‘We never did. We were so close we didn’t have to. But what I’m trying to say is … all right. But please be kind to me. Don’t always sit so in judgment on everything I say, everything I do.’ She stared at me and forced me to look her in the eyes. ‘I can’t help being what I am.’ I nodded, looked sorry and touched her hand to mollify her. The one thing I did not want was a row; emotion; this eternal reattachment to the past.
After a moment she bit her mouth and the small grins we exchanged then were the first honest looks since we had met.
I said good night to her outside her room. She kissed me on the cheek, and I pressed her shoulders as if, really, it was a far, far better thing that I did then than woman could easily imagine.
39
By half past eight we were on the road. We drove over the wide mountains to Thebes, where Alison bought herself some stronger shoes and a pair of jeans. The sun was shining, there was a wind, the road empty of traffic, and the old Pontiac I had hired the night before still had some guts in its engine. Everything interested Alison – the people, the country, the bits in my 1909 Baedeker about the places we passed. Her mixture of enthusiasm and ignorance, which I remembered so well from London, didn’t really irritate me any more. It seemed part of her energy, her candour; her companionability. But I had, so to speak, to be irritated; so I seized on her buoyancy, her ability to bob up from the worst disappointment. I thought she ought to have been more subdued, and much sadder.
She asked me at one point whether I had discovered any more about the waiting-room; but, eyes on the road, I said no, it was just a villa. What Mitford had meant was a mystery; and then I slid the conversation off on to something else.
We drove fast down the wide green valley between Thebes and Livadia, with its cornfields and melon-patches. But near the latter place a large flock of sheep straggled across the road and I had to slow down to a stop. We got out to watch them. There was a boy of fourteen, in ragged clothes and grotesquely large army boots. He had his sister, a dark-eyed little girl of six or seven, with him. Alison produced some airline barley-sugar. But the little girl was shy and hid behind her brother’s back. Alison squatted in her green sleeveless dress ten feet away, holding out the sweet, coaxing. The sheep-bells tinkled all around us, the girl stared at her, and I grew restless.
‘How do I ask her to come and take it?’
I spoke to the little girl in Greek. She didn’t understand, but her brother decided we were trustworthy and urged her forward.
‘Why is she so frightened?’
‘Just ignorance.’
‘She’s so sweet.’
Alison put a piece of barley-sugar in her own mouth and then held out another to the child, who pushed by her brother went slowly forwards. As she reached timidly for the barley-sugar Alison caught her hand and made her sit beside her; unwrapped the sweet. The brother came and knelt by them, trying to get the child to thank us. But she sat gravely sucking. Alison put her arm round her and stroked her cheeks.
‘I shouldn’t do that. She’s probably got lice.’
‘I know she’s probably got lice.’
She didn’t look up at me or stop caressing the child. But a second later the little girl winced. Alison bent back. ‘Look at this, oh, look at this.’ It was a small boil, scratched and inflamed, on the child’s shoulder. ‘Bring my bag.’ I went and got it and watched her poke back the dress and rub cream on the sore place, and then without warning dab some on the child’s nose. The little girl rubbed the spot of white cream with a dirty finger, and suddenly, like a crocus bursting out of winter earth, she looked up at Alison and smiled.
‘Can’t we give them some money?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re not beggars. They’d refuse it anyway.’
She fished in her bag and produced a small note, and held it out to the boy and pointed to him and the girl. They were to share it. The boy hesitated, then took it.
‘Please take a photo.’
I went impatiently to the car, got her camera, and took a photo. The boy insisted that we take his address; he wanted a copy, to remember.
We started back for the car with the little girl beside us. Now she seemed unable to stop smiling – that beaming smile all Greek peasant children have hidden behind their solemn shyness. Alison bent and kissed her, and as we drove off, turned and waved. And waved again. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her bright face turn to me, then take in my expression. She settled back.
‘Sorry. I didn’t realize we were in such a hurry.’
I shrugged; and didn’t argue.
I knew exactly what she had been trying to tell me. Perhaps not all of it had been put on for me; but some of it had. We drove for a mile or two in silence. She said nothing until we got to Livadia. We had to talk then, because there was food to buy.
