The Shortest Way to Hades (20 page)

I have sometimes suggested, I think, that when your fancy is taken by a young man of slender figure and pleasing profile you should not disclose at too early a stage the true nature of your interest. Young men, I seem to remember saying, like to be thought of as people, not as mere physical objects: you should therefore begin by seeming to admire their fine souls and splendid intellects and showing a warm interest in their hopes, dreams and aspirations.

It looks as if someone has given the same advice to Camilla and Lucinda. Seeing that Sebastian was not to be drawn away from the company of Constantine Demetriou, they settled down on the grass close by and arranged themselves in attitudes of attentive admiration, designed to suggest that there was nothing they found quite so fascinating as the theory and technique of translating Greek verse. When our host made some reference to a recent article of Sebastian’s published in one of the learned journals, they went so far as to ask what it was about.

I am now obliged to mention a slight pitfall in the approach I have recommended: the young man may actually tell you about his hopes, dreams and aspirations. Fascinating though he believes the subject to be, Sebastian is not the sort of man to lecture anyone against their will on the errors in the P. Codex of Euripides’
Helena,
but Camilla and Lucinda—to quote any common law judge in almost any rape case—were asking for what they got. They had led Sebastian on to believe that they were the sort of women who would be willing, even eager, to listen to a learned exposition of the finer points of textual criticism: if they didn’t like it, as appeared from their glazed looks and blank expressions to be the case, they had no one to blame but themselves, and it should have been a lesson to them not to go about admiring the souls and intellects of other people’s young men.

I did at last try to create a diversion by talking about our previous three days’ sailing, which I thought would be a topic of more general interest. I cannot claim, however, that this was a great success. Sebastian was reminded of his theory about the Necromantion and Book XI of the
Odyssey,
Camilla and Lucinda continued to look bemused; Constantine Demetriou was moved to warm enthusiasm; and the conversation, as was to be expected in these circumstances, again lapsed into Greek.

I have done what I can, by the way, to further your interest with young Leonidas. He seems to be quite a sensible boy really, though rather precocious, having been encouraged by people like you and Hilary to think himself interesting on account of his looks; and at least he doesn’t tower over me, like everyone else here apart from Dolly, as if I were Gulliver in Brobdingnag. He is thinking of coming to the Bar when he has done his degree and would like to specialize in tax matters. I warned him of the difficulty of obtaining a tax pupillage; but suggested that when the time came, if he could persuade you of the seriousness of his interest in Revenue law, you might be willing to take him on as a pupil. I don’t know, of course, to what lengths he may be prepared to go to convince you of his seriousness, nor am I to be thought to approve of his going to them, whatever they may be, nor of your encouraging him to do so; but I hope you will feel that I have done my best for you.

The second thing which disconcerted me happened in the afternoon.

Dolly had been telling me at lunch about pottery-making—she is part-owner, you may remember, of a small ceramics business near here, for which she designs plates and things. When I said I would like very much to see how it was done, she invited me to her studio, where she keeps some examples of her work and a potter’s wheel for trying out her designs. She showed me how to use it, and I managed eventually to make quite a respectable sort of bowl, hardly lopsided at all.

The pottery I liked best was a kind apparently traditional in Corfu—a black or deep blue glaze decorated in gold with scenes from Greek mythology and so forth. When I admired it, she insisted on making me a present of a pair of little jugs in this style—shaped like ancient amphorae, with a picture on one of Penelope weaving her web and on the other of Odysseus sailing his ship. Since she said that it was a joint present to Sebastian and myself, I asked which one she thought he should have.

“Oh,” she said, with a matchmaking look in her eye, “it would be a shame to separate them.”

She has made her mind up, it seems, to marry me off to Sebastian, and was at pains to persuade me of the attractions of the married state: “It’s lovely,” she said, “it’s so comfortable.” She did concede, however—rather wistfully, I thought—that it was not quite as exhilarating as other possible arrangements.

