The Balkan Trilogy (127 page)

Rumours, that the authorities did not deny, grew more coherent. By Sunday they had taken on the substance of truth. It was Palm Sunday and the beginning of Easter week, but no one gave much thought to Easter this year. It was a dull, chilly day with a gritty wind that seemed to carry anxiety like an infection. Everyone was out of doors, moving about the main streets, restless, aimless and asking what was happening.

Alan Frewen, walking from the Academy with the Pringles, was several times stopped by English people who lived at Psychico or Kifissia and usually spent their Sundays at home.

This Sunday, like everyone else, they had caught suddenly
and for no reason they could name, the
frisson
of alarm. They had felt themselves drawn to the city’s centre, imagining that someone there might tell them something. Alan, as Information Officer, would know what was going on. Again and again he was asked to deny the rumour that German mechanized forces were driving almost unopposed through the centre of Greece. It could not be true. Everyone knew the fall of Salonika had been inevitable. The northern port was too near the frontier. It could not be held. But this talk of the British being in retreat! British resistance was not so easily broken. The stories must be the work of fifth columnists?

Alan, listening with sombre sympathy, agreed that the fifth columnists were doing their worst. It was true the British had withdrawn from the Florina Gap, but that, likely enough, was part of a plan. He did not think anyone need feel unduly anxious. The British were not beaten yet.

People accepted his comfort, realizing that he was doing his best but knew no more than they did themselves. They thanked him, looked cheerful, and went off in search of other informants.

One man, Plugget, with a mottled face, wiry moustache and the brisk yap of a terrier dog, did not play his part so well. The Pringles had never seen him before. He worked for an English firm but had married a Greek and associated chiefly with Greeks, but now, like everyone else, had come out in search of news. He rejected Alan’s consolation out of hand.

‘Don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Things look bad, and I think they’re worse than bad. I don’t like it at all. What’s going to happen to us? And what did our chaps come here for? Retreating without a shot fired! What’s the idea? They just caused trouble, and now they’ll be getting out and leaving us to face the music. Not a shot fired! It’s the talk of the town,’ he insisted, while his wife stood on one side looking ashamed for him.

‘If that’s the talk of the town, it’s being put round by fifth columnists,’ said Alan.

‘You’re deceiving yourself, Frewen. There aren’t all that
number of fifth columnists. It’s a terrible business. We went to see a lad in hospital, relation of the wife. He’d just been sent down from a field depot. He said it’s chaos up there.’

At last, in need of comfort themselves, Alan and the Pringles were able to move on to Zonar’s. Tandy, who had gone inside out of the wind, was seated with Yakimov and Ben Phipps at a short distance from a party of English women which included Mrs Brett and Miss Jay. At the sight of Alan, Mrs Brett jumped to her feet and hurried to him, calling out: ‘What’s the news? They say our lads are on the run. You can tell me the truth. I’m English. I shall keep my head.’

Standing over her with his mountainous air of pity, Alan let her repeat over and over again: ‘I’m not alarmed. No, I’m not alarmed. If we’re in a fix, don’t hesitate to let me know.’

When his chance came, Alan said slowly and firmly: ‘It’s a perfectly orderly withdrawal: a piece of strategy. They’ve decided to reinforce the Olympus Line.’

Mrs Brett gave a cry of rapture: ‘I knew it was something like that. I’ve been telling everyone it was something like that. And we can rely on the Olympus Line, can’t we? That’s where the Australians are.’ She returned to her friends shouting: ‘I told you so … nothing to worry about …’ but her manner was too confident, too much what might be expected from an Englishwoman who sees calamity ahead.

Ben Phipps watched her with a sour approval and when Alan sat down, asked: ‘Have you any reason for making that statement?’

‘We must hope while we can.’

‘Nothing definite, then?’

‘Nothing. And you?’

‘Nothing at all. And probably won’t be. They could keep us in the dark till the Jerries walk in. That’s what happened in Salonika. There was a camp full of Poles: no one told them, no one did anything about them. Some of the English did a last-minute bolt, but they got no warning. It could happen here.’

