Lady Cameron had recognised Charles Hornett at once.
It was in the departure lounge of Number Two Terminal at Heathrow. She had shown her passport, briefly resigned her handbag for rummaging, and walked through the contraption that rings a bell or flashes a light should one happen to be secreting any substantial metallic object about one’s person. There was something slightly ignominious about this last manoeuvre. Perhaps it suggested to cultivated persons (and on this trip, incidentally, they would all be that) the symbolic driving beneath a yoke which in the ancient world had transformed a free man into a slave. Lady Cameron had once, in a sense, been a slave, and she hadn’t liked it at all.
Yes, there was Charles – instantly known, although unglimpsed for fifty years. He was among a group of people not themselves labelled (as happens on packaged tours within the simpler reaches of society) but with the distinctive yellow and red tags supplied by Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin dutifully attached to their hand-baggage. So here was another instantaneous discovery. She and Charles were together going to do ‘Sites and Flowers of Thessaly and Epirus’ under the guidance of Professor and Mrs Boss-Baker.
Lady Cameron had never gone out of her way to avoid a meeting with Charles, and she had from time to time envisaged – with amusement rather than discomposure – various circumstances under which a casual encounter might take place. It hadn’t, indeed, been like that at the beginning; for a long period after their divorce she would have regarded anything of the sort as quite horrible. But after fifty years! It was almost something that ought to take place when each had survived their disaster so long. It would not be a touching occasion, or sentimental in any way. Essentially it would be curious. They would both comport themselves properly, and that would be that.
Lady Cameron saw a number of familiar faces in the little group.
There was a pronounced element of reunion in the occasion for many of them. Like Lady Cameron herself, they had ‘been with’ the Boss-Bakers before. Indeed, if you hadn’t ‘been with’ the Boss-Bakers before, you were apt to feel, at least at the start, a bit of an outsider in the party. So what about Charles? He was already talking fluently to two elderly women a little wedged into a corner of the lounge. But as a conversationalist he had always been quick off the mark, and it was quite possible that he was a new boy in the Pipkin and Pipkin fold.
Mrs Boss-Baker bore down on Lady Cameron with enthusiastic acclaim. This wasn’t because Lady Cameron, being a baronet’s widow, was likely to be the person of most formal consequence in the group. Mrs Boss-Baker was always enthusiastic, although it didn’t prevent her from also being wary and alert. She had a genius for smoothing things over almost before they were ruffled. If you had been promised that your ‘facilities’ would include a proper bath and you found yourself fobbed off with a shower, Mrs Boss-Baker would know in advance precisely how cross you were likely to be, and proceed to action in the light of this knowledge. And nobody could call her shy. Professor Boss-Baker was shy. He was invariably voted, indeed, wholly delightful; he was a marvellous lecturer; and although he claimed competence only over the flowers he was a classical man by training and knew quite as much about the sites as did the young Greek archaeologists commonly turned on to expatiate about them. Only Professor Boss-Baker did have an odd propensity for simply slipping away. At one moment he would be talking charmingly and instructively to the ladies of his party on this wild flower and that, and the next moment he would have disappeared, mysteriously and unaccountably, into a landscape that ought not to have afforded cover for a mouse. His wife, however, was always to hand.
Mrs Boss-Baker recalled former trips, and Lady Cameron made suitable replies. It gave her time to think about Charles, and also to assess as a whole the party as so far constituted. It was an elderly crowd; indeed it was possible to suppose that she and Charles, both in their mid-seventies, were going to consort with several people a good deal older than themselves. Some of them, it occurred to her, might go in for remembering insignificant social events remote in time. But the small history of Charles Hornett and herself had been very insignificant indeed, and it was only her second marriage that had made her known beyond the bounds of a single parish. So although she had met some of these elderly people on previous trips it was unlikely that any of them would have a story to tell the others about Charles and herself. Which was just as well – trivial although the whole thing was. A divorced couple finding themselves fortuitously on the same tour would come under a good deal of covert scrutiny were their relationship – or former relationship – discovered and bruited abroad.
There was, of course, Mrs Boss-Baker. It was quite clear that she never set out on one of these expeditions without doing vigorous homework on the pedigree of her flock. This enabled her never to put a foot wrong. She and her husband, she would cheerfully confide to you, had to hold down the job year after year if their two sons were to continue at their public school. It was only a commendable love of Greece on the part of a small section of the English prosperous classes that stood between these youths and the horrors of comprehensive education. So Mrs Boss-Baker, although she might well know the truth, would be discretion itself.
