My Brother Michael (3 page)

The paper crackled suddenly as my fingers tightened. I suppose moments of self-knowledge come at all sorts of odd times. I have often wondered if they are ever pleasant. I had one such moment now.

It didn’t last long. I didn’t let it. It was with a sort of resigned surprise that I found myself once more at the counter, handing a slip of paper across it to the proprietor.

‘My name and address,’ I said rather breathlessly, ‘just in case someone does come for the car later on. Miss Camilla Haven, the Olympias Hotel, Rue Marnis … Tell them I – I’ll take care of the car. Tell them I did it for the best.’

I was out in the street and getting into the car before it occurred to me that my last words had sounded uncommonly like an epitaph.

E
VEN
if it wasn’t Hermes himself who had brought me the key, the hand of every god in Hellas must have been over me that day, because I got out of Athens alive. More, unscathed.

There were some sticky moments. There was the shoeblack who was so urgent to clean my shoes that he followed me to the car and clung to the side and would certainly have been hurt when I started off, if only I’d remembered to put the car into gear. There was the moment when I turned – at a cautious ten miles per hour and hugging the left-hand pavement – out of Omonia Square into St Constantine Street, and met a taxi almost head-on on what I thought was his wrong side, till the volume and fervour of his abuse shocked me back on to my own right. Then there was the encounter in the narrow alley with two furious pedestrians who stepped off the pavement without a single glance in my direction. How was I to know it was a one-way street? I was lucky with my brakes that time. I
wasn’t so lucky with the flower-donkey, but it was only the flowers I touched, and the driver was charming about it. He refused the note I hastily held out to him and he actually gave me the flowers I’d knocked out of the donkey’s pannier.

All things considered, people were very forgiving. The only really unpleasant person was the man who spat on the bonnet as I came hesitatingly out from behind a stationary bus. There was no need for such a display of temper. I’d hardly touched him.

By the time I got to the main road that leads out of Athens along the Sacred Way I’d found out two things. One was that a few weeks spent in punting around the English country roads in Elizabeth’s old Hillman (Philip, understandably, had never let me touch his car) was not really an adequate preparation for driving through Athens in a strange car with a left-hand drive. The other was that the shabby black car had an unexpectedly powerful engine. If it had been less shabby and ancient-looking – if it had been one of the sleek-winged transatlantic monsters commonly used as taxis in Athens – I should never have dared myself to drive it, but its shabby façade had reassured me. Almost it could have been the old Hillman I’d learned on. Almost. I hadn’t been in it three minutes before I discovered that it had an acceleration like the kick of a jet, and by the time I’d assessed its possibilities as a lethal weapon – which were limitless – it was too late. I was out in the traffic, and it seemed safer to stay there. So I hung on grimly to the wheel, changing hands now and again as I remembered that the gear
levers were on the right, and prayed to the whole Olympian hierarchy as we jerked and nudged our terrified and apologetic way out through the city suburbs, turning at length into the great double road that runs along the coast towards Eleusis and Corinth.

After the packed and flashing streets, the road seemed open and comparatively empty. This was the Sacred Way: down this wide sea-bordered road the ancient pilgrims had gone with songs and torches to celebrate the Mysteries at Eleusis. This lake now lying to the right was the holy lake of Demeter. Across that bay on the left the island of Salamis lay like a drowned dragon, and there –
there
– Themistocles had smashed the Persian fleet …

But I looked neither to right nor left as I drove. I had been this way before, and had got the first sharp disillusion over. There was no need, here, to leave oneself open to the ghosts; they had long since gone. Now, the Sacred Way ran straight and wide (the tar sweating a little in the sun) between the cement factories and the ironworks; the holy lake was silted up with weeds and slag; in the bay of Salamis lay the rusty hulks of tankers, and the wine-dark water reflected the aluminium towers of the refinery. At the other side of the bay belched the chimneys of Megara, and above them a trio of Vampire jets wheeled, screaming, against the ineffable Greek sky. And this was Eleusis itself, this dirty village almost hidden in the choking clouds of ochreous smoke from the cement works.

