My Brother Michael (16 page)

I laughed. ‘Oh dear, and it’s still walking these mountains. It makes me feel raw and new and very, very Western. That face, now—’

My hand was hovering over the Juliette Gréco girl.

Simon laughed. ‘That’s real enough, and very Western indeed,’ he said. ‘That’s our one and only Danielle, isn’t it, Nigel? You’re surely not going to put her in among the “Hellenic types”?’

‘Danielle?’ I said. ‘Oh, she
is
French, then? Somehow I thought she looked it.’

Nigel had taken the drawing from Simon, and was stuffing that, too, away. He said in a muffled voice: ‘She was here as secretary to a chap attached to the French School.’

‘French School?’

‘Of Archaeology,’ said Simon. ‘It’s the French School which has the “right” or whatever they call it to excavate here at Delphi. They’ve been working here again recently on the site – there was some talk of a hunt for a lost treasury fairly high up the hill. You’ll see a lot of exploratory pits dug on both sides of the road, too, but all they found there was Roman.’

‘Ah, yes. Modern stuff.’

He grinned. ‘That’s it. Well, they’ve had to pack up, because I believe funds gave out. Some of their workmen are still here tidying up – there are trucks and tools and what-have-you to be removed. But the archaeologists have gone, more’s the pity.’

I saw Nigel throw him a sidelong glance, and remembered suddenly something that Simon had said to me earlier. ‘
He’s been here in Delphi too long, and got tied up with a girl who wasn’t very good for him
.’

I said: ‘Yes. I’d rather have liked to watch them at it. And think of the excitement if anything did turn up!’

He laughed. ‘
That
sort of excitement, I believe, is the rarest kind! Most of the long years are spent shifting tons of earth a couple of yards, and then putting them back again. But I agree. It would be terrific. And what a country! Did you see that glorious thing of the negro and the horse that the workmen dug up when they were mending the drains in Omonia Square a few years ago? Imagine wondering what you might find every time you set out to dig your garden or put a plough to the hillside. After all, even the Charioteer—’ He stopped, and turned his cigarette over in his fingers as if he was
admiring the twist of blue smoke that curled and frothed from it.

Nigel looked up. ‘The Charioteer?’ His voice still sounded cagey and queer. He was still kneeling on the floor, shuffling the drawings in the folder into some sort of order. ‘The Charioteer?’ he repeated mechanically, as if his mind was on something else.

Simon drew on the cigarette. ‘Uh-huh. He wasn’t dug up till 1896, long after the main shrines and treasuries had been excavated. Not long ago I read Murray’s
History of Greek Sculpture
, and wondered why the author was so sketchy about Delphi, till I realised that, when he wrote his book in 1890, the half was not told him. Who knows what else is still up there in the odd corners under the trees?’

Nigel had sat back on his heels, his hands moving vaguely and clumsily among the drawings. If they were indeed his bread and butter he was, it occurred to me, remarkably careless of them.

He looked up now, the drawings spilling again from his hands.

‘Simon.’ It was that strung-up voice again.

‘Well?’

‘I think I—’ Then he stopped abruptly and turned his head. The studio’s outer door had opened and shut with a bang. Rapid footsteps approached along the corridor.

To my surprise Nigel went as white as a sheet. He swung round towards me, swept the rest of the drawings off the bed into an unceremonious heap, then hastily gathered them all together to shove back into the folder on the floor.

As unceremoniously, the door burst open.

A girl stood there, surveying the untidy and crowded little room with an expression of weary distaste. It was the girl of the portrait, Gréco-look and all. She drawled, without removing the cigarette from the corner of her mouth: ‘Hullo, Simon, my love. Hullo Nigel. On your knees praying over my picture? Well, the prayer’s answered. I’ve come back.’

D
ANIELLE
was slightly built, of medium height, and had made the most (or the worst, according to the point of view) of her figure by encasing it in drainpipe jeans and a very tight sweater of thin wool, which left nothing to wonder at except how in the world did she get her breasts that shape and into that position. They were very high and very pointed and the first thing that one noticed about her. The second was her expression, which was very much the weary waif-look of Nigel’s picture. Her face was oval, and palely sallow. Her eyes were very big and very black, carefully shadowed with a blend of brown and green that made them look huge and tired. She had long curling lashes that caught the smoke wisping up blue from the cigarette that appeared fixed to her lower lip. She wore pale lipstick, which looked odd and striking with the sallow face and
huge dark eyes. Her hair was black and straight and deliberately untidy, cut in that madly smart way that looks as if it had been hacked off in the dark with a pair of curved nail-scissors. Her expression was one of world-weary disdain. Her age might have been anything from seventeen to twenty-five. She looked as if she hoped you would put it at something over thirty.