‘Charles, this is after more years than one cares to remember . . .’ Lady Cameron had decided to begin – and for the moment pretty well to end – with that. Later on, she and Charles would work it out that there had formerly been some slight acquaintanceship between them. It would be deception – but deception of a civilised sort, designed to obviate any occasion of embarrassment to other people. And perhaps she had better not turn to Charles at once. For one thing, it didn’t look as if he had yet noticed her; for another, the Peppers were now in evidence, and had. The Peppers frequented the enterprises of Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin with an assiduity suggesting both uncommon physical vitality and enormous wealth. Yet they were a weedy couple, and it was demonstrably not to the ‘higher’ clergy that the Reverend Mr Pepper belonged. So there was something enigmatical about the Peppers, although a modicum of light was perhaps cast on it by Mrs Boss-Baker’s occasional discreet reference to Mrs Pepper as coming of ‘people very well known in the City’. Lady Cameron conversed for a few minutes with the Peppers. Mr Pepper, as usual on these occasions, retained his somewhat shabby clerical attire. But this effect he had a little lightened – as again was his custom – by superimposing upon it a new and therefore immaculate panama hat. Such objects, Lady Cameron vaguely believed, nowadays cost about as much as an air ticket to Athens.
And now for Charles, Lady Cameron resolved. He was still talking to the two women in a corner. But no: that was incorrect. It was the same corner, but a different brace of women. And as Lady Cameron approached they moved away. It had been a shade odd, she thought. Could they conceivably have been aware of an awkward moment as in prospect? Or was it simply that Charles still . .? But there was no time for speculation, and Lady Cameron’s prepared words were on her lips. They died there. Charles, planted squarely in front of her, was looking at her absolutely blankly. For a moment she supposed that this was what used to be called the cut direct; that Charles was simply going to refuse to know her. Then the truth came to her. He hadn’t recognised her. He was totally failing to recognise her now. It was rather a bewildering situation. Curiously, too, it was an intensely humiliating one.
Mrs Boss-Baker was at their side. The admirable woman had sensed some contretemps from afar and on the instant, and now she was performing an introduction.
‘Lady Cameron,’ she said, ‘may I introduce Mr Hornett? Mr Hornett has not been with us before, but has travelled extensively in the Far East. Mr Hornett, this is Lady Cameron, who has been President of the Alpine Flower Society.’ Having thus provided two little spring-boards towards acquaintanceship, Mrs Boss-Baker departed on some further diplomatic mission. She would keep it up untiringly until their flight was called and they had all been settled in their seats.
‘How do you do?’ Charles said with the perfunctory air (which Lady Cameron well remembered) of one getting through a useless preliminary. ‘I’m afraid I know nothing about alpine flowers. But I can tell you something I remember about my tactics when I decided I had as much information as I needed about the plans I had been working on when I was in Persia.’
‘In Persia?’ It was in a tone of well-bred interest that Lady Cameron contrived to respond to this prolix remark. Inwardly, she was overwhelmed. Charles was just as he had been. And how could it be otherwise? Leopards don’t change their spots, nor bores their blotches. Her former husband’s egotism, so mysteriously masked during their brief courtship, had calamitously revealed itself in the earliest days of their marriage. And now (if the thing were possible) he was even more of a monomaniac than he had proved to be fifty years ago.
‘Of course I hadn’t believed a word they told me,’ Charles was saying. ‘I’m not a fool, and it was as simple as that. I didn’t believe a word of it.’ Charles’s tone had now become aggressive, resentful, aggrieved – although what he was embarking upon was plainly an anecdote designed to show how he had triumphed over enemies. ‘I rather fancy I always know just where I stand when I find that it’s with cattle of that sort that I have to deal.’
Charles continued in this vein without any sign of stopping. It was all hideously of the past, and yet present here and now. She had been buried under this, stifled by it, crushed by it as by a cartload of stone, when she had been no more than a young bride. But now there was a bizarre super-addition to the burden. He still hadn’t a clue about her. He still believed her to be a stranger – an empty pot, a blank sheet or tabula rasa, for the reception, for the remorseless inscribing or incising, of all this compulsive self-absorption.
