My Brother Michael (7 page)

I laughed. ‘Including the driver?’

‘This is true. Yes, including the driver. I have a feeling that sometimes,’ said Simon, ‘he also shuts his eyes.’ He pulled the big car round an even sharper
bend, missed an upcoming lorry by centimetres, and added: ‘You can open yours now. This is Chrissa.’

I felt the colour come into my cheeks. ‘I’m sorry. I must be losing my nerve.’

‘You’re still tired, that’s all. We’ll have something to drink in Itea before we seek out this Simonides.’

‘No, please,’ I protested, almost too quickly.

He eyed me for a moment. ‘You really are scared, aren’t you?’

‘I – yes, I am.’

‘I shouldn’t worry; I really shouldn’t. It can’t matter, or it’d have been settled long before this.’

‘I know. I know it’s nonsense. It’s silly and it’s trivial and it doesn’t mean a thing, but I told you I’m the world’s worst coward. It’s true. I’ve been persuading myself for years that I’d be as competent and self-sufficient as anyone else, given the chance, but now I know … Why, I can’t even bear
scenes
, so why I ever thought I could get away with this sort of mayhem I have no idea.’ I stopped. It occurred to me with a queer little shock that I would never have said anything like that to Philip, not in a hundred years.

Simon was saying calmly: ‘Never mind. I’m here, aren’t I? Whatever we get into, I’ll talk you out of it, so sit back and relax.’

‘If,’ I said, ‘we find Simon.’

‘If,’ said Simon, ‘we do.’

I was glad enough, when we got to Itea, to leave everything to him.

Itea is the port which in ancient times saw the
landing of the pilgrims bound for the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. The shrine was a religious centre for the whole ancient world for many hundreds of years, and to us nowadays, used to modern transport, it is astonishing to contemplate the distances that men travelled on foot and on horseback or in small ships, to worship the god of light and peace and healing, or to ask the advice of the famous Oracle enshrined below the temple. The easy way was by Itea. The sea-journey, for all its hazards, was less exhausting and dangerous than the journey by road through the mountains, and here into the little port of Itea the pilgrims crowded, to see from the harbour the winding river valley of the Pleistus and, beyond the shoulder of Parnassus where modern Delphi stands, the bright cliffs of the Shining Ones that guard the holy spring.

Today Itea is a grubby little fishing village, with one long street of shops and
tavernas
facing the sea, and separated from it by the road and then perhaps fifty yards of dusty boulevard where pepper-trees give shade and the men of the village gather for the usual drinks and ices and sticky honey-cakes.

Simon stopped the car under the trees and led me to a rickety iron table which seemed to have fewer attendant wasps than the others. I would have liked tea again, but felt so ashamed of this insular craving – and so doubtful of getting anything approaching what I wanted – that I asked for fresh lemonade, and got it, delicious and cold and tangy with the real fruit, and with it a
pasta
something like Shredded Wheat, but frantically oversweet with honey and chopped nuts. It
was wonderful. The wasps loved it too. When we had finished it I defiantly asked for another, and stayed to eat it, while Simon went off to look for the baker’s shop of Simonides.

I watched him go, thoughtfully beating off an extra large and persistent wasp.

Somehow I didn’t think Giannakis Simonides was our man. ‘Monsieur Simon, at Delphi …’ And there was only one Monsieur Simon at Delphi.

There was that queer reserve, too, in Simon’s manner; there was Arachova; and the way he had shelved my question as to what he was doing in Delphi. The thing had ceased to be a slightly awkward puzzle. It was fast becoming a mystery, with Simon Lester at its centre. And Simon’s girl …

I finished my cake now and got up. Simon had paid the waiter before he had left me. I could see him standing in a doorway some distance up the street. The place was apparently a restaurant, for outside it stood the big charcoal stove, and over this a whole lamb revolved slowly on the spit which was being turned by a stout woman in a blue apron. Simon appeared to be questioning her; she was nodding vigorously, and then, with a wave of her free hand, seemed to be directing him further up the street.

He looked back, saw me standing under the pepper-trees, and raised a hand in salute. Then he made a vague gesture towards the other end of the street, and set off that way, walking fast.

