My Brother Michael

by Mary Stewart

  He spoke in French. ‘Why, hullo, Danielle.’

  It was as if he had told her quite plainly: ‘It’s all right.’ I could see the look of surprise fade. She relaxed. ‘Hullo. How did you know I was here?’

  I thought: because you’ve just been together behind the juniper-bushes and I interrupted you. Then I shook the thought away with the wry reflection that this was what contact with Danielle did. Five minutes with her, and a full half-pound of civet would hardly sweeten the imagination.

  Danielle said idly – too idly – from the dust: ‘This is Camilla Haven. She’s been out with Simon this afternoon and she’s sleeping at the studio tonight.’

  The man bowed and sent me a smile. ‘Enchanté.’

  ‘Dimitrios,’ said Danielle to me, ‘is—’

  ‘A guide,’ said Dimitrios. ‘Mademoiselle has been to see the shrine this afternoon?’

  As if you hadn’t heard from behind your juniper-bush, I thought. I said: ‘No. I went this morning early.’

  ‘Ah. And now you come up to the top of the Shining Ones to see the last of the sun.’

  I said: ‘It’ll be some time still till dark, surely?’

  ‘Perhaps not so long,’ said Dimitrios. I saw Danielle turn her head to look at him. Her head was on a level with my thigh, and I couldn’t see her eyes for the curtaining lashes. Something crept along my spine like a cold-footed insect. The man, no less than the girl, gave me the creeps.

  I gave myself another of those hearty mental shakes. ‘I must be going. If I’m to have a bath before dinner and arrange about—’

  ‘These rocks,’ said Dimitrios, ‘are called the Phaedriades, the Shining Ones. Always I tell my tourists the story of the Shining Ones. Between them flows the Castalian Spring, whose water is the best in Greece. Have you tried the water of the spring, mademoiselle?’

  ‘No, not yet. I—’

  He came a step nearer. I was between him and the edge of the cliff. ‘They stand over the shrine like guardians, do they not? Because that is what they are. They were not only the protectors of the holy place, but they were themselves the place of execution. There were people executed on these cliffs – for sacrilege, mademoiselle. Did you know that?’

  ‘No. But—’

  Another step. He was smiling, a smile of great charm. He had a pleasant voice. Beside me in the dust I saw Danielle lift her head. I saw that her eyes now watched me, not the man. She was smiling at me with the utmost friendliness, her eyes for once bright, not tired at all. I moved back from him a step or two. It brought me within four feet of the edge.

  Dimitrios said suddenly: ‘Be careful.’ I jumped and his hand came out to my arm. It was gentle on the flesh. ‘You are not here for execution as a traitor to the god, mademoiselle.’ He laughed, and Danielle smiled, and I thought suddenly, wildly, why the hell can’t I just pull my arm away and run. I hate the pair of them and they frighten me, and here I stand because it isn’t polite to go while the damned man’s talking.

  ‘I always tell my tourists,’ he was saying, ‘one particular story. There was a certain traitor who was brought up here for execution. Two of them came with him to the edge … just there … to throw him over. He looked over … yes, mademoiselle, it is a long way down, is it not? … and then he said to them, please will you not send me over face first, please will you let me fall with my back to the drop? One understands how he felt, mademoiselle, does one not?’

  His hand was still on my arm. I pulled back against it. It slid gently up the flesh to the inside of my elbow. I noticed that his nails were bitten to the quick and that his thumb was badly cut and crusted with dried blood. I started to turn from him and to pull my arm away, but his fingers tightened. His voice quickened a little in my ear: ‘So they threw him over, mademoiselle, and as he fell, he—’

  I said breathlessly: ‘Let me go. I don’t like heights. Let me go, please.’

  He smiled, ‘Why, mademoiselle—’

  Danielle’s voice said, dry and thin: ‘Are these your tourists, Dimitrios?’

  He gave an exclamation under his breath. His hand dropped from my arm. He turned sharply.

  Three people, a man and two women, were coming slowly along the path from the direction of Arachova. The women were plain, dumpy, middle-aged; the man was stoutish, and wore khaki shorts and had an enormous camera slung over one perspiring shoulder. They looked at us with incurious red faces as they plodded past like beef cattle in a row, like angels of heaven.

