My Brother Michael Read online

  ‘And so will you. No picture gives the true impression. It’s the same with the great Hermes at Olympia. In photographs he is effeminate, the marble too smooth, and shining like soap. But the statue itself takes away the breath.’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Then prepare yourself to see the Charioteer. It is one of the great statues of Greece. Do you know the thing that comes to me first whenever I see him again – which is every day?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He is so very young. All that gravity, that grace, and so young with it. It used to be thought that he was the owner of the team – the winner of the race – but now they say that he was probably the driver for some lord who owned the chariot.’

  I said hesitantly: ‘There’s a bit in Pausanias’ account of Delphi, isn’t there, about a chariot of bronze with a naked “lord of the car” who might have had a driver, a youth of good family?’

  ‘I believe there is, yes. But it could hardly apply to our Charioteer, kyria; the evidence is that he was probably buried in a great landslip during an earthquake in 373 B.C., and, without being uncovered again, was built into the – what do you call it? – the supporting wall (the “earth-holder” is the Greek word), that was erected to stop the rocks and earth from engulfing the temple again.’

  ‘Retaining wall,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, thank you. The retaining wall. Well, you see, our Charioteer had vanished a few centuries before Pausanias came to Delphi.’

  ‘I see. I didn’t know that.’

  He had finished rolling the cigarette. He put it between his lips and lit it with a spluttering of loose tobacco.

  He said: ‘They say now that the Charioteer was part of a victory-group erected by one Gelon, the winner of a chariot-race, but anything may be true. So much was lost or destroyed or stolen over the centuries that the truth about our discoveries is only guesswork. And Delphi suffered much, because she was so rich. I think it is reckoned that there were six thousand monuments here – at any rate that is the number of inscriptions that have been uncovered.’ He smiled, showing very white teeth. ‘The landslide that broke and hid the Charioteer was an act of the gods, because it kept him out of the hands of the robbers. The Phocians laid the sanctuary waste barely twenty years after he was buried, and of course in later times countless treasures were destroyed or stolen.’

  ‘I know. Sulla and Nero and the rest. How many bronzes do they reckon Nero took to Rome?’

  ‘Five hundred.’ He laughed again. ‘I shall have to watch my patter tomorrow, I can see!’

  ‘I told you I only read it up just before I came. And there’s so much—’

  A sudden clatter and a volley of shouts from somewhere behind the museum startled me, and I stopped and glanced over my shoulder. ‘What on earth’s that?’

  ‘Nothing. A little disagreement among the workmen.’

  ‘A little disagreement? It sounds like a major war!’

  ‘We are always a fighting race, I am afraid. There is trouble today among the workmen. There are still men here from the “dig” of the French archaeologists – the “dig” is finished, but workmen have remained to clear up, and to remove the rails that the trucks ran on, and things of that kind. A mule strayed during the night, and now they have discovered that some tools are missing, and they are accusing the men who work on the stadium road of theft, and so – well, you hear that there is a little disagreement.’

  ‘Some tools and a mule?’ I listened to the uproar for a moment or two. It sounded like the battle of El Alamein in stereophonic sound. I said drily: ‘Perhaps they haven’t heard of the Amphictionic League and the peace of Delphi.’

  He smiled, ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘And now I really must go. I’ll let you know if I can come with you tomorrow. You say you’ll be here at this time?’

  ‘Always.’

  I had a sharp inner vision of a life where one would be – always – serenely on the Delphi road in the early morning sun. ‘I’ll try and be here by eight if I’m coming. If I can’t—’

  ‘It does not matter. If you come, I will take you with the greatest of pleasure. If not, it does not matter. Are you staying at the Apollon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is very nice, yes?’

  ‘Delightful.’ I lingered for a moment, looking at the closed door of the museum. He was watching me through the smoke of his cigarette with that shrewd, incurious blue gaze. I said: ‘Kyrie … you weren’t here during the war, of course, but you’ll know what happened to the statues and things from the museum? The Charioteer, for instance? Where was he? Hidden?’

  ‘Only in a manner of speaking. He was in Athens.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I see.’

  Behind me a shabby black car slid to a halt. Simon grinned at me over the door and said: ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Oh, Simon! Am I late? Have you had to hunt for me?’

  ‘The answer to both those is no. I was early and they told me you’d come down here. Have you had breakfast?’

  ‘Hours ago.’

  ‘Why people should adopt that disgustingly self-righteous tone whenever they manage to achieve breakfast before eight o’clock I do not know,’ said Simon. He leaned across the car and opened the door for me. ‘Come along, then, let’s go. Unless of course you’d like to drive?’

  I didn’t bother to answer that one, but slipped quickly into the passenger’s seat beside him.

  As the car turned the corner and gathered speed along the straight stretch below the temple I said, without preliminary: ‘The Charioteer was in Athens during the war. Presumably in hiding.’

  He gave me a quick glance. ‘Oh. Yes, it would be, wouldn’t it?’ I saw him smile.

  I said, almost defensively: ‘Well, you did get me into it, after all.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ A little pause. ‘Did you come down through the temple this morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you might do that. I’ve been up there myself most mornings by about six.’

  ‘Not today?’

  He smiled. ‘No. I thought you’d like it to yourself.’

  ‘You’re very—’ I began, and stopped. He didn’t ask me what I’d been going to say. I said, not quite irrelevantly: ‘Do you ever lose your temper, Simon?’

  ‘What in the world makes you ask that?’

  ‘Oh, come, I thought you were a thought-reader!’

  ‘Oh. Well, let me see … Last night?’

