“I am a scholar,” I said. “Few mysteries are impenetrable to the trained mind.”
They continued, however, to gaze at me with a sort of superstitious dread, as if supposing me studied in some darker and more secret learning than is to be found in the statutes of Edward I or the books of Glanvil and Bracton. My heart warmed to these delightful young people: it was such a different response from any I could have hoped for in Lincoln’s Inn, where my carefully reasoned deductions would have been described as mere guesswork, or else as so childishly simple that the members of the Nursery, had they not been occupied with more important matters, could have worked them out for themselves in half the time.
“There is no need,” I said kindly, “to look so anxious. Your conduct is quite understandable: the interference of your relative in your affairs must have been most irritating.”
“We wouldn’t have minded,” said Lucian, “but it’s so beastly for Mama. Rupert writes to Father saying we’re behaving badly and Father writes to Mama and says she can’t have brought us up properly and Mama gets all upset. It’s terribly unfair, because she has brought us up properly — well, she tried.”
“You may think,” said Lucinda, “that we’re not terribly well brought up. But it isn’t Mama’s fault.”
“I believe,” I said, “that you are very fond of your mother, and would go to great lengths to protect her from any distress?”
To this they both vigorously assented.
“And we didn’t keep the camera,” said Lucinda. “We gave it to Oxfam.”
There was a further question which I should have liked to ask them; but I thought, despite the impression I had made on them, that they would not have given me a truthful answer. With the photographs again in my possession, I left the Fairfax twins and made my way, by a discreetly circuitous route, to another cafe further down the Liston, where I sat at a table shaded from the sun by a wide blue canopy.
Men in white had begun to gather beside the Esplanade, some young, some middle-aged. The older men — these, presumably, were the Writers and Artists — were dressed in conventional white flannels; the younger ones — those qualified, I supposed, by ties of blood rather than personal accomplishment to play for one or other of the two sides — had preferred to wear shorts. They hoped, perhaps, to impress with the shapeliness of their legs those tourists of the female sex who were now beginning to take afternoon refreshments at the tables in the Liston; though Julia, most susceptible of tourists, has been heard to say that the traditional cricketing costume, if worn by a young man of graceful figure, is of all forms of masculine dress the one most conducive to desire. (But that, I seem to remember, was under the influence of some particular attachment.)
Looking across to the far side of the Esplanade, I observed a motor-car draw up there, of moderate size and rather shabby, and a tall, dark man emerge from the door nearest to the driving seat. Though I had not the privilege of any personal acquaintance with Constantine Demetriou, I thought that I would instantly have known him, even had he not been accompanied by Camilla and his wife and son. I would not have doubted, even at such a distance, that this was a man of no ordinary sort, but one marked out by some kind of greatness. I cannot say precisely what it was that produced this effect: though tall, he was not in truth so much above average height as to account for the impression he gave of Olympian stature: but he walked across the Esplanade like a man who treads an immortal path, in the footsteps of Homer and Aeschylus.
The Writers and Artists welcomed him with enthusiasm. With a certain air of ceremony, he settled Dolly at a table close by the edge of the cricket pitch, in the shade of a thick-leaved acacia tree, with Camilla and Leonidas on either side of her; the group was completed by the Fairfax twins, who strolled across from the Liston to join them. The poet himself continued to go to and fro among the players, no doubt with words of encouragement and exhortation for his team.
There was as yet no sign of Sebastian and Selena, and Constantine seemed once or twice to look anxiously at his watch.
At last, however, I saw them hurrying towards the cricket pitch from the southern end of the Esplanade, Selena every few yards or so giving a little skip to keep pace with Sebastian’s longer stride. She was wearing the dress of sky-blue cotton which I had admired on a previous occasion, and Sebastian had somehow provided himself with clothing of suitable whiteness for the activities of the afternoon. Constantine waved, and went a little way to meet them.
They joined the group at the edge of the cricket pitch, Leonidas yielding to Selena his place beside his mother. The reunion seemed an occasion for much laughter and many embraces: I could hardly think it a suitable moment to break in on the gathering with dark warnings of malice and danger. Which might, after all, be quite unfounded: the theory which in London I had held with such conviction had begun, in the sunlit warmth of Corfu, to seem like a morbid and improbable fancy. Moreover, I was persuaded that there was nothing to fear until they all returned to the Villa Miranda. I accordingly resolved to remain where I was, awaiting an opportunity to speak privately to Selena.
The twenty-three-yard strip of coconut matting which is the island’s substitute for the carefully tended green wickets of England was rolled out in the center of the pitch and secured to the bare brown earth. Though too far away to be certain which side had won the toss, I supposed that it must have been the Artists, since they went in to bat first: on the Corfu ground, I am told by those who understand such matters, this is almost always an advantage, obliging the other side to waste their energies in the field in the hotter part of the day and to face the bowling when the deceptive shadows of evening have begun to reach toward the wicket.
Constantine, however, gave no impression of feeling that luck was against him, but set his field in the bold and heroic style which shows confidence in the favor of the gods: the majority of his team were gathered closely round the batsman, hopeful of catches, and those left to wander in the outfield had an exiled, solitary look. I gathered that Constantine was not of that school of thought which holds that in limited over matches, such as are played in Corfu, the primary object of the fielding side should be to contain the scoring rate rather than to take wickets.
His strategy seemed at first to be vindicated by success, for the opening batsmen were swiftly and inexpensively dismissed. The Artists had scored fourteen runs for two wickets when their captain took his place at the crease — a bushy-bearded, barrel-shaped man, with whom I had a slight acquaintance. The vigor and panache of his painting had earned him, if not an international reputation, one which at any rate extended beyond the shores of his native island. He brought the same qualities to his batsmanship: if, as he notoriously believed, the true function of the brush was to transfer as large a quantity of paint as possible to the canvas, the function of the bat was by the same token to hit every ball bowled, of whatever speed or length, as hard as possible towards the boundary. This technique, if there were any justice in the game, would have cost him his wicket half a dozen times before he reached double figures; but there is none, and he survived.
Constantine began to look anxious. In spite of bowling changes and the reluctant withdrawal of fielders to the depopulated outfield, the painter could not be dislodged and continued to score freely. He did manage, in his eagerness to score at the end of each over the single run required to retain the bowling, to run out two of his partners; but it was plainly too much to hope that the whole team would be similarly disposed of. At the end of the seventeenth over, when the Artists’ score had reached the eighties, Constantine shrugged his shoulders, as if willing to try anything once, and threw the ball to his son.
Not following the fashion of his contemporaries, Leonidas was dressed in flannels, but with a shirt slashed like a tunic from arm to waist: a design intended, no doubt, to give greater ease of movement, but also affording to the onlookers, when he ran up to bowl, a tantalizing glimpse of bare brown flesh. I thought how fortunate it was that Julia was not with me.
The first ball he bowled was what an
The Artists were in due course dismissed for a total of a hundred and thirty-one runs — a respectable score for the ground, but by no means invincible, requiring the Writers to score at a rate of precisely four runs an over in
