This Rough Magic (7 page)

And here he came. The Archbishop, a white-bearded ninety-two, walked ahead, followed by Church dignitaries, whose robes of saffron and white and rose shone splendidly in the sun, until, as they passed nearer, you saw the rubbed and faded patches, and the darns. Then came the forest of tall white candles, each with its gilt crown and wreath of flowers, and each one fluttering its long ribbons of white and lilac and scarlet. Then finally, flanked by the four great gilded lanterns, and shaded by its canopy, the gold palanquin approached, with the Saint himself inside it, sitting up for all to see; a tiny, withered mummy, his head sagging on to his left shoulder, the dead features flattened and formless, a pattern of shadows behind the gleaming glass.

All around me, the women crossed themselves, and their lips moved. The Saint and his party paused for prayer, and the music stopped. A gun boomed once in
salute from the Old Fort, and as the echo died a flight of pigeons went over, their wings whistling in the silence.

I stood watching the coloured ribbons glinting in the sun, the wreaths of flowers fading already, and hanging crookedly from the crowned candles; the old, upraised hand of the Archbishop, and the faces of the peasant-women near me, rapt and shining under the snowy coifs. To my own surprise I felt my throat tighten, as if with tears.

A woman sobbed, in sudden, uncontrollable distress. The sound was loud in the silence, and I had glanced round before I could prevent myself. Then I saw it was Miranda. She was standing some yards from me, back among the crowd, staring with fiercely intent eyes at the palanquin, her lips moving as she crossed herself repeatedly. There was passion and grief in her face, as if she were reproaching the Saint for his negligence. There was nothing irreverent in such a thought; the Greek’s religion is based on such simplicities. I suppose the old Church knew how great an emotional satisfaction there is in being able to lay the blame squarely and personally where it belongs.

The procession had passed; the crowd was breaking up. I saw Miranda duck back through it, as if ashamed of her tears, and walk quickly away. The crowds began to filter back again down the narrow main streets of the town, and I drifted with the tide, back down Nikephoros Street, towards the open space near the harbour where I had left the car.

Halfway down, the street opens into a little square. It
chanced that, as I passed this, I saw Miranda again. She was standing under a plane tree, with her back to me, and her hands up to her face. I thought she was weeping.

I hesitated, but a man who had been hovering near, watching her, now walked across and spoke. She neither moved, nor gave any sign that she had heard him, but stood still with her back turned to him, and her head bowed. I couldn’t see his face, but he was young, with a strong and graceful build that the cheap navy blue of his Sunday best suit could not disguise.

He moved up closer behind the girl, speaking softly and, it seemed, with a sort of urgent persuasion. It appeared to me from his gestures that he was pressing her to go with him up one of the side streets away from the crowd: but at this she shook her head, and I saw her reach quickly for the corner of her kerchief, and pull it across to hide her face. Her attitude was one of shy, even shrinking, dejection.

I went quickly across to them.

‘Miranda? It’s Miss Lucy. I have the car here, and I’m going back now. Would you like me to take you home?’

She did turn then. Above the kerchief her eyes were swollen with tears. She nodded without speaking.

I hadn’t looked at the youth, assuming that he would now give up his importunities and vanish into the crowd. But he, too, swung round, exclaiming as though in relief:

‘Oh, thank you! That’s very kind! She ought not to
have come, of course – and now there’s no bus for an hour! Of course she must go home!’

I found myself staring, not at his easy assumption of responsibility for the girl, or even at the near-perfect English he spoke, but simply because of his looks.

In a country where beauty among the young is a common-place, he was still striking. He had the fine Byzantine features, with the clear skin and huge, long-lashed eyes that one sees staring down from the walls of every church in Greece; the type which El Greco himself immortalised, and which still, recognisably, walks the streets. Not that this young man conformed in anything but the brilliant eyes and the hauntingly perfect structure of the face: there was nothing to be seen here of the melancholy and weakness which (understandably) tends to afflict the saintly persons who spend their days gazing down from the plaster on the church walls – the small-lipped mouths, the meekly slanted heads, the air of resignation and surprise with which the Byzantine saint properly faces the sinful world. This youth had, indeed, the air of one who had faced the sinful world for some years now, but had obviously liked it enormously, and had cheerfully sampled a good deal of what it had to offer. No church-plaster saint, this one. And not, I judged, a day over nineteen.