Lily Cameron had been a beauty. She liked to believe that people still spoke of her as a handsome woman. Was she in brutal truth an unrecognisable ruin? Charles wasn’t. Age had not withered him nor custom staled his infinite monotony. And again she had that dreadful sense of humiliation. Feebly, she told herself that his eyesight might have become defective – and his hearing, surely, as well. But that was a wholly unnecessary conjecture. As a young man his self-regard had been a literal thing. Even on their bridal night he probably hadn’t really seen her. So why should he be seeing her now?
Nor, presumably, had he ever thought of her after they had parted, or acquainted himself with her subsequent fortune in any regard. Her second married name would mean nothing to him. Hence this strange situation. There seemed no reason why it should not continue through the fortnight that lay ahead. That, certainly, would be the most comfortable thing: that when they parted here at Heathrow he should be in the same state of ignorance as held him now. But would playing it that way be quite – well, spirited? Ought there not to be, at some time during their trip, a dénouement to this small absurd episode? Lady Cameron, who owned a sense of style, was not at all sure that it oughtn’t to be so.
The flight to Athens was called, and the Pipkin and Pipkin party – individually scurrying or at leisure according to their degree of experience as pilgrims – made their way down the long sloping corridor leading to their plane. Lady Cameron, it need scarcely be related, secured herself a seat comfortably remote from Charles Hornett.
‘Sites and Flowers’ didn’t, as it happened, begin too well. Athens duly appeared below them, and the Acropolis was glimpsed. Both disappeared; a little later both turned up again; and a little later still they were plainly over nowhere in particular. Then the captain’s voice announced with careful indifference that there was trouble at Alexandria, and that Athens was in a bit of a fuss as a result. For the time being, in fact, Athens would have nothing to do with them. So they were now on their way to Salonika, which it was to be hoped would prove more hospitable, as their endurance was running out. This last was an ambiguous expression, since it might refer either to human patience or to aviation fuel. Mr Pepper, who had a map, announced that Salonika appeared to be about two hundred miles away.
In circumstances such as these the English are not, indeed, tight-lipped, since anything of the kind may indicate nervous strain. Rather they are low-keyed. The Pipkin and Pipkin party, although their ears were alert to catch the first spluttering of an engine which would draw upon them an Icarian fate in the Aegean now so unexpectedly expansed beneath them, conversed quietly from time to time on indifferent topics. Or they all did this except Charles Hornett – who conversed, or rather monologised, un-intermittently and in a penetrating voice to the two unfortunate ladies of his first acquaintance. His subject, being that of a battle fought with a recalcitrant Inspector of Taxes in the previous year, could have been only of a somewhat confined interest to his hearers, but this didn’t prevent Charles from according it a saga-like breadth of treatment. Mrs Boss-Baker (who had just been constrained to announce to her charges that tea and biscuits had run out on the plane, but that drinking water was still in moderate supply) must already have been aware that in Mr Hornett (widely travelled in the Far East though he might be) she had a first-class problem on her hands.
Salonika made no bones about receiving them, and after half an hour even permitted them to disembark – although it then immediately incarcerated them in an enormous glass box. The acoustics of this were notable as combining great resonance with the qualities of an echo-chamber of the kind favoured by the BBC when in quest of eerie effects. It was just right for Charles, who lived up to its opportunities for something under three hours. The party was then embarked again, flown back to Athens, given a meal in a restaurant distinguishably over-taxed and appalled by their arrival, and then driven for three hours in a coach through magnificent scenery which was unfortunately invisible. Finally, at two o’clock in the morning, they tumbled into bed in a hotel which the less bemused or better informed understood to be in the neighbourhood of Delphi. For a few quite appreciable periods during this Odyssey Charles was out of action. He owned the enviable faculty of being able to fall asleep at will, and to wake up fifteen minutes later, restored and alert for new exertions. During this nocturnal journey, too, he made the happy discovery that the coach in which the succeeding twelve days were to be largely spent was half as big again as the Pipkin and Pipkin crowd required. This meant that he could move round the vacant seats in turn – ‘chatting’ (as he would have outrageously expressed it) to a succession of small captive audiences.
