7

On the following Tuesday, Willey and Olivia were able to meet and go out to Pendelis in the morning, to look at building sites. This was made possible because it was half-term at the Embassy School, where Olivia worked, and because Willey discovered when he went to the university to give his weekly lecture on the Victorian novelists that the students were on strike again. They went on strike every summer term, sometimes for a few days only, sometimes for the best part of the term. It was the heat, coupled with various political and economic discontents. Willey went to his usual classroom to find only two students there, playing chess. So he phoned Olivia and they met at a point near Canning Square, where the Pendelis buses left from.

Olivia was waiting for him at the bus-stop. She was dressed in a pink gingham blouse and a peasant-style skirt, black, very full, with a broad folksy pattern stitched in gold round the hem. She also carried a craft-shop bag with further Greek motifs. This was better by far than the knapsack she would sometimes bring, with the thermos-flask of tea — she was a great girl for thermos-flasks. Olivia frequently affected home-woven things, she even sometimes wore wooden beads that clicked together, and what she called chunky ear-rings. Willey suffered with her in this matter of dress, suffered with her lapses of taste and her basic, ineradicable assumption of defeat in advance. He had always thought that for Olivia dressing up to go out was less an act of vanity to ensnare the travelling eye than an act of courage to endure it. Lately, it was true, perhaps emboldened by his love, she had gone in for more sophisticated adornment, bought variously coloured headbands, grown her hair longer. Once, staggeringly, she had met him with a huge mauve artificial rose pinned to her blouse. He had complimented her quickly on this, but something must have been wrong with his tone or his glance, for she had never worn it again. In fact he was helplessly opposed to these experiments. Olivia represented for him not abundance, but a due recognition of inherent limitation. He did not want the sort of love that breeds anguish and the expectation of marvels. Olivia and he, he told himself frequently, with mingled tenderness and pain, had settled for each other; any longings on the part of either that could not be met within their relationship — and some of his own were totally inadmissible — had had to be put beyond hope. Thus he was distressed by any tendency towards expansiveness that Olivia showed, any vagaries, anything unexpected, even if this promised to prove an enrichment. He wanted her as she was, unable or unwilling to realise that she, after so many years of deprivation, of being the unattached girl, did not need commending for the qualities — camaraderie, kindness, social availability — that she had developed in self-defence, but for those more specifically feminine traits for which in the past she had had small encouragement.

Today she greeted him easily and naturally, without that strained sense of occasion that sometimes afflicted her. ‘Just in time,’ she said. ‘This bus leaves in about three minutes. Let’s get in.’

On the bus he told her about the strike. Of course,’ he said, ‘they will be used by the Opposition as evidence of popular unrest. There is no popular unrest. There are simply numerous local discontents which never combine.’

‘Why is it,’ she said, ‘that one only hears of students striking and demonstrating, never these poor labourers and people?’

He could tell by her tone that she had slipped into the rôle of female seeking guidance from male in public affairs. He said, ‘They are the only ones with the necessary irresponsibility, I suppose. Everyone else has too much to lose. The unions have no power except in collaboration with the Government.’

The bus had passed now through the nearer suburbs of Athens, and the green foothills of Pendelis were quite close, gashed white higher up with the marble quarries. In the flat land before the hills were groves of olives, small orchards of apricot and peach. The bus turned down a long straight avenue planted on either side with eucalyptus, from which other, narrower roads branched off at regular intervals. They got off at the terminus, a little square with a trellised taverna, and walked slowly up the ascending street beyond it, which at a certain distance developed into a loose-surfaced track. After some minutes they came to a narrower track, branching away from this, and they followed it, since they had not been this way before, continuing to walk towards the hills as the track narrowed into little more than a footpath, rose, then dipped abruptly, so that suddenly they were out of sight of all habitation, among pine and scrub with huge poppies flaring everywhere. Now the characteristic colours of Athens were all around them: sage and speckled grey and terracotta. Wherever the land was cut it bled sandstone red. Here and there high above them they saw through the pines more quarries, neat white scallops in the hillsides. All the land in their immediate vicinity was scheduled for building development.

‘That would be an interesting site,’ Willey said, pointing a little up the hillside at a sharply sloping area of ground flanked by large rocks. ‘You could have a splendid rock garden at the front there.’

