Levkas Man (20 page)

‘First thing tomorrow morning we'll move camp—to Ayios Giorgios first, and if that doesn't produce what I'm hoping for, then we'll be going to one of the islands. Levkas. Van der Voort seems to have been particularly interested in Levkas last year.'

Kotiadis was shaking hands with Leonodipoulos. I watched him turn and hurry away up the path. ‘So you've found out all you need.'

Holroyd nodded. ‘Enough I think to ensure that our time isn't wasted.'

There was a smugness in the way he said it that had me simmering with anger. ‘You've no further use for him now?'

He was quick to understand my mood. ‘No man is indispensable, you know,' he said mildly. ‘And from what Kotiadis told me, he's not fit to be in charge of an expedition on his own. Would you agree with that?' And when I didn't say anything, he said, ‘Be honest now. He's not a fit man, is he?'

‘He's been without food for some time. He's very weak, that's all.'

It seemed to satisfy him. ‘In that case, he won't have gone far. He'll probably turn up at Ayios Giorgios. Kotiadis enquired there, of course, but—' He patted my shoulder in that aggravating way of his. ‘Anyway, don't you worry. When he does turn up. I'm sure Miss Winters will see to it that he's properly looked after.' He wanted to know my plans then. ‘Kotiadis told me you had a boat waiting for you at Preveza. Leonodipoulos will be leaving shortly for Athens. I'm quite certain he'd give you a lift—as far as Arta, at any rate.'

I looked across at Sonia, but she was already on her feet and moving away. I had a feeling then, a sudden urgent feeling, that I must visit Levkas—now, before Holroyd got there. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'd be glad of a lift.' Levkas was on our route to the Aegean, whether we took the Corinth Canal or went south round the bottom of Greece.

Holroyd nodded as though the matter had never been in doubt. ‘Good. To be plain with you, I don't like people on a dig who are not a part of it. They get in the way. And as for your father, most of his life has been spent in strange countries. He's well able to look after himself.'

‘I expect you're right,' I said.

‘No doubt about it. And you've got your own life to live, eh—your own problems?' And he went off to fix it with Leonodipoulos.

That night I slept in a private house in the old Roman town of Arta. Leonodipoulos arranged it at a taverna where he was known. They were kindly people who spoke a few words of English and sent me to bed full of a strong local wine after showing me endless photographs of their son, who was about my own age and serving in a tank regiment somewhere up by the Bulgarian border. They had given me their best room, all Victorian style furniture and lace—lace curtains and the sheets and pillow cases of the big double bed edged with lace and smelling of lavender. A ewer and basin in blue china stood on a marble-topped washstand and there was even a chamber pot. Probably the room was typical of countless others belonging to the petit bourgeoisie in the country towns of Greece, so spotlessly clean, so lovingly cared for, that to me it was almost a museum piece. A single naked light bulb hanging from its flex in the middle of the ceiling was the only indication that the world had progressed in the last fifty years.

Lying there in the faded splendour of that brass-trimmed bedstead, the camp at Despotiko already seemed remote, part of another world to which I did not belong. When we had left they had already started packing up for the move to Ayios Giorgios. In the morning the tents would be gone, the olive grove empty except for the goats. The involvement which I had begun to feel was a very tenuous one. I was on my own again now and even my concern for the old man faded as my mind began to grapple with the problems of the voyage ahead, Leonodipoulos had given me a lot of information about sea conditions in the Aegean. He had sailed there regularly in a friend's yacht out of Vouliagmeni. He not only knew Samos, but he knew the actual port I should be using and warned me against the severe down-draughts to be expected off Pythagorion whenever the meltemi was blowing.

This common interest in the sea had made the drive pleasant for both of us, and it amused me that Holroyd, in his haste to be rid of me, had made me a present of such a useful contact in the Greek Establishment. In fact, during our meal together in the taverna, Leonodipoulos had assured me that he would see to it that my father was all right; Kotiadis had orders to report to him as soon as he had located him.