It should have cast a shadow over the day. But it didn’t, perhaps be-because it was a beautiful day and the landscape we came into one of the greatest in the world; what we were doing began to loom, like the precipitous blue shadow of Parnassus itself, over what we were. We wound up the high hills and glens and had a picnic lunch in a meadow dense with clover and broom and wild bees. Afterwards we passed the crossroad where Oedipus is reputed to have killed his father. We stopped and stood among the sere thistles by a drystone wall; an anonymous upland place, exorcized by solitude. All the way in the car up to Arachova, prompted by Alison, I talked about my own father, and perhaps for the first time in my life without bitterness or blame; rather in the way that Conchis talked about
his
life. And then as I glanced sideways at Alison, who was against the door, half-turned towards me, it came to me that she was the only person in the world that I could have been talking like that to; that without noticing it I had slipped back into something of our old relationship …
too close to need each other s names.
I looked back to the road, but her eyes were still on me, and I had to speak.
‘A penny for them.’
‘How well you look.’
‘You haven’t been listening.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Staring at me. It makes me nervous.’
‘Can’t sisters look at their brothers?’
‘Not incestuously.’
She sat back obediently against the seat, and craned up at the colossal grey cliffs we were winding under.
‘Just a walk.’
‘I know. I’m having second thoughts.’
‘For me or for you?’
‘Mainly for you.’
‘We’ll see who drops first.’
Arachova was a romantic shoulder of pink and terracotta houses, a mountain village perched high over the Delphi valley. I made an inquiry and was sent to a cottage near the church. An old woman came to the door; beyond her in the shadows stood a carpet-loom, a dark-red carpet half-finished on it. A few minutes’ talk with her confirmed what the mountain had made obvious.
Alison looked at me. ‘What’s she say?’
‘She says it’s about six hours’ walk. Hard walk.’
‘But that’s fine. It’s what Baedeker says. One must be there at sundown.’ I looked up at the huge grey mountainside. The old woman unhooked a key from behind the door. ‘What’s she saying?’
‘There’s some kind of hut up there.’
‘Then what are we worrying about?’
‘She says it will be damn cold.’ But it was difficult to believe, in the blazing midday heat. Alison put her hands on her hips.
‘You promised me an adventure. I want an adventure.’
I looked at the old woman and then back at Alison. She whisked her dark glasses off and gave me a hard, sideways, tough-woman’s stare; and although it was half-joking I could see the hint of suspicion in her eyes. If she once began to guess that I was anxious not to spend the night in the same room with her, she would also begin to guess that my halo was made of plaster.
At that moment a man led a mule past and the old woman called to him
.
He was going to fetch wood down from near the refuge. Alison could ride on the packsaddle.
‘Ask her if I can go in and change into my jeans.’
It was destined.
40
The long path zigzagged up a cliff-face, and leaving the lower world behind, we came over the top into the upper Parnassus. A vernally cool wind blew across two or three miles of meadowland. Beyond, sombre black firwoods and grey buttresses of rock climbed, arched and finally disappeared into fleecy white clouds. Alison dismounted and we walked over the turf beside the muleteer. He was about forty, with a fierce moustache under a broken nose and a fine air of independence about him. He told us about the shepherd life; a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars and chilling winds, endless silences broken only by bells, alarms against wolves and eagles; a life unchanged in the last six thousand years. I translated for Alison. She warmed to him at once, establishing a half-sexual, half-philanthropic rapport across the language barrier.
He said he had worked in Athens for a time, but
then hyparchi esychia,
there was no silent peace there. Alison liked the word:
esychìa, esychìa,
she kept on repeating. He laughed and corrected her pronunciation; stopping and conducting her, as if she were an orchestra. Her eyes flicked defiantly at me, to see if she was behaving properly in my eyes. I kept a neutral face; but I liked the man, one of those fine rural Greeks who constitute the least servile and most likeable peasantry in Europe, and I couldn’t help liking Alison for liking him back.
On the far side of the grassland we came to two
kalyvia,
rough stone huts, by a spring. Our muleteer was taking another path from then on. Alison fished impulsively in her red Greek shoulder-bag, and pressed on him two packets of airline cigarettes.
‘Esychia,’
the muleteer said. He and Alison stood interminably shaking hands, while I took their photo.
‘Esychia, esychia.
Tell him I know what he means.’
‘He knows you know. That’s why he likes you.’
At last we set off through the firs.
‘You think I’m just sentimental.’
‘No, I don’t. But one packet would have been enough.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. I felt two packets fond of him.’
Later she said, ‘That beautiful word.’
‘It’s doomed.’
We climbed a little way. ‘Listen.’
We stopped on the stony track and listened and there was nothing but silence,
esychia,
the breeze in the fir-branches. She took my hand and we walked on.