I kept my eyes on the road, my attention on the car,
and drove as fast as I dared. Soon the industrial country was behind us, and the road, narrower now and whitening with dust under the pitiless September sun, lifted itself away from the shore and wound up between fields of red earth set with olives, where small box-like houses squatted, haphazardly it seemed, among the trees. Children, ragged and brown and thin, stood in the dust to stare as I went by. A woman, black-clad, and veiled like a Moslem, bent to lift bread from the white beehive oven that stood under an olive tree. Scrawny hens scratched about, and a dog hurled itself yelling after the car. Donkeys plodded along in the deep dust at the road’s edge, half hidden under their top-heavy loads of brushwood. A high cart swayed along a track towards the road; it was piled with grapes gleaming waxily, cloudy-green. The flanks of the mule were glossy, and bloomy as dark grapes. The air smelt of heat and dung and dust and the lees of the grape harvest.

The sun beat down. Wherever the trees stood near the road the shade fell like a blessing. It was not long past noon, and the heat was terrific. The only relief was the breeze of the car’s movement, and the cloudy heads of the great olives sailing between the road and the great brazen bowl of the sky.

There was very little traffic out in the heat of the day, and I was determined to take full advantage of the afternoon lull, so I drove on through the hot bright minutes, feeling confident now, and even secure. I had got the feel of the car, and I was still steadfastly refusing to think about what I had done. I had taken a ‘dare’
from the gods, and the results would wait till I got – if I got – to Delphi.

If I got to Delphi.

My confidence in myself had been steadily growing as I drove on through an empty landscape, through country that grew wilder and more beautiful as the road shook itself clear of the olive groves and climbed the hills that lie to the north of Attica. It even survived the series of frightening hairpin bends that sink from the summit of these hills towards the flat fields of the Boeotian plain. But it didn’t survive the bus.

This was the service bus from Athens, and I caught up with it halfway along the dead-straight road that bisects the plain. It was small, evil-looking, and smelly. It also seemed to be packed to the doors with people, boxes, and various livestock, including hens and at least one small goat. It was roaring along in a fifty-yard trail of dust. I drew carefully out to the left, and pressed forward to pass.

The bus, which was already in the middle of the road, swung over promptly to the left and accelerated slightly. I moved back, swallowing dust. The bus went back to the crown of the road and settled back to its rackety thirty miles an hour.

I waited half a minute, and tried again. I crept cautiously up to its rear wheel and hoped the driver would see me.

He did. Accelerating madly, he surged once again into my path, got me well and truly behind him, then settled back complacently into the centre of the road. I went back once more into the choking dust-train. I was
trying not to mind, to tell myself that when he had had his joke he would let me safely by, but I could feel my hands beginning to tighten on the wheel, and a nerve was jumping somewhere in my throat. If Philip had been driving … but then, I told myself, if Philip had been driving, it wouldn’t have happened. Women drivers are fair game on the roads of Greece.

Here we passed a board which said, in Greek and English letters:
THEBES
4 km.,
DELPHI
77 km. If I had to stay behind the bus all the way to Delphi …

I tried again. This time as I pulled out to approach him I sounded the horn decisively. To my surprise and gratitude he drew over promptly to the right, and slowed down. I made for the gap. There was just room, no more, between the bus and the verge, which was of deep, crumbling dry soil. Taut with nervous concentration, I pressed forward and accelerated. The bus rocked and roared alongside.

I wasn’t getting past. He was travelling faster, keeping pace with me. My car had the speed of him, but the gap was narrowing and I wasn’t sure of my judgment to force the big car past. He closed in more sharply. I don’t know if he would actually have forced me off the road, but as the swaying dirty-green enamel rocked nearer, I lost my nerve, as he had known I would. I stood on the brakes. The bus roared on. I was left once more in the dust.

We were getting near the outskirts of Thebes when I realised that of course a service bus would have to stop for passengers. The thought steadied me. I dropped back out of the dust-cloud, and drove slowly in his wake, waiting.

