A huge wave lifted me forward, tumbled me over helpless in its breaking foam, then dropped me hard in its wake. I went down like a stone, hit something, and went flat on the bottom … pancaked on the sand of a sloping beach, with the sea recoiling past me, my hands already driven in to the land, like hooks to hold me there against the drag and suck of the retreating wave. The sea tore and pulled and streamed back past me. Sobbing and retching, I crawled and humped myself up the slope, while wave after wave, diminishing, broke over me and then drew back, combing the sand where I clung. And then I was crawling through the creaming shallows, on to the firm dry beach.
I have a half memory, just as I collapsed, of looking back for my rescuer and of seeing him rear up from the waves as if to see me safe home, his body gleaming black through the phosphorescence, the witches’ oils of his track burning green and white on the water. The starlight caught the cusp of the dorsal fin, glittered there briefly, then he was gone, with a triumphant smack of the tail that echoed right up the rocks.
Then I went out flat on the sand, barely a foot above the edge of the sea.
20
Though the seas threaten they are merciful.
I have curs’d them without cause.
V. 1.
There was a light, hanging seemingly in the sky far above me.
When this resolved itself into a lamp set in a cottage window, high up near the head of the cliffs, it still seemed as remote as the moon. I cannot even remember now what it cost me to drag myself in my dripping, icy clothes up the path that clung to the rock face, but I suppose I was lucky that there was a path at all. Eventually I made it, stopping to lean – collapse – against the trunk of an ancient olive that stood where a stream cut through the path to fall sharply seawards under a rough bridge.
Here a shallow valley ran back through a gap in the cliff. Dimly I could see the stretches of smoothed ground between the olive trees, painfully cultivated with beans and corn. Here and there among the trees were the scattered lights of the cottages, each with its own grove and its grazing for goats and sheep. The groves were old; the immense heads of the trees stirred and whispered even in that sheltered spot, and the small hard fruit pattered to the ground like rain. The twisted boughs stood out black against the light from the nearest window.
I forced my shivering, lead-weight limbs to move. Under my feet the rubbery olives rolled and squashed. The stems of camomile caught between my bare toes, and I stubbed my foot on a stone and cried out. Immediately there was a volley of barking, and a dog – one of the vicious, half-wild dogs that are a hazard of the Greek countryside – hurled itself towards me through the trees. I took no notice of it, except to speak as I limped forward, and the dog, every hair on end, circled behind me, growling. I felt the touch of his nose, cold on the cold flesh of my leg, but he didn’t snap. Next moment the cottage door opened, loosing a shaft of light across the grass. A man, in thickset silhouette, peered out.
I stumbled into the light. ‘Please,’ I said breathlessly, in English, ‘please … can you help me?’
There was a startled moment of silence, while he stared at me, coming ghostlike out of the night, soaked and filthy with sand and dust, with the dog circling at my heels. Then he shouted something at the dog which sent it swerving away, and fired some sharp question at me. I didn’t know what it was; didn’t even recognise the language, but in any case I doubt if I could have spoken again. I just went forward blindly towards the light and the human warmth of the house, my hands stretched out like those of the traditional suppliant, and came heavily to my knees over the threshold, right at his feet.
The blackout cannot have lasted more than a couple of seconds. I heard him call out, then there came a woman’s voice, questioning shrilly, and hands were on me, half-lifting, half-dragging me in to the light and warmth of a room where the embers of a wood fire still burned red. The man said something rough and urgent to his wife, and then went quickly out, slamming the door. For a dazed, frightened moment I wondered where he had gone, then as the woman, chattering in some undistinguishable gutturals, began to fumble with my soaked and clinging clothes, I realised that her husband had merely left the cottage’s single room while I undressed.
