Greeks Have a Word for It

Mitsos stopped for a few moments outside the Old Palace. On the paved area, before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, pigeons gobbled and strutted: people were throwing corn for them from little packets. From time to time children rushed shouting into their midst, scattering them in all directions.

He looked across the wide avenue towards Constitution Square. The paved walks were the same, with their borders of cannas and wallflowers, the garden of olives and orange-trees in the centre, all this was the same, but he could not have recognised the buildings around the perimeter. Everything seemed much higher than he remembered. The enormous American Express building dominated the square now, and the big stores round Hermes Street, linked by new travel agencies and airline offices. The Hotel Grande Bretagne on the right was as he remembered it, with its sharp marble steps, the braided and constantly saluting person on the pavement outside, and the perpetual swarm of taxis at the kerb. A group of elderly, pastel-coloured American ladies came down the steps as he watched. It was as though the garden and hotel had been transplanted from some place totally familiar if he could only find it, and set down here in this strange square. He had come here quite often as a child, with his mother, after the ritual walk in the National Gardens, the ritual feeding of the ducks, for an ice-cream — a Special, with pistachio nuts and caramel. How long ago that seemed now, his greed for ice-cream conflicting with his desire for a distinguished seemliness of behaviour. … His mother’s face of that time too he could recall in every detail, the great delicacy of temple and cheek, the beautiful, shortsighted eyes, the mouth mild, too small for beauty. … He was swept by the feeling of desolation that had accompanied all his wanderings through the city. Whatever he recognised seemed arbitrarily transposed, as though some vast and pointless reorganisation had taken place in his absence. And as though to confirm the changes that had happened, he heard once more as he stood there the sound of this new Athens, the steady remorseless chipping of steel on stone, repeated at exact intervals. It came from across the square in the direction of Philhellinon Street, but for Mitsos this sound had ceased to be local: everywhere he went in the city it pursued him, sometimes light and quick, almost gay, sometimes heavier, more solemn, frequently overlaid by the screeching of traffic or the voices of people, threading the more abrupt and dramatic evidences of change, the roar of demolitions, the stuttering of drills; re-emerging in every pause, every lull, every interval of silence. It was the sound of Athens continuing her renewal, continuing to elude him.

He crossed the avenue and went past the kiosk at the head of the steps leading into the garden. The man in the kiosk was picking his teeth with customary Greek discretion, holding his hands as though playing a flute, although he was alone there, behind Corriere della Sera and Athens News. Mitsos did not go directly through the garden but turned and proceeded round the outer edge in the shade of the orange-trees. He came out on the wide area of pavement covered with green tin tables and little stiff cane chairs. It was deserted now, in the hot mid-morning — clients went over the way to Zabaritis, where there was shade.

After hesitating for some moments Mitsos himself crossed over and sat at one of the tables just off the square. He asked for coffee and, while he waited, thought again of earlier that morning, walking along Partriarchou Joachim, striving to persuade himself of a destination, past the new apartment houses, the new boutiques, the new florist with great sheaves of lilies and irises in his window, precisely on the site surely of the little shop where he had once gone for the breakfast yogurt. Round the corner and up a little, over the steep cobbles to Charitos Street, where he had been born, spent his whole life, until the night of his father’s death. He had known the house was no longer there — Alexei had told him — but he had expected at least to be able to see where it had been. The whole block was a maternity clinic now, with swing doors and a glimpse within of hushed green carpeting. Indeed in all the street only one original house was left standing, with its graceful wrought-iron balconies, wide-eaved roofs, tall narrow windows. It had clearly been empty, probably condemned. Jasmine grew over the closed green shutters. He walked up and down, past the clinic with its green neon cross, the sharp-edged apartment houses. The change was too radical, it denied his experience; the street denied him a past. He had not known that by new styles of architecture the past could be denied. As he walked up and down, the fig man with a basket on his head had passed by, uttering his trailing sibilant cry of Sica! Sica!, a sound well remembered from childhood in this street which was then another street. And into Mitsos’ ears as the calls receded came the slow, almost stealthy sound of hammering metal against stone, from somewhere further up on Lycavettos.

Opposite him now was an obese pale woman in a black silk dress with short sleeves from which her soft white arms came billowing. She was eating with solitary greed a tiered cream cake, using for the purpose a tiny fork, almost lost in her plump white hand. Mitsos watched the fork dig deftly into the yielding cream, saw it freighted and conveyed to the moist lips above, saw the mouth shape itself at the last moment, the lips widen in a sort of grimace before closing over the fork completely in a perfectly round pout, to suck the cake softly off the prongs.

Mitsos experienced a slight feeling of nausea. He closed his eyes for a moment. There were times when the obsessive observation of detail descended on him, like a sort of visual cruelty, that he was helpless to prevent. Without finishing his coffee, he put the money for it down on the table and walked slowly away.

Not far away, in the Cathedral Square, Kennedy and Roland were having a beer together. It was one of Roland’s days off. He worked four days a week, Kennedy had discovered, for a big firm of architects and civil engineers with many foreign employees, correcting the inter-departmental minutes, which were always written in English, of a sort. He had got this job because of his training as a draughtsman in England.

‘I’m worried about Simpson,’ Roland said.

‘Oh yes?’ Kennedy was wary. He had not yet been able to discover who was parasitic on whom in Roland’s relationship with Simpson. Until he could unearth the self-interest he felt curiously hampered and powerless. There was no doubt that Simpson occupied a central place in Roland’s life. Roland had adopted, it seemed voluntarily, the rôle of translating Simpson’s predicaments into coherent form for the benefit of third parties. What did he get out of it? Kennedy dismissed as monstrous the suspicion that Roland might be really disinterested, might be experiencing, merely, a human concern. He was himself quite capable of the sudden anarchic impulse of generosity, even self-sacrifice, but he never gave considered kindness to another without some motive of gain, however blurred or impractical. And a faculty he did not possess himself he could not believe in in other people. ‘Simpson’s all right,’ he said. ‘He’ll still be all right when you and I are on the scrap-heap.’ He smiled suddenly and looked down at the tubby beer bottles on the table before him. On the whole he felt pleased with life this morning. Things were beginning to move. He had already secured three private students and had an appointment later with the girl that Sophy had told him about. Also, Eleni Polimenou, the actress, was back in Athens now. Kennedy intended to visit her later in the morning and offer his services.

‘Yes, but the drinking, Bryan,’ Roland said. ‘I do hope he recovers his easel soon.’

‘You believe in this easel, then?’

‘Believe in it?’

‘Believe it exists, I mean.’

‘Of course I do,’ Roland said indignantly. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Well, it strikes me as a bit fishy, if you want to know the truth.’

‘I know a dedicated man when I see one.’ Roland was quite flushed.

‘Listen,’ Kennedy said, ‘he’s dedicated all right, he’s dedicated to surviving.’ Artistic bums like Simpson he had met before and always disliked, mainly for their spurious sense of caste, the way their cadging always got muddled up with feelings of privilege.

Roland’s flush had faded. His face was pale, deeply lined for one so young. He declined his head a little and Kennedy could see the pale gleam of scalp beneath the thin hairs on his crown. He would in a few years be quite bald. It seemed to Kennedy that this was a particular result of a general lack in Roland of nutritive oils. He was essentially a sparse person. What impulse, what sudden image of himself, had taken him from his parents’ home in Wimbledon, his safe job in a drawing office — for he had told Kennedy something of his life — to be Kitty’s oldest resident, Simpson’s defender, lay almost beyond speculation.

‘You may be right,’ he said now. ‘But that wouldn’t stop you from being hopelessly wrong too. I mean wrong from beginning to end. You don’t care about anything, that’s your trouble. Everyone should care for something; Kenneth does.’

