Strangers in Company (20 page)

“Never mind.” He was taking it beautifully. “It must have been my fault for not knocking loud enough. That's the worst of these hotels that don't have telephones in their rooms.”

“Goodness,
did
you knock?” She had always thought she could as easily sleep through a crying child as a knock on her door. But then, how long ago it was that one or other of the twins would come knocking to report some midnight crisis of earache or nightmare?

“Never mind.” David Cairnthorpe was shepherding them out to the bus. “Oh”—he handed two white boxes to Stella—“here are your packed lunches. It's a long day, I'm afraid.”

“And I've made it worse.” Marian climbed into the bus, glancing apologetically to right and left as she made her way to the left hand side of the back seat. The professor and Mrs. Spencer, she saw, had sensibly moved one forward, avoiding the seat over the wheel to take the one that had been occupied by Miss Gear and Miss Grange. Absurd to have been worried about Edvardson last night.

“It's not like you to oversleep.” His smile did the strangest things to her.

“No, I'm properly ashamed of myself. Too much retsina last night, I suppose. I don't know when I've slept so sound.”

“Do you good,” he said as she passed him to settle in the corner of the back seat. “Though I must say you don't look exactly wide awake yet.”

“I don't feel it.” She smiled at Pam and Meg, who were to share the back seat with them, and settled down for the long day. It was a cool, grey morning, with puddles in the streets as a reminder of yesterday's rain. “Surprising,” said Marian, looking out of the window as the bus moved heavily off, “I thought it would be fine today after the moonlight night.” And then, getting a sharp glance from Stella, wished she had kept quiet.

They caught the ferry at Aighion with ten minutes to spare. “And very satisfactory, too,” said Edvardson. “I've spent hours sitting in the draughty little café on that quay being sold pistachio nuts by indigent Greeks.”

“There aren't very many of them,” said Marian thought
fully as they filed on board the ferry. “I mean, not actual beggars.”

“I expect the colonels have put them all in goal,” said Stella. “Beggars are so untidy.” Either she had gone overboard with her eye makeup today, or that scene with Mike had given her a sleepless night. Judging by her obviously frayed state of nerves, Marian suspected the latter. She, too, still felt curiously exhausted, considering how long and hard she had slept, and was delighted when Stella suggested that they eat their packed lunches on the open, breezy upper deck of the ferry. It was crowded, of course, but mainly with Greeks, and they were able to eat their highly flavoured cold chicken and hard-boiled eggs in what felt like a companionable silence.

The professor joined them as the ferry drew in towards the quay at Itea. “I'm going to try and get off one of the first,” he said. “I've always wanted to look at this place—it's a bit of a naval headquarters, you know, and looks like genuine living to me. One gets so little of that on these tours. Would you like to come?”

“Yes, do let's.” Marian was aware of Mike farther along the deck, apparently beginning to marshal his party ashore. “I'm sick of walking in crocodile like a good girl. Coming?” she asked Stella, with one of her usual qualms of conscience.

“I suppose so.” Stella, too, had a quick glance for Mike. Perhaps she needed to demonstrate independence today. At all events the three of them worked their way down to the narrow catwalk that ran along above the deep central space where cars and lorries were stowed. Their bus, as a last arrival on this rather primitive ferry, would be off among the first.

“But that proves nothing.” Edvardson looked down to where Andreas sat relaxed in his cab, a Greek newspaper spread over the steering wheel. “We're bound to lose some of the old dears. There'll be time for a quick walk down the front and back. There's a shop I've heard of—There! We're in.” The ferry had touched, bounced a little and steadied, as men up and down the wharf worked fast
and skilfully with huge ropes. Now the great ramps were letting down onto the quay with an accompaniment of the revving of car engines. Little groups of people stood at the front of the catwalks, waiting for their chance to climb down the few metal steps and edge ashore among the cars.

It was a rather disconcerting free-for-all, Marian thought, watching group after group jockey their way through the slowly advancing stream of vehicles. Now their chance had come; they waited for a moment at the bottom of the catwalk steps. “Now,” said Edvardson, and then, “Christ!”