I was woken in the morning by the daughter-in-law bringing my breakfast in on a tray. She had put in a brief appearance the night before, leaving with a giggle and flash of dark eyes. I watched her now as she stretched up to pull the curtains. Like most of the girls I had seen in. Greece she was too broad in the beam, too thick in the calves—a dumpy, unattractive figure. And yet somehow she managed to imbue her movements with a sensuous sexuality. And when she leaned over me to put the tray on the bed I forgot about her figure; all I was conscious of was her eyes, big and shining and black like newly-washed grapes.

‘Kafé,' she said firmly and almost filled the cup with hot milk before adding a little of the very strong black coffee. Her skin had the sheen of olives. She smiled at me, and the smile lit up her eyes, and then she gave that embarrassed little giggle and was gone in a swirl of skirt and fat little buttocks.

I drank my coffee, wondering when the boy in those photographs would get home again. Six months they had said since he last had leave. She was too ripe a plum to be left on her own that long. She reminded me a little of Florrie. Florrie had that same southern sensuality—and there'd be another dawn, or perhaps a night watch …

Somewhere above me a baby cried, and then I heard the murmur of the mother's soothing voice. Sex, procreation, birth, death—it all seemed much closer, more natural down here in the Mediterranean, an inevitable part of living. And the old people worrying. That had seemed inevitable, too. Worrying about their son, about themselves, about the future—that strange mixture of fear and human warmth and happiness that seems to be a characteristic of hot countries.

I was stripped to the waist, shaving, when she returned for the tray, and she stood there, her body thrust out to take the edge of it as she tried a few words of conversation—‘You—Preveza—Simera?'

She meant today, of course, and I nodded.

‘Autobus—ten half hours.'

She giggled, her eyes bright and liquid with the excitement of this contact with a stranger from another country. But then the baby started crying again, and as she listened the excitement in her eyes changed to something softer. ‘Stefan,' she said, smiling gently, and she was gone—no swirl of skirt, but a mother to her young, quickly and with purpose.

They saw me to the bus, the whole family, including the baby: made sure I got a seat and waved me goodbye as though I were the son of the house. It was a leisurely journey, for we stopped at every village, and the waits were sometimes long. It was afternoon before we saw the Gulf of Amvrakikos. The great expanse of water was a silken blue, arrowed by the wake of a few fishing boats, and the hills beyond were puffed up to twice their size by the clouds that hung over them.

All the way down I had been seeing traces of that same aqueduct whose ventilation shafts marked the erosion in the red dunes. Now at last I was catching glimpses of the great city it had served, the ruins overgrown with creepers, half-buried in vegetation, but still gigantic in size. The outer wall ran like a stone rampart into green grass country where sheep and goats grazed. Beyond Nikopolis, the grass gave way to agriculture, and where there was irrigation, the land was intensively cultivated. And then at last we were in Preveza itself, swinging through an area of new building centred around a petrol storage depot and out on to the waterfront, a broad promenade built on the scale of a major seaside resort with the town behind it a low huddle of nondescript buildings.

The water was absolutely still, a sheet of glass mirroring the blue of the sky. I pressed my face to the dirty window. But there were no boats. The whole length of that waterfront was absolutely empty. The emptiness of it came as a shock to me. I had been so certain the Barretts would be waiting for me there, the boat anchored stern-on. The weather had been perfect. There had been no gales. The bus came to a stop and I got out with the rest of the passengers, standing there, irresolute in the sunshine, my suitcase in my hand. A group of gypsies passed with a mule-drawn cart, two dogs slinking in the shade below the axle, the women following, free-striding and upright, their skirts and shawls bright with colour. The little band was a gay contrast to the drab black of the Greeks sitting over their coffee at the kaféneion, which was also the bus terminal; and out beyond the smooth strip of water that was the entrance to the Gulf of Amvrakikos, the further shore showed as a fringe of low-lying land. It was all flat country, the hills a long way away, and seaward I could see the buoys that marked the dredged channel. No vessels were coming in and the only thing that moved on the flat molten surface of the water was a small open fishing boat powered by an outboard.

For a moment I was at a complete loss.
Coromandel
should have arrived two days ago. Standing there, conspicuous and somewhat forlorn, I realized how urgent had been my desire to get to Levkas, how committed I was to the idea of searching for a cave-shelter there similar to the one at Despotiko.

‘Say, fellow—you American?'

