will believe in the Princess Nausicaa even without her laundry-list.”
“Alone?” said Camilla at this point, rather lowering the tone of the conversation. “Alone? On the seashore at Palaeocastritsa? Honestly, Costas, you must be thinking of it the way it was thirty years ago. Nowadays it’s all high-rise hotels and hamburgers — you might as well talk about standing alone on the beach at Blackpool on August Bank Holiday.”
“It’s true that nowadays it’s very crowded,” said our host sadly. He was plainly having difficulty, as so often happens with you left-wing intellectuals, in reconciling his political principles with his dislike of crowds and hamburgers. “But it’s right that it should be — it’s right that so many people should wish to see the city of King Alcinous.”
“They don’t go to see the city of King Alcinous,” said Camilla. “They go for a booze and a bathe and a bit of slap and tickle. The only time it’s bearable is first thing in the morning.”
“Ah, yes,” cried our host, “yes, that’s the time to see it. At dawn, with the sun rising behind Mount Pantocrator — ah, yes, Sebastian, if you could see it then—”
This inevitably led — inevitably, that is, given Sebastian’s reverence for the lightest word of Constantine Demetriou — to a discussion of how we might reach Palaeocastritsa by sunrise on the following morning. There were practical objections to our borrowing Dolly’s car, on which the family are largely dependent for transport; but Camilla has a motor-scooter, which she claimed was ideal for quick journeys from one part of the island to another, and offered us the use of it. Sebastian, who has been riding round Oxford on a motor-scooter for years and prides himself on his expertise, accepted immediately.
Waking up this morning well before daybreak — I don’t sleep as well here as on board the
After he had gone I failed to go back to sleep, but lay in bed thinking how unfair it was that he should be seeing interesting things in Palaeocastritsa, and looking for Nausicaa’s laundry-list, while I was left stranded at the Villa Miranda in the company of people who towered over me in the Brobdingnagian fashion previously objected to. Without the stimulus of coffee, however, I could work out no way of regarding this as Sebastian’s fault rather than mine, and so was prevented from sympathizing with myself as fully as I would have wished. After about twenty minutes, I dressed and went downstairs.
Dolly was already up, drifting about the kitchen in a housecoat, trying simultaneously to make coffee and to read a letter which she had evidently just opened. She gave the impression of being upset by it, though as if at news of a minor rather than a major misfortune. I asked her if anything was the matter.
“Oh no, it’s nothing really,” she said. “Just a silly letter from my solicitor. Oh dear, don’t people make things difficult? One does one’s best to do the right thing, but it doesn’t do any good.”
I wondered for a moment whether it might have something to do with Rupert’s investment plans for the Remington-Fiske funds; but I remembered that Dolly’s interest had been extinguished by the variation, so that there would now be no reason for anyone to write to her about it.
“Solicitors,” I said, “often write silly letters. Is it anything that I could help with?”
I didn’t discover whether it was or not, because at that moment there was a ring at the doorbell. Seeing that Dolly was at a crucial stage in her coffee-making, I went to answer it. On the doorstep was Sebastian, with his clothes torn and blood all over him.
It wasn’t, when we had cleaned and tidied and disinfected him, as bad as it looked at first sight, but still disagreeable. We learnt, in the course of our ministrations, that a goat had run out into the road in front of him on the way down to Casiope: he had swerved to avoid it, lost control of the motor-scooter and landed in the ditch at the roadside. In spite of protests that he was only shaken and there was nothing to worry about, we had no difficulty in persuading him to return to bed.
Discreetly left by Dolly to attend alone at the bedside — the matchmaking look was in her eye again — I poured him a medicinal dose of Metaxa and made some adverse comments on the character and ancestry of the goat.
“Oh no, don’t say that,” he said, “it was a lovely goat. I won’t hear a word against it.”
Rather alarmed at this — I could think of no rational explanation for such saintly benevolence — I expressed a desire to know what on earth he was talking about.
“The brakes on the motor-scooter weren’t working,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the goat, I wouldn’t have known until the hairpin bend.”
The Villa Miranda is on a side road, narrow and not well surfaced, which runs along the cliffs for about half a mile before joining the main road to Casiope. The first occasion one would normally have to brake after leaving the Villa is just before the junction, where the road begins to descend more steeply and twists sharply back on itself. At this point one has a sheer cliff face on one’s right and on one’s left an unbroken drop of about a hundred feet to some fairly jagged rocks: not a good place to discover unexpectedly that one’s brakes were out of order. I decided that I too needed a medicinal Metaxa.
“You won’t mention it to anyone, will you?” said Sebastian. “Camilla might feel embarrassed about lending us the scooter.” He then went peacefully off to sleep, apparently not in the least troubled, nor expecting me to be, by the thought of how close he had come to falling over a hundred-foot cliff.
So here am I at his bedside with all sorts of sinister notions running through my mind which common sense tells me are altogether absurd. I don’t go so far as to imagine that anyone intended any harm to Sebastian: they have known him, after all, for only two days, during which the worst he has done is to talk a little too much about Book XI of the
But it was Camilla’s motor-scooter, and I suppose that in the normal course of events she would have been the next person to ride it.
No, this is all nonsense. I am suffering, as previously supposed, from an interesting neurosis — Henry’s fault, I expect, for disrupting my holiday arrangements.
With very much love,
Selena.
During the week that I had been his guest, I had hardly seen Timothy for five minutes together — the members of Lincoln’s Inn, in the weeks which lead up to the Long Vacation, become tediously over-occupied with the concerns of their profession. On the Friday, however, in recompense for his unsociable conduct, he had undertaken to buy me lunch at one of the better restaurants in Chancery Lane.
My confidence in the arrangement was not unqualified: I knew all too well how characteristic it would be of Henry to conjure up in the course of the morning some obstacle to Timothy’s lunching at leisure or at all. I judged it prudent, therefore, before proceeding to the restaurant, to seek confirmation at 62 New Square that our plans were unchanged.
Entering the Clerks’ Room with a certain diffidence — Henry does not quite approve of me — I perceived that the only occupants were the temporary typist and the solicitor Tancred: he was seeking to persuade her of the urgency of an Opinion, to be written by Timothy in the course of the weekend, which would be entrusted to her for typing on Monday morning.
“So you see, Muriel, my dear,” said the solicitor, reinforcing the persuasiveness of his tone with an avuncular pat on her shoulder, “if you would be so kind as to give it your immediate attention, I should really be most grateful.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Tancred,” said the temporary typist, unimpressed by the mellow tone and avuncular manner, “but I’ve only one pair of hands, and you’re not the only one that wants things urgently, you know.”
I gave a discreet cough to draw attention to my presence. The solicitor turned towards me and nodded coldly: he had again forgotten, I gathered, how he had made my acquaintance, but remembered that he did not much want to renew it.
“If you’re looking for Mr. Shepherd,” said the temporary typist with dark satisfaction, “you’ve missed him.
