This Rough Magic (35 page)

A mounting hill of a wave caught and lifted me. As I reached its crest I saw him; he had a light on, and the
Aleister
, now bare of canvas, was slipping along at half-throttle, searching the waves. She was still a good way off, and moving away from me at a slant, but she would be back …

What was more, she was between me and the land. I saw this now, dimly, a black mass studded with faint points of light. It seemed a lot further away than it had from the deck of the Aleister.

Half a mile, he had said. I could never swim half a mile; not in this sea. The water was very buoyant, and I was lightly clad, but I wasn’t in Spiro’s class as a swimmer, and could hardly hope for his luck. I dared do no other than swim straight towards the nearest land, and if Godfrey hunted about long enough he would be bound to see me.

He had turned, and was beating back on a long tack, still between me and the shore. All around me the crests of the seas were creaming and blowing. I was carried up climbing slopes of glass, their tops streaming off against the black sky till the whole night seemed a windy race of wet stars. Foam blew into my eyes, my mouth. My body was no longer mine, but a thing of unfamiliar action, cold and buoyant. I could do little more than stay afloat, try to swim in the right direction, and let the seas take me.

As I swam up the next mounting wave I caught, clearly, the reek of petrol in the wind, and saw a light not two hundred yards away. The engine was throttled back to the merest throb, and the boat circled slowly round the beam, which was directed downwards into the water. I even thought I saw him stooping over the side, reaching for something – my shoe, perhaps, kept floating by its rubber sole. He might take it as evidence that I was drowned; on the other hand, he might beat in widening circles round the place until he found me …

Then not far away I saw another light, dimmer than the
Aleister
’s, and riding high. The
Aleister
’s light went out. I heard the beat of another engine, and the second light bobbed closer. Faintly, a hail sounded. The clapped-out old scow from Kentroma was coming to take a look at the odd light on her fishing pitch …

The
Aleister
’s throttle opened with a roar, and I heard it dwindling away until the wind took all sound.

Then I shouted.

The sound came out as little more than a gasping cry, a feeble yell that was picked up by the wind and thrown away like the cry of a gull. The Kentroma boat may have attempted to go in the track of the
Aleister
, I do not know, but I had lost sight of her yellow light, and the sound of her engine, long before I gave up from sheer exhaustion, and concentrated on swimming rather than merely keeping afloat.

It was then that I realised that the sea was dropping. I was well into the lee of the great curve of Corfu, where Pantokrator broke the winds and held the Gulf quiet. And the lights of Kouloura were a long way to my right. I had been drifting westwards, far faster than I could have swum.

The discovery was like a shot of Benzedrine. My brain cleared. Of course. We had been still some distance from the east-bound current that had carried Spiro to the Albanian coast. And tonight it was an east wind. Where I had gone in the drift must be strongly to the south-west. He had thrown Yanni’s body in in the Gulf, and Yanni’s body had fetched up at the Villa Rotha. I doubted if St. Spiridion would take me quite
so neatly home, but at least, if I could stay afloat, and make some progress, I might hope to stay alive.

So I swam, and prayed, and if St. Spiridion got muddled up in my wordless prayers with Poseidon and Prosper, and even Max, no doubt it would come to the right ears in the end.

Twenty minutes, in a sea that was little more than choppy, and with the roar of the rocky shore barely a hundred yards ahead, I knew I couldn’t make it. What had been chance for Spiro was none at all for me. Under the lee of the cliff, some freak current was setting hard off shore, probably only the backwash of the main stream that had brought me here, striking the coast at an angle and being volleyed back to the open water, but where I had till now been able to keep afloat and even angle my course slightly north across the current, I no longer had strength to fight any sea that wasn’t going my way: my arms felt like cotton-wool, my body like lead; I gulped and floundered as the cross-waves met me, and every little slapping crest threatened to submerge me.