‘Here endeth,’ Kennedy said. He was somewhat disconcerted by this unusual directness of Roland’s and to cover this he looked away across the square, smiling broadly.

Roland took a nervous swallow of his beer. ‘They are an extraordinary people in some ways,’ he said, with an abrupt change of subject. ‘Just look at this city, marvellous natural site, between the sea and the hills. Numerous eminences commanding extensive views. Wonderful climate, brilliant light, almost no industrial pollution. An architect’s dream, you might say. And yet there is hardly a building of any distinction in the whole place. Excepting the antiquities, of course.’ He looked across the square at the pigeons, the slowly moving people, the vast straight shadows of the cathedral. ‘Just look at this ghastly cathedral,’ he said. ‘It has no merit of any sort, unless size is a merit. Certainly it’s big. You’d think they’d know, wouldn’t you, with all these beautiful little Byzantine churches in Athens. … Well, just compare it with the little Metropolis over there. About seventeen centuries between them …’

They looked for some moments in silence at the tiny church, the exquisite proportions of cupola and façade, the warm flush of the walls, in which fragments of antique marble were inset, the Byzantine reliefs of symbolic birds and beasts, the coats of arms of the Frankish lords of Athens. Then, because any claim on his piety irked him, Kennedy shifted suddenly in his seat and said, ‘By the way, the fellow who had my room, what are the theories?’

Roland immediately began to look uncomfortable. ‘There are conflicting stories,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Some say he exposed himself to Kitty one morning on the stairs. Others that he misbehaved in some public way on the balcony overlooking the street.’

‘I shall wait for a favourable moment,’ Kennedy said, ‘and ask Kitty.’

At this moment they saw Simpson approaching from the direction of the Plaka. He was wearing his maroon cap. He walked with outlandish loping steps, his head lowered so that his features were quite concealed beneath the long peak. For some reason he was walking close to the walls of the houses, and so he was frequently held up by the steps from the street doors on to the pavement. Instead of swerving to avoid them he stopped dead at every one and side-stepped sharply. It was as though he were demonstrating his powers of co-ordination.

When he reached their table he raised his hand in a sort of salute before sitting down. ‘Jesus,’ he said, sticking his jaw out, ‘I’ve had a hell of a morning.’ He always conveyed the pressure of events, though what he did when he was not at Piraeus enquiring about his easel nobody knew. This morning, not being drunk, he had his features more under control. There was still, however, that curious staring quality, the grey film round the irises.

‘I got a commission,’ he said, ‘for some paintings of Hydra. Rich bloody Americans. How the hell can I give of my best without an easel?’

‘What will you have?’ Kennedy asked.

‘Cognac,’ said Simpson. ‘Without ice,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Don’t you put any ice in it. It’s perfect,’ he said, ‘if only I had my easel. They say they want views of Hydra because they’ve just been there. I’ve never been there of course but all these bloody islands look the same, anyway. I could do it easy, if only I had my easel.’

‘Maddening,’ Roland said.

‘Can’t you just work on a table or something, for this once?’ Kennedy said.

There had been something derogatory in his tone and Simpson stiffened. ‘I’ve got my reputation to think of,’ he said. ‘These paintings will be shown to friends, back in the States. “That’s a Simpson”, they will say.’

‘Quite so, Kenneth,’ Roland said. He gave Kennedy a reproving glance.

‘It’s like what I said to Halpin the other day — I met him in the Plaka, he is often there hanging about, he’s been telling people I don’t pay my debts, the bastard — I was talking to him about these blisters I get in my heels from wearing baseball shoes all the time and he said to me … he wears these coloured scarves and he has these long sideburns. God, I hate his guts! He knows it too.’ Simpson looked at them triumphantly as though this was the end of the story, Halpin’s knowledge of his hate.

‘What did he say then, Kenneth?’ Roland prompted.

‘I happened to meet him in the Plaka, he lives down there, and I was showing him these blisters and he said to me, “Ken, you’re a bum, admit it, Ken.” I looked at him a minute, then I said to him, “I’ve got my talent, Halpin, what the bloody hell have you got? I hate those bloody scarves you wear,” I said to him.’ He fixed Kennedy with the look of considerable animosity, then he delivered a right hook at the air before his nose. There was a remarkable savagery in the gesture. ‘What the bloody hell have you got?’ he said.

‘Look, old boy,’ Kennedy said. ‘I don’t give a monkey’s for any bloody Halpins, but are you telling me you can’t paint anything at all without your easel?’

‘I’m telling you,’ said Simpson in a loud voice. ‘I’m telling you …’ He paused for a moment as though baffled.

‘You’re up the creek, that’s what it is,’ Kennedy said.

‘Please, Bryan,’ Roland said.

‘You may be all right at kipping in parks,’ Simpson said, ‘but you don’t know your arse from your elbow when it comes to painting. I hate that bloody suit you’re wearing.’ Saliva had collected in the corners of his mouth.

‘Don’t get excited, Kenneth,’ Roland said.

‘I asked a civil question,’ said Kennedy.

At this moment the waiter returned with the drinks. ‘Look,’ Simpson said, ‘the bastard has put ice in my cognac.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Take this fucking ice out of my cognac,’ he said.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Kennedy said, in some disgust. ‘If you can’t behave like a gentleman, piss off.’ He was about to say something else when he saw a person he knew passing across the square. It was the Greek he had tried to touch for a pound or two on the boat. ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Come over and have a drink. Hey you,’ he called again, as the other did not appear to have heard him.

Mitsos turned his head and looking across the square saw a tall gesticulating person in a red cap with a strangely long peak. Then he saw the Englishman who had shared his taxi from Piraeus sitting at the table together with a worried-looking young man. While he looked, Kennedy beckoned to him, smiling broadly. ‘Come and have a drink,’ he shouted again. Slowly Mitsos walked towards them. He saw the man he knew reach up and draw the capped person down into his seat again. He stood smiling and inclining his head while Kennedy performed the introductions.

‘What was your name again?’ Kennedy said.

‘Mitsos,’ he said. ‘Stavros Mitsos.’

‘Stavros, that’s right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I remember your surname, of course. Come and sit down. What will you have?’

Mitsos said he would have a coffee.

‘How’s it going?’ Kennedy said. ‘You said we’d be sure to meet, didn’t you?’

‘I did, yes,’ Mitsos said. ‘Athens is small. Or, rather, the area where people congregate is small.’ He looked from face to face for some minutes. He could not understand how it was he came to be talking to these people. Suddenly he became aware that the person in the cap was speaking to him in muttered conspiratorial tones.

‘Ken Simpson,’ he heard this person say. ‘American artist, exhibitions in every European capital. If you are interested in buying paintings I hope to be doing a series of impressions of Hydra shortly, or Mykonos, or Poros — Greek islands, you know. When I recover my easel, they lost my easel, not the Greeks, the bloody Germans.’ There was something odd about this person’s eyes.

‘I do not know a great deal about paintings,’ he said.

‘All the better,’ said Simpson. ‘The response will be fresh.’

The other man, who had been shifting and fidgeting in his seat, now broke in with the air of a person performing a familiar duty of interpretation. ‘Mr Simpson,’ he said, ‘is at present without his easel which has been mislaid by the railways authorities somewhere in Germany. It is a very valuable easel with various unique attachments.’

‘I see,’ Mitsos said. ‘That was very unfortunate.’

‘Unfortunate?’ said Simpson unbelievingly. ‘I’ll buy that.’ He had begun groping in his top pocket and after a moment produced one of his cards, which he handed to Mitsos with old-world courtesy. ‘My card,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ Mitsos said. He was holding the card and seemed about to look down at it when the others saw his expression change suddenly. He stood up, looking across the square. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

‘What’s the matter, old boy?’ Kennedy asked, looking up at him curiously, then following his gaze across the square. There seemed, however, nothing remarkable happening there. People passing, that was all. The pigeons. A pappas on the cathedral steps talking to a woman dressed in black.