On the following morning the party, to a man (or woman) heroically declaring itself refreshed and fit for anything, paid a visit to Hosios Loukas. Professor Boss-Baker, declaring himself wholly uninstructed on early Byzantine art, in fact knew at once which were the most approved mosaics, and was charmingly perceptive, if also a little whimsical, in front of them.
‘He means business, you know,’ Professor Boss-Baker said of the Christ of The Harrowing of Hell. ‘You can see he won’t let go of Adam easily. Eve is expected to look after herself. And as for David and Solomon – I’m told it’s David and Solomon there on the left – they’re quite clearly just you and me. So you can see how amazement and gratification are expected of us – and quite right, too, of course.’
There was a murmur of appreciation among the Pipkins – evoked partly by this important artistic object itself and partly by the Professor’s lightness of touch in hinting the propriety of mild reverence before such strange old things. Mrs Pepper ventured to explain with agreeable diffidence why the sun and moon were simultaneously present at the Crucifixion, and her husband translated the inscriptions on several of the mosaics. It was in the middle of this that Charles’s voice was again heard, addressing an unwary individual who had strayed from the company.
‘And he had the damned cheek,’ Charles’s voice was heard by all to declare, ‘to propose raising an assessment under Schedule D.’
Lady Cameron slipped out of the catholicon into the warm sun. Here in mid-April there was already the scent of lemon blossom in the air, and across the groves and orchards the eye travelled to the foothills of Helicon. ‘”Where Helicon breaks down in cliffs to the sea,”’ she murmured to herself. But she wasn’t feeling poetical. She was feeling ashamed. She knew – although she was now almost certain that none of her present companions were aware of her as having been Charles’s wife – that she was going to feel her heart sink every time she heard him speak. It would be her impulse always to edge away from him, as one used to edge away from a rashly-chosen school-friend when she proved liable to talk shaming nonsense.
On the following day the party ‘did’ Delphi, but Lady Cameron cried off. She had been to Delphi before, and could recall being properly awed by the undeniable numinosity of the site. She had been told, however, that it was now much commercialized. (‘”Not here, O Apollo, are haunts fit for thee,”’ she pronounced, returning to Matthew Arnold’s poem.) And of this she made an excuse to herself for a get-away plan. She ordered sandwiches and summoned a taxi – for she was a capable woman – and proposed to spend the day in solitude on the plateau of Mount Parnassus. But quite this was not to be. Mrs Boss-Baker appeared as she was about to drive off – a Mrs Boss-Baker all conspiratorial fun.
‘Please, can I come too?’ Mrs Boss-Baker asked childishly. ‘Oh, I am wicked! Here’s only the second day, and I’m dying for a little time off.’
Lady Cameron produced the necessary cordial acquiescence, although inwardly she was inclined to be annoyed. Just because she was seventy-four this interfering woman was judging her unfit to go off for a day’s ramble by herself. It was totally insufferable! But then Lady Cameron remembered those two boys at Rugby – paid for year by year at the cost of this sort of eternal vigilance on their parents’ part. If the Boss-Bakers lost a baronet’s doddering old widow over a precipice it was quite certain that Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin wouldn’t be too pleased. So Lady Cameron’s heart warmed towards Mrs Boss-Baker, and they got on excellently together throughout the day.
There was a lake and there was a deserted village. (‘Goldsmith in Phocis,’ Lady Cameron said – to the bewilderment of Mrs Boss-Baker, who was not literary.) They walked through irises and tiny forget-me-nots and sheets of blue veronica; chats and pipits and buntings enlivened the immediate scene; falcons and vultures hovered; in the distance the Muses’ haunt lay under brilliant sunlit snow. It was a perfect day, and ought to have been totally absorbing. Yet for Lady Cameron it wasn’t quite that. Ought she to have stuck it out? She asked herself the question again and again as it returned to her from its hiding place half-a-century back. Had she hung on, could she have broken through the dreadful prison of self-absorption that Charles had constructed for himself? Its walls had thickened over the years, and were certainly impregnable now. Even at the time of her first horrified realisation of his malady – for it was certainly that – she had judged it to be already so. But she had been very young – and might she not have been wrong? And to have stood before an altar with a man, taking tremendous vows – and then to have divorced him merely because he was a bore! And that had been it. Not, of course, in law. Only in queer places in America could you at that time have parted with a husband for such a reason. She had detected poor Charles in sporadic low amours – and had hardly blamed him in the least. It would have been unfair to do so, since her own going to bed with him had proved mutually unrewarding. But it was something upon which she was entitled to seize, and she had seized upon it – unscrupulously, she now told herself. It had, naturally, all been very uncomfortable. In those days any sort of airing adultery in court had been very uncomfortable indeed.
