Strangers in Company (7 page)

“Ooh, how frightful. Where?” Mrs. Hilton was putting the pill back in a little bottle.

“All over. Ought you to take the glass back?” Anything to get rid of this friendly, intolerable woman.

“Mr. Cairnthorpe can, when he gets back. After all, he's supposed to be in charge of us.” She poured the
water out of the window and went forward down the aisle to deposit the glass on Cairnthorpe's seat. “That was a proper turn-up between him and your Miss Marten, wasn't it?”

“What?”

“Ooh, didn't you hear? She's mad as fire because of this moving round business. In the bus, you know. Seems like common sense to me, but it won't suit her nohow. So hard on the singles, she says. Stuck with the same person all the time. Proper narked she was when he stuck to his guns and said it was all settled. There's more to that young man than meets the eye, if you ask me; I thought he was a dead loss yesterday, but I'm not so sure today. The guide chipped in, too, that Mike, and took your Miss Marten's side, but Cairnthorpe wasn't having any. ‘You're the guide,' he says, ‘but I'm the courier.' And that was that. I don't reckon Mike liked it overmuch, and I'm dead sure Miss Marten didn't. Oh—here they come.”

She moved up to her own seat, which was now two forward from Marian's, owing to the clockwise movement of the passengers. At least, Marian thought, if they must resign themselves to the same people in front and behind them, there would be a constant change in those across the aisle.

“Well.” Stella plumped down irritably in the aisle seat. “You didn't miss much, Mrs. F. How's the head?”

“Better, thanks.” Surprisingly it was true. Equally surprisingly, and much to her relief, Stella said nothing about the argument with Cairnthorpe.

“Corinth next,” she said. “Are you game to walk across the canal, Mrs. F.?”

Mike was an admirable guide. By the time they reached the Corinth Canal, they knew it had been planned over and over again through the ages, by Nero amongst others. He
had actually dug the first earth with a golden spade, before trouble in Rome called him home, but what with one thing and another the project had not been finished until the nineteenth century. They also knew a good deal about Corinth, city of wealth and courtesans, where the famous Lais charged ten thousand drachmae a night, but gave her favours free to ugly Diogenes, the philosopher who told Alexander the Great to get out of his sun. “‘It isn't everyone who can afford to go to Corinth,'” Mike quoted to them, and when their visit to the Temple of Apollo was over and they were back in the bus, Stella summed up what might well have been many people's feelings: “It isn't everyone who'd want to. They can keep it for all of me, Doric columns and the lot. I never did go much for architectural terms.”

“No.” Marian was happy to agree with her. “But I'm looking forward to Mycenae.”

One last look up to the towering citadel of the Acro-Corinth, where, the professor leaned forward to tell Marian and Stella, the Turkish garrison had held out all through the Greek War of Indepedence, and the bus began to climb up out of the coastal plain.

“God, I'm hungry,” said Stella. “Thank goodness it's lunch first and Mycenae afterwards.”

Lunch at the Belle Hélène was stuffed vine leaves again, and delicious. Only the professor was disappointed. “They've changed the place a whale of a lot since I was here last. Progress, I suppose. But I liked it the way Schliemann saw it.”

“Schliemann?” asked Stella.

“The man who found Mycenae and all that gold. I expect Mike will tell us about him on our way up to the site.”

Mike did, but Marian was not listening. She was back in her own deep past, those lonely days at school, before she met Mark, when all her life was books. A day girl at an Oxford boarding school, she had somehow belonged in neither the world of school nor that of home. The school library, and later the public one, had been her refuge,
secondhand bookshops her pleasure. She would never forget discovering the tattered grey translations of Aeschylus' three plays about the doomed House of Atreus. A cold little shiver ran down her spine. Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, to get a fair wind for his fleet to sail against Troy. He had got it, too, and conquered Troy, after ten years, by the meanest of tricks, only to come home, bringing the unlucky prophetess Cassandra with him, to his own doom, and hers. And could you blame his wife, Clytemnestra, who had sent her daughter off, as she thought, to marry the great Achilles and then learned of her death on the sacrificial alter? No wonder if she took a lover, and if the two of them, alerted by the beacon fires that announced Agamemnon's triumphal return, planned and carried out their deed of blood. Daughters.… What was Mark doing with Viola? Sebastian would be all right. It was his nature, all too like his father's. But Viola.… Would Mark be taking care of her properly? Or sacrificing the two of them on the publicity altar of his career? They had been a liability eighteen years ago. Now, eighteen, similar, beautiful, they had proved, suddenly, an asset. Would he even have the sense to take care of them as such? And, if not, would they be wise enough to come home? Suppose they decided to, cabled her and got no answer, because she was here, on this mad venture, in Greece?