“You can’t expect your husband to spend the whole day thinking how wonderful it is that he’s going to have dinner with you—he usually does have dinner with you, so there’s nothing special about it. One does rather miss that sort of thing—it makes one feel so cheerful, doesn’t it, and so good-tempered and energetic? But men don’t understand that, they like being married—it makes them feel safe and secure. You wouldn’t want poor Sebastian to feel insecure, would you?”

I suggested that the ideal arrangement might be to have both a husband and an admirer—that being the correct term, I believe, for a man who looks forward to having dinner with one.

“Oh, it is,” she said, with more enthusiasm than you might expect from a respectable married woman. “But you can’t make it last, you see. The admirer always wants to marry you and be safe and secure, so you end up with complications and unpleasantness.” I suppose she was thinking of her divorce from George Fairfax.

It was silly of me, in such a light-hearted conversation, to make any mention of Deirdre’s death. It seemed heartless to have said nothing at all about it, and I thought this a suitable opportunity to offer some sort of condolence; but I ought to have guessed that Dolly would find it upsetting.

“Poor Deirdre,” she said. “And the awful thing is, I hardly notice she isn’t here—it’s as if she never existed. I tried to love her as much as the others, but I couldn’t quite—I did try, but it wasn’t enough. She must have been so unhappy—oh, poor Deirdre.” She buried her nose in a paint-stained handkerchief. I found myself reminding her that Deirdre’s death had been an accident and had nothing to do with her being unhappy. “You were with her, weren’t you,” I said, “just before it happened, and she seemed quite cheerful?”

“Yes,” said Dolly. “Yes, that’s true—I was with her on the roof terrace just a minute or two before, and she seemed in very good spirits—quite excited about something. I told them that at the inquest.”

But the thing is, you see—

You know how it is, Julia, when one is cross-examining a witness, that sometimes there is something about the way they answer a particular question which means they are not telling the truth? Well, the thing is—it would be absurd, of course, to think oneself infallible—but if we had been in court when Dolly told me about being with Deirdre on the roof terrace, and if she had said it in the same tone and manner—well, the thing is, Julia, I’d have staked my reputation that she was lying.

Even if I’m right, it’s nothing to make a great fuss about: if Deirdre was not in such good spirits as Dolly led the Coroner to believe, one can hardly blame her for doing what she could to avoid a verdict of suicide. Still, I felt slightly uncomfortable: I left the studio as soon as I could, and came into the garden to continue writing to you.

After telling you about the things which disconcerted me, I see they are even more trivial, and my sense of uneasiness even less reasonable, than I thought when I began. There is no more to it, I suppose, than this: Sebastian would evidently be quite happy to stay at the Villa Miranda for as long as our welcome lasts, whereas I would prefer to go on sailing round the Ionian Islands. You will say that if I insisted—

Oh yes, I dare say, if I insisted on leaving Sebastian would not insist on staying. Things, however, are not as simple as that. When Henry disrupted my plans for Easter and then again for Whitsun he also disrupted Sebastian’s; and Sebastian, it is fair to say, behaved rather well about it—there are men who would claim that their holiday arrangements are more important than
my
brief in the Court of Appeal, even in a leading case on equitable estoppel. If translating the work of Constantine Demetriou is Sebastian’s equivalent of a brief in the Court of Appeal, I should not like to do anything to interrupt the progress of their friendship: it would make me feel selfish and ill-natured and see myself in a bad light. I do not at all want to spend ten days sailing round the Ionian seeing myself in a bad light.

There is also the matter of the cricket match—no, Julia, your eyes do not deceive you, we are involved in a cricket match: the annual fixture between the Writers of Corfu on one side and the Artists on the other, the former under the captaincy of Constantine Demetriou. Lucian, though unpublished, is considered eligible to play for the Writers and was to have done so; but his broken arm has put him out of action. Sebastian has been invited to take his place; he regards this, I need hardly say, as a most extraordinary honor, and there could be no question of his refusing. Fortunately, it isn’t feasible to remain in Corfu until this event takes place: the terms of my charter require me to re-deliver the
Kymothoe
at Preveza on Friday week, and the match is to be played on the following day, so that whatever happens we shall have to sail back to the mainland at some stage before the match and return to Corfu by ferry. But if Sebastian gets the idea that he ought to have some batting practice—

It seems unreasonable and ungrateful of me to object to remaining at the Villa Miranda: I expect you would think it a perfect Paradise. Somehow, though, it is not quite my sort of place. Besides, having meant to go to Ithaca, it seems a pity not to.