Thus did Lady Cameron, sharing her sandwiches with Mrs Boss-Baker on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, meditate a distant past. She knew that it wasn’t a very effective meditation, in the sense of being one that might lead to a changed course of conduct. She knew that she couldn’t have done other than she had done, and that if it could all happen again she would do it again. And she had stuck it out – for quite long enough to know. Why, for two whole years it was almost literally true that she had been reduced to silence – since from dawn to dusk there had scarcely been an opportunity of getting a word in edgewise! And how different it had been with her second husband. She and Donald had been endlessly interested each in the other. They had chattered together like happy children through a long married life.
Mrs Boss-Baker did not intrude upon these periods of abstraction on the part of her companion. From time to time their conversation strayed from the birds and flowers to one or another member of their party – sometimes not without amusement, but predominantly on the proper note of cordial regard. Mrs Boss-Baker said nothing about Mr Hornett. Was this because he was fast becoming such a pain in the neck (Lady Cameron had a brother who would have used this phrase) that any reference to him had tacitly been voted taboo? Or was it because Mrs Boss-Baker had indeed done her homework only too well? Lady Cameron didn’t much mind. Only she was coming to feel a little sorry for Charles. Surely through the terrible bars he had forged for himself he sometimes peered out and was aware of the figure he cut? Yes – she told herself again – she might have done something about it once, but it was too late now. The weird fact of his continued failure to identify her surely spoke of a pathological condition of a formidable sort, not to be resolved by amateurs.
The taxi reappeared, and in half an hour restored the two wanderers to their companions. Mrs Pepper, it seemed, had taken a photograph of the Castalian Spring, but was apprehensive that she had superimposed it upon one of the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaea. Another lady was triumphing in the discovery of an unfamiliar bee-orchid, pronounced by Professor Boss-Baker to be quite a surprise in this habitat. A third had stolen some bay leaves, and was inquiring whether it would be a further misdemeanour to smuggle them into England. Lady Cameron joined the group she judged likeliest to suggest a preliminary glass of ouzo before changing for dinner. Fortified by this, she ventured to speculate anew to herself on what would happen were she to confront Charles with the revelation that she was his former wife. She decided that it would be merely wounding and bewildering, and therefore a wicked and silly thing to do.
It was the agreeable custom of Professor Boss-Baker to spend half an hour or so after dinner talking about the following day’s prospects to any members of his party who cared to gather around. He did this with the most casual air, but in fact was contriving to keep a cunning balance of interest between one sort of activity and another. Everybody was going to get a fair share of their sort of thing. The botanical ladies (who were in a majority) would be afforded ample scampering grounds for hunting down the rarer flora of the region. But the archaeologically minded, and those who (like the Peppers) were deeply versed in the Glory that was Greece, and again those more modish persons who were becoming well-seen in Byzantine art: all would be catered for in the most accommodating fashion. Professor Boss-Baker performed this task in a slightly throwaway manner which – as has been recorded – was judged very delightful in an overpoweringly learned man.
He mounted such an occasion on the evening before their arrival at Arta. Arta, it seemed, was stuffed with history – mainly of the ecclesiastical order. There were little churches all over the place, acting as a kind of supporting chorus to one big one. The Panagia
Parigoritissa – which somebody had told him meant the Virgin of Consolation – was a very rum thirteenth-century effort indeed: so rum that they mustn’t mistake it for a bank and try to cash their traveller’s cheques in it. Once inside the unlikely cube they would be in the presence of a naked architecture which was quite breathtakingly strange. There would be a guide who would have a great deal to say about it. In fact, what with cyclopean walls, and the palace of the Greek metropolitan, and mosques and synagogues thrown in, they would be hurried round for the whole day after their arrival if they cared to be. So it had occurred to him that it might be a good idea to drive straight to the bridge before going to their hotel.
‘Is it an important bridge?’ one of the botanical ladies asked. Bridges were not her thing, but she had been brought up to respect objects adequately starred in Baedeker or Michelin.
