Strangers in Company (25 page)

“Aren't those the two from Mistra?” The professor, too, had recognised them as they got on the bus and took two empty seats up at the front.

“Yes,” said Stella. “I suppose the Athenian is showing his country cousin round.” Her hand, still on Marian's, gave it a warning squeeze.

“It seems odd to choose an English-speaking bus,” objected Mrs. Spencer.

Apparently, the Grande Bretagne was the last stop. The guide picked up his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this GRAT tour of Athens. We are now, as you probably know, in Syntagma, or Constitution Square, so called because of the Parliament Buildings, which were once the royal palace. I beg your pardon—” He stopped to listen to an impassioned outpouring, in Greek, from one of the two men who had just got on. He spoke at last, courteously but firmly, in Greek, then, as the man sat down again, grumbling to himself, changed back to his fluent English. “I apologise, ladies and gentlemen. These two gentlemen have found themselves on the wrong bus, but since they will have missed the right one by now, they will stay with us, and you will, I am sure, bear with me if I—how do you say it?—fill them in from time to time, in Greek.” While this was going on, the bus had got clean out of Constitution Square with its problems of democracy and of royalty, and Marian thought the guide might well be grateful for an interruption that had spared him what must be a difficult bit of his speech these days when Parliament was closed and the king in exile.

He was silent until the bus paused across the road from a handsome triumphal arch. “Hadrian's Arch, ladies and gentlemen, built by one of the Romans who loved Greece. And behind it, the Temple of Zeus, which you should visit if you have the time, but as you can see, our traffic problems, which are like everyone else's, do not make it easy for buses to stop here. We are going on to the stadium and the royal palace.”

“This is the way we came in,” said Stella.

“Yes.” Both of them must be thinking of poor Mrs. Hilton, her grumbles and her espadrilles.

That afternoon's tour was to remain in Marian's mind merely as a confused jumble of impressions. The kilted Evzones stamping their sabots for the tourists outside the empty royal palace with its dismal, boarded windows … the huge modern stadium … even the Acropolis itself was merely the backdrop to terror. By tacit consent, she and Stella stayed as closely as possible with the professor and Mrs. Spencer and with the rest of the party. But somehow, the two Greeks were always nearby. Did they speak English? Marian found she could not be sure but anyway was careful to talk the merest tourist chatter to Stella and the others.

There was one moment of sudden crisis on the Acropolis, when the four of them had paused to look at the view from the far end, above the museum. She and Stella were trying to decide which was the Pnyx Hill, where the Greeks had held their public meetings, and did not notice that the professor and Mrs. Spencer had moved away to join the rest of the party.

“We must ask Mike.” Marian looked up, saw they were alone, and saw the two Greeks approaching. The parapet was low, the drop beyond vertiginous. She, the double, was safe, but Stella? The Greeks were coming quietly towards them, one from each side of the little alcove where
they were standing, closing them in. She raised her voice. “Oh, Professor, could you come here a minute?”

For a moment she was horribly afraid that, deep in conversation with Mrs. Spencer, he had not heard. The next, he was coming back to them with his surprisingly fast, loping stride. One of the Greeks made way for him with a smile. It had undoubtedly all been imagination. “Which is the Pnyx?” she asked, and saw that Stella was cloth-white.

After that, the tour changed from phantasmagoria to nightmare. Waiting for the funicular railway up to the viewpoint on Lykabetos, Marian and Stella stayed well back from the gates. At the top, they hardly looked at the view. Stella provided the excuse. “I'm starving,” she announced in a loud voice. “I thought I was going to faint back there on the Acropolis.”

The professor and Mrs. Spencer, equally lunchless, joined them at a marble-topped table, for the most expensive sawdust sandwiches Marian had ever eaten. The ouzo was expensive, too, but it was worth it. “Tour prices,” commented the professor briefly.

“Profiteering,” said Mrs. Spencer.

“Profitouring,” said Stella, and got a puzzled, inimical look from Mrs. Spencer, who, presumably, did not approve of puns.

It was a relief to find that the next section of the tour was simply a ride through modern Athens. “They will do it,” said the professor. “I've had the same thing in Yugoslavia. They're so proud of their modern buildings they want you to see them.”