‘I doubt it,’ Alan said, but there was over all of them the fear of being overtaken unawares. Their instinct was to keep
together. If one knew something, then the rest would know. If they were overtaken, they would not be alone. Even Guy was distracted from the urge to find distraction and stayed with the others, knowing there was nothing to be done but wait.

Though nobody except Yakimov preserved any extravagant ideas about Tandy, he acted as a nucleus for the group. He was, if nothing else, experienced in flight. Even Phipps agreed that Tandy knew his way around. If anyone escaped, he would escape; and the rest of them might escape with him.

Less than a week after Charles left, Harriet saw the first English soldiers returning to Athens. There were two lorry-loads. The lorries stopped outside a requisitioned hotel but the men made no attempt to move.

She went over to them thinking if there was news, they would have it. The tail-board of the first lorry was down and she could see the men lying, some on the floor, some propped against baggage, one with his head drooping forward, his hands dangling between his knees. They seemed dazed. When she asked: ‘Where do you come from? Is there any news?’ no one answered her.

Two of the men wore muddy bandages on their heads. Several moments after she had spoken, one of them lifted his eyes and looked through her, and she took a step back, feeling rebuffed. They were exhausted, but it was not only that. A smell of defeat came from them like a smell of gangrene. Their hopelessness brought her to the point of tears.

People on the pavement stopped and stared in dismay. It had been no time at all since the British troops drove out of Athens singing and laughing and catching flowers thrown by the girls. Now here they were, back, so chilled by despair that a sense of death was about them like frozen mist about an iceberg.

It had been raining and the sky, bagged with wet, hung in dark boas of cloud over the hills. The wind was tearing up the blossom and the pink and white petals circled on the ground among the dust and paper scraps.

An officer came out of the hotel and an elderly businessman on the pavement said in English: ‘We’ve been told nothing. We want to know what’s happening.’

‘You’re not the only one,’ the officer said, and, going to the lorry, he shouted at the men: ‘Get a move on there.’

Somehow the men roused themselves and slid down from the lorry like old men. As they crossed the pavement, someone put a hand on the arm of one of the wounded. He shook it off, not impatiently, but as though the weight of a hand were more than he could bear.

When they had all gone inside, Harriet remained standing, uncertain which way she had been going. She had left Guy in the bookshop in Constitution Square to go round the chemist shops in search of aspirin, but the aspirin was forgotten and she hurried back to the square. She had had proof of disaster. Guy, seeing her, was startled. At first she could not speak, then she tried to describe what she had seen but, strangled by her own description, sobbed instead. He opened his arms and caught her into them. His physical warmth, the memory of his courage when the villa was shaken by gun-fire, her own need and the knowledge he needed her: all those things overwhelmed her and she held to him, saying: ‘I love you.’

‘I know,’ he answered as lightly as he had answered when she first said the same thing on the train to Bucharest. Suddenly angry, she broke away from him, saying: ‘No, you don’t. You don’t know; you don’t know anything.’

He had hold of her hand and now shook it in reproof. ‘I know more than you think,’ he said.

‘Well, perhaps.’ She wiped her eyes like a child that is promised another doll for the doll that is broken, and scarcely knew which meant more, her loss, or her hope of recompense.

‘Come on, you need a drink,’ Guy said and, pulling her hand through his arm, led her from the shop.

During the day more lorries arrived, small convoys bringing in soldiers stupid with fatigue. At first people stood amazed in the streets, then they knew the rumours were right. These stricken men meant only one thing. The battle was lost. The
English were in retreat. Yet people remained standing about, expecting some sort of explanation. There would surely be an announcement. Their fears would be denied. The day passed, and no announcement was made. The Athenians could be kept in ignorance no longer. Disaster was upon them. They had seen it for themselves.

In the early evening, impelled to get away from a town benumbed by reality, Alan Frewen said he must give his dog a run. He suggested that they all take the bus down to the sea front and walk to Tourkolimano.

Unlike the rest of them, Ben Phipps was in an excited state for he had narrowly escaped death. While driving in from Psychico, he had been caught in a raid and had joined some men sheltering in a doorway. Two Heinkels had swooped down like bats, one behind the other, and opened fire, pitting the road with bullets. No one had been hurt and when the aircraft were gone, Ben had run out and picked up in his handkerchief a bullet too hot to hold. He could talk of nothing but his adventure and on the esplanade he brought on the bruised bullet and threw it into the air, saying: ‘I’ve been personally machine-gunned.’

