Decision at Delphi (23 page)

“He is not always reliable.”

“It wasn’t altogether his fault that he didn’t meet you at the plane. He had to go to Nauplion yesterday: some people from a yacht wanted to go sight seeing. Now that really would be a cosy way to travel around.”

“To Nauplion and back here, in one day, in time to pick me up at the airport? He has plenty of confidence.” He began opening his brief-case for Steve’s photographs of Paestum and Sicily.

“He must certainly know his way around the Peloponnese. You know, I think I’ll stay at Nauplion myself. It’s easy to reach Mycenae and Epidaurus from there. And it’s right on the bay where Agamemnon sailed away to Troy. You can see the mountains of Sparta just across the water, and the plains of Argos...”

“You’re getting yourself into the mood, I see.” She would do good work, he thought. “But I am still against Yorghis.” For if he had clients at Nauplion yesterday, then the Spyridon Makres Agency hadn’t known about them; or else they would have sent someone else to meet Strang at the airport, that was certain. Yorghis couldn’t resist the job-on-the-side, evidently.

“Oh, come,” she said, laughingly, “you won his heart. Don’t break it! He called you a ‘very nice gentleman’ several times. He really was sorry. He wouldn’t admit he had been wrong, of course; just apologised sideways by impressing on me how rich and important his client at Nauplion was. That excused everything, apparently. He wanted me to tell you that it was all unavoidable. His client was a ‘very great lady,’ and he couldn’t hurry her sight seeing. As a very nice gentleman, you see that, don’t you?”

“He only called me that because I didn’t report him to the agency,” Strang said, unimpressed.

“You wouldn’t have done that, would you?” She looked at him, uncertainly, almost anxiously.

“No,” he agreed, “you can’t report a man whose shirt collar is fraying.”

She looked at him thoughtfully. She said, holding out her hand, “Are these the photographs?”

She spent a long time with them, examining each of them critically, while Strang watched her. She was intent, unnoticing, absorbed in Steve’s work. The impersonal C. L. Hillard, he thought, in her simple, elegant grey suit: smooth-haired, calm-faced, intelligent, competent, charming; and in complete control of any situation. But, relieved in one way as his mind was, he was glad he had met Cecilia first. Without Cecilia, C. L. Hillard would be a little overwhelming. And yet, without C. L. Hillard, Cecilia would be just a very pretty girl, enchanting for three months. But for thirty, years?

She looked up at him. “Oh, Lord!” Cecilia said. “I’ll have my work cut out to come anywhere near this. He’s so good, he’s so very good!” She gathered the photographs together. “He ought to have finished the job,” she said regretfully. “Why didn’t he, Ken?”

Strang opened his portfolio and drew out some of his drawings.

“All of them,” C. L. Hillard said, coming over to the desk, “I want to see all of them, if I may.” She switched on the lights.

He didn’t watch her, this time. He went out on to the terrace and watched, instead, the soft dusk gathering its violet-grey cloak around the city.

She didn’t come out in five minutes, not even in ten. When she looked at drawings, she looked at drawings, he thought. Politeness? No. C. L. Hillard was too honest for that. Or perhaps she hadn’t liked them, had found them lacking, and Cecilia was standing now in an agony of indecision, not wanting to hurt him. He lit a third cigarette, and switched his thoughts to Nauplion, with its broad bay where a yacht could anchor. There must be many yachts coming there through the sight-seeing season, enough, at least, to establish acceptance among the shore dwellers. Nauplion with its view of the mountains of Sparta...

He heard the light sound of her thin high heels on the terrace behind him. He turned around quickly. “You’re better than Steve,” she said slowly. She gave a deep sigh. “Or perhaps photography is not enough. Perhaps I ought to try to learn to draw.”

“You think they are all right?” He watched her carefully.

“All right?” She was honestly scandalised. “They are better than your Mayan pictures, and that’s quite something.” She stood looking at him, remembering his drawings with such delight and absolute pleasure that he could have stood there looking at
^-
her with both delight and pleasure for the next half hour. “You really love those ancient Greeks, don’t you?” she asked softly.

He nodded. So that had come through, had it? “They soared,” he said, “while other men were crawling in the mud.” He broke his mood with a grin. “Come on,” he said, taking her arm, “let’s find out where we’ll have dinner. And you’d better take a coat—it gets cool here at night.” He noticed the amazed look in her eyes. “Something wrong?”