With very much love,

Selena.

Spare room at the Villa Miranda.
Wednesday morning.

Dear Julia,

A rather disagreeable thing has happened to Sebastian—I almost hesitate to write to you about it.

It occurred to our host during dinner yesterday evening that we should on no account miss seeing Palaeocastritsa, a village some twenty miles away on the north-western coast of the island; it was, he said, a place of great magnificence and natural beauty; also, by tradition, the site of the palace of King Alcinous, who gave hospitality to Odysseus on his way home to Ithaca.

“Ah, Sebastian, my dear friend, I know that you don’t believe King Alcinous ever existed—you think that Homer imagined him, him and his palace and his wife and his daughter and his daughter’s washing. Wouldn’t you think, though, with all that imagining, that he could imagine some better reason for a princess to go down to the seashore in the morning? Something sublime and majestic and suitable to be mentioned in a great epic? But no, it’s to do her washing, just like a peasant girl. Oh, he’s hopeless, poor fellow—just fancy thinking a princess would ever make her clothes dirty.” He sighed and looked very satirical. “But who knows? Perhaps if you go to Palaeocastritsa and search carefully you’ll find the Princess Nausicaa’s laundry-list, and be able to tell your archaeologist friends that she existed after all. Or perhaps, when you stand alone on the seashore at Palaeocastritsa, and see the great cliffs rising above you and the dark sea foaming against the rocks, perhaps you will believe in the Princess Nausicaa even without her laundry-list.”

“Alone?” said Camilla at this point, rather lowering the tone of the conversation. “Alone? On the seashore at Palaeocastritsa? Honestly, Costas, you must be thinking of it the way it was thirty years ago. Nowadays it’s all high-rise hotels and hamburgers—you might as well talk about standing alone on the beach at Blackpool on August Bank Holiday.”

“It’s true that nowadays it’s very crowded,” said our host sadly. He was plainly having difficulty, as so often happens with you left-wing intellectuals, in reconciling his political principles with his dislike of crowds and hamburgers. “But it’s right that it should be—it’s right that so many people should wish to see the city of King Alcinous.”

“They don’t go to see the city of King Alcinous,” said Camilla. “They go for a booze and a bathe and a bit of slap and tickle. The only time it’s bearable is first thing in the morning.”

“Ah, yes,” cried our host, “yes, that’s the time to see it. At dawn, with the sun rising behind Mount Pantocrator—ah, yes, Sebastian, if you could see it then—”

This inevitably led—inevitably, that is, given Sebastian’s reverence for the lightest word of Constantine Demetriou—to a discussion of how we might reach Palaeocastritsa by sunrise on the following morning. There were practical objections to our borrowing Dolly’s car, on which the family are largely dependent for transport; but Camilla has a motor-scooter, which she claimed was ideal for quick journeys from one part of the island to another, and offered us the use of it. Sebastian, who has been riding round Oxford on a motor-scooter for years and prides himself on his expertise, accepted immediately.

Waking up this morning well before daybreak—I don’t sleep as well here as on board the
Kymothoe
—I had the following sequence of thoughts: (1) that no one except myself now seemed to have any notion of our continuing our voyage round the Ionian Islands—this slightly depressed me; (2) that even if we didn’t, we could still have a reasonable amount of sailing in the waters around Corfu—this cheered me up a little; (3) that since Camilla had lost her own boat we couldn’t very well go sailing without inviting her and her cousins to join us. This I found so dispiriting that when Sebastian also woke up (which he always does quite easily when he wants to) I said grumpily that I didn’t feel like bumping across the hills of Corfu on the back of a motor-scooter and proposed to go back to sleep again.