His delight amused Alan, who watched him much as he watched the gambols of Diocletian. ‘You have not gone to the war,’ Alan said. ‘But the war has come to you. Could any journalist ask for more?’

The clouds had broken with evening, revealing the vast red and purple panorama of sunset. When the colours had faded, a mist rose over the sea, jade-grey yet luminous, reminding them of the long twilights of summer. Alan began to talk of the islands and the seaside days that lay ahead.

Melancholy and nostalgic, they reached the little harbour of Tourkolimano as darkness fell. ‘We have been deprived of heaven,’ Harriet said.

‘It will come again,’ said Alan. ‘Even the war can’t last for ever.’

They made their way through streets devastated by the explosion, climbing among broken bricks and wood, intending
to catch a bus on the Piraeus road. When they saw a thread of light between black-out curtains, they stopped, glad to get under cover. They crowded into the narrow café where there were a few rough tables lit by candle-ends. The proprietor, who sat alone at the back of the room, welcomed them with a mournful courtesy so it seemed, in the silence and solitude, that they had come to a region of the dead.

During the last few days the men had taken to telling limericks and stories and talking about life in a large general way while they all drank themselves into a state of genial intoxication. In such close companionship, the sense of danger receded and was sometimes forgotten. Sitting knee to knee in the little café served with glasses of Greek brandy, they tried to remember some comic verse or anecdote that had not yet been told. Harriet said to Yakimov: ‘Tell us that story you told the first time we met you. The story about a croquet match.’

Yakimov smiled to himself, gratified by the request, but not quick to comply. He was penniless again and dependent for his drinks on anyone who would buy them, but had no wish to return to his old arduous profession of raconteur. His pale, heavy eyelids drooped and he gazed into his glass. Finding it empty, he slid it on to the table and said: ‘How about a drop more brandy?’

Guy called to the proprietor and the brandy bottle was placed beside Yakimov, who sighed his content and said: ‘Dear me, yes; the croquet match!’

The story that had been funny in Bucharest was here, at the dark end of the lost world, almost too funny to bear. Every time Yakimov, in his small, epicene voice, said the word ‘balls’, his listeners became more helplessly convulsed until at last they were lying about in their chairs, sobbing with laughter. The proprietor watched them in astonishment, never having seen the English behave in this way before.

When no one could think of a story that had not been told, they sat abstracted, conscious of the quiet of the ruined seafront and the streets about them.

After long silence, Alan said: ‘When I camped out on the
battlefield of Marathon, I was awakened by the sound of swords striking against shields.’ He seemed to be confessing to an experience which in normal times he would not care to mention, and the others, impressed against reason, knew he spoke the truth. Ben Phipps said that he came from Kineton and had often been told that local farmers would not cross Edgehill at night.

Roger Tandy grunted several times and at last brought out: ‘Everyone’s heard something like that. In Ireland there’s a field where a battle was fought in the fourth century of the world – and the peasants say they can still hear them banging away.’

The others laughed but even Guy, the unpersuadable materialist, was caught into the credulous atmosphere and discussed with the others the theory that anguish, anger, terror and similar violent emotions impressed themselves upon the ether so that for centuries after they could be perceived by others.

Harriet imagined their own emotions impinging upon the atmosphere of earth and wondered how long her own shade would walk through the Zappion Gardens, not alone.

Ben took his bullet out of his pocket and rolled it across the table. Did they suppose, he asked, that his emotions had become fixed in the doorway where he had been a target for the German air-gunners?

Yakimov tittered and said: ‘Must have been harrowing, dear boy. Did you change colour?’

‘Change colour? I bloody near changed sex.’

Alan gave a howl of glee and, leaning back against the wall, wiped his large hands over his face and gasped: ‘Oh dear!’ In this exigency, fear was the final absurdity. They could do nothing but laugh. They were still laughing when the proprietor told them apologetically that he had to close the café. In happier days he would be glad to have them drink all night; but now – he made a gesture – the explosion had destroyed his living quarters and he had to walk to his brother’s room at Amfiali.