This Rough Magic (21 page)

It was a better kiss this time, no less breathless, but at
least we were dry and warm, and had known each other nearly two hours longer …

From somewhere in the shadows came a sharp click, and a whirring sound. Instantly, we were a yard apart.

A small, fluting voice said: ‘
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
,’ and clicked back into silence.

‘That damned clock!’ said Max explosively, then began to laugh. ‘It always frightens me out of my wits. It sounds like someone sneaking in with a tommy-gun. I’m sorry, did I drop you too hard?’

‘Right down to earth,’ I said shakily. ‘Four o’clock, I’ll have to go.’

‘Wait just a little longer, can’t you? No, listen, there’s something you’ve got to know. I’ll try not to take too long, if you’ll just sit down again …? Don’t take any notice of that clock, it’s always fast.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’

‘For a start,’ I said, ‘men don’t usually jump sky-high when they hear a noise like a tommy-gun. Unless they could be expecting one, that is. Were you?’

‘Could be,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Goodness me! Then I’ll certainly stay to hear all about it!’ I sat down, folding my silk skirts demurely about me. ‘Go on.’

‘A moment, I’ll put another log on the fire. Are you warm enough?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘You won’t smoke? You never do? Wise girl. Well …’

He leaned his elbows on his knees, and stared once more at the fire.

‘… I’m not quite sure where to start, but I’ll try to make it short. You can have the details later, those you can’t fill in for yourself. I want to tell you what’s happened tonight, and especially what’s going to happen tomorrow – today, I mean – because I want you to help me, if you will. But to make it clear I’ll have to go back to the start of the story. I suppose you could say that it starts with Yanni Zoulas; at any rate that’s where I’ll begin.’

‘It was true, then? He was a smuggler?’

‘Yes, indeed. Yanni carried stuff regularly – all kinds of goods in short supply – over to the Albanian coast. Your guess was right about the “contacts”: he had his “contact” on the other side, a man called Milo, and he had people over here who supplied the stuff and paid him. But not me. Your guess was wrong there. Now, how much d’you know about Albania?’

‘Hardly a thing. I did try to read it up before I came here, but there’s so little to read. I know it’s Communist, of course, and at daggers drawn with Tito’s Yugoslavia,
and
with Greece on the other border. I gather that it’s a poor country, without much workable land and no industries, just peasant villages perched on the edge of starvation, like some of the Greek ones. I don’t know any of the towns except Durres on the coast, and Tirana, the capital, but I gathered that they were still pretty Stone Age at the end of the war, but trying hard, and looking round for help. That was when the USSR stepped in, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. She supplied Albania with tools and tractors and seeds and so forth, all it needed to get its agriculture
going again after the war. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. I won’t go into it now – in fact I’m not at all sure that I’ve got it straight myself – but a few years ago Albania quarrelled with Russia, and broke with the Cominform, but, because it still badly needed help (and possible support against Russia) it applied to Communist China; and China, which was then at loggerheads with Russia, jumped happily in to play fairy godmother to Albania as Russia had done before – and presumably to get one foot wedged in Europe’s back door. The situation’s still roughly that, and now Albania’s closed its frontiers completely, except to China. You can’t get in, and by heaven, you certainly can’t get out.’

‘Like Spiro’s father?’

‘I suspect he didn’t want to. But you might say he brings us to the next point in the story, which is Spiro. I suppose you’ve heard about our connection with Maria and her family?’

‘In a way. Adoni told me.’

‘My father was here in Corfu during the war, and he was working in with Spiro’s father for a time – a wild type, I gather, but rather picturesque and appealing. He appealed to the romantic in my father, anyway.’ Max grinned. ‘One gathers they had some pretty tearing times together. When the twins were born, father stood godfather to them. You won’t know this, but over here it’s a relationship that’s taken very seriously. The godfather really does take responsibility – he has as much say in the kids’ future as their father does, sometimes more.’

‘I gathered that from Adoni. It was obvious he had a say in the christening, anyway!’

He laughed. ‘It certainly was. The isle of Corfu went to his head even in those days. Thank God I was born in London, or I’ve a feeling nothing could have saved me from Ferdinand. Would you have minded?’

‘Terribly. Ferdinand makes me think of a rather pansy kind of bull. What is your name, anyway? Maximilian?’