  I shot away from the brink of the cliff the way a cork leaves the very best champagne. I didn’t bother to say anything polite to Dimitrios, and I didn’t even fling a goodbye at Danielle.

  I hurried down the path in the wake of the three tourists. Neither the Greek nor the girl made any move to follow me, and after a while I slackened my pace and walked more slowly, trying to control my thoughts. If Danielle and her damned lover – for that the Greek was her lover I had no doubt at all – had tried for some silly reason to frighten me, they had succeeded. I had felt both frightened, and a fool, and it was a beastly mixture. But there had surely been nothing more than that … a spiteful trick and a distorted sense of humour? It was absurd to imagine anything more. I had only done so because I had spent an exacting and physically tiring day. I disliked Danielle and I had shown it, and she had wanted to frighten and humiliate me because I had interrupted her sordid meeting with the Greek behind the junipers. And even, perhaps, because of Simon …

  I had reached the stadium. The flat race-track lay empty and silent in the sun, cupped in its tiers of marble seats. I almost ran across the bare dust, hurried between the columns of the starting-gate, and down into the path that led to the shrine. I found that my heart was still hammering in my breast, and my throat was tight. The path dipped, dropped, twisted past a well where water trickled, and came precipitously down on to the smooth track above the theatre. There were my three tourists, still comfortably trudging along, talking something incomprehensible that might have been Dutch. There were people, too, in the theatre just below me, people on the steps, people everywhere on the floor of Apollo’s temple. It was quite safe to stand here under the trees and wait for my heart to slow down. Quite safe …

  The slanting sun was golden on the quiet stones, was apricot, was amber, was a lovely liquid wash of light and peace. A bee went past my cheek.

  Beside me was the pomegranate tree. The fruit glowed in the rich light. I remembered the cool feel of it in my hand last night, and Simon’s voice saying: ‘Eat it soon, Persephone; then you’ll have to stay in Delphi …’

  Well, I was going to stay. I was still going to stay.

  Someone said, very clearly, just beside me: ‘If you’ll just walk up there, it’ll give me the touch of colour I need.’

  I jumped and looked about me. There had been no sign of anyone on the path a moment since. There was still no one here. Then I saw, small below me, a grey-haired man with a ciné-camera, standing in the centre of the amphitheatre. He had the camera to his eye, and he was photographing a section of the tiered seating. A young woman, perhaps his daughter, walked slowly up the steep steps, turned rather self-consciously, and sat down to face the camera. As clearly as if it were beside me, I could hear the whirr of the mechanism as he took the picture. It was he who had spoken, and the wonderful acoustics had done the rest. If anyone had stood here above the theatre last night, they might well have been startled to hear, rising out of the dark well of silence, the great cry for vengeance from Electra …

  My breathing was back to normal. Apollo the healer had done his work.

  I went composedly down the steps, across the sunbaked circle of the theatre, down through the scented pines that rim the shrine, and along the main road to the hotel.

  Even when, washing for dinner, I saw on my bare arm a streak of dried blood – Dimitrios’ blood from that cut thumb – I felt only a brief moment of disgust. I had been stupid and imaginative and had had a fright; that was all.

  But I felt a curio
us reluctance to go down to dinner before Simon appeared, and I wished with a quite startling fervour that I was not committed to sleeping in the studio that night.

  13

  … With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.

  MILTON: Nativity Hymn.

  IT must have been close on three o’clock in the morning when something woke me. My room was second from the end of the long corridor, next to Danielle’s, and at the opposite end from the outer door, near which were the rooms of the two men. The Dutch painter had gone that day, so we four were the only occupants of the studio.

  For some time I lay in that heavy state between sleep and waking where it is hard to disentangle reality from the trailing clouds of dream. Something had woken me, but whether I had heard a noise, or whether it was the dream itself that had startled me awake, I couldn’t tell. There was no sound outside. The quiet air of Delphi wrapped us round. I moved my cheek against the hard pillow – pillows in Greece are always made like bricks – and prepared to drift back into sleep again.