I turned. A broad, grizzled man was staring at me with bright dark eyes from one of the tables. ‘No, English,' I said.

‘Englézos, Americanós—same thing, eh? I sail many ports.' Be reeled off the English ports he had been in, most of them barely recognizable the way he pronounced them. ‘I was stoker, see. In the old
Mauritania
one time. Jeez! That was work. You like a kafé, sump'n to drink? What you like?'

He was a battered, garrulous old man who had knocked around the world in all sorts of ships. ‘Ain't many coal burners left now. They want greasers, not stokers. Anyway, I'm too old. An' I got dollars. Anybody got dollars in Greece, they can sit in the kaféneion an' do nothin'—jus' talk. That's a good life, eh?' He gave a toothless chuckle. ‘Not bad for an old man who's bin a stoker all his life. You in the war? No, too young, I guess. Torpedoed twice. Second time was on one of those P.Qs. Jeez, that was cold. We was in the goddam ice three days …'

I sat and drank my coffee and listened to that Ancient Mariner going on and on about the disaster that had hit a convoy to Murmansk. It was an incredible story, but difficult to follow. Finally he ran out of steam and I asked him if he had seen an English boat in Preveza during the last two days.

‘An old fishing boat with a bowsprit? Yeah. She come in Thursday evening, but she don't stay. She was lyin' right there.' He indicated a position almost opposite us with a hand that had two fingers missing. ‘Woman spoke Greek. Very bad Greek. Said they gonna wait here for a friend. Guess that was you, eh? Well, they was gone next morning. Yesterday morning.'

‘Where did they go to?' I asked.

He shook his head. ‘They jus' vamoose.' He smiled. I think he was pleased at remembering that word. And then he thrust his mutilated hand in front of my face. ‘See that? That was the first time I get the torpedo. Lucky I don't lose my fukkin arm.' He was in mid-Atlantic then and it was ten minutes before I could extricate myself and visit the Port Captain's office. It was about a hundred yards further along the waterfront and there I was able to confirm
Coromandel
's movements. The Port Captain himself showed me the entry in his book. She had arrived at 18.30 hours on Thursday evening direct from Pylos and she had left the following morning at 08.30 bound for Port Vathy on the island of Meganisi. He did not speak. English so that I was unable to question him, but just as I was leaving he indicated a poste restante box on the wall. There was a note in it addressed to me, just a line from Bert to say they would be back by Saturday evening, or at the latest Sunday morning.

There was a local chart pinned to the wall beside the Port Captain's desk. ‘Meganisi?' I asked him and he pointed to an island shaped like some extraordinary crayfish with a thick, pronged body and a whiplash tail. It was about ten miles south of the Levkas Canal and separated from the island of Levkas by the narrow Meganisi Channel.

There was a restaurant nearby and I left my suitcase there and walked out to a wooden promontory that looked across to the ruined fortress of Actium. By then a small breeze had come in and the sea glinted between the red boles of the pines. I sat at a table near a logwood kiosk that served coffee and soft drinks, watching the dredged channel. But though I stayed there until the last of the boys who had been running in and out of the water had gone home and the sun was slanting towards the sea, I saw only two ships come in, and both of them were caiques.

It was almost dark by the time I got back to the restaurant and there I had the best meal I had had in weeks—huge meaty prawns, fresh-caught that morning from the sands off Preveza. I was sitting over my coffee, wondering whether I would have to find myself a room for the night, when I saw the green and red of navigation lights close off the quay, heard the rattle of an anchor chain running out. By the time I was out of the restaurant the boat had turned stern-on and was coming in fast. It was
Coromandel
and I reached the edge of the quay just as Bert heaved the first warp for the waiting harbour boy to slip over a bollard. He saw me, gave a cheerful wave, and the next moment the bight of chain that carried the second warp crashed at my feet. As soon as he had made fast and the gang-plank had been rigged, I went on board. Bert's hand gripped mine. ‘Are you alone?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Where's Kotiadis?'

I began to explain, but then the glimpse of a white sweater showed for'ard and Florrie was spotlighted green as she came quickly down the starboard side. ‘Paul!' I suddenly found myself embraced, enveloped almost in the warmth of her emotional personality. ‘You're alone?'