The path mounted interminably through the trees, through clearings alive with butterflies, over rocky stretches where we several times lost the path. As we came higher, it grew cooler, and the mountain ahead, a damp polar grey, disappeared completely into the cloud. We spoke very little because we seldom had breath to speak. But the solitude, the effort, the need I had continually to take her hand to help her when the path became, as it frequently did, a rough staircase rather than a path – all this broke some of the physical reserve between us; instituted a sort of sexless camaraderie that we both accepted as the form.
It was about six when we came to the refuge. It was tucked away above the tree-line in a goyal, a minute windowless building with a barrel-vaulted roof and a chimney. The door was of rusty iron, perforated with jagged bullet-holes from some battle with the Communist
andarte
during the Civil War: we saw four bunks, a pile of old red blankets, a stove, a lamp, a saw and an axe, even a pair of skis. But it looked as if no one had stayed there for years.
I said, ‘I’m game to call it a day here.’ But she didn’t even answer; simply pulled on a jumper.
The clouds canopied us, it began to drizzle, and as we turned up over a crest, the wind cut like January in England. Then suddenly the clouds were all around us, a swirling mist that cut visibility down to thirty yards or less. I turned to look at Alison. Her nose had gone red and she looked very cold. But she pointed up the next boulder-strewn slope.
At the top of it we came to a col and miraculously, as if the mist and the cold had been a small test, the sky began to clear. The clouds thinned, were perfused by oblique sunlight, then burst open into great pools of serene blue. Soon we were walking in sunshine again. Before us lay a wide basin of green turf, ringed with peaks and festooned by streaks of snow still clinging to the screes and hollows of the steeper slopes. Everywhere there were flowers – harebells, gentians, deep magenta-red alpine geraniums, intense yellow asters, saxifrage. They burst out of every cranny in the rocks, they enamelled every stretch of turf. It was like stepping back a season. Alison ran on ahead, wildly, and turned, grinning, her arms held out, like a bird about to take wing; then ran on again, dark-blue and jeans-blue, in absurd childish swoops.
Lykeri, the highest peak, was too steep to be climbed quickly. We had to scramble up, using our hands, resting frequently. Near the top we came on beds of violets in bloom, huge purple flowers that had a delicate scent; and then at last, hand in hand, we struggled up the last few yards and stood on the little platform with its crowning cairn.
Alison said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’
On the far side a huge chasm plunged down two thousand feet of shadowy air. The westering sun was still just above the horizon, but the clouds had vanished. The sky was a pale, absolutely dustless, absolutely pure, azure. There were no other mountains near to crowd the distances out. We seemed to stand immeasurably high, where land and substance drew up to a narrow zenith, remote from all towns, all society, all drought and defect. Purged.
Below, for a hundred miles in each direction, there were other mountains, valleys, plains, islands, seas; Attica, Boeotia, Argolis, Achaia, Locris, Aetolia, all the old heart of Greece. The setting sun richened, softened, refined all the colours. There were deep-blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-coloured earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters ÖÙÓ
–‘
light’. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light. It didn’t touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be.
We took photographs of each other, of the view, and then sat down on the windward side of the cairn and smoked cigarettes, huddled together because of the cold. Alpine crows screeched overhead, torn in the wind; wind as cold as ice, as astringent as acid. There came back the memory of that mind-voyage Conchis had induced in me under hypnosis. They seemed almost parallel experiences ; except that this had all the beauty of its immediacy, its un-inducedness, its being-now-ness.
I looked covertly at Alison; the tip of her nose was bright red. But I was thinking that after all she had guts; that if it hadn’t been for her we wouldn’t have been there, this world at our feet, this sense of triumph – this transcendent crystallization of all I felt for Greece.
‘You must see things like this every day.’
‘Never like this. Never even beginning to be like this.’ Two or three minutes later she said, ‘This is the first decent thing that’s happened to me for months. Today. And this.’ After a pause, she added, ‘And you.’
‘Don’t say that. I’m just a mess. A defilement.’
‘I still wouldn’t want to be here with anyone else.’ She stared out towards Euboea; bruised face, being dispassionate for once. She turned and looked at me. ‘Would you?’
‘I can’t think of any other girl I’ve ever known who could walk this far.’
She thought it over, then looked at me again. ‘What an evasive answer
that
was.’
‘I’m glad we came. You’re a trouper, Kelly.’
‘And you’re a bastard, Urfe.’
But I could see that she wasn’t offended.