‘It has a certain historical interest,’ Professor Boss-Baker said mildly. ‘The river, you know, is the ancient Arachthos. Not long ago – or not long ago as one reckons time in these parts – it marked the frontier between Greece and Turkey. It’s a Turkish bridge, although that fact is probably ignored locally. But it was treated as neutral ground, and what happened when it required repair, I don’t know. It’s a handsome and picturesque structure – on nine semicircular arches, if I remember aright.’
‘But isn’t there a legend?’ Mrs Pepper asked. ‘I’m sure I’ve read somewhere about the legend of the bridge at Arta.’
‘There’s certainly a legend, and it’s even older than this particular bridge is. Like the trade winds, such things move with the sun from country to country, changing a little as they go.’
‘Like ballads,’ one of the botanical ladies said with a flash of erudition in an unexpected field.
‘Just so. And it’s in a Greek folk ballad – not, I believe, a particularly ancient one – that the legend hitches on to the bridge at Arta. But it’s a slightly macabre affair, I’m afraid.’ Professor Boss-Baker glanced round his auditory – which was, of course, predominantly female – in a hesitant way. But this was a merely teasing manoeuvre, since he had every intention of telling his story. ‘The bridge-builder got into trouble every time his work neared completion. At the final and critical moment, when the principal keystone was just about to be slipped into place, the whole affair fell down. It kept on happening until one night along came a raven and had a word with him. The raven was some sort of tutelary spirit, I imagine, and it told him just what to do. He must immure in the foundations – alive, needless to say – the first living creature that came in sight. This might have been a goat or a donkey, I suppose, but as things turned out it was the builder’s wife. So there was no help for it. Professional success and duty were paramount, and in she went.’
‘How extremely horrible!’ one of the botanical ladies said.
‘Well, yes.’ Professor Boss-Baker was delighted at having elicited this reaction. ‘And it wasn’t, if the ballad is to be believed, any sort of sharp and short occasion. There is some difficulty in lowering the unfortunate woman into position, and she makes a long and lugubrious speech while the job is going on. One gets the impression of a somewhat insistently talkative person. She enters, in fact, on a good deal of family history. Two of her sisters, it seems, were married to bridge-builders, and precisely this fate overtook them. It seems improbable, one must admit. But that sort of thing is constantly happening in ballads the world over, is it not? I believe it’s known as the technique of incremental repetition. However, the bridge got completed; it’s there to this day; and we’re all going to stand on it and meditate the tale. I don’t know whether it can be said to have a moral.’
‘I rather think it has,’ Mr Pepper said. He had perhaps observed that some of the ladies were really shocked by Professor Boss-Baker’s recital, and aimed at offering some droll comment upon it. ‘Prudent wives will keep clear of their husbands’ work. For my part, I deprecate the suggestion. Long may my own wife continue to find time and inclination to cast a critical eye over my sermons.’
From Mr Pepper, this was quite a sally, and it was strongly approved of. Lady Cameron, however, was among those not much amused by the story – or rather by the slightly morbid notion of a kind of tourist attraction having been manufactured out of it. She would have been glad enough not herself to have to visit the bridge at Arta. But this, she saw, could not be, since the coach was going to take the whole party straight there at the end of their next day’s run. She glanced across at Charles, whom as usual on these after-dinner occasions she had contrived a little to distance. He had actually listened in silence to Professor Boss-Baker’s narrative. He even appeared to have been much struck by it.
Perhaps because of the build-up it had received, the bridge at Arta proved rather a flop. Unlike Delphi, or Dodona, or even the charming island where Ali Pasha had lived so unspeakably scandalous a life (and which is still in the charge, most improperly, of half a dozen extremely personable young men), the bridge and its environs were by no means heavy with the spirit of place, whether numinous or otherwise. The Arachthos flowed in a rapid but well-conducted way beneath its arches; on its banks there were a few old men fishing and a few young couples making not particularly passionate love; at one end there were some broken-down farm buildings and a low pot-house of the most unpromising sort. But the parapet was of a height convenient for leaning upon and its stone was warm from the sun. People lit cigarettes, or took photographs, or talked about English gardens. The more elderly exchanged information about ailments or grandchildren. Nobody much thought about the bridge-builder’s wife. There was perhaps a slight impatience to board the coach again, be driven on to their hotel and discover whether in Arta bathrooms had baths or not.
