A Man Over Forty (29 page)

Soon after that Balintore began to show signs of a new phobia. They hired a motor-car and drove to Port Sounion where, debouching from several large buses, they encountered a crowd of two or three hundred people who presently mingled with the larger throng who were already admiring the gaunt ruin of Poseidon's temple, and taking photographs of it and
each other. The sun was hot, the sea was blue, and the stark surviving columns stood majestically above the waves that the angry god had ruled; and amateur photographers from Birmingham and Hamburg, from Stockholm and Geneva, from Scranton and Kansas City and St Louis trained their lenses on the scene to shoot a view and take its carcass home.

Again and again Balintore and Palladis got into the line of fire – were warned, with anger or reproach – and hastily removed themselves; and at dinner that night Balintore said fretfully, ‘I still see those black muzzles. You can't escape them, can you?'

Now on the soaring Acropolis, sitting on a convenient plinth near the Museum in the luminous air of Greece – and sweating slightly in the heat of the Hellenic sun – he said to Palladis,' It's too much for me. It's too much!'

‘The crowd? It's a good-humoured, harmless crowd.'

‘And armed to the teeth! Every one of them – quick on the draw, or cuddling his weapon like marksmen at Bisley – pointing his camera at you!'

‘They don't hurt you.'

‘They get on my nerves.'

‘We'll go, then. Perhaps the sun's too hot for you. We'll go and find somewhere cool, and drink ouzo.'

At night – they dined in their hotel – Palladis spoke seriously and said, ‘I'm thinking of giving you notice. Or, to put it more politely, of offering my resignation. No, don't interrupt me. Wait till I've finished. I have been your secretary for about four years now, and you have treated me very generously. I, on my part, have worked with you, and for you, and done all I could to help you. Wait, wait! I'm not asking for overtime or claiming a bonus. But since January, since we went to Jamaica, I've been saddled with a responsibility that I hadn't anticipated. I was prepared for eccentricity, I welcomed the chance of working with a distinguished eccentric. For characters – I mean “characters” – are almost as rare in the world as the white rhinoceros. But I wasn't, and I'm not, prepared to nurse indefinitely a neurotic who is letting his neurosis take charge of him; and that's what happening to you.

‘Wait! I haven't nearly finished. Take some more of that retsina, we'll get another bottle. I'm going to remind you of your initial collapse, when you said on the television screen, with half England watching you, that what you were really afraid of was being “found out”. And I'll admit, for a start, that I had sometimes thought your stories, of what you had seen and done, were probably more fiction than fact. Your stories of fighting in Spain, for example. But O'Halloran – though you can blame him for trying to blackmail you – has disproved that. You have nothing to be afraid of in that respect. Well, what else is there? You're a foundling, and possibly a bastard – I'm using the word in a legal, not a pejorative sense – and public discovery of that would do you no harm at all. In the present temper of the world it would, more probably, do you good. Well, then, what is there to be frightened of? What false claim have you made, what false feathers are you wearing, that make you afraid of the truth coming up like the morning sun to expose their falsity? And forgive me for talking like that. It's the way O'Halloran might talk. I must have drunk too much Irish whisky at Turk's Court.'

‘Everything I've told you,' said Balintore, ‘is true. And no one can deny it.'

‘Why are you afraid of cameras?'

‘They seem to look through and through you.'

‘And what do they see?'

Balintore filled his glass from another bottle of retsina, belched, and with solemn sentimentality replied, ‘That I've got the best friend in the world, and I've never told him a lie.'

‘You still haven't told me what you're afraid of.'

‘So long as you stay with me, I'm afraid of nothing.'

‘Not even of dreams?'

‘I think I've stopped dreaming.'

‘I nearly said goodbye to you at Turk's Court,' said Pal-ladis. ‘When you told me you were determined to leave the following day, and wanted to go to Greece – your only reason being Honoria's discovery that pre-history had moved that way – I was on the point of writing our separation order. But
then I thought you might be moved by something I don't believe in, and that's a homing instinct. Geese have got it – grey lag and pink-foot navigate by instinct – but we've long lost the gift. Or have we? For suddenly I remembered, or the thought occurred, that if Greece is anything in the history of the world, it's the home of sanity. And sanity, God knows, is the home that you and I, and all of us, ought to be locking for.'