I should perhaps say here that her eyelashes were very long, quite real, and quite beautiful. This is in case it should be thought that my description of Danielle smacks of prejudice. The only reason that I had then for prejudice was the expression on Nigel’s face, stuck there on his knees on the floor with his ungainly hands full of the delicate drawings, turning to face the door, and saying ‘
Danielle!
’ in a cracked young voice that gave him away immediately and very cruelly.

He shoved the drawings clumsily into the folder and got to his feet.

After that first greeting she had ignored him. Nor, after one cool glance, had she looked at me. Her eyes were all over Simon.

She said again: ‘Hullo.’ I don’t quite know how she made the simple dissyllable sound sexy, but she did.

‘Hullo,’ said Simon, not sounding sexy at all. He was looking ever so slightly amused, and also wary, which annoyed me. Why it should, I’m not prepared to say, and didn’t try at the time.

Nigel said hoarsely: ‘What are you doing here? I thought you’d left Delphi.’

‘I had. But I came back. Aren’t you going to ask me in, Nigel dear?’

‘Of course. Come in. It’s wonderful – I mean I didn’t expect you back. Come in. Sit down.’ He darted forward and dragged out the best chair – the one I had vacated – for her. But she walked past it towards Simon, who was standing by the window. She went very close to him. ‘I’m sleeping in the studio, Simon. I got tired of the Tourist Hotel, and anyway I can’t afford it now. You don’t mind me coming here, do you … Simon?’

‘Not in the very least.’ He looked across her at me. ‘You’d better be introduced. Camilla, this, as you’ll have guessed, is Danielle. Camilla Haven: Danielle Lascaux. I told you that Danielle was here for some time with the French School. She was Hervé Clément’s secretary. You probably know the name. He wrote
Later Discoveries at Delphi
.’

‘I read it not long before I came here. How d’you do?’ I said to Danielle.

She gave me a brief stare, and a barely civil nod. Then she turned, and with what looked like very conscious grace, sat down at the opposite end of the bed from me, curled her slim legs up under her, and leaned back against the bed-head. She tilted her head and sent Simon a long look between narrowed lids.

‘So you’ve been talking about me?’

Nigel said eagerly: ‘It was your portrait – the one I did of you.’ With one of his ungraceful gestures he indicated the untidily stuffed portfolio lying on the bed beside me.

‘Oh, that.’

‘It’s very good, don’t you think?’ I said. ‘I recognised you as soon as you came in.’

‘Uh-huh. Nigel’s quite a clever boy, we know that.’ She sent him a smile that was a shadow of the one she’d given Simon, then reached out an idle hand and pulled two or three sheets out of the folder. I saw Nigel make a small sharp movement, as if of involuntary protest, then he sat down in the orange canvas chair, his hands dangling between his bony knees.

‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good enough portrait. Are my eyes really as big as that, Nigel?’ She was leafing through the drawings: her own portrait; the one we had called the ‘Phormis head’, with the close curls and tight smile; the cyclamen; and a drawing I hadn’t seen, of a man’s head and shoulders. ‘Flowers?’ said Danielle. ‘Are they
paying
you to do things like that, Nigel? …
Who’s this?
’

Her voice had changed on the query, so abruptly that I was startled. I saw Simon turn his head, and Nigel almost jumped. ‘Who? Oh, that. That’s a chap I saw today on Parnassus. We were just saying before you came in that he was rather like an archaic—’

‘No, no!’ She had been holding the Phormis head, and another drawing. She dropped the former abruptly, and thrust the other forward. ‘Not that one. This.’