‘Excuse me,’ Mitsos said again. His face had gone whiter. Still holding Simpson’s card in his hand, he took a few steps from the table.

‘Wait a minute, here’s your coffee,’ Roland called, afraid, it seemed, of further offending the waiter. But Mitsos began walking rapidly away from them towards Odos Mítropoleos. They watched in silence while he disappeared from sight.

‘Extraordinary way to behave,’ Roland said.

‘He saw something that shook him,’ Kennedy said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what it was.’

Simpson said morosely, ‘Look, that’s my card on the ground there. The bastard dropped my card.’

All three of them looked for some moments at Mitsos’ cooling coffee, as though the explanation might be there.

Simpson’s card fluttered down unnoticed from Mitsos’ fingers. His whole being was concentrated on keeping in view the man before him, the man whose face he had glimpsed on the square a few moments before. The man was bulky and walked slowly and was carrying, moreover, a very large black umbrella loosely furled, which he from time to time rested on his shoulder like a rifle, so he was not difficult to keep in sight.

But as they proceeded slowly up Hermes Street his surrender of will, his present complete dependence on the other for direction and purpose, began to seem like faith — needing at least, if not exactly guarantees, yet certainly a revision of the steps that had led to it. He recalled the man’s features as though this constituted evidence: the face full, very pale, clean-shaven, a shallow cleft in the heavy jaw; memorable really only for the strange light eyes, almost yellow in colour, set at a slight downward slant in the head, like the eyes of a sad dog. … That look of mournful belligerence he had seen on the square just now, but he could not, at such a distance, have noted the colour of the eyes, that was a memory, not a present impression, a memory of fifteen years ago, when the men had come from Epirus to his father’s house, the man with yellow eyes among them, he who had turned at the door and looked back, at his father’s body, the whimpering woman beyond it, looked for some moments and then come back into the room. …

At Syntagma the man in front paused briefly on the edge of the pavement, as though undecided. He had a slow, lordly way of moving his head on the short thick neck. His linen jacket was crumpled and ill-fitting, strained too tight across the heavy shoulders. The black umbrella was like a symbol of office. After hesitating for a moment he crossed over to the inner square, and Mitsos followed, to the left down the central path, where the man installed himself on one of the green wooden benches under the orange-trees. The sun was hot now, high in the sky, it was desirable to be in the shade. Mitsos chose another of the benches, at a considerable distance. He was not so much afraid of recognition — he had been, after all, only a child then, only twelve years old — as reluctant to be registered at all in the other’s awareness, at least for the present. The distance, however, was a disadvantage, in that he still could not see the man’s face clearly. The man himself was quite motionless, a fawn sprawl on the bench, the rusty black umbrella hooked on the seat beside him. Suddenly, while he watched, it moved to unbutton its jacket, loosen its tie. Paunchy, sluggish, without apparent occupation, encumbered with an eccentric black umbrella, what could such a person have to do with him? Everything that had occurred on that distant evening had seemed sealed off from all possible aftermath, since his father had died violently then, and his mother within a year, and he himself, the only victim to survive, could refer to no one for mitigation nor even for confirmation of what had happened — the others, the men who had done these things, having no objective existence for him at all, as though summoned only for that time, to perform that one rôle, afterwards too monstrous for any other imaginable context. And now by some chance the only face among those others that his memory had culled and retained was possibly across the square before him, possibly. In the continuing uncertainty of this, only faith on his part could persist in asserting the identity, since he had seen the face again so briefly, for those few seconds on the square, and age and daylight had altered it. The face he knew had been younger, leaner, ruddy in the lamplight, with glinting stubble along the jaws. It had looked back with those queer yellow eyes from the door at the three of them, his father’s body on the floor, himself crouched still partly stunned in a corner, and his mother standing in the middle of the room, body slightly stooped in an attitude of readiness as though awaiting the signal for a race, a repeated moaning note coming from her open mouth. That face had turned smiling at the door and glanced at them all in turn, his mother finally. For some moments the face had smiled, regarding his mother. Then some fixity, like earnestness had come over it, and the man had come back into the room. It was as though, it was exactly as though, those irrepressible noises of grief and shock had aroused the man, acted as the equivalent of female heat. Crouched there in his corner, he had seen it all happen, seen his mother straighten her body at the last moment, before the man reached her, straighten and raise her hands palm outwards and her moaning changed, not into words, but a higher more continuous note and then she was thrown down on to the carpet already soaking with his father’s blood, a bundle that jerked and threshed. He saw everything that was done to his mother and he did nothing, made no sound. The man rose from the body of his mother whose exposed legs were strangely inert now and shameless. While he fumbled with the front of his trousers he had looked at the boy in the corner and the boy had known that it was in the man’s mind to kill him. It was then that the man’s face had laid its final impress on his memory, the yellow eyes grave now, almost impersonal. The man had stared a moment longer, shrugged slightly, and gone. His father’s outstretched hand had quivered.

The person opposite Mitsos stirred suddenly. After a pause to adjust his tie and unhook his umbrella he made his way diagonally across the square in the direction of Philhellinon Street. Mitsos watched him for some moments, saw him pause again at the pavement, waiting apparently to cross the street. Then he got up himself and, keeping the other continuously in view, emerged from the square at a point somewhat higher up. There he waited. He knew that on no account must he allow the man to be lost to him ever again. To do so would be to offend irrevocably, put himself beyond help.

Kennedy left the others sitting at the table, involved now in an animated discussion of Simpson’s easel, the favourite topic, it seemed, of both, and made his way to Carneadou Street, where his prospective pupil lived. The apartment was on the third floor of a new and imposing block of flats. An elderly woman in black with several whiskery moles, whom he assumed to be a retainer of some sort, came in answer to the bell and led him into a large sitting-room crowded with very new-looking furniture and with a great many pictures on the walls. Pride of place was held by a huge and shiny cocktail cabinet with a front of chrome and glass, and massive, incongruous webbed feet. It was not a room in which people would readily unbutton. Sitting on the sofa, wondering whether to smoke, Kennedy felt a growing discomfort. People, of whatever sort, could rarely abash him. He had considerable resources of effrontery and, moreover, a sort of naïve cynicism, an almost helplessly denigratory habit of mind, which did not permit the recognition of aspirations beyond the level of his own. But things, inanimate objects, especially when they were glossy and redolent of the wealth of their owners, had this power of discomfiting him when he was left alone among them. He felt belittled by these evidences of a fixed abode. He had had on occasion the impulse to defecate on deep pile carpets. There was an armchair opposite him now which especially aroused his resentment, fashioned in pink leather, encapsuled still in polythene. He was thinking of the joy of ripping out the stuffing when a stout, handsome woman, with the faintest of moustaches, wearing a green silk dress, entered the room and approached him, holding out her hand.

‘Ah, Mrs Logothetis,’ Kennedy said with considerable relief, uncoiling his legs and rising.

‘How do you do, Mr Kennedy? I am afraid,’ she added hesitantly, ‘that my English is not good.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kennedy said, allowing his eyes to linger on the lady’s abundant, scarcely differentiated green bosom. She belonged to an age group in which he had scored some notable successes in the past.

‘I have not called my daughter yet, as I wanted to have a little word with you before you begin.’

‘Naturally.’

‘She has the diploma examination very soon now. She has a good basis in grammar and vocabulary. But she lacks the confidence to speak. She is not like her mother in this respect.’ Here Mrs Logothetis laughed a little and looked somewhat gaily at Kennedy, as though inviting him to approve her maternal freedom.

‘Ha, ha, no, that’s only to be expected,’ said Kennedy. ‘Perhaps she’s a bit on the timid side?’