It all happened so fast. Afterwards Marian could be sure of nothing. There had been, unmistakably, a pause in the movement of cars; she had noticed that their bus was next in line as she stepped out on to the ramp, with the professor on one side of her and Stella on the other. People were surging down from the opposite flight of steps, and others pushing rather harder than she liked from behind. Her last steps from the metal stairway on to the ramp were taken, helplessly, too fast, and it was then that the screams began. Looking up, she saw their own bus bearing down on them. A hand pulled violently backwards; she saw the professor falling forward, blacked out for a moment and came to herself, still, incredibly, alive, the centre of an hysterical crowd. The front of the bus was over the professor's prostrate body. He lay there, horribly still, and Marian's world spun black about her. Nothing in her life had ever felt like this.… Nothing.… Silent tears streamed down her face. Stella had her arm, was crying and swearing and trying to comfort her all at once. Mike, miraculously appeared from nowhere, was kneeling beside that too-still body. Andreas, white-faced and shaking, was climbing down from the cab of the bus.

“God blast all wheeled vehicles.” It was a miracle: the professor's voice. His legs moved, turned over; he wriggled out from under the huge front of the bus, black with dirt, his jacket torn, his sunglasses hanging over one ear, his face white with shock—or was it rage?

“You're not hurt?” Mike was helping him up.

“No, by the grace of God. And no one else?” He looked round, gave Marian a quick nod and turned back to Mike. “Ask that damn fool what he thought he was doing. He might have killed us all.”

This view was obviously shared by a good many Greeks, who had surrounded Andreas in a threatening, noisy crowd. Mike spoke through them, loud and angry, and Andreas pushed forward, answering, as rapidly, in Greek.

Mike dismissed whatever excuse he had made with one explosive Greek monosyllable and turned to the professor. “Reading the newspaper!” The scorn in his voice was nuclear. “Bad news of his home village. So—foot on the accelerator instead of the brake. And the last job he does for Mercury Tours. But for the moment, we're blocking traffic.”

It was true. Angry hootings from farther back in the queue of vehicles spoke of everyone's impatience to get ashore.

“Yes.” Edvardson pulled his torn jacket together. “No use crying over this lot of spilt milk. Come help me buy a jacket, Mrs. Frenche?”

Incredibly, it was all over. The angry Greeks had seen friends waiting on the dock. It was just one more episode in the long, sanguinary battle between man and the motor vehicle, and this time, in fact, no blood had been drawn. The curious stop-go, pedestrian-vehicular movement ashore began again, with Andreas, back in his cab, driving as if over eggs.

Safely on shore, the professor looked Marian and Stella up and down. “You look like the wrath of God,” he said. “You need ouzo, not exercise. And this looks like the place. Stay here”—he settled them at the metal table of a waterfront café—“and for God's sake, don't let that maniac leave without me. This was my only jacket.” He gave it a rueful glance.

“It's your only life, too,” said Stella.

“Yes,” he said, “that had occurred to me, Miss Marten.”

He had just left them when David Cairnthorpe came hurrying across the quay. “You're not hurt?” The question was for them both, but his anxious look for Stella.

“Just shaken up a bit,” Marian reassured him. “Someone grabbed us from behind.”

“Mike,” said Stella, with what sounded oddly like hatred. “But the professor nearly bought it. He's had to go and get himself a new jacket.”

“He asked us to see that the bus waited for him,” put in Marian.

“Of course. Thank God it was no worse. But”—he paused—“Mrs. Frenche, Stella, I know it's a lot to ask, but for everyone's sake, can we say as little as possible about this?”

“Yes.” Marian had thought of this, too. “One more accident.… We don't want a general panic, do we?” Or did they? One more accident. Could she really believe it one? Might not the safest thing for them all, be a general panic and consequent return home? But that was absurd. “This really
must
have been an accident.” She was not quite sure whom she was trying to convince.

The bus, sedately parked on the quay, was filling up by the time the professor rejoined the party, wearing, to Marian's amusement, the kind of navy blue windbreaker popular with the younger Greeks. As he had bought himself a navy blue beret the day before in Olympia, to replace the hat lost at Mistra, he now looked, as she told him, every inch a Greek.