‘Praise heaven, no. Maxwell. It was my mother’s name.’

‘I take it you had a godfather with no obsessions.’

He grinned. ‘Too right. In the correct English manner, he gave me a silver teaspoon, then vanished from my life. But you can’t do that in Corfu. When Spiro’s own father did actually vanish, the godfather was almost literally left holding the babies.’

‘He was still over here when that happened?’

‘Yes. He was here for a bit after the European war finished, and during that time he felt himself more or less responsible for the family. He would have been if he’d been a Greek, since Maria had no relatives, and they were as poor as mice, so he took the family on, and even after he’d gone home sent money to them every month.’

‘Good heavens! But surely, with children of his own—’

‘He managed.’ Max’s voice was suddenly grave. ‘We’re not rich, heaven knows … and an actor’s life’s a darned uncertain one at best … but it’s rather frightening how little a Greek family can manage on
quite cheerfully. He kept them completely till Maria went out to work, and even after that he more or less kept them until the children could work, too.’ He stretched out a foot and shoved the log deeper on its bed of burning ash. ‘We came over here for holidays most years; that’s where I learned my Greek and the kids their English. We had a whale of a time, and father always loved it. I was thankful I had somewhere like this to bring him when the crash came … it was like having another family ready-made. It’s helped him more than anything else could have done. Being wanted does.’

‘Good heavens, the thousands that want him! But I know it’s different. So he came back here for peace to recover in, and then Spiro was killed. It must have hit him terribly.’

‘The trouble was,’ said Max, ‘that Maria wouldn’t believe the boy could be dead. She never stopped begging and praying my father to find out what really happened to him, and to bring him back. Apparently she’d made a special petition to St Spiridion for him, so she simply wouldn’t believe he could have drowned. She got some sort of idea that he’d gone after his father, and must be brought home.’

The second cigarette stub went after the first. It hit a bar of the fire, and fell back on the hearthstone. He got up, picked it up and dropped it on the fire, then stayed on his feet with a shoulder propped against the high mantel.

‘I know it wasn’t reasonable, not after Manning had told her what had happened, but mothers don’t always
listen to reason, and there was always the faint chance that the boy
had
survived. My father didn’t feel equal to handling it, and I knew that neither he nor Maria would have any peace of mind till they found what had become of his body, so I took it on. I’ve been having inquiries made wherever I could, here and on the mainland, to find out in the first place if he’d been washed ashore, dead or alive. I’ve also had someone in Athens trying to get information from the Albanian side. Where Spiro went in, the current sets dead towards the Albanian coast. Well, I did manage to get through in the end, but with no results. He hadn’t been seen, either on the Greek coast or the Albanian.’

I said: ‘And I read you a lesson on helping other people. I’m sorry.’

‘You couldn’t know it was any concern of mine.’

‘Well, no, it did rather seem to be Godfrey’s.’

‘I suppose so; but the local Greeks at any rate assumed that it was my father’s job – or mine – to do it. So the police kept in touch with us, and we knew we’d get any information that was going. And when Yanni Zoulas went across on his routine smuggling trip on Saturday night, and did actually get some news of Spiro through his Albanian “contact”, he came straight to us. Or rather, as straight as he could. You saw him on his way up to see us, on Sunday evening.’

I was bolt upright in my chair. ‘
News of Spiro
? Good news?’

I knew the answer before he spoke. The gleam in his eyes reminded me suddenly, vividly, of the way Adoni
had looked at me on the staircase, glowing.

‘Oh, yes. He came to tell us Spiro was alive.’

‘
Max!
’

‘Yes, I know. You can guess how we felt. He’d been washed ashore on the Albanian side, with a broken leg, and in the last stages of exhaustion, but he’d survived. The people who found him were simple coast folk, shepherds, who didn’t see any reason to report things to the People’s Police, or whatever it’s called over there. Most people know about the smuggling that goes on, and I gather that these folk assumed that Spiro was mixed up in something of the sort, so they kept quiet about him. What’s more, they informed the local smuggler, who – naturally – knew Milo, Yanni’s “contact”, who in turn passed the news along to Yanni on Saturday.’

‘Oh, Max, this is marvellous! It really is! Did Yanni actually see him?’