‘Yes.’ Gravity once more descended on Mrs Logothetis. ‘And this causes me to be worried about the oral part of the examination.’

‘It is a problem,’ Kennedy said, with a sense of brilliant improvisation, ‘with which we often have to deal. Practice, constant practice, is what she needs.’

‘You think?’

‘Certainly. I suggest she has at least three hours a week.’

‘You think?’ said Mrs Logothetis again. Her seriousness deepened. It seemed to Kennedy that her bosom heaved somewhat. ‘She is not accustomed to being alone with a young man. We could send her to an institute, but these institutes are not always … The parents think the girl is in class applying herself, but often it is otherwise. She is walking out with boys. We do not want this for Lydia.’

‘Quite so.’ Kennedy nodded slowly, striving to assemble his features into a compound expression which would indicate his full realisation of the dangers of such contacts, his own professional integrity, setting him far above suspicion, and at the same time, in order to establish a vital link with Mrs Logothetis, the sense they shared of the potential delights of such contacts once the period of sheltered youth was over. It was a difficult expression to achieve.

‘We believe in protecting our girls, Mr Kennedy. We accompany Ketty everywhere, the beach, the cinema. We take her for excursions in the … Studebaker. Do you not think we are right?’

‘Well,’ said Kennedy, ‘I think you are.’ His concentration had lapsed a little and he was no longer sure whose virginity they were talking about: Ketty’s imperilled one in the present, or Mrs Logothetis’ judiciously abandoned one in the past. What emerged as the only real positive was the general randiness of the male population of Athens. ‘In England’ he said, making a slight recovery, ‘as you probably know, our young people have more freedom. It is what you might call a more permissive society.’

Mrs Logothetis pursed her full, rather pale lips and shook her head sorrowfully. ‘All that is for after marriage,’ she said. ‘How much do you charge for the lessons?’

‘One hundred drachmas an hour.’

‘Ah yes.’ Mrs Logothetis looked simultaneously pleased and worried. ‘The last teacher only charged sixty. We were not pleased with the progress Lydia was making with her. A hundred, however, is too much, I think. You will take eighty?’

‘A hundred is the official charge,’ Kennedy said, ‘among us qualified teachers.’

‘But since it is for three hours a week …’

‘Let us say ninety, then,’ said Kennedy, conveying by his smile that for Mrs Logothetis’ sake he was lowering standard hitherto strictly maintained. Ninety drachmas was twenty-two and six, after all, he reflected. Not bad for an hour’s gentle dalliance with the delicately nurtured Lydia.

‘I will bring her now,’ Mrs Logothetis said.

Lydia must have been waiting in an adjoining room, because after only a very few moments her mother returned with her. She was short and plump with shining shoulder-length hair, a completely round face, puffy lips, pale like her mother’s, and an extraordinary passivity of demeanour. Her face registered no expression during the introduction. Her hand was soft and cold.

‘Hairo poli,’ she said tonelessly.

‘Ah,’ said her mother, with a sort of raillery, ‘you must speak English now. “How do you do?” That’s it.’

‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, smiling broadly. ‘That’s it.’

‘How do you do?’ Ketty said. She regarded him steadily. Her eyes, though large and well shaped, were not clear, but yellowish round the almost black irises. And in the depths of them, unrelated to any change of feature, he discerned the light of a pure and relentless hostility. He also divined in that moment that these English lessons were entirely an idea of her parents.

‘I will leave you together now,’ Mrs Logothetis said. ‘For today I suggest not a complete lesson, but to discuss your programme and become acquainted. Lydia knows the times she has free. She has private lessons also in French, German and piano. And this year she has the final examinations of the Greek Gymnasium. So, you see, she is quite busy.’ Mrs Logothetis smiled richly.

That might be it then, Kennedy thought, but without much hope, as he smiled goodbye to the retreating mother; possibly he had been mistaken, and the girl was not antagonistic at all, simply dazed with study and controlled trips in the Studebaker.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we sit down? I won’t keep you long today, since it is the first time. Your mother wants you to have three hours a week of English.’

There was no reply to this and after waiting some moments Kennedy said, ‘How do you think we should arrange the lessons?’

Lydia said something in Greek in a low and rapid voice.

‘I’m afraid,’ Kennedy said, keeping up his smile, ‘that we shall have to talk only in English. This will be practice for you and, besides, I don’t know any Greek.’

Looking once more into the girl’s unwavering eyes, he knew that he had not, after all, been mistaken: the inimical light was blended now with what seemed the beginnings of a more personal antipathy. There was a fairly prolonged pause which Kennedy spent calculating how much this girl’s father must be spending on private lessons alone. Ten pounds a week at least. Straight down the drain. He had no idea at all of how to proceed, having never given an English lesson, nor any other kind for that matter, in his life before.

‘Well,’ he said with something of an effort, ‘this is what I suggest. You read something in English in your own time, something on the shortish side, of course, a story or such-like, and then I can ask you questions about it, and then …’

Suddenly, without warning, without any preliminary tension of features, without even turning her eyes away, Lydia opened her mouth wide and uttered straight towards him a loud and piercing cry.

Kennedy was horribly surprised. He sat bolt upright in his seat. For a moment he wondered if Lydia was subject to fits. But no further sound came from her, her face was quite impassive. ‘What on earth… ?’ he said.

At this moment a full-bodied girl in the uniform of a maid came into the room and stood quietly at the table at which they were sitting. That screech had been a summons, then. Still in the grip of the surprise and alarm it had aroused in him, Kennedy looked up at her and immediately Lydia and all disagreeable thoughts faded far away. The maid was beautiful. In Kennedy’s mind, as in the minds of many men, there was an ideal feminine type. It could perhaps best be summed up in the word bovine. And in the first hasty upward glance it was that sort of serenity in the face that impressed him, a quality of mindlessness. The eyes were widely spaced, very gentle and cow-like, not brown, however, but luminous grey, the colour of a shallow pond; very level under rather deep brows. The whole face was broad, inclining to heaviness, but the cheek-bones were high and the large mouth well shaped, with a tendency to hang open a little. A face almost breathtakingly reposeful.

‘Fere mou ena potiri nero,’ said Lydia, with graceless abruptness.

‘Amesos!’ the girl said. Her voice was rather deep, Kennedy noted. In the moment before turning away she gave him an unhasty neutral gaze. He watched her leave the room, observing the square, steady shoulders, the regular, unselfconscious sway of the hips, the high firm buttocks. The back of her thighs and legs were heavy, but her ankles neat, even in the thick stockings and clumsy black shoes she was wearing.

Kennedy breathed out audibly. He looked once more at Lydia, with renewed astonishment that such a creature should have a goddess like that at her behest. Nothing could so well have illustrated the power of the drachma. He had still not fully recovered when the maid returned with the glass of water that Lydia had apparently demanded and which she took from the tray without a glance or a word of thanks. Again the maid met his glance, this time it seemed a fraction more lingeringly. He forgot to smile at her, and this too denoted the impression she had made.

The rest of the conversation with Lydia was conducted on his part with a sense of unreality. Somehow they arrived at an agreement about the hours to be set aside for the lessons, and Kennedy stalled on the choice of a textbook, since he did not as yet know of one. He made a mental note to get some advice from Willey on the matter at the earliest opportunity. Lydia herself conducted him to the door, which was a disappointment, because he had hoped to see something more of the maid at his departure. Still, there would be time for that. Lydia had a curious and rather touching way of walking very close to the wall. As she led him along the passage her left shoulder was actually rubbing against the wall as though she would have liked to vanish through it.

Once more on the pavement Kennedy found the harsher aspects of life obtruding. He had now to find Neofiton Vamva, where lived Eleni Polimenou, the celebrated Greek actress. He stayed the first passing Greek with a smile and a broad gesture. ‘Neofiton Vamva?’ he said, stretching his mouth round the vowels to assist comprehension. ‘Neofiton Vamva?’