I struggled out of the sopping clothes. I suppose the old woman was asking questions, but I couldn’t understand, and in fact hardly heard. My brain was as numb as my body with the dreadful cold and shivering of exhaustion and shock. But presently I was stripped and dried – on a fine linen towel so stiff and yellowed that I imagine it must have been part of the woman’s dowry, never used till now, and then a rough blanket was wrapped round me, I was pushed gently into a wooden chair near the fire, logs were thrown on, a pot shoved down into the leaping flames, and only when my discarded clothes were carefully hung up above the fireplace – with much interested fingering of the nylon – did the old woman go to the door and call her man back.
He came in, an elderly, villainous-looking peasant, with a ferocious moustache, and a dirty home-made cigarette drooping from his lips. He was followed, inevitably, by two others, shortish, tough-bodied men out of the same mould, with dark, fierce faces. They came into the light, staring at me. My host asked a question.
I shook my head, but the thing that mattered most to me at that moment was easy enough. I put an arm out of my blanket to make a gesture embracing my surroundings. ‘Kerkyra?’ I asked. ‘This – Kerkyra?’
The storm of nods and assenting ‘ne’s’ that this provoked broke over me with a physical sense of relief. To open human communications, to know where one was on the map … of such is sanity. Heaven knows what I had expected the answer to be; I suppose that shreds of nightmare still clung to me, and it needed the spoken assurance to bring me finally out of the bad dream – the isolated near-death of the sea, the prison of the Aleister with Godfrey, the unknown black cliff I had been climbing. This was Corfu, and these were Greeks. I was safe.
I said: ‘I’m English. Do you speak English?’
This time heads were shaken, but I heard the word go round, ‘Anglìtha’, so they had understood.
I tried again. ‘Villa Forli? Castello dei Fiori?’
Again they understood. Another fire of talk where I caught a word I knew, ‘thàlassa’, which means the sea.
I nodded, with another gesture. ‘Me,’ I said, indicating my swaddled person, ‘thàlassa … boat …’ A pantomime, rather hampered by the blanket … ‘swim … down.’
Exclamations, while the woman thrust a bowl into my hands, with words of invitation and sympathy. It was soup of some kind – beans, I think – and rather thick and tasteless, but it was hot and filling, and under the circumstances delicious. The men looked the other way politely while I ate, talking in quickfire undertones among themselves.
As I finished, and gave the bowl back to the woman, one of them – not my host – came forward a pace, clearing his throat. He spoke in very bad German.
‘You are from the Castello dei Fiori?’
‘Ja.’ My German was very little better than his, but even a smattering might see us through. I said slowly, picking the words: ‘To go to Castello, how far?’
More muttering. ‘Ten.’ He held up his fingers. ‘Ja, ten.’
‘Ten kilometres?’
‘Ja.’
‘Is – a road?’
‘Ja, ja.’
‘Is – a car?’
‘No.’ He was too polite to say so, but the impression that the single syllable gave was that of course there was no car. There never had been a car. What would they want with a car? They had the donkeys and the women.
I swallowed. So I wasn’t yet free of the nightmare; I still had the long frustrations of the impossible journey ahead of me. I tried, not very coherently, to think what Godfrey would do.
He was bound to discover at his rendezvous that the package was missing, and would know that I must have taken it, and where I must have hidden it. But I hoped he would decide that as yet no one else could have reason to suspe
ct him: he might well reckon that if there had been any suspicion of him, his journey would have been intercepted. No, it was to be hoped that he would think I had made a chance discovery – possibly that I had seen him carrying the packages, had hunted for them out of curiosity, and having seen them, had realised that something big was afoot, and had been frightened into hiding and carrying out the elaborate pantomime of innocence on the Aleister to save my skin. I was sure that he wouldn’t even give Miranda a thought.
Well, he had got rid of me. My disappearance would provoke a hue and cry which he might well find embarrassing after what had happened to Spiro and Yanni, and this might decide him to cut his losses here and now, but the sudden absence of ‘G. Manning, Esq.’ would naturally focus official attention on his house, and the boat-house, so (since it was unlikely that any official alarm had been raised for me yet) I felt sure that he would have to risk going back tonight to find and remove the last package of forged currency.
