Strangers in Company (12 page)

“Yes?” Something in her tone had brought Stella's attention full on her.

“Could you bear to go back and leave something for me?”

“Of course.” But she looked up swiftly from the photograph Marian handed her. “Your children? Are you sure, Mrs. F.?”

“Quite sure.” Don't let her say anything. Not anything at all.

Stella said nothing. She climbed quietly down into the ditch again, vanished into the labyrinth, and returned, after a surprisingly short time, to hold up a hand once more, for help, and say, “They're there, Mrs. F. Under my flower. Aesculapius has had a good day. And now, how about that drink?” She took Marian's arm, in a curiously protective gesture. “I think we could get across this way.”

They could. Emerging from a lower entrance to the site, they found Andreas leaning comfortably against his bus. “
Kalemera
, Andreas,” said Stella.

“
Kalespera, kyria
,” corrected Andreas, with his beaming smile.

“Crushed again,” said Stella cheerfully, leading the way up to the shady terrace of the café. “Ouzo, Mrs. F.?”

“Yes, but it's my turn.” She handed Stella her purse. “You're spoiling me abominably, bless you. I can't tell you how restful it is to have you to do all the coping.”

“Even to making your offerings for you?” Stella had ordered their ouzos from a hovering waiter by the simple expedient of raising two fingers and uttering the one essential word. “Seriously, Mrs. F., are you sure about that? The photo? I could easily go and get it back for you?”

“You're an angel.” Marian was enormously touched. “But it's not absolutely the gesture it may seem. I've got a bigger one at the hotel, and the negative at home.”

“Oh, well, in that case.” Stella smiled and raised the glass that had just been set before her. “To Aesculapius,” she said. “And to your children. Do you feel like telling me about them, Mrs. F.?”

“Yes.” Surprisingly, now, she did. “They're a bit younger than you. Eighteen. Twins. They took their A levels last summer. Not very brilliantly, I'm afraid. Personally, I thought the school pushed them too hard.… That they'd have been better to have taken another year. But I suppose that's the kind of thing mothers do think. Anyway, they were mad to get out of there.… They'd had it, they said. And of course no university would look at them: not with their A levels.”

“And they wouldn't try again?”

“No.” In retrospect, the bitter, useless argument seemed a complete waste of time and strength. “Viola had had all kinds of holiday jobs. Well, he wanted the money.” Had Mark been mean on purpose?

“For clothes.” Stella was quick. “I suppose she's pretty, like you?”

“Me!” Marian did not quite like the sound of her own laugh. How many light-years was it since Mark had called her beautiful? And of course Viola had wanted clothes, had gone to work in a big shop where she could get them cheap. Easier to talk of Sebastian. “My son never meant to go to college,” she explained. “He said it was the tyranny of the mediocre. Or something like that.” How long ago it seemed.

“So they got jobs?”

“Yes.” How they hated them. “Not very good ones, I'm afraid. And—different firms. They'd never been separated. They were wretched. But what could I do?”

“Nothing. They're grown up, aren't they? Eighteen. Voters.”

“I know. But just the same.…”

“You feel it's all your fault, of course.” Stella's voice was tolerant. “Really, mothers! And then?” She was a child, wanting the end of the story, and Marian, who had meant to, found she could not deny it to her.

“Their father sent for them. He's in America, doing very well. He left me before they were born.”

“Rugged.”

“Well, it was a bit. But he supported us. Lavishly. For a while.”

“Past tense?” Stella was too quick for comfort.

“It got less … and stopped when they left. They don't know, of course. I can tell from their letters.”

“They're happy?”

“Blissfully. So far.” She looked anxiously into the future. “He lives a very interesting life,” she said fairly.

“And you were just little mother?”

“I suppose so. My fault.”

“Your job.”

“Actually”—Marian was amazed to find herself ready to probe this old, old wound—“I didn't do it. Not properly. I failed them when it mattered most. At least that's what I think now. You see, when we met—their father and I—I was just going up to Oxford. It was September.” Could the sun really have shone all the time? It certainly had at the fête in that green village whose name she could never remember. She had gone, unwillingly, with her mother, who was on a committee—several committees? Certainly, having got her there, her mother had abandoned her to drift round, aimlessly, from stall to stall. And then—Mark. Mark, coming suddenly up from behind her and taking her hand. “All alone, beautiful?” Trite enough words, if one had ever thought of oneself as beautiful.