Meanwhile, about half a mile away Mitsos was following the man carefully down Philhellinon Street. The man moved slowly, as though conscious of leisure, moving his head from side to side in a way that seemed lordly, swinging his umbrella. Just before the English church he turned into a doorway and disappeared. Coming up to it in his turn, Mitsos saw it was a café bar with half a dozen steps leading down. The bar was below street-level, but outside on the pavement there were two small tables, and Mitsos, after a moment’s hesitation, sat down at the first of these, with his back to the bar. From here, if he turned his head, he could see below him through the glass front of the bar, the top of the other man’s head and the lower part of his face. Although there could not have been more than two or three yards between them, he was himself practically invisible to the man below because of a sort of ornamental trellis across the lower half of the bar front, through which had been trained the shoots of some creeper with glossy sharp leaves. The sun shone hotly on Mitsos, for there was no awning, and falling on the slatted trellis and faintly stirring leaves, dappled the interior of the bar with flecks of light, so that the man’s lowered head and his face and his fawn suit were chequered with shifting patterns, and Mitsos had the impression of looking down from the upper air into some leafy cage. There was no one else in the bar. On the table before the man were kephtedes, bread and white cheese, and a glass of beer. One of his hands was out of sight below the table; the other, large and very pale, quite hairless, plied a fork busily. He seemed from this angle of vision to have no neck at all, his blunt head balancing by a sort of miracle on the thick shoulders, while he fed steadily, chewing with an open mouth.

Mitsos asked for bread and a little salad when the waiter came, and ate it quickly, without appetite, constantly turning his head to watch the man below. There was in that face and form as he was compelled to view it now no trace of the resemblance which had so shocked him in the Cathedral Square. Then the man’s pause and smile had seemed almost like a deliberate reminder; a vague smile, perhaps no more than a clench of the features against the sun; but then there were the eyes too, so distinctive, and, above all, perhaps that moment of irresolution, almost of bafflement. Fortuitous, of course, but recalling so strongly, so irresistibly, the other, distant, pause at the door, that other smile, that had turned from relish to purpose at the stimulus of his mother’s grief. …

They were from Epirus, this had been stated at the outset: men come from far, intent on something. He remembered the curious contained peace in the house in the days immediately before that evening, with his officer father home from the north, the first time for almost a year they had seen him. A professional soldier, commissioned before the war, who had fought both Italians and Germans and, of course, in the latter years of the occupation exclusively Greeks. He had returned from the north changed, grimmer, always preoccupied. Mitsos had been too young then fully to understand the disgust inspired in his father, fastidious, authoritarian, deeply conservative like almost all his class, by the activities of the guerillas, who had turned to rend one another even before the Germans withdrew, turning what might at first have been seen as a movement of liberation into a murderous gibberish of initials, E.A.M., E.L.A.S., K.K.E. ‘Eamobulgarians,’ he had said, the bitter word of abuse twisting his lips under the neat moustache. ‘The only minds that have a sense of why they fight are in Russia, not in Greece.’

He had known, of course, must have known, that he was in danger. This would be the reason for that grimness, that absorbed quality in his father. His mother, too, would have known. That calm then, remembered now as happiness because of the horror that succeeded it, but of a peculiar tension nevertheless, had perhaps been a sort of despair. For the departure of the German occupation force had delivered the country to the andartes, which meant increasingly, as Zervas was confined to his perch in the hills, to the groups of the extreme left. It was a time when public and private motives had become confused — a time for the settling of old scores. All the collaborators who could, including the rank and file of the Security Police, had sought immediate obscurity and there were some no doubt who had escaped detection and the certain death that followed upon it, survived until the following year when justice was again in official hands and the courts, moreover, disposed to be lenient. … His father, however, had been an officer, commanded a battalion. He had made no effort to hide himself. Where, after all, was he to go? He had come home to Athens to the house that had been his father’s. No doubt, with customary cold incredulity he had misjudged the lawless temper of the people on liberation, trusted too much to the immediate re-establishing of order now that the common enemy at last was gone. A bullet in the street was the worst he could have expected, otherwise he would not so have endangered his family. And Epirus must have seemed quite far away. …

‘We are from Epirus,’ had been the first words Mitsos remembered from the group of shabby men who had come in from the street that October evening. They had been frighteningly without gesture, without extravagance of speech or behaviour, confronting his father and mother in their softly lit living-room. Where is your uniform now?’ one of the men had said quietly. ‘Your fine uniform.’ There had been in this colloquy a note, a feeling as though this were the beginning of a quarrel, rather than the end of it. What words, if any, his father had said he had not retained in memory. He did not know which of the men had moved, it was not the man with yellow eyes, he felt sure of that, an amazingly casual gesture of the arm but swift too, as though he was trying to dislodge something possibly noxious, possibly about to sting, from his father’s collar, but there was a short knife in his hand, and his father stepped back sharply, he looked startled, exactly as if he had in fact been stung, and began to raise his hand to the side of his neck, but the blood came spurting over his hand, staying it, and he was suddenly red to the waist. He fell face forward on to the carpet, not as though collapsing but as though struck down, and he died then or a little later, died without another look at anyone, face pressed against the carpet. Mitsos himself, with that great jet of blood before him and his mother’s cries in his ears, had sprung wildly forward, to minister to his father, not to attack the men, only to receive a heavy blow on the side of the head which flung him partially stunned against the wall, from where he had endured the rest, the smile, the hideous moments of irresolution, his mother’s reduction to anonymity, his own mute plea for life.

He glanced down again through the trellis into the interior of the café. The man was fed now and still, stippled by the light that rayed through the leaves and bars. Mitsos clapped his hands for the waiter, wanting to be ready — time spent in paying his bill might result in the man’s being lost to him, since no destination had yet been established. He had barely finished paying in fact when the man came up the steps into the sunlight and stood for a moment with raised head and narrowed eyes as though himself seeking a scent or a direction. Mitsos had turned away, but there had been no need for this, the man did not look towards him at all, but, after that brief pause, proceeded steadily up Philhellinon Street.

And Mitsos followed. The pavements were crowded, but he had no real awareness of other people. He saw no faces, heard no individual voices. Noise and movement of people formed a sort of element through which he tracked the man, comforting as cover might be, more comforting, since they took away his particularity, gave him a reason for walking down this street where other persons walked.

Neofiton Vamva proved not difficult to find. Eleni Polimenou had an apartment on the sixth floor, with polished parquet and chintz and sketches of nude rotund females on the walls. There was a fine view from the window of the eastern side of the city, extending from the wooded hill of Pangrati across to the Byzantine Museum with the suburb of Kaisariani beyond it, and the tawny foothills of Hymettos in the distance. Kennedy had full leisure to dwell on all this because Eleni Polimenou kept him waiting for a considerable time. He had in fact abandoned the view and was looking fixedly at the photograph of a smiling man in a big black hat with the words ‘Kindest regards, Eugene’ inscribed in one corner, when a door must have been opened somewhere, for suddenly he heard a harsh voice talking, he realised after a moment, into the telephone.

‘But, darling, shit! shit! shit!’ he heard this voice say. ‘What? Yes, I know, I understand, angel, but there are things in this play to make you vomit green, my love. … No, not bad, impossible. Yes. My meaning is, no human tongue could frame them. Some changes, yes. … Also, this, what do you call it, this biographical note. … Yes, I know they ask for it, darling, but I think it is better not to go on and on about the years as though I will soon be getting the gold watch. Nor do I like references to my middle period. You can say mature, if you like. … Better, yes. …’ The voice spoke English with a plangent American accent, and this, in conjunction with the habit of heavy aspiration retained from Greek, made it a vehicle of considerable harshness and carrying power. The phone was replaced and a few moments later a slim middle-aged woman of striking and energetic appearance entered the room, smoking a cigarette in a short holder. She had auburn hair, narrow eyes and a mouth of slightly peevish sweetness. Guessing from the outset that Kennedy was a foreigner, she said to him in English, ‘You want to see me?’