Eventually, one did. I swallowed more water, and in my panic began to struggle again. I burst free of the water, my eyes wide and sore, arms flapping feebly now, failing to drive me on or even to keep me above water. The roar of the breakers came to me oddly muffled, as if they were far away, or as if their noise came only through the water that was filling my ears … I was being carried back, down, down, like a sackful of lead, like a body already drowned, to be tumbled with the other sea-wrack on the rocks in the bright morning …

It was bright morning now. It was silly to struggle and fight my way up into darkness, when I could just let myself drift down like this, when in a moment or two if I put my feet down I would find sand, golden sand, and sweet air, sweet airs that give delight and hurt not … no, that was music, and this was a dream … how silly of me to panic so about a dream … I had had a thousand dreams like this, floating and flying away in darkness. In a few moments I would wake, and the sun would be out, and Max would be here …

He was here now. He was lifting me. He thrust and shoved at me, up, up, out of the nightmare of choking blackness, into the air.

I could breathe. I was at the surface, thrown there by a strength I hadn’t believed a man could command outside his own element. As I floundered forward, spewing the sea from burning lungs, his body turned beside me in a rolling dive that half-lifted, half-threw me across the current; then before the sea could lay hold on me again to whirl me back and away, I was struck and butted forward, brutally, right into the white surge and confusion of the breakers, rolling over slack and jointless as a rag in the wind.

A huge wave lifted me forward, tumbled me over helpless in its breaking foam, then dropped me hard in its wake. I went down like a stone, hit something, and went flat on the bottom … pancaked on the sand of a sloping beach, with the sea recoiling past me, my hands already driven in to the land, like hooks to hold me there against the drag and suck of the retreating wave. The sea tore and pulled and streamed back past me.
Sobbing and retching, I crawled and humped myself up the slope, while wave after wave, diminishing, broke over me and then drew back, combing the sand where I clung. And then I was crawling through the creaming shallows, on to the firm dry beach.

I have a half memory, just as I collapsed, of looking back for my rescuer and of seeing him rear up from the waves as if to see me safe home, his body gleaming black through the phosphorescence, the witches’ oils of his track burning green and white on the water. The starlight caught the cusp of the dorsal fin, glittered there briefly, then he was gone, with a triumphant smack of the tail that echoed right up the rocks.

Then I went out flat on the sand, barely a foot above the edge of the sea.

Though the seas threaten they are merciful.
I have curs’d them without cause
.

V
. 1.

There was a light, hanging seemingly in the sky far above me.

When this resolved itself into a lamp set in a cottage window, high up near the head of the cliffs, it still seemed as remote as the moon. I cannot even remember now what it cost me to drag myself in my dripping, icy clothes up the path that clung to the rock face, but I suppose I was lucky that there was a path at all. Eventually I made it, stopping to lean – collapse – against the trunk of an ancient olive that stood where a stream cut through the path to fall sharply seawards under a rough bridge.

Here a shallow valley ran back through a gap in the cliff. Dimly I could see the stretches of smoothed ground between the olive trees, painfully cultivated with beans and corn. Here and there among the trees were the scattered lights of the cottages, each with its own grove and its grazing for goats and sheep. The groves were old; the immense heads of the trees stirred
and whispered even in that sheltered spot, and the small hard fruit pattered to the ground like rain. The twisted boughs stood out black against the light from the nearest window.

I forced my shivering, lead-weight limbs to move. Under my feet the rubbery olives rolled and squashed. The stems of camomile caught between my bare toes, and I stubbed my foot on a stone and cried out. Immediately there was a volley of barking, and a dog – one of the vicious, half-wild dogs that are a hazard of the Greek countryside – hurled itself towards me through the trees. I took no notice of it, except to speak as I limped forward, and the dog, every hair on end, circled behind me, growling. I felt the touch of his nose, cold on the cold flesh of my leg, but he didn’t snap. Next moment the cottage door opened, loosing a shaft of light across the grass. A man, in thickset silhouette, peered out.

I stumbled into the light. ‘Please,’ I said breathlessly, in English, ‘please … can you help me?’

There was a startled moment of silence, while he stared at me, coming ghostlike out of the night, soaked and filthy with sand and dust, with the dog circling at my heels. Then he shouted something at the dog which sent it swerving away, and fired some sharp question at me. I didn’t know what it was; didn’t even recognise the language, but in any case I doubt if I could have spoken again. I just went forward blindly towards the light and the human warmth of the house, my hands stretched out like those of the traditional suppliant, and came heavily to my knees over the threshold, right at his feet.