Taking his gesture to mean that he had some information, but that he didn’t expect me to follow him, I
stayed where I was and watched him. He went perhaps a hundred yards, hesitated, then glanced up at a hoarding and plunged into the darkness of a deserted cinema. As he vanished, I turned in the opposite direction and began to walk along the boulevard. I was only too thankful to leave the inquiry to him. If he really was in the centre of the mystery, he could keep it to himself, and welcome …

Meanwhile I would do what I had come to Delphi for. Since chance had brought me down to Itea, the start of the ancient pilgrimage, I would try and see the shrine as the old pilgrims had seen it on their first landing from the Corinthian Gulf.

I walked quickly along the harbour’s edge. On my right the sea paled towards sunset, and across the opal shimmer of the bay came a fishing-boat, turquoise and white, with her prow raked in a proud pure curve above its liquid image. Under a sail of that same scarlet had the worshippers come into harbour when the god was still at Delphi.

I left the sea’s edge and walked rapidly across the street. I wanted to get behind the ugly row of houses, back into the old olive woods, where I could look straight up towards the Pleistus valley with nothing but immemorial rock and tree and sky between me and the shrine.

Behind the main street were a few sorry alleys of concrete, with houses, as usual, scattered seemingly at random in the dust-patches between the trees. I passed the last house, skirted a building that looked like a ruined warehouse, and followed a cracked stretch of
concrete which appeared to lead straight into the outskirts of the forest of olives. The concrete was crisscrossed with cracks, like crazy paving, and thistles grew in the fissures. I startled a browsing donkey, and it plunged off under the olives in a smother of dust, to be lost in the shadows. Soon the concrete came to an end, and I found myself walking through soft earth in the deeper twilight of the trees. The breeze had strengthened with the approach of evening, and overhead the olives had resumed their liquid rippling.

I hurried on towards a space ahead where stronger light promised a clearing. I was lucky. There was a slight rise in the ground, and to the north of it the great olives thinned. From the top of the little ridge, across the ruffling crests of the trees, I could see the old Pilgrim’s Way, unscarred by my own century. I stood for a few minutes, gazing up towards the shrine in the now rapidly fading light.

The temple columns were invisible behind the curve of the Chrissa bluff, but there was the black cleft of Castalia, and above it the great cliffs whose names are Flamboyant and Roseate, the Shining Ones … The dying sun ran up the Flamboyant cliff like fire.

This was, I thought, the way to come to Delphi … not straight up into the ruins in the wake of a guide, but to land from a small boat in a bay of pearl, and see it as they would have seen it, flaming in the distance like a beacon, the journey’s end.

Something like a fleck of darkness went by my cheek. A bat. It was deep twilight now, the swift-falling Aegean dusk. I turned to see lights pricking out in
the houses behind me. I could just see the street lamps, faint and far between, along the sea-front. They looked a long way away. Where I stood the shadow of a huge olive brooded like a cloud. I turned to go back to the village.

Instead of returning the way I had come, I took what I judged to be the direction of the car, and, plunging down from the ridge into the depths of the olive-wood, I set off quickly through the twisted and shadowy trunks.

I had gone perhaps a hundred yards before the trees began to thin. Some way off to my left I saw the lights of the first house, an outpost of the village, and was hurrying towards it through the soft dust when a sudden flash of light quite near me, and to my right, brought me up short, startled. It was the flash of an electric torch, deep in the trees. Perhaps my adventures of the day had worked on my imagination rather too well, or perhaps it was the ancient mystery that I had been attempting to call up, but the fact remains that I felt suddenly frightened, and stood very still, with the trunk of an enormous olive between me and the torchlight.

Then I realised what it was. There was a house set by itself deep in the grove, the usual two-windowed box of a place with its woodpile and its lean-to shed and its scrawny chickens gone to roost in the vine. The flash I had seen showed me a man bending over a motor vehicle of some sort which was parked close to the side of the house. It looked like a jeep. As I watched he jerked the bonnet open, shone the light into the engine, and leaned over it. I saw his face highlighted by the
queerly refracted light, a very Greek face, dark, with hair crisping down the wide cheekbones in the manner of the heroes, and a roundish head covered with close curls like a statue’s.

Then somebody in the cottage must have kindled the lamp, for a soft oblong of light slanted out of one of the windows, showing the dusty clutter outside – a woodman’s block with the axe still sunk in it and gleaming as the light caught it, a couple of old petrol cans, and a chipped enamel bowl for the hens’ food. My causeless fear vanished and I turned quickly to go.