‘Yes, John, but it doesn’t face south, I don’t think, does it?’ Olivia had two fixed ideas about the house they would have: that it should face south, and have an internal courtyard with a tiled floor, and a fountain. Willey, on the other hand, thought largely in terms of rock gardens. They both thoroughly enjoyed these inspections of the terrain, which they conducted on an average twice a month.

‘Water, that is the important thing,’ said Willey, nodding his head sagely. ‘We mustn’t forget about the water.’

‘I can just see you,’ Olivia said, ‘in your old things, watering the garden. In your old hat.’

He glanced at her smiling, then looked away again, disturbed by the depth of love in her eyes. He knew of old this way of hers of isolating him in particular images, to stay her love on: watering the garden, marking papers by the fire, playing with the children. There was something curiously youthful, immature really, about these projections, but they served her need — since she lacked skill at expressing love directly — and she held to them with a tenacity that Willey found both moving and amusing. It occurred to him that this might be an appropriate time to tell her about Kennedy’s phone call. ‘By the way,’ he said casually, ‘you remember that fellow they sent to me a few weeks ago, Kennedy his name is, they sent him to me to be fixed up… ?’

‘Yes, I remember. They have a cheek …’

‘Yes, well, he rang me up last night at the institute. Wanted to know if I was free tomorrow evening to meet Eleni Polimenou.’

‘The actress? But I didn’t know she ever came to Greece. She lives in America.’

‘She’s in Athens now, it seems. Kennedy said on the phone that he had spoken to her about me, and she would like to meet me. I can’t imagine why. It seems he’s been helping her with some play that she’s appearing in.’

‘Goodness,’ Olivia said, ‘you are going up in the world.’

He knew, before he turned his head, what he would see on her face, that look of assumed indifference. Nevertheless his spirits sank at the sight of it.

‘You said you’d go, I suppose,’ she said.

‘Yes, I did.’ Willey tried hard to keep his voice free from asperity. This immediate unreasoning hostility to any move on his part not including her was something he found difficult to endure in Olivia. It meant, he always thought, that she must be unhappy.

‘It ought to be interesting,’ he said. ‘And, after all, it is not often one has a chance of meeting a celebrity.’

‘She’s celebrated for more than just acting,’ Olivia said, with a little smile — she went in for little smiles when she was wounded.

‘I daresay she is.’

‘They say,’ said Olivia, looking straight before her, the little smile coming and going, ‘that she pays people to sleep with her. She must be fifty if she’s a day, and, of course, when you get to that age …’

‘I say, look out, Olivia,’ said Willey urgently, but it was too late. While she had been speaking the path had narrowed further and Willey was now walking a few paces behind. What she did not appear to see, and he only at the last moment saw, was that the path took a sudden tilt downward, the steepness of which was partially concealed by the shrubs that straggled over it on either side. Olivia, rigid with grievance, was precipitated downward before she knew what was happening. She slipped, clutched wildly, and fell headlong. She lay where she had fallen, without a sound of any sort, several feet below, in a rocky and tangled declivity roughly circular in shape. Willey scrambled down after her.

‘Are you hurt?’ he said wildly, bending over her.

‘No,’ she said quietly. Only winded. Give me a hand up.’

Perhaps it was reaction to his fears for her safety, but the Girl Guide, matter-of-factness of this reply infuriated Willey. And when he had lifted her to her feet; regarded the pallor of her rather equine face, the eyes moist and vague, either from pain or vexation, the dishevelled hair, above all perhaps, the burrs which she had collected in her descent, which liberally adhered to the peasant skirt; when he considered these things his fury mounted until it refused any longer to be contained.

‘Tell me, Olivia,’ he said, ‘why is it that you are so bloody clumsy?’

Her face did not change its expression, as though no further damage could be registered facially. And immediately Willey felt ashamed, ashamed of the words he had uttered and the entire unfairness of his anger. He was not able, he would never be able, to explain to Olivia his anger and his shame, the ideal of physical grace and adroitness that accompanied him on these expeditions, for ever trembling in his imagination on the verge of its adolescent incarnation, lithe legs stepping delicately and surely where poor Olivia had tumbled and rolled. …

Now, unable to speak, he looked about him blankly for some moments. It was a hollow where Pan might have fluted, completely secret and enclosed, tangled with vegetation, savage with seamed granite. A place that appeared for the moment menacing, as though ready to blast the intruder with myth.

‘I don’t like it very much down here,’ Olivia said. ‘I’m sensitive to atmosphere, you know.’