‘I’ve heard,’ began Kennedy, ‘through the Cultural Centre …’

‘Ah, so you have come from the man Jennings?’ Miss Polimenou’s eyes were chestnut-coloured and brilliant, but not very efficient, it seemed: she screwed them up and advanced her head a little to get a good look at Kennedy. Myopia, which lends to many an aspect of peering benevolence, did not achieve this for her.

‘An odd little man, somewhat shitty,’ she said, still referring apparently to Jennings. ‘He said he would send someone. Well, this is what I want, darling, I will just tell you now because I have not much time, some men are coming to take pictures. I am appearing in a play on the British television in October and I have the script to look at now. It is a kind of family tragedy about Greek peasants in the Peloponnese. There is a good part for me, the mother, a strong part, but we have to make some changes in the script.’

‘Yes, I see,’ Kennedy said.

‘Also you must correct my accent. It is too American. I must speak English as the English expect foreigners to speak it.’

Miss Polimenou produced from the pocket of her robe a leather spectacle case and donned tinted glasses of a greenish shade. She gave Kennedy a long look through them. ‘My God!’ she said. ‘You are a tall man. How much do you weigh?’

‘About thirteen and a half stone,’ Kennedy said.

‘Good beef, ah!’ said Miss Polimenou. ‘Do you think you can help me?’

‘I’m sure of it.’

‘You will not regret it, darling. How much is that in kilos?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘In kilos, how much you weigh?’

‘I’m not sure; a kilo is about two pounds, isn’t it? That would be …’

‘I like a big man,’ Miss Polimenou said. ‘Let’s have a look at the play now. We can do the first act maybe. It’s in my bedroom.’

‘But the men,’ said Kennedy, suddenly disquieted. ‘The men who are coming to take the pictures.’

‘They can wait.’ She laid a beringed hand on his arm. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

The bedroom was predominantly blue, Kennedy noticed. Miss Polimenou made no move to get the script. ‘Got good biceps muscles too, I bet,’ she said.

‘They’re not bad,’ Kennedy said, ‘I suppose. I don’t really get enough exercise.’ He was unable to prevent his voice from quavering a little during this utterance, for Miss Polimenou, while still apparently looking through her tinted lenses at his arms, had laid her hand elsewhere.

Jennings sat at his desk, wheezing very slightly, tapping softly with his fountain-pen on the blotter before him. Beyond the blotter was his papier-mâché tray, with tea things and shortbread biscuits. He was musing on the inconsistencies of the English language and on the imminent arrival in Athens of an English mandolinist for whom a recital and afterwards a cocktail party had to be arranged. The difficulty was that although the hall had to be booked in advance and the invitations for the cocktail party issued, the mandolinist had not yet said definitely when he would be arriving. I hope, Jennings said to himself experimentally, that the fellow arrives in time. But, of course, that was ambiguous. It might mean arrive in time to perform at the appointed hour or it might merely mean arrive in the course of time. There existed, it was true, the radiantly precise on time, but that argued an attitude to a mandolinist (admittedly a minor one), more appropriate to a person one directly employed — a plumber, perhaps, come to mend a pipe. The amazing range and complexity of the English prepositions, no other language could approach them. The puny French à, for example, the heavy German mitt, made to do service in a dozen different contexts, they came nowhere near the ease and grace of the English. Once the prepositions were abandoned, of course, one met with difficulties. Consider clauses, some extraordinary things happened in clauses. If he, Jennings, for example, were to say to his assistant Robinson, during the cocktail party, ‘It will soon be time the mandolinist was going,’ then they would both, clutching their glasses, be confronted by this stark, this inexplicable, this mystical past tense. Was going. Robinson, of course, would notice nothing, make some glib reply. Not a spiritual man, Robinson. There was an alternative, to be sure, time for him to go — the boundless infinitive, spanning like the participles all times, without number, without tense. Still, he was reluctant to abandon that dark irrational past. It gave power to the user. ‘It will soon be time the mandolinist was going or went.’ He heard himself answering with impeccable modulations the flurried questions of foreign students rendered distraught by this inconsistency. ‘If you will permit me to observe, ladies and gentlemen,’ or ‘If I may be allowed at this point to observe, to your many questions my only answer can be, that this is the language we use,’ accompanied, as he glanced from face to face, by the impenetrable blandness of the Zen master.

Some of this blandness had appeared on his face, but it faded as he thought once again how undesirable it would be that the mandolinist should return to London in any way dissatisfied with his reception. It must not be thought that he, Jennings, was indifferent to the arts. Perhaps Robinson had some news. He did nothing for the moment, however, to summon his assistant. He sipped tea for some while and nibbled a biscuit. The biscuits, he noted, were not quite fresh, unduly friable; little crumbs fell over the dark serge of his lapels. He must register a complaint, a sharp one, to the administrative office about the quality of the biscuits that were reaching his table. Hard, when one could eat almost nothing else, to have crumbly biscuits sent up to one. He made a note on the blotter, and this purposeful activity recalled to him the question of prepositions. It would be a good idea, he thought, to get Willey to prepare a paper for him, taking a single substantive and proliferating examples to give, as it were, in miniature a demonstration of the richness of English in this respect. It might make a useful appendix to his book. Hand for example ‘to hand’, ‘by hand’, ‘in hand’, ‘on hand’, ‘at hand’. That would serve admirably. Willey’s was a temperament perfectly suited to this sort of research. The donkey work, as Jennings humorously put it to himself, without which no scholarship was possible. Not an original mind, of course, no feeling for the marvellous paradox at the heart of grammar, a structure monumental yet always in flux. All right in his place. Latterly, though, he had not seemed to know that place. Jennings had not forgotten his insolence at the staff meeting. ‘Permit me to observe, Mr Willey, that I know something of your previous history, and to your many requests for a permanent post I can only say …’ Mackintosh was the man for a permanency. He had recognised Mackintosh’s promise from the outset, his devotion to grammatical forms, the absence of any sentimental reluctance to inform on less-conscientious colleagues. Jennings even felt some slight affection for Mackintosh, who recalled his own first faltering steps as an untried Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, in Istanbul, all those years ago. Mackintosh would be waiting outside for him now. Presumably he had been in touch with Eleni Polimenou, in accordance with his instructions. It was of the utmost importance that nothing be allowed to ruffle Eleni Polimenou. There must be no reservations in the glowingly favourable report Jennings hoped she would make of him in London as courtier, scholar and wit. Besides this any number of mandolinists paled into insignificance. Eleni Polimenou’s word carried real weight.

He pressed a button in his desk and after a few moments Robinson appeared, wearing a navy-blue blazer and a green cravat. Jennings looked at him sourly. His assistant’s sartorial pretensions always affected him disagreeably. They marked Robinson as a man without real interest in English as a Foreign Language.

‘Has anything further been received,’ Jennings said, ‘regarding the arrival of Mr Slingsby-Merd?’

‘Nothing, I’m afraid. There is a cinema on Stadium Street which would be available in the mornings, but they require to be told exactly when.’

‘Naturally.’

There was a short silence during which Robinson assembled his shrewd expression. ‘By the way,’ he said at last, ‘are you acquainted with the work of a poet, a contemporary poet, named Gilligan?’

‘Just a moment,’ Jennings said. ‘Gilligan, did you say?’ He never read poetry of any sort, being unable to tolerate the violence done to syntax. His reading consisted almost entirely of books about linguistics with, for light relief, property advertisements in newspapers of the sort that are accompanied by photographs. ‘The name has a certain resonance,’ he said. ‘It, ah, rings a bell.’