Mike's voice aroused her, and she was glad of it. This kind of aimless worry was a self-indulgence she could ill afford. They had reached the gate to the inevitable wire-mesh fence, and Mike was striking an attitude by it as Cairnthorpe handed out tickets. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are here, at the entrance to the palace of the doomed Atrides. Can you hear the Furies howling up the wind?”

“Grue,” said Stella, and then, “We actually seem to have the place to ourselves.”

It was true; theirs was the only bus below them in the car park, but now, looking back, Marian saw a small red car being deftly parked beside it. Two young men
emerged and came up the hill with the long, swift strides of practised walkers. Marian wondered for a moment if they intended to hang on the edges of their party and get the benefit of Mike's guiding, but as they passed, they were talking in what she assumed to be Greek. Quick glances at all the younger females of the party suggested a more likely interest. They were handsome enough themselves to get several covert sideways looks as they loped past, up the hill and out of sight.

The Mercury party, straggling more slowly up the slope, struck Marian as disgustingly cheerful. Had they no sense of history? Probably not, she thought. Even the schoolmistresses were giggling happily together, having shared their first brave bottles of wine at the Belle Hélène. Only Stella was silent, deep in her own thoughts, and Marian was glad to walk, just as silently, beside her, up the hillside resplendent in the appropriate royal purple and gold of a thousand vetches and small, strange daisies. And then, turning a corner of the path, she saw ahead the great gateway, with the two headless lions guarding the entrance to Agamemnon's palace. Her first feeling was complete disappointment. She had imagined, for some reason, a kind of cross between Trafalgar Square and those extraordinary lions on Delos that turned up in all the picture books.

Stella, too, was looking at the stone figures with less than enthusiasm. “I don't see how their heads fitted in,” she said.

“I think they were gryphons.” Mrs. Duncan had joined them “I never saw a gryphon.” Stella's tone was so rude that Mrs. Duncan moved away with a quick, at once surprised and sympathetic glance for Marian.

Mike was saying his piece about the weight of the huge stone lintel, interrupted from time to time by the necessities of the various photographers of the party. “The light's hopeless.” One of the schoolmistresses had given it up. They moved forward raggedly through the great gate to see the rough path leading still upwards.

“Ouch!” Mrs. Hilton, just in front of Marian and Stella, turned an ankle and swore. “These damned shoes. Hey,
you, Mike!” And as he turned back towards her, “Do we come back this way? I've half a mind to stay here.”

Mike shrugged. “As you please. But the shaft graves where Schliemann found the golden death masks are just at the top here. You could sit and rest there, if you like, while the rest of us go down to the hidden spring.”

“Come on, Mrs. Hilton.” Cairnthorpe had stayed behind buying their tickets at the gate but now caught up with them and took her arm. “It's worth the climb, I promise you.”

“Oh, very well, if you say so.” Leaning on Cairnthorpe's arm, she flicked a quick, spiteful glance at her husband. “That's what I needed.”

“We'll get you some espadrilles in Nauplia,” said Mr. Hilton.

Stella wanted to take a picture back through the lion gate, and Marian was glad of the excuse to let the Hiltons get on ahead. She was beginning to find Mrs. Hilton's whining voice and perpetual grumbles an increasing irritant, and worse still, it was all too obvious that Mrs. Hilton intended to make friends with her.

The professor, too, had lingered and now came hurrying up through the gate. “Ah.” He moved sideways to keep out of Stella's picture. “I was beginning to wonder if I'd lost you. There's supposed to be a bird here that croaks the doom of the House of Atreus. I've never managed to get a proper description of it from anyone, but I keep hoping to hear it every time I come.”