The beautiful eyes were taking me in with the frank appraisal of the Greek. ‘You must be Miss Waring?’

‘Why, yes,’ I said, in surprise; then suddenly saw who, inevitably, this must be. ‘And you’re – Adonis?’

I couldn’t for the life of me help bringing out the
name with the kind of embarrassment one would feel in labelling one’s own compatriot ‘Venus’ or ‘Cupid’. That in Greece one could meet any day a Pericles, an Aspasia, an Electra, or even an Alcibiades, didn’t help at all. It was the looks that did it.

He grinned. He had very white teeth, and eyelashes at least an inch long. ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it? In Greek we say “Adoni”.’ (He pronounced it A-thoni.) ‘Perhaps you’d find that easier to say? Not quite so cissy?’

‘You know too much by half!’ I said, involuntarily, and quite naturally, and he laughed, then sobered abruptly.

‘Where is your car, Miss Waring?’

‘It’s down near the harbour.’ I looked dubiously at the crowded street, then at the girl’s bent head. ‘It’s not far, but there’s a dreadful crowd.’

‘We can go by a back way.’ He indicated a narrow opening at the corner of the square, where steps led up into the shadow between two tall houses.

I glanced again at the silent girl, who waited passively. ‘She will come,’ said Adoni, and spoke to her in Greek, briefly, then turned to me, and began to usher me across the square and up the steps. Miranda followed, keeping a pace or so behind us.

He said in my ear: ‘It was a mistake for her to come, but she is very religious. She should have waited. It is barely a week since he died.’

‘You knew him well, didn’t you?’

‘He was my friend.’ His face shut, as if everything had been said. As, I suppose, it had.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

We walked for a while in silence. The alleys were deserted, save for the thin cats, and the singing-birds in cages on the walls. Here and there, where a gap in the houses laid a blazing wedge of sunlight across the stones, dusty kittens baked themselves in patches of marigolds, or very old women peered from the black doorways. The smell of charcoal-cooking hung in the warm air. Our steps echoed up the walls, while from the main streets the sound of talk and laughter surged back to us, muted like the roar of a river in a distant gorge. Eventually our way opened into a broader lane, and a long flight of shallow steps, which dropped down past a church wall straight to the harbour square where I had left Phyl’s little Fiat.

There were crowds here, too, but these were broken knots of people, moving purposefully in search of transport home, or the midday meal. Nobody paid any attention to us.

Adoni, who apparently knew the car, shouldered his way purposefully through the groups of people, and held out a hand to me for the keys.

Almost as meekly as Miranda (who hadn’t yet spoken a word) I handed them over, and our escort unlocked the doors and ushered her into the back seat. She got in with bent head, and sat well back in a corner. I wondered, with some amusement, if this masterful young man intended to drive us both home – and whether Phyl would mind – but he made no such attempt. He shut the driver’s door on me and then got in beside me.

‘You are used to our traffic now?’

‘Oh, yes.’ If he meant was I used to driving on the right-hand side, I was. As for traffic, there was none in Corfu worth mentioning; if I met one lorry and half a dozen donkeys on an average afternoon’s excursion it was the most I had had to contend with. But today there was the packed and teeming harbour boulevard, and possibly because of this, Adoni said nothing more as we weaved our way through the people and out on to the road north. We climbed a steep, badly cambered turn, and then the road was clear between high hedges of judas trees and asphodel. The surface was in places badly pitted by the winter’s rain, so I had to drive slowly, and the third gear was noisy. Under cover of its noise I said quietly to Adoni:

‘Will Miranda and her mother be able to keep themselves, now that Spiro has gone?’

‘They will be cared for.’ It was said flatly, and with complete confidence.

I was surprised, and also curious. If Godfrey Manning had made an offer, he would surely have told Phyllida so; and besides, whatever he chose to give Maria now, he would hardly feel that he owed this kind of conscience-money. But if it was Julian Gale who was providing for the family, as Phyllida had alleged, it might mean that her story of the twins’ parentage was true. I would have been less than human if I hadn’t madly wanted to know.

I put out a cautious feeler. ‘I’m glad to hear that. I didn’t realise there was some other relative.’