‘You,' said Balintore, ‘are as drunk as I am.'

‘It may be so,' said Palladis. ‘It may well be so. You've been keeping company with an unacknowledged fear, and get bad dreams. I've been keeping company with you, and get drunk. Not as a habit, though! I haven't been drunk for a long time. A very long time. I can't remember being drunk. But to walk on the Acropolis with a man who's frightened of cameras is enough to drive any man into the refuge of alcohol. And this I tell you, once again: I'm going to leave your employment unless you discard and forget your neurosis – and I think you could do it. I think you're cossetting and encouraging it, because in a perverted way you're enjoying it. Well, that's one alternative – you can go on doing that – and the other is that you can bring your neurosis out into the daylight, and we'll see if we can deal with it.'

‘Otherwise,' said Balintore, ‘you're going to abandon me?'

‘Yes.'

‘But the trouble is that I don't know the answer. You say to me, “You're afraid of being found out”—'

‘It was you who said it.'

‘All right. But now you're saying it. And I'm asking myself, what is there to be found out? And I don't know.'

‘You've done something you're ashamed of—'

‘Hundreds of things! Who hasn't?'

‘What's the worst?'

‘I think,' said Balintore, ‘that it was accepting the present of a stamp-album. I was only a boy I was sixteen, I think – and I hated the man who gave it to me. It was a valuable collection, but he thought I needed it. He thought I needed something to comfort me. Though, as a matter of fact, I didn't. So he offered me his stamp-album, which he valued very highly, and I took it. And that, I think, was a shameful thing to do.'

‘It isn't the sort of thing to ruin a man's reputation.'

‘I can't think of anything worse.'

‘In Jamaica, you remember, we met those people called Bulfin.'

‘And they said I had stolen a novel written by Tom Bulfin. But that isn't true. I told you the truth.'

‘You ought to see an analyst, of course.'

‘That I shall never do.'

‘Then we'll have to wait for a catalyst.'

‘Another explosion?'

‘I'd prefer something quieter.'

‘Let's have some brandy.'

‘No, it's bed-time. We've an early start tomorrow. We're going to Delphi – in a bus.'

Bare Andx vast, Parnassus rose in forbidding grandeur on their right-hand side, and the voice of an American woman in the seat behind them complained, ‘I thought Italy was a fert'le country.' She was reproved by her daughter who said tartly,' We left Italy Tuesday.'

In the seat in front sat an old Englishman and his wife: he, of time-engraved, proconsular appearance, wore a panama girt with an Old Etonian ribbon, and she – who was plump and looked kind, but with the kindliness of innate authority – a hat like a small blue beehive of plaited straw ornamented with a fragment of fish-net and some cockle shells.

‘How appropriate!' said Palladis. ‘A cockle shell is the pilgrim's emblem, and all good travellers are pilgrims at heart.'

‘Pilgrims or fugitives,' said Balintore in a voice that discouraged conversation.

The day was fine, and the growing warmth of the sun lulled the tourists into a drowsy silence as the long bus climbed the hillside road. Their guide – an attractive and well-informed young woman – who had spoken with nice discrimination
about Eleusis and Boeotian Thebes, was now engrossed in private conversation with the driver, and only the voices of two young men – tall, broad-shouldered, with close-clipped hair – broke the mechanic undertones of their journey.

‘Xenophilia,' said one of them. ‘I thought it was a disease, but you say it means that Greeks like foreigners.'

‘So they say, and I guess it's true enough. But I wish they'd learn to spell. If you want a drink, it doesn't help you to find what you're looking for when they spell it
M par
.

‘They haven't taught their dogs about xenophilia. You ever been attacked by a Greek shepherd dog?'