  From the next room came the sound of a movement, and then the creak of the bed – two sounds so completely normal and expected that they should never have roused me further. But with them came a third sound that brought my eyes wide open in the dark and my cheek up off the pillow, and made nonsense of the normality of the night. Someone was talking, very softly: a man.

  My first thought was embarrassment at having heard, my next irritation succeeded by disgust. If Danielle had to have her lover in her room I didn’t want to be pilloried, sleepless, on the other side of a too-thin partition. I turned over with as much fuss of bedclothes and creak of bed-springs as I could, to let them know how thin the wall was, then I pulled the sheet – it was too hot for blankets – over my head, and tried to stop my ears to the sounds that succeeded the whispering.

  Sleep had gone for good. I lay rigid under the sheet with my eyes wide open in the darkness and my hands as hard as I could bear to hold them over my ears. It wasn’t that I’m particularly a prude; but being forced to listen in on anyone’s more private moments isn’t pleasant, and I didn’t want any part or parcel or hint of the more private moments of Danielle. Her public moments were quite embarrassing enough.

  I wondered how the unpleasant Dimitrios had got into the place. Even though he was only here to visit Danielle, I didn’t one bit like the idea of his being free to come and go. I supposed that he might have climbed in by her window, and if so, sooner or later he would go out the same way. I would no doubt hear him scramble out and drop the twelve feet or so to the floor of the rocky platform where the studio was built. I waited, furious with Danielle for subjecting me to this, furious with myself for minding, furious with Dimitrios for pandering to her monstrous egotism. It was a beastly experience.

  How long it was before there was quiet from the next room I don’t know. It seemed an age. But after a while all was silent, except for the whispering again, and then I heard someone moving furtively across the floor. I waited for the sounds of the window, and the cat-foot drop to the ground outside. But they didn’t come. I heard the door to the corridor open, and steps went stealthily past my door.

  That brought me upright in bed with a quick nervous jerk of the heart. If Danielle wanted to let a man in and out of her room, very well. But she had no damned right to let a man like Dimitrios loose inside the place. Had she – had she? – given him a key?

  Then, out of the dark, came another thought that kicked through those nerves again.

  Perhaps it wasn’t Dimitrios at all.

  Perhaps it was Nigel.

  I was out of bed and had thrust my feet into my slippers, and was shrugging my way into the light summer coat that also served me for a dressing-gown, before I quite realised myself what I was going to do. Then I had fled across the little room and had, very softly, opened my door and was peering out into the corridor.

  I suppose this bit isn’t pretty. It wasn’t any business of mine if Nigel had gone to Danielle’s room and got what had been so patently his heart’s desire. But when I had thought of him I had had a memory, sudden and bright and clean, of the young eagerness of Nigel’s face; the vulnerable eyes and the weak mouth and the silly boy’s beard. And I had seen his drawings, the visions of tree and flower and stone that he had translated with such impeccable and yet impassioned skill. If this, too, was Nigel … I had to know. Call it sheer, vulgar, woman’s curiosity if you like, but I had to know if the impossible Danielle could really annex him like that – if she was really prepared to make Nigel, whom she despised, squander himself in worship at her shoddy little shrine.

  I believe I was thinking, incoherently, that something must be done to stop her ruining Nigel, and then, even more incoherently, of Simon. Simon must be told tomorrow. Simon would know what to do …

  I slipped softly out of my room. The outer door at the end of the corridor had its upper half of glass, and outside it the dark was slackening off into the dawn. The pane was grey. Against it I saw him.

  He was almost at the end of the corridor, standing outside a door – Nigel’s door – as if he had paused there waiting for something. I shrank against the wall, but even if he had looked back he could not have seen me against the darkness at my end of the passage. I stayed still, pressed against the cold marble, and felt humiliated and angry and ashamed all at once, wishing I hadn’t known, wishing I was still fathoms deep in sleep, wishing I could remember Nigel by his work and not, as now, through the smudgy whispers of Danielle … ‘Men are all the same anyway … it bores me … I want Simon: I genuinely do …’

  The silhouette at the corridor’s end moved at last. He took a step forward and put his hand to the knob of the door. Then he paused again, momentarily, with his head bent, as if listening.