But from Mark, beauty personified, they had been the incantation that woke the sleeping princess. The mad, ecstatic weeks that followed were preordained from that moment. Why was it only now, recollecting it all, for the first time, in tranquillity, that she recognised that Mark that day, had not been his normal self? He had been ruffled—frightened? Certainly in what he would later, in their brief married life, refer to as “one of my states.”

“So you never got to Oxford?” Stella's question brought her back from the lost, baffling past.

“Well, yes, actually, I did.” She was proud of the casual note she struck. “When he left me, next spring, they offered me my place again. We lived in Oxford,” she explained. “My mother helped with the twins. I think half
the time they didn't know which of us was which.”

“So they had a mother
and
a grandmother, and your heart is bleeding because they were so deprived! Honestly, Mrs. F., I would have thought you'd have had more sense. No grandfather?”

“No. That's why my mother was so glad to have us. The trouble was, all our ideas were so different. I read Dr. Spock.” She said it as if it explained everything.

“I know. And your mother believed in discipline? They sure must have been two crazy mixed-up kids. And if you say it's all your fault, Mrs. F., I'll clonk you. You managed to raise them, didn't you? You didn't leave two tiny bundles in the snow anywhere? You did the best you could. Right?”

“I suppose I did.”

“Then, for God's sake, stop suffering about it. You've done your best; now you can relax and enjoy yourself. You never thought of remarrying?”

“No.” After Mark? But was that all the explanation? “I was too busy. I got quite a good degree,” she explained. “Mother thought I ought to go on to a D. Phil.”

“Mother liked having the twins.” Stella summed it up with her usual devastating accuracy.

“I suppose so. Well, she was better with them than I was. It was hell for a while after she died.”

“When was that?”

“Halfway through my D. Phil. Suddenly. Overstrain, the doctor said. She hadn't told me anything.”

“So you're carrying round a great load of guilt about that, too? Honestly, Mrs. F., you need a psychiatrist.”

“Miss Gear and Miss Grange?” She looked quickly around, but their party must still be in the museum. “No, thanks. I've tried that. To tell you the truth, they were the ones who made me feel it was all my fault.”

“Don't they!” Something absolutely basic had changed in Stella's face. She leaned forward eagerly. “Just because you're what they've got to work on, they want to find the root of all the trouble in you. And if it's not there, why, then they plant it and sit back and watch it grow. I'll tell you
about me some time, Mrs. F., and that's a promise. But just now I can see the others coming down like a wolf on the fold. Shall we nip back and do a quick tour of the museum while they're having their elevenses? The carvings really are rather super, I believe.”

“But the museum will be closed.” Marian looked at her watch. “More lunch than elevenses. I imagine David will be rounding us up pretty smartly to get us back to the hotel.”

“Oh, Lord, yes. I don't imagine them tenderly keeping it warm for us. Well then, let's just go sit in the sun, shall we? And listen to the cuckoo?” While they were talking, she had competently paid and tipped the young waiter. “Remember, Mrs. F., ‘Privacy is the last resort of the human spirit.'”

“The trouble is, it's true.” Marian rose and walked across the café's terrace with her, wondering what it was that nagged at her about Stella's quotation of Miss Grange. Or had it been Miss Gear?

Lunch was cold, and so was their welcome. David Cairnthorpe, marshalling them like an anxious hen, urged them straight to the ground-floor cloakrooms at the hotel and so into the dining room. “The staff must have their afternoon off,” he explained. “It's all my fault. We took a bit longer than was planned.”

“And enjoyed it enormously.” Marian followed him into the dining room. She had meant to ask Stella, in the relaxed atmosphere that had followed their talk about the twins, which of the various combinations of table partners she looked on as the lesser evil, but David Cairnthorpe had rounded them up so smartly for the bus that she never got round to it. She hung back a little to let Stella lead the way and was surprised and pleased when she crossed the floor to join Cairnthorpe and the professor, already settled in an inconspicuous corner.

“May we?” Stella pulled out a chair as she spoke.