“Hilton and all,” said Stella.

“Right.”

But it meant a blessed relaxation of tension as they listened to the guide expatiating on the thriving state of Athens and saw, indeed, the proof of this in untidy concrete buildings going up everywhere. “You do have to give it to the colonels,” said the professor, as they passed a development of small houses, each with its tiny patch of garden. “They're building houses and roads, hand over fist.”

“Soon there won't be a private place in Greece,” said Stella.

“The grave's a fine and private place”—the quotation came, unbidden, into Marian's mind. If the professor had not been so quick, up on the Acropolis, would Stella have found her private place by now? At least, blessed thought, this must mean that her suspicions of the professor were entirely unfounded. She had reached the point of starting at shadows and must control herself.

The bus had plunged back into the urban thicket of central Athens and now slowed and stopped. Up front, the guide was announcing that they were to see two Byzantine churches.

“I don't know,” Marian said doubtfully. “What do you think, Stella? I'm tired.” Much safer, surely, in the bus.

Unless everyone got out, which they showed signs of doing. The professor turned round. “Do come, Mrs. Frenche, the big one's nothing in particular, but I'd like you to see the other.”

Everyone else was moving. Marian got up. “Oh, well, in that case …” Getting off the bus, she saw the two Greeks going off in the opposite direction. Could they be leaving the tour, or were they perhaps looking for a public telephone? Of course, it might seem odd for them to visit their own churches as tourists.

At all events, it was pleasant to be free of them, at least for a little while, and the professor had been right about the tiny church, where black-garbed old women stopped to kiss the hands of ikons, dark with centuries of just such treatment.

“It's not right to traipse through it like this.” Marian emerged into late-afternoon sunshine.

“I know,” the professor agreed, “but they've got to live.” She had seen him slip something into the church's collection box. “And speaking of living, are you as hungry as I am, you two? How about playing hookey and slipping off to a restaurant I know in the Plaka? It's only a step from here, and I bet now they're going to start the old
routine of dumping us back at hotels.
And
we'll be the last, or nearly.”

Danger? Safety? Marian and Stella exchanged glances. Mrs. Spencer had got left behind, momentarily, embroiled with a postcard seller. A whole evening free of fear. If one trusted the professor.

“Do let's,” said Stella.

“Yes,” said Marian.

“Down here.” The professor led the way down an alley. Old Athens swallowed them, crowded and alive and smelling of unknown groceries.

“But won't they wait for us?” Marian paused outside a shop that actually sold real espadrilles, thought for a moment of Mrs. Hilton, and shivered.

“Not for long,” said the professor comfortably. “They know we're not far from home. People are always doing it. And I'd like you to have one real Greek meal before we go.” He looked at his watch. “It's a bit early yet, so we'll go to a café first, shall we?”

“Do let's.” Stella had entered into the spirit of this escape.

“Keep close to me,” the professor warned, as he guided them through a network of small, incredibly crowded streets. “It might not be just the place for ladies alone.” He steered them round a corner past a shop full of extraordinary metal implements.

Ladies alone. Marian almost laughed. If that was only the worst of their troubles. “I thought a woman was supposed to be able to walk right through Athens with a gold bar on her head.”

“A woman, perhaps,” he said. “A foreign lady?” He left it doubtful. “Ah, here it is.” They were in an alley that sloped slightly upwards, and he turned through a wrought-iron gate into a little courtyard, with a vine-covered trellis and small tables. It was half empty at this early hour, the proprietor lounging, hands in pockets, against the trunk of the vine. At sight of Edvardson, his face lit into a smile of extraordinary sweetness.

“Thor!” He came forward with both hands outstretched,
took Edvardson in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks. A flood of Greek followed, and Marian was amazed and appalled to hear the professor answer in kind.

“But you don't speak Greek!” They were being settled at the best table. Should she and Stella run for it? Were all her suspicions correct after all?

“Come now, Mrs. F.,” said the professor comfortably, pulling out Stella's chair as the owner did Marian's. “You must have realised that was just my laziness.”