  I thought I must have made some sound and that he had heard me, because I could see, now, that it wasn’t the Greek: it was too tall. It wasn’t Nigel either. It was Simon.

  If I had been in a condition to think, the swift and complete rebellion of every nerve and muscle in my body, and of every drop of blood in my brain, would have told me finally about myself and Simon. But I had hardly realised what I had seen, when the night broke open rather more really, and very much more noisily.

  Simon pushed open Nigel’s door. I saw him reach up as if for the light-switch, but even as he moved the beam of a powerful torch speared out of the darkness of the room to catch him full on the face and chest. I saw his fractional check and recoil, as if the light were a physical blow in the eyes, but the pause was less than momentary, no more than the tensing before the spring. Before he had even blinked once he had launched himself forward along the beam of light, with the speed of a bullet. I heard an impact, a curse, the swift stamp and flurry of feet on the stone floor, and then all hell seemed to break loose inside the room.

  I ran down the corridor and paused in the doorway. The little room seemed to be a pandemonium of violently struggling bodies. In the weaving, flashing beam of the torch the two men looked enormous, and their shadows towered and waved grotesquely over ceiling and walls. Simon was the taller, and seemed to have a momentary advantage. He had the other’s wrist in one hand and seemed to be struggling to twist the man’s arm so that the torch would light his features. The beam swung wildly, erratically as the other fought to resist him, the light sweeping in violent, broken arcs through the darkness. It caught me, standing in the doorway, and raked a brilliant curve across my feet and the skirt of the nightdress below my coat. Someone snarled something incomprehensible in Greek, and then the man had wrenched his arm free from Simon’s grip and, with a grunt of effort, brought the heavy torch down in a vicious blow aimed for Simon’s head. Even as the blow whistled down, Simon jerked aside, so that the torch came down with a sickening sound on the side of his neck. It must have struck a muscle, for his grip seemed to loosen, and the Greek tore free.

  It must, after all, have been Dimitrios. I saw the stocky body and broad shoulders in the erratic light before
Simon was on him again, and the torch flew wide, to strike the wall beside me and fall somewhere near the foot of the bed. Darkness stamped down. I had not time to wonder about Dimitrios; why he had come to Nigel’s room, why Simon had followed him, or even – strangest of all – why Nigel himself didn’t appear to be here, when the two men, at grips again, hurtled past me to come violently up against the door of the shower-cupboard. There was a crack as a wooden panel gave way; somewhere on the floor was the sharp explosion of breaking glass; one of the flimsy chairs went over with a splintering sound; then the bed-springs crashed and whined as the two bodies went down on the bed together.

  I flung myself to my knees not two feet from the heaving bed, groping wildly for the torch. Somewhere here I had heard it roll … not far, surely? … these things rolled in semi-circles … ah! there it was. I clutched it, groping at the metal to find the catch, wondering if the fall had broken the bulb …

  It was a heavy torch and the catch was stiff. The bed, rocking like a ship in a storm, shot away a foot from the wall on screaming castors, hurtled back again with a crash that should have brought the plaster off the walls. The springs creaked, strained, gave again with an appalling noise as the men slithered to the edge and fell to the floor.

  A moment of gasping stillness, and then they were on their feet again. A pause, filled with the sound of heavy breathing. I jumped to my feet, still wrestling with the torch, and suddenly the thing flashed on in my hand. For the second time that night it caught Simon full in the eyes. And this time the Greek, seizing the advantage like lightning, charged down the beam, out of the blinding light. Simon went down with a crash that shook the room. I saw him catch the edge of the bed with his shoulder as he fell. The blow must have momentarily crippled him, but, surprisingly, the Greek didn’t follow it up. Nor did he turn to deal with me. He had his back to me, and the light waveringly pinned for a moment the heavy bull-like shoulders, the dark curled hair … He didn’t even look round. I heard a gasping snarl in French: ‘Put the bloody thing out, will you?’