‘Well,’ said Adoni, ‘there is Sir Gale, in a way, but I didn’t mean him or Max. I meant that I would look after them myself.’

‘You?’

He nodded, and I saw him throw a half-glance over his shoulder at Miranda. I could see her in the driving-mirror; she was taking no notice of our soft conversation in English, which in any case may have been too rapid for her to follow, but was staring dully out of the window, obviously miles away. Adoni leaned forward and put a finger on the radio button, a gadget without which no Greek or Italian car ever seems to take the road. ‘You permit?’

‘Of course.’

Some pop singer from Athens Radio mooed from under the dash. Adoni said quietly: ‘I shall marry her. There is no dowry, but that’s no matter, Spiro was my friend, and one has obligations. He had saved to provide for her, but now that he is dead her mother must keep it; I can’t take it.’

I knew that in the old Greek marriage contract, the girl brought goods and land, the boy nothing but his virility, and this was considered good exchange; but families with a crop of daughters to marry off had been beggared before now, and Miranda, circumstanced as she was, would hardly have had a hope of marriage. Now here was this handsome boy calmly offering her a contract which any family would have been glad to accept, and one in which, moreover, he was providing all the capital; of the virility there could certainly be no doubt, and besides, he had a good job in a country where jobs are scarce, and, if I was any judge of character, he would keep it. The handsome Adoni would have been a bargain at any reckoning. He knew
this, of course, he’d have been a fool not to; but it seemed that he felt a duty to his dead friend, and from what I had seen of him, he would fulfil it completely, efficiently, and to everyone’s satisfaction – not least Miranda’s. And besides (I thought, prosaically), Leo would probably come through with a handsome wedding present.

‘Of course,’ added Adoni, ‘Sir Gale may give her a dowry, I don’t know. But it would make no difference; I shall take her. I haven’t told her so yet, but later, when it’s more fitting, I shall tell Sir Gale, and he will arrange it.’

‘I – yes, of course. I hope you’ll both be very happy.’

‘Thank you.’

I said: ‘Sir Julian is … he makes himself responsible for them, then?’

‘He was godfather to the twins.’ He glanced at me. ‘I think you have this in England, don’t you, but it is not quite the same? Here in Greece, the godfather, the
koumbàros
, is very important in the child’s life, often as important as the real father, and it is he who arranges the marriage contract.’

‘I see.’ As simple as that. ‘I did know Sir Julian had known the family for years, and had christened the twins, but I didn’t know he – well, had a responsibility. The accident must have been a dreadful shock to him, too.’ I added, awkwardly: ‘How is he?’

‘He is well. Have you met him yet, Miss Waring?’

‘No. I understood he didn’t see anyone.’

‘He doesn’t go out much, it’s true, but since the summer he has had visitors. You’ve met Max, though, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’ There had been nothing in Adoni’s voice to show what he knew about that meeting, but since he called him ‘Max’, without prefix, one might assume a relationship informal enough for Max to have told him just what had passed. Anyway, this was the faithful watch-dog who threw the callers over the cliff. No doubt he had heard all about it – and might even have had orders regarding further encroachments by Miss Lucy Waring …

I added, woodenly: ‘I understood he didn’t see anyone, either.’

‘Well, it depends,’ said Adoni cheerfully. He pulled a duster out from somewhere under the dashboard, and began to polish the inside of the screen. ‘Not that this helps much, it’s all the insects that get squashed on the outside. We’re nearly there, or you could stop and I’d do it for you.’

‘It doesn’t matter, thanks.’

So that was as far as I’d get. In any case, Miranda seemed to be coming back to life. The back seat creaked as she moved, and in the mirror I could see that she had put back her kerchief, and was watching the back of Adoni’s head. Something in her expression, still blurred though it was with tears, indicated that I had been right about the probable success of the marriage.

I said, in the brisk tone of one who changes the subject to neutral ground: ‘Do you ever go out shooting, Adoni?’

He laughed, undeceived. ‘Are you still looking for your criminal? I think you must have been mistaken –
there’s no Greek would shoot a dolphin. I am a sailor, too – all Corfiotes are sailors – and the dolphin is the beast of fair weather. We even call it “dolphin weather” – the summer time, when the dolphins go with the boats. No, me, I only shoot people.’