“Delighted.” Cairnthorpe was on his feet to help Marian. “I'm sorry you two missed the museum.”

“We'll have to come back someday.” Marian was
impressed that he had noticed. For all his casual air, he must be contriving to keep a closer eye on his charges than she had realised.

His next question confirmed this. “And what are your wild plans for the afternoon?”

“The Palamede for me. Mrs. Duncan says we have to climb more than eight hundred steps.”

“And I'm swimming,” said Stella. “But I still wish you'd rest, Mrs. F. Don't you think she looks tired, David?”

He flushed with pleasure at her use of his first name but refused the gambit. “It's too fine a day to stay indoors. Just don't be tempted to go to the other fort, Mrs. Frenche. I'm told they're dynamiting there. You're a strong swimmer, I hope, Miss—Stella? It's pretty rough down in the bay.”

“I know. That's how I like it.”

Eight hundred steps were too many. Mrs. Duncan seemed made of entirely muscle and went up without pause, while Marian panted after, stopping obstinately from time to time to admire the developing view. But Mrs. Duncan, pausing irritably a little higher up to wait, made it imposible to enjoy it At last, reaching a corner where the steps turned away from the sea for what looked like a last steep ascent, Marian jibbed. “You go on.” She settled on a convenient parapet. “I've had enough. I'll wait here.”

“But we can't be any distance from the top.”

“I don't care.” At least, alone, she could enjoy such view as she had.

“Oh, very well.” No doubt Mrs. Duncan was delighted to be able to go at her own ruthless pace. Marian sat peacefully for a while, enjoying sun, and breeze and small birds the professor would have identified. She had picked, in fact, a point with a sea view and ramparts rising steeply behind her on the landward side and wondered whether to climb a little higher, in the hope of a landward prospect. But the backs of her legs, already aching, decided her against it. This was quite far enough for anyone not made of steel like Mrs. Duncan.

She settled herself more comfortably on the warm stone
and gazed out to sea, her mind, after the morning's self-exploration, a blessed blank. Would this be how an Elysian spirit would feel? Her eyes closed, for a moment, then flashed open at the sound of falling rock. A huge boulder from the wall above roared past her and dropped, in a scurry of smaller stones, over the cliff edge towards the sea.

She was on her feet, shaking all over. It had been a very near thing indeed. An accident? She looked upwards. No sign of life, but then the tourist who had dislodged the stone might easily not have realised the near disaster he had caused. Or, face it, if he had, he might easily have lost his nerve, hurried to join his party and pretended that nothing had happened.

The wind felt cold. Two accidents in two days were too many. It was more of a relief than she liked to admit when she saw Mrs. Duncan appear, unmistakable in the navy blue windbreaker that was so like Marian's own, and come hurrying towards her down the steps. Was she going to tell her about the boulder? She rather thought not. If she had made an uncomfortable connection between it and Mrs. Hilton's accident, so might other people, with deplorable effects on the morale of the tour. And of course, she told herself briskly, it was all her imagination.

“Sorry to have been so long.” Mrs. Duncan shouted down to her. “It's fascinating up there … much bigger than you'd think. You ought to have come.”

“I'm afraid I've had enough as it is,” Marian said. “Look, don't wait for me on the way down. I'll be happier going my own pace. But what's the matter?” Mrs. Duncan was looking back over her shoulder. Something, surely, had disturbed that calm self-confidence. Her heartiness rang just a trifle false. Marian was not the only one who had had a fright.

“Oh, nothing.” And then, “Well, actually, something rather odd. You'll think me a fool, but I could have sworn someone was following me round up there. It's all so complicated. You know, with bastions and different levels and bits of wall you don't quite understand. I'm not an
imaginative type.” She was proud of it. “But I actually found myself keeping away from the edges of things. Ridiculous. That's partly why it took me such a long time to get back. There was a way I didn't want to come. Oh, well, all nonsense, of course. But if you really don't mind, I think I will go on down. What I need is an aspirin and a good rest.” She had settled it to her own satisfaction that she was suffering from nervous fatigue. “These coach tours are a bit more tiring than one expected, aren't they?” And then, “You won't tell the others, will you? I'd feel a fool.”