“I shouldn't think it would do much croaking with us chattering all over the place.” Stella had taken her picture and slung her camera back over her shoulder.

“No,” he agreed. “I'd give my eyeteeth to stay here one day and come up in the evening.”

“Ugh.” Stella shivered. “I bet it really would feel haunted then.”

“It does now.” Marian surprised herself. It was curious; she had not quite realised how much she had felt it, the strange, heavy atmosphere of the place. It was like, and yet unlike, what she had felt back in London, the feeling
of being always watched that had sent her to Dr. Brown. But there the haunting had been particular to her; here she felt it as general, heavy in the air, the breath of the Furies?

“Imagination,” said the professor robustly. “Come on up, Mrs. Frenche. I want to hear what that glib young man has to say about Schliemann.”

“Glib?”

“Well.” Fairly. “It's splendid stuff, for the purpose, but I wouldn't give him an A for the course. I wonder if he'll even mention that Homer speaks of Agamemnon as from Tiryns, not Mycenae at all.”

They found Mike haranguing a rather silent group scattered round a circle of stones deeply planted in the earth. “Not Agamemnon, of course,” he was saying. “Much earlier. And so is what they call his tomb—the beehive one we'll be visiting presently.” Behind Marian, the professor grunted approval.

“But what an extraordinary place.” She turned to him as the rest of the party moved on up the hill. “It's like Stonehenge.”

“Only different.” The tension of the place seemed to have got into Stella. Once again she spoke with a brusqueness that was very nearly rude.

“Which came first?” Marian turned to ask the professor but found that he had drifted away, binoculars at the ready.

“Bird watching.” Stella gazed after him with contempt.

Marian fought irritation and won. “Let's go on up.” She made her voice a little extra cheerful. “I want to know if Mike will show us the bathroom where Clytemnestra killed her husband.”

“Bloodthirsty, aren't you, Mrs. F.?” Had Stella noticed the strain in Marian's voice? Certainly the place was doing something very strange to her. Could she really be wishing that she had, simply, killed Mark all those years ago? It would have been easy enough, looking back on it. He was always taking pills. Pills to make him sleep, and pills
to wake him up. Pills that combined well with alcohol, and pills that were poison with it. One of those times when he had been in session and had called upstairs, “Hey, Mari, throw me one of those blue torpedoes,” she could so easily have thrown him the wrong one. She would have been a wealthy widow; the twins all hers. Horrible. She looked out over the rolling plain. How had Clytemnestra and Aegisthus felt when they faced each other over the knowledge of what they had done?

There was no fatal bathroom. The site of the palace was open to the sky, and one must imagine the great hall where Clytemnestra and her lover feasted Agamemnon and Cassandra before they killed them.

“But Orestes' stair still exists,” Mike told them. “And the postern by which he escaped after he killed his mother. You can go down if you want to, but it's a long way, and besides, the Furies might get you the way they did him. I'd recommend the stairs to Perseus' spring, myself; that's really interesting, so long as you don't mind the dark.” He felt in his pockets, produced an electric torch and a handful of candle stumps and gave a Greek exclamation that was evidently an oath. “I'm a fool. I forgot to get new ones. But these will do if we share them. Who's for the long stair to the secret spring that made the palace of the Atrides impregnable?”

“What do you think?” Marian turned to Stella. “I'm not mad about the dark myself.” Passionately, she hoped that Stella would agree with her. Even the entrance to the secret stair looked sinister, black against the bright sunshine.

But Stella was already moving forward. “Oh, come on, Mrs. F.,” she said impatiently. “You can't come all this way and then welsh out on the horrors.”

Something odd about her tone? No time to think about it as Marian reluctantly joined the slowly shuffling queue and collected a candle stump from Mike. “That's it”—he was cheerfully matter-of-fact—“one to four of you, follow my torch, and I promise you won't get lost.” He laughed. “No room for that on the secret stair. And no
time to waste, either, if we are to see the beehive tomb of Agamemnon.”

“
Not
Agamemnon,” said Edvardson, from behind Marian, but Mike had already led the way into the dark cavity. There were exclamations, little gasps, giggles, as pair after pair vanished into the darkness.