And this was where I had to come in. Even if Max were there to receive him, it would take evidence to hold him – hard evidence, not just the hearsay of Adoni and Miranda or even Spiro, which I was sure Godfrey could cut his way through without much trouble. Once they had taken their hands off him for five minutes, ‘G. Manning, Esq.’, with his prepared gataway, could vanish without trace, for good and all.
I looked up at the ring of men.
‘Is – a telephone?’ I asked it without much hope, but they all brightened. Yes, of course there was a telephone, up in the village, further up the hill, where the road started. (This came in Greek from everybody at once, with gestures, and was surprisingly easy to understand.) Did I want the telephone now? They would take me there …
I nodded and smiled and thanked them, and then, indicating my clothes, turned an inquiring look on the woman. In a moment the men had melted from the room, and she began to take my things off the line. The nylon was dry, but the cotton dress was still damp and unpleasant. I threw the blanket off thankfully – it smelt of what I tried charitably to imagine was goat – and began to dress. But when I tried to put on my frock the old woman restrained me.
‘No, no, no, this … it is an honour for me. You are welcome …’ The words couldn’t have been plainer if she had said them in English. ‘This’ was a blouse of white lawn, beautifully embroidered in scarlet and green and gold, and with it a full black skirt, gay with the same colours at the hem – the Corfiote national dress, worn for high days and holidays. Either this also had been part of her trousseau as a young bride, or else it was her daughter’s. It fitted, too … I put it on. The skirt was of thick, handwoven stuff, and there was a warm jacket to go over the blouse. She hovered round me, delighted, stroking and praising, and then called the men in to see.
They were all waiting outside, not three now, but – I counted – sixteen. On an impulse I stooped and kissed the wrinkled cheek of the old woman, and she caught my hand in both of hers. There were tears in her eyes.
‘You are welcome,’ she said. ‘English. You are welcome.’
Then I was outside, swept up by the band of men and escorted royally up the stony track through the groves to the tiny village, to knock up the sleeping owner of the shop where stood the telephone.
No reply from the Castello. I hesitated, then tried the Villa Forli.
The bell had hardly sounded before Phyl was on the line, alert and anxious.
‘Lucy! Where in the world—?’
‘It’s all right, Phyl, don’t worry. I’m sorry I couldn’t ring you up before, but I’m quite okay.’
‘Where are you? I tried Godfrey, but—’
‘When?’
‘An hour ago – three-quarters, perhaps. He wasn’t in, so I thought you might be out with him. Are you?’
‘No. Listen, Phyl, will you do something for me?’
‘What? What is all this?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you, but there’s no time now. Just don’t ask any questions, but will you ring up Godfrey’s house again now? If he answers, tell him I’m not home yet, and ask if I’m still with him – just as you would if you hadn’t heard from me, and were worried. It’s terribly important not to let him know I rang up. Will you do that? It’s terribly important, Phyl.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Then please do it, there’s an angel. I promise you I’ll be home soon and tell you all about it. But I must know if he’s got home. As soon as you’ve rung him, ring me back here.’ I gave her the number.
‘How in the world did you get there? Did you go out with him again? I know you were in to supper, because it wasn’t washed up; Miranda seems to have just walked out and left everything.’
‘That was my fault. I sent her on a message.’
‘You did? Look, just what is going on? What with all the supper things just left lying, and you halfway up Pantokrator in the middle of the night—’
‘You might say Godfrey ditched me. You know, the long walk home.’
‘Lucy! You mean he tried something on?’
‘You might say so,’ I said. ‘I don’t like your Godfrey, Phyl, but just in case he’s home by now, I’ll ring off and wait to hear from you. But please do just as I say, it’s important.’
‘My God, I will. Let him worry,’ said Phyl, viciously. ‘Okay, sweetie, hang on, I’ll ring you back. D’you want me to come for you?’
‘I might at that.’
‘Stinking twerp,’ said my sister, but presumably not to me, and rang off.
There were twenty-three men now in the village shop, and something had happened. There were smiles all round. As I put down the receiver, my German-speaking friend was at my elbow.