‘None of the people I’ve asked so far have been acquainted with his work,’ Robinson said.

‘Gilligan, Gilligan, Gilligan,’ Jennings said with a remote expression, as though summoning something from the depths. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well, you remember a person named Kennedy who called here some time ago?’

‘Yes,’ Jennings said. His alertness increased visibly. ‘I remember him quite clearly. Not a good type.’ He had made a note on his blotter about Kennedy while still in the grip of the rage those insolent sarcasms had roused in him.

‘Well,’ Robinson said, ‘he offered to give a lecture on contemporary poetry at the institute. Of course, I pressed him for details’ — Robinson shrewdness intensified — ‘I mean to say, anyone could just walk in here, couldn’t they? He mentioned this Gilligan as a key figure. I haven’t, as I say, been able to find anyone who has read him, or even heard of him.’

‘In my opinion,’ Jennings said, ‘that is not a young man to be trusted. An ill-bred and coarse-grained young man. He spoke of the Greeks as wogs, for example. In my hearing.’

‘That’s a bit thick,’ Robinson said. ‘I am coming to the conclusion,’ he added, ‘that Gilligan does not exist. Gilligan is simply a name he invented on the spur of the moment. It seems incredible.’

‘There was something inherently untrustworthy and semi-educated about him.’ Jennings lifted his upper lip in a slight snarl. ‘Also, if I remember, he had a cockney accent. Quite unmistakably.’

He looked fixedly at Robinson, who narrowed his eyes even further and looked back. ‘So he did,’ Robinson said. ‘So he did.’

The two men looked at each other in silence for some moments, then Jennings placed his fingertips together with renewed urbanity. ‘Is Mr Mackintosh out there?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Ask him to come in, will you? And let me know as soon as anything further is received concerning Mr Slingsby-Merd.’

‘Will do,’ said Robinson, who was inclined at times to brisk abbreviations.

While he waited, Jennings found Kennedy’s name on his blotter and put a ring round it, enclosing as an afterthought the date. ‘Ah,’ he said, when Mackintosh came in. ‘You wanted to see me?’

Mackintosh inclined his head sideways to an angle of about forty-five degrees. His delivery, while lacking Jennings’ plopping virtuosity, had an exaggerated distinctness that promised well for the future. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s only a suggestion, sir, of course, but what I thought was, why don’t we have a sort of extra-mural weekly lecture?’

‘H’m,’ Jennings said. ‘Extra-mural. I see; yes.’

‘Yes; perhaps on Saturday mornings, but that would be for you to decide sir, of course. Each member of staff could deliver a lecture on successive Saturdays, on some aspect of English Language teaching, to a selected audience of students and practitioners.’

‘It sounds promising, promising,’ Jennings said. ‘I will give the matter my full consideration, Mr Mackintosh. Did you come to an arrangement with Eleni Polimenou?’

Mackintosh righted his head, which he had been keeping tilted while he watched the effect on Jennings of his suggestion. ‘No,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact I didn’t.’

Jennings looked at him in surprise. ‘Why was that? You went to see her, didn’t you?’

Oh yes, I went to see her, only about half an hour ago, as a matter of fact, but when I got there she said she was fixed up already. She said she was quite satisfied. She’s got rather a raucous laugh, hasn’t she? Not what you’d expect at all. Someone from you had already been, she said. A big boy, she described him as. I thought this was hardly likely, so I asked who it was. She said a man called Kennedy. I was introduced to a person of that name some days ago, by Mr Willey. It might be the same man.’

‘Did you point out to her that he was not in any way an official person?’ Jennings spoke even more deliberately than usual, in order to disguise the rage which the mention of this name had awakened.

‘Yes, I did. I said I was pretty sure the fellow had no official backing, but she didn’t seem to care. She said Mr Kennedy knew his onions. Those were her exact words. She has a picturesque way of expressing herself.’ Mackintosh commenced what was almost a chuckle, but seeing no response on Jennings’ face, he tilted his head quickly and said, ‘It’s a bad show, sir, isn’t it?’

‘So he is one of Mr Willey’s friends, is he?’ Jennings said slowly.

‘I gather so, sir,’ Mackintosh said, restoring his head to the vertical. ‘I gather so.’

After Mackintosh had gone, Jennings mused on Kennedy for a while malignantly. The man ought to be denounced, of course. But for a moment his hands were tied. If Eleni Polimenou pronounced herself satisfied there was nothing really to be done. She was not, Jennings sensed, the sort of person to be much disturbed by the illegality of Kennedy’s proceedings. Better to leave things as they were for the moment. At all costs Eleni Polimenou must not be antagonised. Jennings sighed. It was all so difficult. How much better, really, if humanity could be approached like grammar, such persons as Kennedy classified once and for all as irregular, like certain verb forms, for example. Then everyone could read and be apprised of them, they would never be able to deceive again by false analogy with regular people. …

As a means of forgetting Kennedy and his own powerlessness, Jennings fell to imagining a perfectly arranged, rapturously applauded mandolin recital at the end of which people thundered, not for the performer, that mere adjunct Slingsby-Merd, but for the organising brain, Jennings. Jennings. Jennings. He stood blinking charmingly raising his hand for silence, waiting for a hush to fall over the vast audience. Ladies and Gentlemen, if I may be permitted to observe, in reply to your many requests for further recitals, I can only say …

The man Mitsos was following pursued a steady course, coming out on Amalias opposite the National Gardens. They passed the sponge seller on his customary corner, straw hat low over his eyes, his sponges strung round his body. Large-pored, ochreous, of all sizes, their soft organic shapes were in startling contrast to the hard edges of the kerb and the granite facings of the buildings behind.

They went past the massive columns of the Temple of Zeus, then to the right along the avenue of Dionysus the Areopagite, past the theatre of that older pagan Dionysus of wild celebrations. Above them on the right the slopes of the Acropolis with the pale gold of the Parthenon at its crest. All the way along the mosaic pavement of the avenue, like the echo of his steps, Mitsos heard the chipping of metal on stone, coming clear from the Acropolis on the still air, through the intermittent trilling of the cicadas; masons were squatting amid the vegetation with which these slopes had been planted, fabricating items needed for more extensive, more evocative ruins; cornice, pediment, the fluted drums of columns.

At the Odeon of Herodus Athens they left the pavement and mounted the steps towards the Acropolis. They climbed past flagged terraces, clumps of laurel and umbrella pine, emerging on the wide, level terrace which partially girdles the hill from north to south, the southern side leading to the little kiosk where those who intend to ascend to the Parthenon itself buy their tickets, the northern broadening into a coach park fringed with stalls selling postcards, coloured slides, reproductions in plaster of antique vases and statuary. This was an area devoted entirely to chicanery and the importuning of tourists; below precincts sacred to Athena and Poseidon, light gauges twinkled and the gold molars of lurking photographers, and persons vociferated in broken English.

The man exchanged some pleasantries with the vendors, was evidently well known there. Then, passing further along the hill northward, he took up finally a position directly beside the rough steps leading to the summit of the Areopagus. He was directly in the sun there, and proceeded to open his umbrella, the purpose of which was at last fully revealed. It was a vast umbrella of an old-fashioned sort with a long handle and strongly arched struts. The black cloth was very thin, especially where the spokes distended it, so that to Mitsos, standing somewhat below the man at a point further down the path, the umbrella resembled a symmetrically arched membrane, partially admitting the light, like the fully extended wings of a huge bat. The man stood quite still beside the steps, his head and shoulders in shadow. From time to time he spoke to groups of passers-by, appearing to make to them some proposition.

