The Balkan Trilogy (132 page)

The sky was a limpid blue; the water beneath it black with wood scraps. Out of this dense, black, viscous surface poked the masts and funnels of sunken ships, a tangle of wreck and wreckage, lying at all angles.

The harbour buildings, burnt or blasted, lay in fragments. Among the smoked rubble, broken glass and charred ravelment of wood, green things had taken root. The Piraeus already seemed an ancient ruin, reaching again towards the desolation that covered it for eighteen hundred years after the Peloponnesian Wars.

The
Erebus
and
Nox
alone had colour: they were red with rust. They had been used for the transport of Italian prisoners and, according to Ben Phipps, were ‘not only derelict, but filthy’.

Guy said in a cheerful voice: ‘Thalassa! You said you felt safe because the sea was near. Well, here we are!’ but Harriet could not even remember now why the sea had seemed a refuge.

English soldiers had been detailed to help the passengers on board. They had already hoisted the Major’s Delahaye and packing cases on to the deck, and carried up the baggage belonging to the Major’s guests. The single suitcases of the uninvited were treated as a joke.

‘That all you got?’ they said when the small pile of luggage came off the lorry. ‘Didn’t let you bring much, did they?’

Some of the recent arrivals were still on the quay. The Pluggets were getting out of a taxi. Mrs Brett and Miss Jay were watching for the Pringles and, catching sight of them, Mrs Brett came striding towards them in a fury of indignation, shouting: ‘What do you think! That Archie Callard is up there insulting everyone that comes on board!’

The Pringles had forgotten Archie Callard who, surprisingly
enough, had not been flown off to join some daring desert group but had been loitering all the time, unoccupied, at Phaleron.

‘What do you think he said to Miss Jay?’ said Mrs Brett.

Miss Jay, whose vast bulk had shrunk until her flesh hung like flannel over her bones, said crossly: ‘You’ve said enough about it, Bretty,’ but Mrs Brett was determined to say more: ‘He said: “Women should be painlessly put down when they look like Miss Jay.”’

Ben Phipps laughed in delight: ‘Did he, really! Come on. If we get a squeak out of him, we’ll deal with him.’

They went forward prepared for Callard who was leaning over the gunwale with Dubedat beside him, but he let the Pringles and Phipps pass without a word. His eye was on Plugget, who came behind them. ‘They’re all coming out of their holes,’ he said. ‘Here’s that drip Plugget. His wife’s family put him up for twenty years. Now he’s saving his own skin and leaving them to starve.’

Plugget, pushing his wife importantly ahead of him, gasped, but said nothing. A little later, when she stood at the rail overlooking the quay, Harriet found him at her elbow. His wife’s parents stood below with their unmarried daughter, an elderly girl who held herself taut with a look of controlled desperation, a suitcase at her side.

‘Isn’t she coming with us?’ Harriet asked.

‘No,’ said Plugget with decision. ‘She wanted to come but when she saw the old folk in tears, she didn’t know what to do. My wife thought she ought to stay. I thought she ought to stay. Her duty, I told her.’

‘Poor thing! What will become of her?’

Impatient of Harriet’s pity, Plugget said: ‘She’ll be all right. You can’t take everyone. Think of me landed with two women!’ Turning his back on the forlorn spectacle of his relations-in-law, he said: ‘You people found anywhere to sleep?’

The main cabins had been taken by the Major’s party and most of the deck was covered by his possessions. Any space left had been occupied by earlier arrivals. Guy and Phipps
had gone off in different directions to see what they could find. Guy had at once been caught up in conversation by his many acquaintances, and it was Phipps, with his indeflectable, inquiring energy, who came back to say there was a cabin empty on the lowest deck.

Guy, Mrs Brett and Miss Jay were called together, and the party went down into a darkness heavy with the reek of oil and human excretions. Every outlet from the lower passages had been boarded up to prevent the escape of prisoners and Plugget, who had come after them, put up a complaint: ‘If we’re torpedoed, we’d never get out of here,’ but he kept at their heels until they came to the narrow three-birth cabin next to the engine-room. Inside he at once took command:

‘You two ladies here,’ he said, slapping the middle bunk. ‘Pringles on top. You’re young and agile. Me and the wife down here. The wife’s not strong. Right?’

No one contested this arrangement, but Guy asked: ‘What about Ben?’

‘The floor suits me,’ Phipps said. ‘It’s cleaner.’

