This Rough Magic (36 page)

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 …

All at once we were running through a village I knew, and he was slowing down. We ran gently between walls of black cypress, past the cottage in the lemon-grove, past the little tea garden with its deserted tables under the pine, and up to the Castello gate, to stop almost between the pillars.

The youth put his feet down and turned inquiringly, jerking a thumb towards the drive, but I shook my head. It was a long walk up through the grounds of the Castello, but until I knew what was going on I certainly wasn’t going to advertise my homecoming by roaring right up to the front door.

So I loosed my limpet-clutch from the leather jacket, and got rather stiffly off my perch, shaking out the pretty embroidered skirt, and pulling my own bedraggled cotton dress from the carrier.

When I tried to thank my rescuer, he smiled and shook his head, wheeling the machine back to face the way we had come, and shouting something which, of course, must mean: ‘It was a pleasure.’

As his hand moved on the controls I put mine out quickly to touch it.

‘Your name?’ I knew the Greek for that. ‘Your name, please?’

I saw him grin and bob his head. ‘Spiridion,’ he said. ‘God with you.’

Next second he was nothing but a receding roar in the darkness, and a cloud of dust swirling to settle in the road.

Thou dost here usurp
The name thou ow’st not, and hast put thyself
Upon this Island, as a spy
…

I
. 2.

There was no light in the Castello. The house loomed huge in the starlight, turreted and embattled and almost as romantic-looking as its builder had intended. I walked round it to the terrace, treading softly on the mossed tiles. No light there either, no movement, nothing. The long windows were blank and curtained, and – when I tried them – locked.

Keeping to the deepest shadows, I skirted the terrace till I reached the balustrade overhanging the cliff and the bay. The invisible sea whispered, and all round me was the dark, peppery smell of the cypresses. I could smell the roses, too, and there were bats about, cutting the silence with their thin, knife-edge cries. A movement caught my eye and made me turn quickly – a small slither of pale colour vanishing like ectoplasm through the stone balustrade, and drifting downhill. The white cat, out on his wild lone.

Then I caught a glimpse of light. This came from
somewhere beyond the trees to the right, where the Villa Rotha must lie. As softly as the white cat, and almost as silently as the ghost from the sea that I was, I crept off the terrace and padded down through the woods towards the light.

I nearly fell over the XK 150, parked among the trees. He must simply have driven her away from the house, so that a chance caller would assume he was out with the car, and look no further.

A few minutes later I was edging my way through the thicket of myrtle that overhung the bungalow.

This was, as I have said before, the twin of the Forli house. The main door, facing the woods, had a cleared sweep of driveway in front of it, and from this a paved path led round the house to the wide terrace overlooking the sea. A light burned over the door. I parted the leaves and peered through.

Two cars stood on the sweep, Max’s big, shabby black Buick, and a small car I didn’t know.

So he was back, and it was battle-stations. I wondered if the other car was the police.

My borrowed rope soles made no sound as I crept round towards the terrace, hugging the house wall.

The terrace, too, was the twin of Phyllida’s, except that the pergola was covered with a vine instead of wistaria, and there was no dining-table, only a couple of large chairs and a low table which held a tray with bottles and glasses. I bypassed these quietly, making for the french windows.

All three were shut and curtained, but the centre one showed a gap between the curtains some three inches
wide through which I could see the room; and as I reached it I realised that I would be able to hear as well … In the glass beside the windowcatch gaped a big, starred hole where someone had smashed a way in …

The first person I saw was Godfrey, near the window and to one side of it, sitting very much at his ease in a chair beside the big elm-wood desk, with a glass of whisky in his hand. He was still dressed in the jersey and dark trousers, and over the back of his chair hung the navy duffel coat which I had torn free of before I went into the sea. I was delighted to see that one side of his face bore a really classic bruise, smeared liberally with dried blood, and that the good-looking mouth appeared to hurt him when he drank. He was dabbing at a swollen lip with his handkerchief.