“Laziness?” She seemed to be sitting down. If there had been a moment for escape, it had passed.

“Well, yes. Just think back.… If I'd admitted knowing Greek, at the start there, when poor young Cairnthorpe was having such trouble, I'd have ended up running the tour. And what kind of holiday would that have been? I must admit, I had a kind of a battle with myself when the trouble started. But I was so far in by then, and young Cairnthorpe was coping pretty well, I thought. And then there was your French, Mrs. Frenche.”

“Yes.” Had they been mad to come? Had the professor his own, sinister reasons for refusing to admit that he understood Greek? She looked across, a quick question, at Stella.

She seemed calm enough. “I must say,” she said, “I did think it a bit odd. Someone like you.” If she was considering flight, she showed no sign of it.

“Right. Anyone in my position would be bound to learn at least enough to get by with. I'm quite good, in fact. Stavros will tell you.” He spoke now, rapidly, in Greek.

It made the proprietor, Stavros, roar with laughter. “You Thor.” His English was as good as Mike's. “You were always the joker. So you have left this poor young man to struggle on alone, you who speak like a native. He is a wicked one, this.” His smile asked for sympathy from Marian and Stella and got it.

“Nothing of the kind,” said Edvardson. “I interpreted for him, in German.”

“Pah.” It was an extraordinary sound. “We had best
drink on that, Thor, my old friend. It is a long time—” He showed signs of reckoning it up.

“A very long time,” Edvardson interrupted him. “And a long time for us, Stavros, without a drink. Except what you get on Lykabetos.”

“Oh!” He made a comic face. “Then you are sufferers indeed. But not for long.” He was gone, to return with glasses of ouzo and the most elaborate
mezes,
or hors d'oeuvres, that Marian had ever seen.

Starting hungrily on the lumps of cheese that nestled among olives, garlic sausage and improbable cold fried potato, she wondered what she ought to be thinking, what doing. But what was there to do except sit, and eat, and drink, and feel, extraordinarily, safe?

Two ouzos later, she and Stella retired to the surprisingly elegant ladies' and conferred, briefly. “He saved me, up top there,” Stella summed it up in a quick whisper. “I don't suppose he knew it, but he did. I'm inclined to trust him. For several reasons.” A wicked look for Marian. “Besides, what else can we do?”

It was true. Without the professor, they were lost in this network of alleys that was, he had told them, the old quarter of Athens, the Plaka. With him, they were guided and felt protected. “Besides,” said Stella, “I'm hungry.”

“Me, too.” The
mezes
had merely sharpened Marian's appetite. “I wish we could eat here.”

“I like it, too.”

But they got an equally enthusiastic welcome at the restaurant, a few corners away, to which Edvardson presently led them. “It doesn't look much of a place,” he warned them, and, indeed, here was no vine-covered courtyard, but a small, spare almost basement room, with the best smell of cooking Marian had ever encountered. And here, too, the proprietor hurried forward to kiss Edvardson on both cheeks, to call him “Thor” and to urge him and his guests to the best table.

The food was Elysian. After three ouzos, Marian and Stella were glad to let the professor order for them, to eat the astonishing first course of garlic-rich cream cheese
and highly flavoured cod's roe; to sop up the last smears with tough, delicious bread; and to listen with approval as the professor ordered retsina.

“God, I feel better,” said Stella.

“Me, too,” said Marian. And yet some cautious corner of her mind warned her against telling the professor of the Furies that pursued them. This was a halcyon moment of safety, of happiness. She would take it as such—and take no chances.

The first course was followed by a Platonic ideal of a shepherd's pie, which the professor explained was moussaka made with artichoke hearts. “They use whatever vegetable is in season. And you must try your Greek salad, Mrs. F.” He poured retsina for them all as she plunged her fork into the extraordinary mixture of lettuce, herbs, olives, cheese and a few other things she never quite identified.

After this came baclava, a confection of pastry, nuts and honey which cried out for more retsina, and strong Turkish coffee. Stella smiled across the professor at Marian and lit one of her rare cigarettes. “To celebrate,” she said. “It's been a marvellous meal. I haven't eaten so much for years.”