The bunks, without mattresses or covers, were wooden shelves, sticky to the touch and spattered with the bloody remains of bugs.

‘Like coffins,’ said Mrs Brett. ‘Still, it’s an adventure.’

Peering about in the glimmer that fell from a grimy, greasy, ochre-coloured electric bulb, she said: ‘We might try to get the dirt off this basin.’

Miss Jay pulled out three chamber-pots caked with the yellow detritus of the years. ‘“Perfum’d chambers of the great,”’ she said. ‘We’ll send these up to Cookson.’

While these activities went on, Toby Lush appeared in the doorway with a commanding frown. When he saw who was inside, his manner faltered: ‘I was keeping this cabin,’ he weakly said.

‘What for?’ Phipps asked.

‘The Major might need a bit extra storage space. Or he might, f’instance, want something unpacked, and I thought …’

‘If the Major has any request to make,’ said Phipps, ‘send him to me.’

Toby Lush put his pipe into his mouth and sucked. After an interval of indecision, he said mildly: ‘Glad you got on board all right.’

‘Were you expecting us?’ Harriet asked.

‘Hey, there! Crumbs!’ Toby shielded his face in mock alarm. ‘You aren’t blaming me, are you? Not my fault; nor the old soul’s, neither. The Major made his arrangements. He didn’t consult us.’

‘You knew nothing about it?’

‘Well, not much. Anyway, here you are. Nothing to grumble about. I suppose you were told to bring food for three days?’

‘We had no food to bring.’

The air-raid warning sounded. ‘More magnetic mines,’ said Toby and, giving an exasperated tut, he made off as though he meant to deal with them himself.

‘Don’t want to be trapped down here,’ said Plugget. He hurried after Toby and the others went with him. They reached the main deck as the guns, upturned on the quay, started up like hysterical dogs. In the uproar women seized their children and asked what they should do. There was a shelter on the quay but as the passengers ran to the companionway, Dubedat shouted from the boat-deck: ‘We’re leaving any minute now. If you get off the ship, you’ll be left behind.’

Bombs fell into the harbour, sending up columns of water that brought a rain of wreckage down on the ship. The passengers crowded into the corridors of the main deck where the nervous chatter and the cries of children caused Toby Lush to put his head out of his cabin: ‘Less noise there,’ he commanded. ‘You’re disturbing the Major,’ and withdrew before comment could reach him.

At noon, in the midst of another raid, Dobson drove on to the quay, bringing the Legation servants to the ship. In his light, midge-like voice, he shouted to Guy: ‘We’ll meet in the land of the Pharaohs.’

‘Good old Dobson,’ Guy said emotionally as the car turned on the quayside and started back to Athens.

‘Perhaps now we’ve had his blessing,’ Phipps said, ‘we’ll be allowed to embark.’ But the sun rose hotly in the sky, the reconnaissance planes came and went, and the
Erebus
and
Nox
remained motionless at their berths.

A taxi-load of students came to say farewell to Guy. They shouted up to the boat that the Prime Minister, Koryzis, was dead.

‘How did he die?’ the passengers asked, feeling no surprise because there was nothing left surprising in the world.

The students said: ‘The German radio says the British murdered him.’

‘You don’t believe that, do you?’

They shook their heads, believing nothing, knowing nothing, buffeted and confused by the drama of existence. Other Greeks drove down to the Piraeus, their eyes bleared with sleeplessness and tears, bringing with them the tormented nervousness of the city. The English asked again about Koryzis. The Greeks on the quay, doomed themselves, shook their heads, mystified by a death that was too apt an ingredient of the whole tragedy.

To those on board, not knowing when they would sail or whether the ship would survive to sail at all, the afternoon shifted about like a disordered vision. They could only wait for time to pass. The only event was the appearance of a man selling oranges. Despite Dubedat’s warning the women hurried ashore to buy, for there was no drinking water on the ship.

The Acropolis could be seen from the boat-deck. Harriet went up several times to look at it. Seeing it glowing in the sunset, she thought of Charles, scarcely able in memory to distinguish between his reality and her private image. She had condemned Guy’s attachment to fantasy but wondered now if fantasy were a part of life, a component without which one could not survive. She saw Charles catching the flower and thought of the girls who had given flowers, not only as a recognition of valour but a consolation in defeat.

The hills of the Peloponnesus, glowing in the sunset light, changed to rose-violet and darkened to madder rose, grew sombre and faded into the twilight. The Parthenon, catching the late light, glimmered for a long time, a spectre on the evening, then disappeared into darkness. That was the last they saw of Athens.

