a horse-fair at Levadia, which, with its accompanying trappings of fiesta, jammed the streets; but after that I met nothing, except slow little caravans of country people on their way by mule and donkey-back to the fair; and once a train of gypsies – real Egyptians – on the move with mules and ponies covered in bright blankets.
Soon after I had passed Levadia the country began to change. The grim banalities of Attica, the heavy Technicolor prosperity of the plains, sank back and were forgotten as the hills crowded in. The road reared and twisted between great ribs of brown hill that thrust the landscape up into folded ranges. At the foot of the steep waterless valleys dead streams curled white along their shingle-beds, like the sloughed skins of snakes. The sides of the valleys were dry with the yellowish growth of burned grass, and drifts of stones and crumbling soil.
Bigger and bigger grew the circling hills, barer the land, drawn in with great sweeps of colour that ran from red to ochre, from ochre to burnt umber to lion-tawny, with, above all, the burning, the limitless, the lovely light. And beyond all, at length, a grey ghost of a mountain-massif; not purple, not faintly blue with distance like the mountains of a softer country, but spectre-white, magnificent, a lion silvered. Parnassus, home of the ghosts of the old gods.
I stopped only once to rest some way beyond Levadia. The road, which wound high along the hillside, was in shadow, and the air, at that height was cool. I sat for about fifteen minutes on the parapet that edged the road. Below me deep in a forked valley, was a place where three tracks met; the ghost of an ancient crossroads where once a young man, coming from Delphi to Thebes, struck an old man down out of his chariot, and killed him …
But no ghosts moved today. No sound, no breath, not even the shadow of a hanging hawk. Only the bare lion-coloured hills, and the illimitable, merciless light.
I got back into the car. As I started the engine I reflected that the god of wayfarers, who had done very well by me so far, had only some twenty miles’ more duty to do, and then he could abandon me to my fate.
In fact, he abandoned me just ten kilometres short of Delphi, in the middle of the village of Arachova.
3
But if I don’t get out from under
pretty damned soon, there’ll be a disaster in the rear.
ARISTOPHANES: The Frogs.
(tr. Dudley Fitts.)
ARACHOVA is a show-place. It is not self-consciously so, but its setting is picturesque in the extreme, and the Greek style of building does the rest.
The village is perched on a precipitous hillside, and the houses are built in tiers, one up behind the other, the floor of one level with the roof of the next. The whole village looks as if it were just about to slide into the depths of the valley below. The walls are white and the roofs are rose-red, and over every wall hang flowering plants, and vines rich with grapes, and great dollops of wool dyed the colours of amber and hyacinth and blood. Along the short main street are places selling rugs which hang out in the sunlight, brilliant against the blinding white walls. The street itself has some corners, and is about eight feet wide. On one of these corners I ran into a lorry.
Not quite literally. I managed to stop with my bonnet about nine inches away from his, and there I stayed, paralysed, unable even to think. The two vehicles stood headlamp to headlamp, like a pair of cats staring one another out, one of them preserving a mysterious silence. I had, of course, stalled the engine …
It became apparent all too soon that it was I, and not the lorry-driver, who would have to back. The whole village – the male portion of it – turned out to tell me so, with gestures. They were charming and delightful and terribly helpful. They did everything except reverse the car for me. And they obviously couldn’t understand why anyone who was in charge of such a car shouldn’t be able to reverse it just like that.
Eventually I reversed it into somebody’s shop doorway.
The whole village helped to pick up the trestle table, re-hang the rugs, and assure me that it didn’t matter a scrap.
I straightened up the car and reversed again, into a donkey. The whole village assured me that the donkey wasn’t hurt and that it would stop in a kilometre or so and come home.
I straightened up the car. This time I churned out a reasonably straight course for ten yards while the village held its breath. Then came a bend in the road. I stopped. I definitely was not prepared to chance reversing over the two-foot parapet into somebody’s garden twenty feet down the hillside. I sat there breathing hard, smiling ferociously back at the villagers, and wishing I had never been born and that Simon hadn’t either. My bolt was shot.
I had stopped in a patch of sunlight, and the glare from the white walls was blinding. The men crowded closer, grinning delightedly and making gallant and – no doubt fortunately – incomprehensible remarks. The lorry-driver, also grinning, hung out of his cab with the air of a man prepared to spend the whole afternoon enjoying the show.
In desperation, I leaned over the door of the car and addressed the most forward of my helpers, a stout, florid-looking man with small twinkling eyes, who was obviously vastly delighted with the whole business. He spoke a fluent if decidedly odd mixture of French and English.
‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘I do not think I can manage this. You see, it’s not my car; it belongs to a Monsieur Simon, of Delphi, who requires it urgently for business, I – I’m not very used to it yet, and since it’s not mine, I don’t like to take risks … I wonder, could you or one of these gentlemen back it for me? Or perhaps the driver of the lorry would help, if you would ask him? You see, it’s not my car …’
Some rag of pride led me to insist on this, until I saw he wasn’t listening. The smile had gone from the cheerful sweating face. He said: ‘Who did you say the car was for?’
‘A Monsieur Simon, of Delphi. He has hired it from Athens, urgently.’ I regarded him hopefully. ‘Do you know him?’
‘No,’ he said, and shook his head. But he spoke a little too quickly, and as he spoke his eyes flickered away from mine. The man at his elbow looked at me sharply, and then asked a question in rapid Greek, where I thought I caught the word ‘Simon.’ My friend nodded once, with that swift flicker of a sidelong look back at me, and said something under his breath. The men near him stared, and muttered, and I thought I saw a new kind of curiosity, furtive, and perhaps even avid, replacing the naïve amusement of a moment ago.
But this was only the most fleeting of impressions. Before I could decide whether to pursue the inquiry or not, I realised that none of the men were looking at me any more. There was some more of that swift and semi-furtive muttering; the last of the cheery grins had disappeared, and the men who had been crowding most closely round the car were moving away, unobtrusively yet swiftly, bunching as sheep bunch at the approach of the dog. One and all, they were looking in the same direction.
At my elbow came the fluttering click of ‘nervous beads’, and the stout man’s voice said softly: ‘He will help you.’
I said ‘Who?’ before I realised he was no longer beside me.
I turned my head and looked where they all were looking.
A man was coming slowly down a steep stepped alley that led uphill between the houses on my right.
He was about thirty years old, dark-haired and tanned like all the others in the group near the car, but his clothes, no less than his air and bearing, made him look unmistakably English.
He was not tall, an inch or two under six feet, perhaps, but he was broad in the shoulder, and held himself well, with a sort of easy, well-knit movement that spoke of training and perfect physical fitness. I thought him good-looking; a thinnish sun-browned face, black brows, straight nose, and a hard mouth; but just at the moment his expression was what Jane Austen would have called repulsive – meaning that, whatever thoughts held him in that slightly frowning abstraction, it was obvious that he didn’t intend them to be disturbed.
He seemed to be hardly aware of where he was, or what he was doing. A child scampered up the steps and pushed by him, apparently unnoticed. A couple of hens flapped across under his feet without making him pause. A hanging plant splashed petals in a scarlet shower over the white sleeve of his shirt, but he made no move to brush them away.
When he reached the foot of the alley-way he paused. He seemed to come abruptly out of his preoccupation, whatever it was, and stood there, hands thrust into the pockets of his flannels, surveying the scene in the street. His eyes went straight to the group of men. I saw the slight frown disappear, and the brown face became a mask, remote, cold, reflecting oddly the wariness that I had seen in the villagers. Then he looked straight at me, and it was with something of a shock that I met his eyes. They weren’t dark, as I had expected. They were grey, very clear and light, and violently alive.
He came down the last step and crossed to the door of the car. The group melted away from us. He took no more notice of them than he had of the hens, or the falling geranium petals.
He looked down at me. ‘You seem to be in trouble. Is there anything I can do?’
‘I’d be terribly grateful if you could help me,’ I said. ‘I – I’ve been trying to back the car.’
‘I see.’ I thought I heard amusement behind the pleasant voice, but his face still expressed nothing. I said bleakly: ‘I was trying to get it to go there.’ ‘There’ was a space beyond the curve of the road which, about fifty yards back, looked as remote as the moon.
‘And she won’t go?’
‘No,’ I said shortly.
‘Is there something wrong with her?’
‘Just,’ I said bitterly, ‘that I can’t drive.’
‘Oh.’ It was amusement.
I said quickly: ‘It’s not my car.’
Here the lorry-driver leaned out of his cabin and shouted something in Greek, and the Englishman laughed. The laugh transformed his face. The mask of rather careful indifference broke up, and he looked all at once younger and quite approachable, even attractive. He shouted something back in what sounded to me like excellent Greek. At any rate the lorry-man understood, because he nodded and withdrew into his cab, and I heard the lorry’s engine begin to roar.
The newcomer laid a hand on the door.
‘If you’ll allow me, perhaps I can persuade her to go.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ I said bitterly, as I moved over. ‘I was told this was a man’s country. It’s true. Go ahead.’