After he had gone I failed to go back to sleep, but lay in bed thinking how unfair it was that he should be seeing interesting things in Palaeocastritsa, and looking for Nausicaa’s laundry-list, while I was left stranded at the Villa Miranda in the company of people who towered over me in the Brobdingnagian fashion previously objected to. Without the stimulus of coffee, however, I could work out no way of regarding this as Sebastian’s fault rather than mine, and so was prevented from sympathizing with myself as fully as I would have wished. After about twenty minutes, I dressed and went downstairs.

Dolly was already up, drifting about the kitchen in a housecoat, trying simultaneously to make coffee and to read a letter which she had evidently just opened. She gave the impression of being upset by it, though as if at news of a minor rather than a major misfortune. I asked her if anything was the matter.

“Oh no, it’s nothing really,” she said. “Just a silly letter from my solicitor. Oh dear, don’t people make things difficult? One does one’s best to do the right thing, but it doesn’t do any good.”

I wondered for a moment whether it might have something to do with Rupert’s investment plans for the Remington-Fiske funds; but I remembered that Dolly’s interest had been extinguished by the variation, so that there would now be no reason for anyone to write to her about it.

“Solicitors,” I said, “often write silly letters. Is it anything that I could help with?”

I didn’t discover whether it was or not, because at that moment there was a ring at the doorbell. Seeing that Dolly was at a crucial stage in her coffee-making, I went to answer it. On the doorstep was Sebastian, with his clothes torn and blood all over him.

It wasn’t, when we had cleaned and tidied and disinfected him, as bad as it looked at first sight, but still disagreeable. We learnt, in the course of our ministrations, that a goat had run out into the road in front of him on the way down to Casiope: he had swerved to avoid it, lost control of the motor-scooter and landed in the ditch at the roadside. In spite of protests that he was only shaken and there was nothing to worry about, we had no difficulty in persuading him to return to bed.

Discreetly left by Dolly to attend alone at the bedside—the matchmaking look was in her eye again—I poured him a medicinal dose of Metaxa and made some adverse comments on the character and ancestry of the goat.

“Oh no, don’t say that,” he said, “it was a lovely goat. I won’t hear a word against it.”

Rather alarmed at this—I could think of no rational explanation for such saintly benevolence—I expressed a desire to know what on earth he was talking about.

“The brakes on the motor-scooter weren’t working,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the goat, I wouldn’t have known until the hairpin bend.”

The Villa Miranda is on a side road, narrow and not well surfaced, which runs along the cliffs for about half a mile before joining the main road to Casiope. The first occasion one would normally have to brake after leaving the Villa is just before the junction, where the road begins to descend more steeply and twists sharply back on itself. At this point one has a sheer cliff face on one’s right and on one’s left an unbroken drop of about a hundred feet to some fairly jagged rocks: not a good place to discover unexpectedly that one’s brakes were out of order. I decided that I too needed a medicinal Metaxa.

“You won’t mention it to anyone, will you?” said Sebastian. “Camilla might feel embarrassed about lending us the scooter.” He then went peacefully off to sleep, apparently not in the least troubled, nor expecting me to be, by the thought of how close he had come to falling over a hundred-foot cliff.

So here am I at his bedside with all sorts of sinister notions running through my mind which common sense tells me are altogether absurd. I don’t go so far as to imagine that anyone intended any harm to Sebastian: they have known him, after all, for only two days, during which the worst he has done is to talk a little too much about Book XI of the
Odyssey
and the transmission of the texts of Euripides—even someone not much interested in these subjects would hardly try to murder him for that.

But it was Camilla’s motor-scooter, and I suppose that in the normal course of events she would have been the next person to ride it.

No, this is all nonsense. I am suffering, as previously supposed, from an interesting neurosis—Henry’s fault, I expect, for disrupting my holiday arrangements.

With very much love,

Selena.