The blackout cannot have lasted more than a couple of seconds. I heard him call out, then there came a woman’s voice, questioning shrilly, and hands were on me, half-lifting, half-dragging me in to the light and warmth of a room where the embers of a wood fire still burned red. The man said something rough and urgent to his wife, and then went quickly out, slamming the door. For a dazed, frightened moment I wondered where he had gone, then as the woman, chattering in some undistinguishable gutturals, began to fumble with my soaked and clinging clothes, I realised that her husband had merely left the cottage’s single room while I undressed.

I struggled out of the sopping clothes. I suppose the old woman was asking questions, but I couldn’t understand, and in fact hardly heard. My brain was as numb as my body with the dreadful cold and shivering of exhaustion and shock. But presently I was stripped and dried – on a fine linen towel so stiff and yellowed that I imagine it must have been part of the woman’s dowry, never used till now, and then a rough blanket was wrapped round me, I was pushed gently into a wooden chair near the fire, logs were thrown on, a pot shoved down into the leaping flames, and only when my discarded clothes were carefully hung up above the fireplace – with much interested fingering of the nylon – did the old woman go to the door and call her man back.

He came in, an elderly, villainous-looking peasant, with a ferocious moustache, and a dirty home-made cigarette drooping from his lips. He was followed,
inevitably, by two others, shortish, tough-bodied men out of the same mould, with dark, fierce faces. They came into the light, staring at me. My host asked a question.

I shook my head, but the thing that mattered most to me at that moment was easy enough. I put an arm out of my blanket to make a gesture embracing my surroundings. ‘Kerkyra?’ I asked. ‘This – Kerkyra?’

The storm of nods and assenting ‘ne’s’ that this provoked broke over me with a physical sense of relief. To open human communications, to know where one was on the map … of such is sanity. Heaven knows what I had expected the answer to be; I suppose that shreds of nightmare still clung to me, and it needed the spoken assurance to bring me finally out of the bad dream – the isolated near-death of the sea, the prison of the
Aleister
with Godfrey, the unknown black cliff I had been climbing. This was Corfu, and these were Greeks. I was safe.

I said: ‘I’m English. Do you speak English?’

This time heads were shaken, but I heard the word go round, ‘
Anglìtha
’, so they had understood.

I tried again. ‘Villa Forli? Castello dei Fiori?’

Again they understood. Another fire of talk where I caught a word I knew, ‘
thàlassa
’, which means the sea.

I nodded, with another gesture. ‘Me,’ I said, indicating my swaddled person, ‘
thàlassa
… boat …’ A pantomime, rather hampered by the blanket … ‘swim … down.’

Exclamations, while the woman thrust a bowl into my hands, with words of invitation and sympathy. It
was soup of some kind – beans, I think – and rather thick and tasteless, but it was hot and filling, and under the circumstances delicious. The men looked the other way politely while I ate, talking in quickfire undertones among themselves.

As I finished, and gave the bowl back to the woman, one of them – not my host – came forward a pace, clearing his throat. He spoke in very bad German.

‘You are from the Castello dei Fiori?’

‘
Ja
.’ My German was very little better than his, but even a smattering might see us through. I said slowly, picking the words: ‘To go to Castello, how far?’

More muttering. ‘Ten.’ He held up his fingers. ‘
Ja
, ten.’

‘Ten kilometres?’

‘
Ja
.’

‘Is – a road?’

‘
Ja, ja
.’

‘Is – a car?’

‘No.’ He was too polite to say so, but the impression that the single syllable gave was that of course there was no car. There never had been a car. What would they want with a car? They had the donkeys and the women.

I swallowed. So I wasn’t yet free of the nightmare; I still had the long frustrations of the impossible journey ahead of me. I tried, not very coherently, to think what Godfrey would do.

He was bound to discover at his rendezvous that the package was missing, and would know that I must have taken it, and where I must have hidden it. But I hoped
he would decide that as yet no one else could have reason to suspect him: he might well reckon that if there had been any suspicion of him, his journey would have been intercepted. No, it was to be hoped that he would think I had made a chance discovery – possibly that I had seen him carrying the packages, had hunted for them out of curiosity, and having seen them, had realised that something big was afoot, and had been frightened into hiding and carrying out the elaborate pantomime of innocence on the
Aleister
to save my skin. I was sure that he wouldn’t even give Miranda a thought.