Lady Cameron did again think of the ballad. Professor Boss-Baker had told her that, although there was almost certainly no woman’s skeleton imprisoned beneath her feet, it was likely enough that some member of the brute creation had been unkindly done by at an appropriate stage in the bridge’s fashioning. She disliked the idea of such a ritual, and as a consequence walked the full length of the structure and got on innocent earth again. It was possible to follow the farther bank for some way downstream to a point from which the bridge would appear at least pleasingly picturesque. In this interest she strolled on, not much regarding the time, or reflecting that she had injudiciously sundered herself from her fellow-travellers. But this she suddenly found was not entirely so. Immediately in front of her the figure of a man had emerged abruptly from behind a tree – perhaps having withdrawn there for some trivial private purpose. And this last circumstance absurdly lent a small additional edge of unease to the disconcerting fact that the man was Charles.
‘Oh, Lady Cunningham!’ Charles said in his perfunctory way. He hadn’t bothered to acquire more than random approximations to the names of any members of the party. ‘I wonder whether I left my camera on my seat when I got out of the bus. And I happened to have an eye on the driver and I don’t think I saw him lock the doors as he ought to have done. I can tell you something about how I came by that camera in a way I’m rather proud of.’ Charles didn’t sound proud; he sounded, as he always did, immensely aggrieved about something that he would communicate to you in due course. And that – Lady Cameron suddenly remembered – had really been it. It had been the constant note of discontent and self-commiseration accompanying Charles’s solipsistic maunderings that had put the final lid on things. And this had continued, like the drone on a bagpipe, through all the varied exigencies, whatever they had been, of the past fifty years of his life! It was a horrible thought: much more horrible, even, than the thought of a woman buried in a bridge.
Lady Cameron tried to think of something to say. So far, she had been very successful in avoiding Charles, and this sudden encounter with him in near solitude almost frightened her. Tête-á-tête like this, it was surely impossible that he shouldn’t recognise her at last. She felt, too, as she had not felt before, that on her own part it was demeaning to continue concealing her identity as if she were ashamed of it. She even wondered how she had conceivably justified the deception to herself in the first place. Yet she knew that this was only a matter of a momentary failure of nerve. Why should she take any step that involved having more to do with Charles than the odd coincidence of their both being on this Pipkin and Pipkin affair made necessary?
‘I think we had better go back to the coach,’ Lady Cameron said.
But in the very moment that she uttered these words, Lady Cameron realised that they proposed something no longer possible of fulfilment. Beyond the bridge the roof of the coach was visible above the small tumble-down farm building. And it was evident that the vehicle was in motion.
‘I suppose the fellow’s just turning round,’ Charles said, having himself become aware of what was happening. But he spoke without conviction, and it quite clearly wouldn’t do. The coach was gathering speed. The coach disappeared in the direction of Arta.
‘I’ve known Mrs Boss-Baker do it before,’ Lady Cameron said, with a casualness she didn’t actually feel. ‘She’s extremely careful, but she does occasionally count the heads incorrectly. It must be very easy to do.’
‘But I can’t believe she’d fail to see I wasn’t yet on board the damned thing!’ Charles exclaimed indignantly. ‘It’s impossible! It’s an outrage! I’ll have the woman sacked.’
‘I don’t think we ought to take it too seriously, Mr Hornett. And we had better return over the bridge at once. It’s probable they’ll turn back in a few minutes. They mayn’t miss me, but they’re certain to miss your voice.’
‘I bloody well hope so.’ Charles had been conscious of no barb in his companion’s words. ‘But if they don’t miss me until it comes to allocating the rooms in the hotel, they mayn’t come back to pick me up for more than an hour.’ Charles paused, broodingly. ‘Or you,’ he added as an unexpected afterthought.
‘Let us hope it won’t be as long as that.’ Lady Cameron now felt that it quite probably would be. Her former husband did, after all, take those fifteen-minute naps on board the coach. So her small witticism hadn’t meant much. ‘For I rather think,’ she said, ‘that it’s going to turn chilly.’ This was undeniable. As they reached the apex of the bridge a cold wind caught them. She regretted that she had left her overcoat in the coach. For that matter she had left her handbag as well, which wasn’t at all her habit. This meant that she was penniless. It wasn’t important, but it was a shade vexatious. The town of Arta was invisible, and might be several miles away. The anglers and the courting couples had departed, and the surroundings now registered a back-of-beyond effect which was far from pleasing. There was nothing but the pot-house they were now approaching, and it was no more than a low hovel with a couple of dirty benches outside. Lady Cameron disliked the effect of dependence on Charles which all this engendered.