Mitsos looked over the westward side of the Acropolis where numbers of people, having obtained their tickets of admission below, ascended by degrees in a sort of slow swarm towards the massive portals of the Propylae. So pure and brilliant was the light that perspectives were obliterated, the slim pillars set into the sides of the hill among the Venetial bulwarks having the same apparent distance from him as the columns of the Sacred Way and the narrow summit of Lycavettos beyond, monuments and hills forming a great frieze against the depthless blue of the sky. The streams of new devotees, guide-books in hand, clambered up through the portals and disappeared into the blue distances beyond.

He glanced down over the florid Roman façade of the Odeon. From this eminence he could trace the steps by which, following the man, he had arrived here, the ascending terraces, the careful mosaic of the avenue, the jumble of streets beyond. Always in Athens there were these prospects, this visual recreation or reminder of the way one had come, which gave a sort of dignity to journeyings about the city, a sense almost of wonder at human mobility and the tremendous intricacy of choices this involves.

He stopped alongside the umbrella and stood there waiting. He had approached at a time when the other was looking away, and he thought in this moment how strange and probably unprecedented it would be for this man, who was accustomed to making the first move, to find a person standing waiting beside him in this deferential way, waiting to be noticed. Then the man turned his head and Mitsos was looking into the wide face, framed by the umbrella. The strange eyes, with their mournful downward slant, regarded him steadily. They were not the colour of the eyes he remembered, not yellow, but a sort of pale hazel. This confrontation must have been of the briefest, but seemed endless to Mitsos. He smiled painfully at the man, but as yet said nothing. He could get no distinct impression of the other’s face yet, only its width, and the eyes, like a dog’s. Surely the eyes were the same?

‘You wanna guide?’ the man said. ‘A guide for the Areopagus?’ His voice, which Mitsos had for some reason expected to be authoritative, was little more than a harshly intensified whisper. Somewhere inside that bulk, it seemed, vital passages were clogged.

‘I am Greek,’ Mitsos said. ‘You can speak Greek.’

The man smiled. He had full, slightly everted lips and his front teeth were very widely spaced. ‘Usually they are foreigners,’ he said. ‘You are not from Athens, then?’

‘I am from Epirus,’ Mitsos said.

The man lowered his umbrella and closed it. ‘Shall we go up?’ he said. ‘This hill,’ he whispered behind Mitsos as they were climbing, ‘the Areopagus, or Areos Pagus, as it was known in ancient times. …’ They stood together on the summit. ‘Down there, it was down there, the temple of Ares.’ He pointed down the north-west slope of the hill.

‘Ah yes,’ Mitsos said.

‘The ancient assembly, the Senate of the Areopagus, met here. While primarily a political body, it had the right to try certain criminal cases. …’ The voice whispered on laboriously, a few inches only from Mitsos’ ear, continuing its regurgitation of fact and legend. Mitsos listened only intermittently. He was possessed by the strangeness of his position, the strangeness of knowing exactly what this man had eaten for lunch. … ‘Also Orestes after the murder of his mother Clytemnestra is said to have appeared before this court. You have perhaps read The Eumenides of Aeschylus?’

‘Yes.’ Mitsos was impelled suddenly to get on to a more personal level with the man, the plane of opinion. ‘I have always thought he was justified,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘It was the crime of matricide,’ the man whispered. ‘An offence against the gods. … You do not speak with the accent of Epirus?’

‘I spent my childhood in Athens,’ Mitsos said.

‘The council was still functioning in the fifth century B.C., the Great Age. Pericles took away its political powers. Thereafter its chief purpose … The deserters of Chaeronia were tried here and condemned, in 338. Demosthenes also. … If you will come this way a little …’ He led Mitsos along a rocky terrace on the eastward side of the hill. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing upward to a higher rectangular terrace. ‘That is the highest point. It was there they conducted the trials of the criminals. And there, to the left, do you see that square stone, the big one, standing alone? That was used as a seat for the disputants. There were two originally it is said, the Stone of Outrage for the accused, the Stone of Resentment for the accuser.’

‘Which is the one remaining?’

‘No one can say.’

‘I think it is the Stone of Outrage,’ Mitsos said, with the same painful smile.

He was beginning now, with an almost unnerving distinctness, to take in the minutest details of the man’s face, the fair stubble along the jaws, the dark pitting of the long lower lip caused perhaps by some infection of the mouth, the ramification of lines and wrinkles round the eyes, the ruptured veins over the cheekbones showing darkly below the tan.

‘If we go round to this point … There you will see it, down towards the foot of the slope, that open space there, this was the sanctuary of the Erynes, infernal goddesses, avengers of murder, called also sometimes The Kindly Ones. Come once more this way …’ He led Mitsos to the central part of the terrace. ‘From here you have a good view. There is the Saronic Gulf, you see, and over there Mount Kithairon. Below us now the Agora, with the library of Hadrian beyond …

‘In the year A.D. 50,’ the man said, with suddenly increased power and volume, ‘St Paul delivered on this hill his Homily on the Unknown God which converted the senator Dionysus, known thereafter as St Denis the Areopagite. St Paul gave utterance to many solemn truths here, which, though received at the time with mockery and jeering …’ The voice went on rapidly, without faltering in the order of the words, though sinking at times into its former harsh and laborious whisper. ‘St Paul extolled the exalted ideal of humanity, without distinction between Greek, Jew or barbarian … foretold the collapse of the Hellenic world at that time so glorious. … The new religion that he brought was destined … The single force to which we Greeks owe everything, our nation, our language, our literature. This way, please. Take care down the steps, paidi mou.’

They descended to the broad terrace at the foot of the hill.

‘Thank you very much,’ Mitsos said. ‘That was most interesting.’ He took out a twenty-drachma piece and handed it over.

‘My pleasure,’ the man said.

‘What is your name?’ Mitsos asked. ‘In case I should need a guide again.’

‘Ask for George. That is what the foreigners began by calling me and now everyone does. I am well known here.’ He turned away, preliminary to raising the umbrella.

Mitsos was visited by a sharp feeling of discouragement. There was no legitimate pretext for detaining the man further. He was alone again. He went slowly back down the hill until he found a wooden bench under one of the pine-trees. From here he could still see George at his station.

While he waited many hundreds of people ascended to the Parthenon. George said his piece several times. Finally, just after six o’clock, he lowered his umbrella for the last time, furled it loosely, and began to make his way northward in the direction of the Agora. Mitsos followed circumspectly. The steps descended steeply, between red-roofed Turkish-style houses, with the mounds and rubble of the Agora on the left, towards Morastiraki Square. Before reaching the square, however, George turned off into a maze of very narrow streets, little more than alleys. Mitsos walked with an exaggerated lightness. If the man had turned to look behind he must have recognised him, but he went on his way, looking ahead, as one very familiar with his surroundings. They emerged on a street that Mitsos thought he recognised, without remembering the name. Here it was close and airless, with tall, dun-coloured buildings rising on either side. From a side-turning Mitsos heard the desperate tearing sounds of an accordion. George turned again down an alley-way that led between blank whitewashed walls into a tiny square, with a kiosk and two orange-trees, and at the further side a small dilapidated taverna built in one floor, with silent birds in cages on its front wall, around the entrance. Immediately alongside the taverna ran a narrow cobbled lane with the outer wall of the taverna on one side and the windowless backs of several small houses on the other. Standing at the corner of the square Mitsos was able to see George turn into the last of these houses, which was the only one to face on to the lane. A few yards further on the lane ended in a brick wall. Thus, although this was a densely populated district, no one could actually overlook the last house in the lane except from the exact position at the corner of the square where Mitsos was standing.

Mitsos waited. He was at peace now, sure that he had tracked George down. And this was confirmed a few minutes later when the other appeared at the street door in shirt-sleeves, holding a large teapot of blue enamel. Standing on the second of his three front steps and stretching out his arm to its fullest extent he began watering the little pots of purple and yellow pansies in a row on his window sill, giving to each pot a particular and loving care.