‘No. It all came at rather third hand. Milo hasn’t much Greek, so all that Yanni got from him were the bare facts, and an urgent message that Spiro somehow managed to convey that no one, no one at all – not even Maria – had to be told that he was still alive, except myself, my father, and Adoni … the people who’d presumably get him out somehow.’ He paused, briefly. ‘Well, obviously we couldn’t go to the police and get him out by normal channels, or the people who’d rescued him would be in trouble, not to mention Yanni and Milo. So Yanni fixed up a rendezvous to bring the boy off by night.’

‘And he went back last night after he’d seen you, and
ran into the coastguards and got hurt?’

But he was shaking his head. ‘He couldn’t have gone back alone; getting that boy off wasn’t one man’s job – don’t forget he was strapped to a stretcher. No, when Yanni came up on Sunday night, he came to ask me to go across with him. The rendezvous was fixed for tonight; Milo and his friend were to have Spiro there and Yanni and I were to take him off. So you see—’

I didn’t hear what he was going to say. It had all come together at last, and I could only wonder at my slowness in not seeing it all before. My eyes flew to his bandaged wrist, as the events of the night came rushing back: the secrecy of his journey through the woods, the impression I had had of more than one man passing me there, the owl’s call, Adoni’s vivid face …

I was on my feet. ‘The catch! Adoni and the catch! You took Adoni, and went over there yourself tonight! You mean it’s
done
? You’ve actually
brought Spiro home
?’

His eyes were dancing. ‘We have indeed. He’s here at this moment, a bit tired, but alive and well. I told you our night’s work had been worth while.’

I sat down again, rather heavily. ‘I can hardly take it in. This is … wonderful. Oh, Maria will be able to light herself a lovely candle this Easter! Think of it, Maria, Miranda, Sir Julian, Godfrey, Phyl … how happy everyone’s going to be! I can hardly wait till daylight, to see the news go round!’

The glow faded abruptly from his face. It must have been only imagination, but the gay firelight seemed dimmer, too.

He said sombrely: ‘I’m afraid it mustn’t go round
yet, not any further.’

‘But—’ I stared, bewildered – ‘not to his mother or sister? Why on earth not, if he’s safely home? Surely, once he’s out of Albania he has nothing to fear? And Milo needn’t be involved at all – no one need even know Spiro was ever on Albanian soil. We could invent some story—’

‘I’d thought of that. The story will be that he was thrown ashore on one of the islands in the strait, the Peristeroi Islands, and that he managed to attract our attention when we were out fishing. It won’t fool the Greek police, or the doctor, but it’ll do for general release, as it were. But that’s not the point.’

‘Then what is?’

He hesitated, then said, slowly: ‘Spiro may still be in danger … Not from the other side, but here. What touched him, touched Yanni, too. And Yanni died.’

Something in his face – his very reluctance to speak – frightened me. I found myself protesting violently, too violently, as if by protesting I could push the unwanted knowledge further away. ‘But we
know
what happened to Spiro! He went overboard from Godfrey’s boat! How
can
he be in any danger now? And Yanni’s death was an accident! You
said
so!’

I stopped. The silence was so intense that you could hear the crazy ticking of the cuckoo clock, and the scrape of silk on flesh as my hands gripped together in my lap.

I said quietly: ‘Go on. Say it straight out, you may as well. You’re insinuating that Godfrey Manning—’

‘I’m insinuating nothing.’ His voice was curt, even to rudeness. ‘I’m telling you. Here it is. Godfrey Manning threw Spiro overboard, and left him to drown.’

Silence again, a different kind of silence.

‘Max, I – I can’t accept that. I’m sorry, but it isn’t possible.’

‘It’s fact, no more nor less. Spiro says so. Yes, I thought you were forgetting that I’ve talked to him. He says so, and I believe him. He has no reason to lie.’

Seconds were out with a vengeance. Now that he had decided he must tell me, he hurled his facts like stones. And they hit like stones.

‘But –
why
?’

‘I don’t know. Neither does the boy. Which, when you come to think about it, makes it the more likely that he’s telling the truth. It’s something he’d have no reason to invent. He’s as stunned by it as you are.’ He added, more gently: ‘I’m sorry, Lucy, but I’m afraid it’s true.’