He got into the car. I found myself hoping that he would miss the gears, forget to start the engine, leave the handbrake on – do even a single one of the damned silly things I’d been doing all day, but he didn’t. To my fury the car moved quietly backwards, slid into the cobbled space beyond the corner, paused about two inches away from a house wall, and waited there politely for the lorry to pass.
It approached with an appalling noise and a cloud of black smoke. As it drew level, its driver, leaning out of his cab, yelled something at my companion and sent a grinning black-eyed salutation to me that somehow, without a word being intelligible, made me understand that, though incompetent, I was female and therefore delightful, and that was just how it should be.
The lorry roared on its way. I saw its driver glance back and lift a hand to the men who still stood in a little group near the café door. One or two of them responded, but most were still watching, not the car, but my companion.
I glanced at him. I knew then that I was right. He was aware of it too. His eyes, narrowed against the sun, showed none of that vivid aliveness that I had surprised in them. He sent the group a look, slow, appraising, utterly without expression. I thought he hesitated. A hand went to the car door, as if he were going to get out, then it dropped back on to the wheel, and he turned to me in inquiry.
I answered his look before he spoke. ‘Don’t give a thought to my amour-propre, will you? Of course I should love you to drive the beastly thing through the village for me. I haven’t a rag of pride left, and as long as I get this car to Delphi in one piece, my self respect can be salvaged later. Believe me, I’m terribly grateful.’
He smiled. ‘You must be tired, and it’s dreadfully hot. Have you come far?’
‘From Athens.’
His brows shot up, but he said nothing. The car was moving with the minimum of noise and fuss through the narrow street. The little group of men had disappeared, melting chin-on-shoulder into the café as the car approached them. He didn’t glance aside after them.
I said defiantly: ‘Yes, all the way. And not a scratch.’
‘Congratulations … And here we are. Clear of the houses and all set for Delphi. You did say Delphi?’
‘I did.’ I regarded him thoughtfully. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t by any chance be going that way yourself?’
‘As it happens, yes.’
‘Would you …?’ I hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘Would you like a lift? In a manner of speaking, that is?’
‘I should be delighted. And if the manner of speaking means will I drive – with pleasure, ma’am.’
‘That’s wonderful.’ I relaxed with a little sigh. The car purred round the last corner and gathered speed up a long curling hill. ‘I’ve really quite enjoyed myself, but you know, I’ve missed half the scenery.’
‘Never mind. You brought some of it with you.’
‘What d’you mean?’
He said coolly: ‘The feathers on the bonnet. Very original they look, and quite striking.’
‘The – oh!’ My hand flew to my mouth. ‘Feathers? Honestly?’
‘Indeed yes. Lots of them.’
I said guiltily: ‘That must be the hen just outside Levadia. At least, it was a cockerel. White ones?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it was asking for it. I even hooted the horn, and if you’d heard this horn you’d know that cockerel was bent on death. I didn’t kill him, though, really I didn’t. I saw him come out the other side and
dash away. It is only feathers, truly it is.’
He laughed. He, too, seemed in some indefinable way to have relaxed. It was as if he had left his preoccupations behind him in Arachova, and with them that impression he had given of a rather formidable reserve. He might have been any pleasant, casually-met stranger on holiday.
‘No hen’ll look at that chap till he’s grown a new tail,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And you don’t have to make excuses to me; it wasn’t my cockerel.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’ve a feeling this is your—’ I stopped.
‘This is what?’
‘Oh, nothing. Merciful heavens, what a view!’
We were running along a high white road that hugged the side of Parnassus. Below us to the left the steep hillside fell away to the valley of the Pleistus, the river that winds down between Parnassus’ great flanks and the rounded ridges of Mount Cirphis, towards the plain of Chrissa and the sea. All along the Pleistus – at this season a dry white serpent of shingle-beds that glittered in the sun – all along its course, filling the valley-bottom with the tumbling, whispering green-silver of water, flowed the olivewoods; themselves a river, a green-and-silver flood of plumy branches as soft as sea-spray, over which the ever-present breezes slid, not as they do over corn, in flying shadows, but in whitening breaths, little gasps that lift and toss the olive-crests for all the world like breaking spray. Long pale ripples followed one another down the valley. Where, at the valley’s end, Parnassus thrust a sudden buttress of gaunt rock into the flood, the sea of grey trees seemed to break round it, flowing on, flooding out to fill the flat plain beyond, still rippling, still moving with the ceaseless sheen-and-shadow of flowing water, till in the west the motion was stilled against the flanks of the distant hills, and to the south against the sudden sharp bright gleam of the sea.
I said, after a while: ‘Are you staying in Delphi?’