“No,” she said, conscious of the touch of his arm. “Nothing’s wrong.” She hid her own surprise. It is so wonderfully easy, to be with him, she was thinking; so simple, so natural. But why should you feel so happy, Cecilia Hillard? This won’t do at all, she told herself. She said, very crisply, “See you in the lobby. In ten minutes?”

The problem of dinner was solved by the avuncular eye of the night porter. He had looked at the two Americans, tried to gauge them with an accuracy sharpened by years of observation, wasn’t quite sure, refused all defeat by playing safe, and recommended a restaurant that had food not too difficult for Western digestion, wine that would not be resinated, music, soft lights, and general atmosphere. “It is a tourist place, of course,” he had added, guarding his own reputation as a gourmet; but, then, who knew better than he that foreigners’ stomachs were not always as strong as their ambitions? And as the expected shadow fell over the foreigners’ brows, he brushed it away by saying, “But, of course, the tourists don’t arrive until ten o’clock.”

“Oh, let’s risk it,” Cecilia said while they waited for a cab, as if she sensed something of Strang’s annoyance and hesitation.

“I’d like to have known a special kind of place for your first dinner in Athens, but I honestly just don’t know,” he
admitted unhappily. He felt inadequate.

“We’ll keep the special kind of place for a night when I don’t have to eat at half past eight.” Besides, she thought, I expect I’d find any place, even a hamburger stand, exciting with him. Doesn’t he know that? And that was something else she liked about him.

“Thank you for taking the blame.” Any place would be wonderful for him if he could just sit opposite this extraordinary girl. “The truth is I haven’t yet found my way around Athens.”

“I suppose, last time you were here—” she began, but the cab arrived and carried them down and around Constitution Square. “It was different,” he said, and he looked out at the huge square, now hiding its bitter memories under spring-green trees. By way of a brightly lit thoroughfare with smart shops, they entered the older part of the city, the Plaka. Here, low houses, capped with gently sloping tiles, pressed in on twisting streets; the heavy balconies overhung the narrow sidewalks of worn and half-sunken flagstones; the lights were mellowed into a soft yellow glow. Many of the houses needed plaster to cover their cracks, paint to cover their plaster, but decay was strangely mated with vitality. The numerous food shops meant numerous kitchens cooking for numerous families gathered in the numerous small dark rooms.

“Crowded and cosy,” Strang said, keeping his eyes well open for street names. He had a small map in his pocket, a fairly good memory for places, an adequate sense of direction, and a heavy dislike for feeling lost.

“Romantic,” decided Cecilia. “This is the kind of place I’d like to stay. One could convert a house like that—” She looked with interest at one with a small secretive garden, only betrayed
by the thick branches of a tree behind a high wall.

“Takes a little money, though,” said the practical architect.

“Then some money and offbeat taste has been moving in around here. There is a house already converted.”

“Quite a good job. Windows widened to chase out tuberculosis, all the rats fumigated, plumbing added.”

She laughed. “I didn’t really like it. Bright-pink plaster and a picture window. That’s too much conversion for me.”

“There’s a better job across the street, all shuttered up, probably closed; but that’s nice detail over the doorway—” Strang looked back quickly at the man who had come out of the house. It had not been so closed, after all. But the man—the man was Alexander Christophorou. “Slow, slow down!” he told the driver, who obliged with a shriek of brakes as the cab skidded around a corner and then jolted to a halt. “Sorry,” he said, catching Cecilia round the shoulders to steady her. “I didn’t mean him to be so damned literal about it.” He tried to see the street name, but his view was blocked from this angle. “Just a moment,” he said, getting out of the cab. He walked quickly back to the corner to make sure. Kriton Street, it was called. He glanced along at the shuttered house, standing so quietly by itself, protected from its less-affluent but more cheerful neighbours by its high-walled garden. Alexander Christophorou had walked a little distance to a waiting car. He got in, quickly, and the car drove off.

Strang went back to the cab, wondering what impulse had made him behave in this way. “Sorry,” he said to Cecilia again, and was grateful for her silence. “That was Kriton Street. But don’t ask me why I got out to look. I honestly don’t know.” He hoped he didn’t seem as foolish as he felt. “Did you notice the man who came. out of that house?”