Ahead of us I could see the first scattered houses of Thebes, the legendary city that, I knew, was gone even more irrecoverably than Eleusis. Where Antigone led the blind Oedipus out into exile, the old men of Thebes sit on the concrete pavements in the sun, beside the petrol-pumps. The game of
tric-trac
that they sit over, hour after hour, is probably the oldest thing in Thebes. There is a fountain somewhere, beloved of the nymphs. That’s all. But I had no time then to mourn the passing of the legends. I wasn’t thinking about Oedipus or Antigone, or even about Philip or Simon or my own miserable prelude to adventure. I just drove on towards Thebes with my eyes fixed in hatred ahead of me. There was nothing left in life at that moment but the desire to pass that filthy bus.

Presently it happened. A knot of women, waiting by the roadside, signalled him to stop, and he slowed down. I closed up behind him, my eyes on the strip to the left of him, my hands slippery on the wheel, and that nerve beginning to jump again.

He stopped, right in the centre of the road. There was no possible space to pass. I stopped behind him and waited, then, as he drew away from me again, and I let in the clutch, I stalled the engine. My hand shook on the ignition. The engine wouldn’t start. At the edge of my vision I caught sight of a face at the rear window of the withdrawing bus, a dark young face, split in a wide grin. As I started the car and followed I saw the youth turn as if to nudge someone on the back seat beside him. Another face turned to stare and grin. And another.

Then, close behind me – so close that it nearly sent me into the ditch with fright – I heard a horn. As I swerved automatically to the right a jeep, driven fast on its wrong side, roared up from behind, overtook me rather too wide, with the nearside wheels churning dust, and charged straight, at the same head-long pace, for the rear of the bus, with its horn still blasting like a siren. I caught a glimpse of a girl driving, a young, dark face, with lashes drooping over her eyes and a bored, sulky mouth. She was lounging back in her seat, handling the jeep with casual, almost insolent, expertise. And, woman driver or no, the bus made way for her, whipping smartly over to the right and staying there respectfully while she tore by. I didn’t consciously decide to follow her; in fact I’m not sure yet whether I trod on the accelerator deliberately, or whether I was feeling for the brake, but something hit me in the small of the back, and the big car shot forward, missed the bus by inches, and stormed past in the wake of the jeep, with two wheels on the crown of the road and the other two churning up enough dust to have guided the children of Israel straight into Thebes. Where the bus had its offside wheels I neither knew or cared. I didn’t even look in the mirror.

I swept into Thebes and dived smartly down the wrong side of the dual carriageway which is the road through to Levadia and Delphi.

The hand of Hermes, god of wayfarers, was over me still. There was a horse-fair at Levadia, which, with its accompanying trappings of
fiesta
, jammed the streets;
but after that I met nothing, except slow little caravans of country people on their way by mule and donkey-back to the fair; and once a train of gypsies – real Egyptians – on the move with mules and ponies covered in bright blankets.

Soon after I had passed Levadia the country began to change. The grim banalities of Attica, the heavy Technicolor prosperity of the plains, sank back and were forgotten as the hills crowded in. The road reared and twisted between great ribs of brown hill that thrust the landscape up into folded ranges. At the foot of the steep waterless valleys dead streams curled white along their shingle-beds, like the sloughed skins of snakes. The sides of the valleys were dry with the yellowish growth of burned grass, and drifts of stones and crumbling soil.

Bigger and bigger grew the circling hills, barer the land, drawn in with great sweeps of colour that ran from red to ochre, from ochre to burnt umber to lion-tawny, with, above all, the burning, the limitless, the lovely light. And beyond all, at length, a grey ghost of a mountain-massif; not purple, not faintly blue with distance like the mountains of a softer country, but spectre-white, magnificent, a lion silvered. Parnassus, home of the ghosts of the old gods.

I stopped only once to rest some way beyond Levadia. The road, which wound high along the hillside, was in shadow, and the air, at that height was cool. I sat for about fifteen minutes on the parapet that edged the road. Below me deep in a forked valley, was a place where three tracks met; the ghost of an ancient
crossroads where once a young man, coming from Delphi to Thebes, struck an old man down out of his chariot, and killed him …