‘You got to sit down and keep still. Then the dog comes right up and licks your face. There's this girl I know—'

‘Maybe it's different for a girl.'

‘– she and a college friend of hers were hiking through the mountains, and two dogs came running up as if they were going to tear ‘em apart. Well, they sat down, right there, and the next thing they knew, the dogs were nuzzling behind their ears. And that wasn't all. About two minutes later a couple of big, rangy shepherds came round the shoulder of the hill, and these two girls – well, they didn't know much about life except what they'd learnt back home in Illinois, and the least thing they expected was instant rape. But no, sir. These shepherds made the dogs lie down and the girls get up and go with them, all the way down hill to a kind of cabin in a draw of the hill, and there they said, in their own language, “Meet the old lady!” And their mother – she was right there waiting for them – she set them down to a dish of fried eggs and goat's milk cheese. Well, they didn't get the big story they might have had to take home, but they did learn about xenophilia.'

As they approached Delphi their guide broke off her conversation with the driver to tell them about the Castalian spring, whose escaping rivulet they crossed at walking pace, and presently, having peered up at the radiance of the great cliffs above the Theatre, the tourists stiffly emerged when their bus stopped beside the Museum.

Balintore and Palladis let the old proconsular Englishman and his wife go out before them; and heard him say, in a high; crackling, but decisive voice, ‘Tomorrow morning – quite
early, before there's a crowd – I want to go down to that spring and drink the water.'

‘For poetic inspiration? You're much too old.'

‘You made me get Jordan water when the children were baptized—'

‘That's quite different.'

‘Mind the step, dear.'

‘I see it.'

‘I don't want to write poetry, but I'd like to have a moment of inspiration, or clear sight, before I die,' he said; and chuckled happily as he helped her down. ‘But it isn't likely, is it?'

Shepherded by their guide, they slowly climbed the Sacred Way, silenced by toil and simple awe beneath the majesty of the cliffs; and most of them were much confused by what they were told about Apollo and the Pythian oracle.

Crowded with broken monuments of the past, the huge amphitheatre was more densely packed with the present. There were tourists everywhere, brightly clad in summer clothes, and the murmuration of a thousand voices re-echoed from ancient walls. In the Theatre, high on the hillside, there was a more purposive noise, and it became apparent that a rehearsal of some sort was going on, though in great disorder.

Leaving their fellow tourists, Balintore and Palladis climbed to the top row of curving, white stone seats – that commanded a view, not only of the ancient stage, but of an enormous valley enclosed by golden hill and flamboyant cliffs – and watched a director or
régisseur
attempting to drill opposing choruses that were impeded by numerous spectators intent on taking photographs.

In the row below them were the two young men, with hair clipped short and brightly patterned shirts, who had sat near them in the bus; one of whom said, ‘It's some college outfit. They're going to play Oedipus.'

‘Iphigeneia in Tauris,' said his companion.

‘One or the other, I couldn't tell ‘em apart.'

‘That's Iphigeneia over there – the big blonde in toreador pants – that's how I know.'

‘She's well stacked.'

‘I'll say.'

‘And who's this?'

From one of the choruses a girl in faded blue denims stepped forward and in a clear, slightly nasal voice recited carefully:

‘Tisiphone donned the head of a dog
,

Alecto flew on bat's wings
,

Megara's serpents she combed like hair
,

And this is the song she sings:

“Respectable women, such as we
,

Have a duty that none of us shirks
,

So Alecto squeaks a curse in his ear
,

And Tisiphone waits till it works
. …”

The director silenced her with an agitated hand, and Palladis said, ‘They appear to have found a new translation.'

‘I'm out of my depth,' said Balintore. ‘Who is Tisiphone?'

‘She and the others – Alecto and Megara – were the Furies who haunted Orestes, and drove him mad, after he had killed Clytaemnestra.'

‘His mother.'

‘Who had murdered Agamemnon his father.'

One of the young men in front of them, who had turned to listen, said gravely, ‘That must have been a very traumatic experience for Orestes.'