“Your friend Mr. Christophorou, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. So I wasn’t mistaken, he thought.

“I like his house. But you should tell him to have those wooden storm windows taken off. It’s strange how dead a house looks with its shutters all closed, as if pennies were lying on its eyes.” She stopped and considered. “That’s a gruesome thought to take us to dinner.”

“Cheer up,” he said, “we are going to have a gypsy orchestra all to ourselves.”

“I thought you were looking a little worried,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t you like violins breathing down the back of your neck, either?” Good, she thought, I got a real smile out of him. But he
is
worried. What is wrong? When I first saw him this evening he was unhappy about something. Watching him from the doorway of the bar, I thought I was the cause of it all. It wasn’t a joke, really, when I told him I had thought of catching the first plane back to Rome: I was scared that Lee Preston had talked me into a job where I wasn’t wanted. But, when we met, I didn’t feel that way any more. I thought, then, that he must have had a quarrel with Steve Kladas in Sicily, and Steve had resigned in his own impetuous way. But I don’t feel that is true, either, now. And yet, there is something troubling him. What is it? Why doesn’t he mention Steve?

The cab was drawing up in front of the restaurant with as much flourish as if the driver had been reining in four mettlesome horses. “This looks charming,” she said.

“You’re the most tactful girl I’ve ever met,” he told her. But he was relieved, and generously calculated the tip in cents and translated it into drachmas.

“What does it say?” she asked, looking at the restaurant’s name.

“The Five Gypsies.”

“Poached rabbit for dinner? How exotic.”

He laughed. “Probably Maryland chicken or London grill. Time, yet, to wander on and look for something more authentic.”

“People who are hungry can’t afford to be snobs. Besides,” she said, as they entered, “Steve did warn me not to rush too quickly into the authentic places.”

“Steve?” The name was jolted out of him. When shall I tell her? he wondered for the tenth time. Not now, not yet... He looked down at her enchanting face and was startled to see something like very real sympathy in her eyes. His hand, quite unconsciously, tightened its grip on her arm. He led her through the subdued lights of the little entrance hall into the large and completely empty dining-room. “Well,” he said, looking at the huge, well-polished barrels lining one wall, “we at least have wine casks for company. Where shall we sit? Under that cluster of grapes or over by the draped mimosa?”

He helped her off with her light cashmere coat. She had used every one of those ten minutes, back at the hotel, to put on a dress of blue that made her eyes devastating. Or perhaps it was the way she smiled as she looked up at him. He sat down opposite her, pretending to study the handsome menu. For a long minute he stared at it, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his body numb, his mind paralysed. Then the revelation hit him, and he looked at her.

This is the girl I’m going to marry, he told himself.

“Tell me,” she said, as dinner was ending, “about Athens when you were last here.”

“In 1944?” He didn’t hide his surprise.

“Yes. We’ve talked so much about me—” she paused, laughed—“there isn’t really much of my life story left, is there?”

Only the most important, he thought: only about the man to whom she had been engaged, the man who had been killed in Korea. She must have been about nineteen or twenty then. “I didn’t learn so much.”

“What? An only child, brought up in Philadelphia, father an English teacher, mother a pianist, summers in Wyoming with my grandparents; then after my parents died, New York, living in one large room euphemistically called a studio, when I’m not being sent to photograph the Grand Canyon or Mesa Verde or Rio apartment houses or Loire châteaux—”

“Why,” he interrupted, “did you choose photography? And
why do you always photograph stone?”

“Stone?” She was startled. “Well—yes—that has become sort of my particular thing, somehow. Now let’s talk about you.”

“How old are you, Cecilia?”

“Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight next month, to tell you the cruel truth.”

“You’ve come a long way, for twenty-seven years.”

“Oh—I didn’t have many distractions.”

“You mean you didn’t allow many,” he said gently.

She looked at him. “It wasn’t so difficult,” she said. “You wait, and you work, and you wait. It becomes a habit. Two years slip away, three—”

“How many now—seven?”

She looked down at her hands, bare of rings, slender and graceful to match her slender, graceful body. “Did Steve tell you about Jim?” she asked quietly.