Something in her voice suggested an effort for self-command, and to my surprise her hand was unsteady. But when I said ‘May I?’ and leaned forward to take the drawing gently from her, she let it go without protest. I looked at it with interest, and then more sharply. It
showed the head and bared throat of a young man. The face was beautiful, but not with Niko’s vital and very Greek beauty; this was remote, stern, perhaps a little sad. He was not, I thought, a ‘Hellenic type’ at all, though something about him was oddly familiar. But it appeared that he was not intended to form part of Nigel’s gallery. This was the only portrait I had seen where Nigel had used what I might call his ‘flower technique’. It was in his own style; the work was delicate, sure and arrestingly beautiful.

‘Why,
Nigel
…’ I said. ‘Simon, look at this!’ Danielle let the others fall to the coverlet. She appeared abruptly to have lost interest, only asking: ‘Did you do those today?’

‘Yes.’ And Nigel, before Simon had time to do more than glance at the drawing, had finally and this time effectively swept every drawing back into the folder and shoved it under the bed. He looked flustered, and every bit as resentful as he had done earlier. But Danielle didn’t pursue the subject. She leaned back again and said in her usual slightly bored tone: ‘For God’s sake, Nigel,
are
you going to offer me a drink?’

‘Of course.’ Nigel dived for the bottle of ouzo, put it down again so that it rocked and nearly spilt, then dashed to rinse a tumbler out in the basin.

I put my own glass down and made as if to get to my feet. But at that moment I caught Simon’s eye, and I thought he shook his head very slightly. I sat back.

He looked down at the girl. ‘I thought you’d gone, Danielle? Hasn’t the “dig” packed up?’

‘Oh, that. Yes. We got to Athens last night, and
really I thought it would be rather a
thing
to be back in civilisation again, but I had the most dreary scene with Hervé, and then I thought to myself I really might as well be back in Delphi with …’ she smiled suddenly, showing very white teeth … ‘back in Delphi. So here I am.’

Nigel said: ‘You mean you’ve got the sack?’

‘You could call it that.’ She watched him for a moment through the cigarette-smoke, then she turned to me. ‘Simon told you the polite fiction,’ she said. ‘Actually, of course, I was Hervé Clément’s mistress.’

‘
Danielle!
’

‘For God’s sake, Nigel!’ She hunched an impatient shoulder. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know.’ Then to me: ‘But he was getting to be a bit of a bore.’

‘Really?’ I said politely.

I thought her look was calculating under the long lashes. ‘Yes, really. They all do, sooner or later, don’t you think? Do you find men bore you, Camilla Haven?’

‘Occasionally,’ I said. ‘But then so – occasionally – do women.’

That one went straight past her. ‘I hate women anyway,’ she said simply. ‘But Hervé, he was honestly getting to be the utter
end
. Even if he hadn’t quit the “dig” here and gone back to Athens, I’d have had to leave him.’ She blew out a long cloud of smoke, and turned her head to look up at Simon. ‘So back I came. But I’ll have to sleep here, at the studio. I’m on my own now, so I haven’t got the cash for the Tourist Pavilion, or anywhere else for that matter …’ She smiled slowly, still looking at Simon. ‘So I’ll have to sleep rough.’

What it was in her intonation I do not know, but somehow she managed to say the last simple sentence as if it meant sharing a bed with a sadist, and that meant Simon. I felt another spasm of intense irritation. I knew I should have wanted to feel sorry for Danielle, or even amused, but somehow it wasn’t possible. I was beginning to suspect that she was not trying to ape a pathetic maturity; the
weltschmerz
wasn’t a pose, it was real, and rather dreadful. So was the weariness in the big lost eyes. But the pity I should have owed her I felt for Nigel, now feverishly drying the tumbler and saying rapidly:

‘It’s wonderful to have you back. You know that. And of course you must stay in the studio. We’d love to have you, and you’ll be quite all right here. There’s only me and Simon and a Dutch painter—’

‘A Dutch painter?’

Simon said smoothly: ‘A boy of about twenty who has walked from Jannina and is very, very tired.’

She shot him a look up under the fabulous lashes. ‘Oh.’ She threw the half-smoked cigarette into the wash-basin where it, lay smouldering. ‘Give me another cigarette, Simon.’

He obeyed. ‘Camilla?’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Nigel pushed past me with a tumbler three parts full of neat ouzo. ‘Here’s your drink, Danielle.’ His face was anxious, concentrated. He might have been carrying the Holy Grail. She took it from him and gave him a brilliant smile. I saw him blink, and the flush on the burnt cheek-bones deepened. ‘Nigel, darling. I’m glad I came back.’