The man by the jeep must have seen the movement of my skirt in the darkness, because he looked up. I caught a glimpse of his face before the torch went out. He was smiling. I turned and hurried away. As I went, I thought the torch-beam flicked out to touch me momentarily, but the Greek made no move to follow.

Simon was sitting in the car, smoking. He got out when he saw me and came round to open my door. He answered my look with a shake of the head.

‘No go. I’ve asked all the questions I could and it’s a dead end.’ He got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. ‘I really think we’ll have to call it a day – go back to Delphi and have dinner and leave it to sort itself out in its own good time.’

‘But will it?’

He turned the car and started back towards Delphi. ‘I think so.’

Bearing in mind what I had been thinking before about the ‘mystery’, I didn’t argue, I said simply: ‘Then we’ll leave it. As you wish.’

I saw him glance at me sideways, but he made no comment. The lights of the village were behind us, and we gathered speed up the narrow road between the olives. He dropped something into my lap, a leafy twig that smelt delicious when my fingers touched it.

‘What is it?’

‘Basil. The herb of kings.’

I brushed it to and fro across my lips. The smell was sweet and minty, pungent above the smell of dust. ‘The pot of basil? Was it under this stuff that poor Isabella buried Lorenzo’s head?’

‘That’s it.’

There was a pause. We passed a crossroads where our lights showed a sign,
AMPHISSA
9. We turned right for Chrissa.

‘Did you go to look for the Pilgrim’s Way back there in Itea?’ asked Simon.

‘Yes. I got a wonderful view just before the light went. The Shining Ones were terrific.’

‘You found the ridge, then?’

I must have sounded surprised. ‘You know it? You’ve been here before?’

‘I was down here yesterday.’

‘In Itea?’

‘Yes.’ The road was climbing now. After a short silence he said, with no perceptible change of expression. ‘You know, I really don’t know any more about it than you do.’

The basil leaves were cool and still against my mouth. At length I said: ‘I’m sorry. Did I make it so obvious? But what was I to think?’

‘Probably just what you did think. The thing’s slightly crazy anyway, and I doubt if it’ll prove to matter at all.’ I saw him smile. ‘Thank you for not pretending you didn’t know what I meant.’

‘But I did. I’d been thinking about very little else myself.’

‘I know that. But nine women out of ten would have said “
What d’you mean?
” and there we’d have been, submerged in a lovely welter of personalities and explanations.’

‘There wasn’t any need of either.’

Simon said: ‘“O rare for Antony”.’

I said involuntarily: ‘What d’you mean?’

He laughed then. ‘Skip it. Will you have dinner with me tonight?’

‘Why, thank you, Mr Lester—’

‘Simon.’

‘Simon, then, but perhaps I should – I mean—’

‘That’s wonderful then. At your hotel?’

‘Look, I didn’t say—’

‘You owe it to me,’ said Simon coolly.

‘I owe it to you? I do not! How d’you work that out?’

‘As reparation for suspecting me of – whatever you did suspect me of.’ We were climbing through the twisting streets of Chrissa, and as we passed a lighted shop he glanced at his wrist. ‘It’s nearly seven now. Could you bear to dine in half an hour’s time – say at half past seven?’

I gave up. ‘Whenever it suits you. But isn’t that fearfully early for Greece? Are you so very hungry?’

‘Reasonably. But it’s not that. I – well, I’ve things to do and I want to get them done tonight.’

‘I see. Well, it won’t be too early for me. I only had a snack for lunch, and I was too frightened to enjoy that. So thank you. I’d like that. At the Apollon, you said? You’re not staying there yourself?’

‘No. When I got here the place was full up, so I got permission to sleep in the big studio up the hill. You won’t have seen it yet. It’s a big ugly square building a couple of hundred feet up behind the village.’

‘A studio. An artist’s studio, do you mean?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what it was used for originally, but now it has a caretaker, and is let out to visiting artists and
bona fide
students who can’t afford to pay for a hotel. I suppose I’m up there under slightly false pretences, but I wanted to be in Delphi for some days and I couldn’t find a room. Now that I’m settled into the studio I find it’ll do me admirably. There’s only one other tenant at present, an English boy, who’s a genuine artist … and good, too, though he won’t let you say so.’