‘I’d say it was a pub of sorts,’ Charles announced. ‘I dare say I can get a drink. I’ll ask them for an ouzo.’ He glanced absently at Lady Cameron, and it was as if a vague memory of the usages of civilisation stirred in his head. ‘What about you, Lady Cunningham?’
‘A café grecque, perhaps.’ Lady Cameron had been so surprised that she sat down abruptly on one of the grubby benches, although it was something she had just decided not to do.
‘Ten drachmas.’
It was not the habit of Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin’s pilgrims to be perpetually standing one another drinks, but in the present circumstances this demand was decidedly peculiar.
‘My purse is in the coach,’ Lady Cameron said briefly.
‘Ah, yes.’ Charles spoke as if this settled the matter, and departed. When he emerged again from the hovel he was carrying a single glass. It wasn’t a matter, his former wife told herself, of brutish bad manners. Charles wasn’t exactly like that. It was much more that the very existence of other people in the universe was a fact continually slipping from him even between one second and the next. Strictly regarded, much of his monologue was really pure soliloquy. And now, when he had sat down with his drink in front of him, he was actually silent for some time. Any attention that he did pay to the external world appeared to be directed towards the bridge, close to which they were still sitting. Lady Cameron was silent too; she felt rather like one of those bespangled females whose function is to disappear opportunely on the stage of an illusionist. Once or twice she detected Charles as producing a sound which she had very little memory of associating with him: a kind of semi-internalised laughter. He seemed to be tickled by the bridge.
Then something very disturbing happened. Charles ceased gazing at the bridge and gazed at her instead. He was actually gazing at her with genuine, if fleeting, curiosity. And he was looking puzzled, as well.
‘I’ll tell you an odd thing about myself,’ Charles said abruptly. ‘It has come into my head that you remind me of somebody.’
‘Indeed, Mr Hornett?’
Lady Cameron had offered this convention of mild encouragement automatically. She still didn’t in the least want to encourage or coax her former husband’s pathologically defective memory. But clearly the thing now had to come. There was no point in attempting diversion or delay.
‘Only I can’t remember who it is. Perhaps it will come back to me later. Of course it can’t be of any importance to me, can it?’
‘Almost certainly not, I should imagine.’ Lady Cameron produced this reply with some relief, and at the same time she looked anxiously in the direction of what she supposed to be the road from Arta. There was always the possibility that a relief expedition would heave into view. And now for the moment the crisis had passed. Charles’s attention had wandered again. It was once more engaged with the bridge.
‘I call that a damned good yarn,’ he said. ‘Sensible chap, eh? And resourceful, too. I’ll bet he made up that raven.’
‘Perhaps the whole story is made up. It’s not a particularly agreeable one.’
‘Depends on how you look at it. And I’ll tell you another interesting thing about myself, Lady Cunningham. I had a wife just like that myself. Never stopped chattering at me. I tell you I just could not shut her up. But this chap managed that in the simplest and most literal manner. Piled up the rubble on her, eh? Stout fellow! I drink to him.’
Charles Hornett raised his glass and drained it. He showed no awareness that the woman vaguely known to him as Lady Cunningham was staring at him in naked horror. And even when she had a little recovered herself she didn’t attempt to speak. The strangeness of this neat and convinced reversal of historical fact was too much for her. For the present, at least, she simply wanted to get away, to be released from a nightmare at once absurd and insupportable.
And release was at hand. Suddenly as if by magic, the coach had appeared and was drawing to a halt beside them. It contained only the driver and Mrs Boss-Baker – who was already lavishly signalling rescue and apology.
‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ Charles said. ‘I was getting damned bored, sitting outside this God-forsaken pub and talking about nothing at all. At least I shan’t be late for my dinner.’ He stood up, glancing blankly at Lady Cameron as he did so. Or glancing, so to speak, at where she was. For it was reassuringly evident – she somehow knew this – that her former husband wouldn’t give her another thought during the remaining course of ‘Sites and Flowers of Thessaly and Epirus’.