“Thanks,” he said. “You might call it protective colouring.”

And what in the world had he meant by that, and why had Stella given him such a strange glance for it? But it was time to get back into the bus, for the inevitable babble of question and exclamation. David Cairnthorpe had been optimistic when he hoped to keep the news of the accident quiet. But oddly enough, it had had the opposite effect to that which he and Marian had feared. Everyone was used to accidents involving motorcars. There was nothing strange or frightening about them. From being
almost ignored, the professor had become a figure of rather affectionate fun, his blue jacket a kind of prize for survival.

But, “Odyssey with Furies,” Marian heard Pam whisper to Meg, and was inclined to agree with her.

Andreas was driving as if he carried a load of Venetian glass, but Mike, picking up his microphone, made no reference to the near tragedy. “Now,” he said, “at last we come to the high point of your Mercury Classical Tour. Now you are to see Delphi, where, for centuries, the oracle gave counsel wise and enigmatic; Delphi, the home of Apollo and of Bacchus, of wisdom and of divine frenzy. You are now on the Sacred Way, ladies and gentlemen. Once more you are to imagine yourselves as pilgrims, coming up through the olive groves to the place of the oracle. And, by the way, these are the largest olive groves in Greece, and some of the oldest. Who knows? A few of these trees may have been bearing fruit when St. Paul preached to the Corinthians, or when the oracle returned its gloomy answer to the Emperor Julian that the bright citadel had perished and Apollo's laurel bough was withered. The laurel may have withered, ladies and gentlemen, but the olive still thrives here in the valley of the Pleistos, and you will find that Delphi is coming alive again, with a new life, that of the International Culture Centre that is being built here, to act, as Olympia did of old, as a meeting place for the nations of the world.”

“And very ugly it is,” said Professor Edvardson.

It was late by the time the bus climbed up through the town's narrow one-way streets. “You'd have thought when the French moved the old town from on top of the site, they'd have had the wits to build wider,” said Stella.

“But that was in the nineteenth century.” The professor turned round to explain. “No one imagined this kind of tourism then. Nor the motorcar,” he added thoughtfully.

“Still less the bus.” Stella, too, must be remembering that frightening moment at the harbour. “Oh, well, I can see this way you get a kind of compulsory tour of the high points of the place.” They were threading their way
narrowly between gift shops full of the usual enticements of hand-embroidered Greek dresses and brilliantly coloured rugs. Now the bus slowed and stopped, on the right hand side of the road, outside the white-painted Hotel of the Muses.

“It looks all right.” Stella hitched her patchwork bag over her shoulder and prepared for the slow struggle off the bus.

A few seats ahead of them, Mrs. Esmond and her son had decided to wait it out. Sitting, as usual, by the window, she was talking to him in a kind of angry half whisper, when Stella, passing by, lost her footing in the crowded aisle and steadied herself, with an apology, by a hand on Charles' shoulder.

It affected him like an electric shock. Ignoring his mother, he leapt to his feet, insisting on taking Marian's small case, which Stella had got into the habit of carrying for her. Following along behind, Marian got the full benefit of Mrs. Esmond's look of blind fury and felt compelled, in her turn, to offer to help her with the extraordinary accumulation of paraphernalia that Charles, as a rule, dutifully loaded and unloaded from the rack. Reaching down heavy raincoat, light plastic mac, umbrella, cardigan and a coloured bag full of lumpy unidentifiable objects, Marian was grateful that they were almost the last out of the bus. Meg and Pam, still collecting themselves on the back seat, could, she thought be relied on to ignore Mrs. Esmond's angry mutterings of “cradle snatcher” and “leaving his old mother to fend for herself.”

At least Charles was waiting to help his mother down the steep step, but Stella was waiting with him. Marian had never seen an understanding arrived at so swiftly and was forced to the conclusion that this was some manoeuvre in Stella's complex, underground relationship with Mike. At all events, it seemed already to have been settled that the four of them would dine together that night. “I hope you don't mind, Mrs. F.,” Stella had the grace to look conscience-stricken when they were alone at last outside their rooms, which proved to be in an annexe a little farther
down the steep hillside on which the hotel was built. “I thought we were due for a change.”