‘Fräulein, come and see.’ He gestured proudly to the door of the shop. ‘For you, at your service.’
Outside in the starlight stood a motor-cycle, a magnificent, almost new two-stroke affair, straddled proudly but shyly by a youth of about twenty. Round this now crowded the men, delighted that they had been able to help.
‘He comes from Spartylas,’ said my friend, pointing behind the shop up the towering side of Pantokrator where, a few miles away, I could see a couple of vague lights which must mark another village. ‘He has been visiting in Kouloura, at the house of his uncle, and we heard him coming, and stopped him. See? It is a very good machine, as good as a car. You cannot stay here, this village is not good enough for a foreigner. But he will take you home.’
I felt the tears of emotion, brought on by anxiety and sheer exhaustion, sting my eyes. ‘You are too good. You are too good. Thank you, thank you all.’
It was all I could say, and it seemed to be all they could desire. The kindness and goodwill that surrounded me was as palpable as light and fire; it warmed the night.
Someone was bringing a cushion; it looked like the best one his house could offer. Someone else strapped it on. A third man thrust the bundle containing my damp frock into a carrier behind the saddle. The youth stood smiling, eyeing me sideways, curiously.
The telephone rang once, briefly, and I ran back.
‘Yes?’
‘Lucy. I got the Villa Rotha, but he’s not there.’
‘No reply?’
‘Well, of course not. Look, can’t you tell me what all this is about?’
‘Darling, I can’t, not just now … I’ll be home soon. Don’t worry. But don’t tell anyone I rang you up. Anyone. Not even Max.’
‘Not even Max? Since when did—?’
‘And don’t bother to come for me, I’ve got transport. Be seeing you.’
The shopkeeper refused to take money for the telephone. It was a pleasure, I gathered, a pleasure to be roused from his bed in the middle of the night by a half-drowned, incoherent stranger. And the men who had helped me would not even take my thanks; it was a privilege to help me, indeed it was. They sat me on the pillion, showed me where to put my feet and how to hang on to the young man’s waist, wished me God-speed, and stood back as my new friend kicked the engine into an unsilenced roar
that slashed through the village like Pandemonium itself. It must have woken every sleeper within miles. No doubt they would count this, also, as a privilege …
We roared off with a jerk and a cloud of smoke. The road was rutted, surfaced with loose gravel, and twisted like a snake through the olive-groves that skirted the steep cliffs, some three hundred feet above the sea. Not a fast road, one would have said – but we took it fast, heeling over on the bends as the Aleister had heeled to the seas, with gravel spurting out under our front wheel like a bow wave, and behind us a wake of dust half a mile long. I didn’t care. The feel of the wind in my hair, and the bouncing, roaring speed between my thighs was at once exciting and satisfying after the terrors and frustrations of the night. And I couldn’t be afraid. This was – quite literally – the ‘god in the machine’ who had come to the rescue, and he couldn’t fail me. I clung grimly to his leather-clad back as we roared along, the shadowy groves flicking past us in a blue of speed, and down – way down – on our left the hollow darkness of the sea.
The god turned his curly head and shouted something cheerfully. We shot round a bend, through a small stream, up something remarkably like a rough flight of steps, and met the blessed smooth camber of a metalled road.
Not that this was really an improvement; it swooped clean down the side of Pantokrator in a series of tight-packed hairpin bends which I suppose were steep and dangerous, but which we took at a speed that carried us each time to the very verge, where a tuft or so of daisies or a small stone would catch us and cannon us back on to the metal. The tyres screeched, the god shouted gaily, the smell of burning rubber filled the night, and down we went, in a series of bird-like swoops which carried us at last to the foot of the mountain and the level of the sea.
The road straightened. I saw the god’s hand move hopefully to the throttle.
‘Okay?’ he yelled over his shoulder.
‘Okay!’ I screamed, clinging like a monkey in a hurricane.
The hand moved. The night, the flying trees, the hedgerows ghostly with apple blossom, accelerated past us into a streaming blur …