The rank sweetness of thyme was in Willey’s nostrils, cicadas shrilled all around and the more solemn liturgies of bees resounded. Beyond this he could sense the stony silence of the hills. There was something exciting to him in the heat and seclusion of the place; he felt that any stealthy act could be cancelled on emergence, or left down here, rather, to vibrate for ever. In order to create a diversion he stepped nearer to one of the several umbrella pines in the dell, and looked closely at the burnished quills on which the sunlight seemed to dwell with particular care. ‘Aren’t they beautiful trees,’ he said, ‘really?’

Suddenly, however, he heard behind him Olivia exclaim with disgust, ‘They’ve got some sort of pest in them!’ Then he saw that the boughs higher up were clothed with great white silky balls, slung hammockwise, glinting in the sun. The nearest of them was outlined against the sky, revealing a black squirming lump of life at the centre. Thousands of caterpillars moved blindly in there, which within hours probably would break through on to their green pastures.

While he stood gazing with repugnance upward — a similar activity was taking place on all the other pines in the hollow — he became aware for the first time, in this landscape, among these trees, of a sound he had grown accustomed to in Athens itself, the sound of chipping and tapping, metal on stone, made furtive here by reason of the impossibility of tracing it to its source, and also, strangely, by the infected trees among which it was taking place. The sound of invisible construction.

‘I have it down here,’ Olivia said suddenly. ‘Please get me out.’

From some perversity which he did not analyse, Willey made no immediate reply to this. He was still looking upward at the branches of the pines. Olivia began circling the hollow, too quickly, stumbling over the rocky, uneven ground. Once she tripped and nearly fell. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she demanded furiously. ‘I want to get out.’

Willey removed his gaze from the caterpillars and looked across at her.

‘You fool,’ she said loudly. ‘You fool.’ Her head was lowered as though she were about to charge him. Hair had escaped from the bun at her nape and hung over her face. Her eyes strained upward through this screen, regarding him with hatred. He was astonished. Suddenly the shrilling of cicadas seemed to intensify, grew deafening. It was very hot in the hollow, the scent of thyme was almost overpowering. He had not thought Olivia could look so baleful. Why did he not reassure her? Suddenly he knew they were not house-hunting at all, that was a pretence, they were passing some time before dying. ‘Good heavens, Olivia,’ he said.

‘I want to get out,’ she said.

‘All right,’ he said quickly. ‘This way we can get out, there, where the rock goes up, there are footholds. I’ll go first and you follow.’

Slowly, slipping, clambering, clutching at tree roots and jutting rocks, they were able to emerge. They discovered a faint track that led further round the hillside, and followed this. For several minutes they walked on in silence. The path improved steadily. Then Willey said, ‘We must have taken the wrong path, somehow. Before, I mean. The proper path couldn’t possibly lead into that hollow, could it?’

After a very long pause Olivia said in her normal tones, ‘Well, I think it’s very dangerous, especially for old people, don’t you?’

‘Extremely so,’ he said promptly.

‘The municipality ought to do something about it,’ Olivia said.

He nodded. Something happened down there, all the same, he thought. Something quite important in its way, to be folded into their lives, just as the declivity itself, now lost behind them, was enfolded in these violated, doomed hills. For those few minutes they had lapsed, they had failed to accord to each other the habitual, the human indulgence. Such a thing must never happen again, he told himself. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that I’d care for a house on this side all that much, you know. Rather exposed and in the winter …’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s so far from the sea, too. Say what you like, the sea is an important consideration.’

‘Perhaps Old Faleron would be a good place to look,’ he said. Of course, we’d have to have a car.’

They passed through a screen of trees to emerge, amazingly, upon a surfaced and sedate strip of road, up there, miles from anywhere, laid out dead straight, with concrete lamp-posts and a neat roundabout, running for a few hundred yards only, beginning and ending in the wilderness of the hills. The sounds of building grew more marked, echoing all around them.

‘You’d need a helicopter to use this road,’ Willey said. ‘Quite unrealistic.’

Now they began to see houses, set behind trees, sugary white in the sunshine, granulated and blinding. Glimpses of paved courts and terraces, puny lemon trees in pots. Here and there the blue gleam of tiled swimming pools.

‘There are people living here already,’ Willey said. ‘There must be another road somewhere. … By the way, if you don’t want me to go tomorrow night, I’ll find an excuse …’

‘Oh, no, you must go,’ Olivia said. ‘It might lead to something quite important. Call in on your way home, if you like.’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I was intending to do that.’