Some time after midnight the engines of the
Erebus
began to throb and shake. Ben Phipps, on the shaking floor of the cabin, said: ‘We’re about to slip silently into the night.’ The ship groaned and shuddered and seemed about to shatter with its own effort. Somehow it was wrenched into motion.

Next morning, when they went on deck, they saw above the southern cloud banks the silver cone of Mount Ida. On one side of the
Erebus
was the
Nox
; on the other there was a tanker that no one had seen before. The tanker, its plates mouldering with rust, was as decrepit as its companions, yet the three old ships had their dignity, moving steadily forward, unhurried and at home in their own element.

Most of the passengers took the pace as fixed and immutable, but Ben Phipps and Plugget, having conferred together, went to the First Officer with the demand that it be increased. They were told that the convoy must conserve its power for the dangerous passage past the coast of Cyrenaica.

Phipps, who had now established his authority over Plugget, went round the ship, his energy unimpaired by a night made sleepless by the thumping engine, the bugs, and the jog-trots of cockroaches and blackbeetles. Plugget felt bound to keep beside him, but Guy sat on the boat-deck, his back against a rail, and read for a lecture on Coleridge. The women, in a stupor, sat round him.

Ben kept returning to the group, trying to rouse in Guy a spirit of inquiring indignation, but Guy, refusing to acknowledge the changes and perils through which they were passing, would not be moved.

Ben Phipps had discovered that the lifeboats were rusted to the davits so there would be little hope of launching them. ‘Those two boy scouts, Lush and Dubedat, are trying to organize
life-boat drill. If they come up here, tell them from me the boats are a dead loss.’ He went again and returned to report that there was no wireless operator on board, but he could work the transmitter himself and had talked to the Signal Station at Suda Bay.

‘Nice to know we’re not cut off,’ said Phipps, looking to Guy for agreement and admiration. Guy, as was expected, smiled admiringly, but it was a rather ironical admiration. Harriet began to suspect that Phipps was losing his hold on Guy. When he said persuasively: ‘Come and see,’ Guy merely stretched and smiled and shook his head. When Phipps took himself off, Guy returned to his books. He spent the day absorbed, like a student in a library. The only difference was that he sang to himself, the words so low that only Harriet knew what they were:

‘If your engine cuts out over Hellfire Pass,

You can stick your twin Browning guns right up your arse.’

sometimes changing to the chorus:

‘No balls, no balls at all;

If your engine cuts out, you’ll have no balls at all.’

Drowsy in the mild, spring wind, Harriet watched Crete take form out of the cloud. The sun broke through. Two corvettes from Suda Bay circled the convoy and let it pass. A reconnaissance plane came back again and again to look at the ships, flying so low that the black crosses were clear on the wings and some people claimed they had seen the face of the enemy. Nothing more happened. The civilian ships did not look worth a raid.

They turned the western prow of Crete, a route not much used by shipping, where the island rose, a sheer wall of stone, offering no foothold for life. Grey and barren in the brilliant light, it seemed an uninhabited island in an unfrequented sea,
but during the afternoon a ship came into view: a hospital ship. It slid past slowly, like a cruising gull, and remained a long time in sight, catching the sun upon its silver flank.

As the afternoon passed, people began to rise out of their torpor and appear on deck. Among them was Pinkrose in all his heavy clothing. Feeling the heat, he began to unwrap, then, in a sudden nervous spasm, he hurried away and returned without his trilby. He was wearing instead a large hat of straw. This contented him for a time, then he felt the top of the hat and was again galvanized into action. He went off and, when he made a third appearance, had placed the trilby on top of the straw.

‘Good God,’ whispered Miss Jay, ‘why’s he wearing two hats?’

‘Because,’ said Phipps, temporarily back at base, ‘he’s as mad as two hatters.’

A very old man came on to the boat-deck trailing a toy dog among the hazards of bodies, baggage and packing-cases. Harriet sat up in surprise. It was Mr Liversage who had been her companion on the Lufthansa from Sofia to Athens. She had scarcely thought of him since and supposed he had gone on the autumn evacuation boat. Instead, here he was, jaunty as ever, with his old snub face, grey-yellow hair and moist yellow-blue eyes. The dog was an old dog, the hair gone from its worn, cracked hide, but it was as jaunty as its master.