  ‘That didn’t take much guessing. Yes, of course. Nigel was abominably rude to you. Didn’t you mind?’

  ‘Mind? No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d have minded from Nigel anyway, because he’s not very happy. Life isn’t easy for him, and on top of everything he has to fall for that girl, and she’s led him the hell of a dance. But last night—’ He paused, and I saw again that pucker of worry round his eyes. ‘Last night there was something wrong. Really wrong, I mean; not just Nigel’s too-usual brand of nerves and temperament and frustrated talent, and that little witch playing him on a very barbed hook. There was something more.’

  ‘Are you sure he wasn’t just a bit drunk? He said he was.’

  ‘Possibly. But that’s part of the trouble; he doesn’t drink much as a rule, and last night he was fairly putting it away, though he’s like you – he doesn’t like ouzo. No, there was definitely something very wrong, and I’d give quite a lot to know what it was.’

  ‘I take it he didn’t tell you anything after you got back to the studio? I got the impression he was going to come out with something just as Danielle interrupted.’

  ‘Yes, so did I. But I didn’t see him again. His room was empty when I went back. I waited a bit, but eventually went to bed. I didn’t hear him come in.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said a little drily, ‘he was fixing the taps.’

  ‘That did occur to me. But no. Danielle’s door was standing open. She wasn’t there either. I think they’d gone
for a walk, or down to the village for another drink, or something. And Nigel had gone when I got up this morning.’

  I said: ‘He went up the mountain. I saw him.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yes, at about seven o’clock. He went up past the graveyard through those pines as if he was going further up the hill.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes. In fact he looked rather as if he wanted to be left very much alone. I didn’t speak to him, and I don’t think he saw me.’

  Simon said: ‘Well, let’s hope he does some work today, and draws it out of himself, whatever it is. I expect I’ll see him tonight.’ He glanced at me, smiling. ‘Did you make any more discoveries this morning?’

  ‘Only one,’ I said, before I thought.

  ‘And that?’

  I found myself telling him, quite simply. ‘It was just my own discovery. We talked about it last night, with Nigel. It’s something we’re taught from childhood, but I’d never really had it brought home to me till now.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That saying of “your parson friend”, as Nigel called him.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that.’ He was silent for a moment, then he quoted it softly, as if half to himself: ‘“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends’ or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” … Terrific piece of writing, isn’t it? One should remember it more often.’

  The car slowed down and drew out to pass a little group of three donkeys pattering along in the dust at the edge of the road. On the foremost an old woman sat sideways; she had a distaff in her left hand, the spindle in her right, and as she rode she spun the white wool ceaselessly, without looking at it. She ducked a smiling salute to us as we went by.

  Simon said: ‘What brought that home to you this morning?’

  I hesitated, then said flatly: ‘Michael’s grave.’

  ‘I see.’ And I thought he did.

  I said: ‘It’s this confounded country. It does things to one – mentally and physically and I suppose morally. The past is so living and the present so intense and the future so blooming imminent. The light seems to burn life into you twice as intensely as anywhere else I’ve known. I suppose that’s why the Greeks did what they did so miraculously, and why they could stay themselves through twenty generations of slavery that would have crushed any other race on earth. You come here thinking you’re going to look at a lot of myth-haunted ruins and picturesque peasants and you find that …’ I stopped.

  ‘That what?’

  ‘No. I’m talking piffle.’

  ‘It’s good piffle. Go on. What do you find?’

  ‘You find that the grave of Michael Lester is as moving and as important as the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycaenae, or Byron or Venizelos or Alexander. He, and the men like him, are a part of the same picture.’ I stopped, and then said helplessly: ‘Greece. Damn it, what is it that it does to one?’

  He was silent a moment, then he said: ‘I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us – to us of the West. We’ve learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It’s given us almost everything that our world has that is worth while. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It’s our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country – and Greece.’

  We sailed round a bend of the road and ahead of us the deep valley opened to show a great rounded beauty of a mountain, silver-green, blue-veined, cloud-grey.

  ‘Why, damn it all,’ said Simon. ‘That hill in front of us. That’s Helicon. Helicon. And then you wonder why this country gets you in the wind?’

  ‘Not any more,’ I said.

  And we didn’t speak again till we came to Arachova and found Stephanos and Niko waiting for us in the café on the corner.

  ‘Do you like my socks?’ asked Niko.

  ‘They’re wonderful,’ I said truthfully. They were indeed, in that landscape, something to be wondered at. They were luminous, and of a startling shade of shocking pink. They shone among the bleached hot stones of the mountain track like neon signs against a clear sky.

  ‘They light up,’ explained Niko.

  ‘I can see that. Where did you get them?’

  ‘In Athens. They are the latest thing from New York.’

  ‘Do you go to Athens often?’

  ‘No. I went to work there when I was fourteen. I was a page boy at the Acropole Palace Hotel.’

  ‘I see. Is that where you learned your English?’

  ‘Some of it. I also learn it here in the school. Is good, huh?’

  ‘Very good. Why didn’t you stay in Athens?’

  ‘Is better here.’ Niko looked back along the track we were climbing. Away below us Arachova had dwindled to a toy waterfall of coloured roofs. Niko turned back to me almost as if he were puzzled. ‘Here there is nothing. Is no money. But is better here. Arachova is my village.’ Again that look. ‘You think I am crazy? You come from London where there is plenty money. All Greeks are a little crazy, huh? But you think I am stupid to leave Athens?’

  ‘There is a sort of divine madness about all the Greeks I’ve met,’ I said, laughing. ‘But you’re not crazy, Niko. It’s better here, certainly, money or no money. Don’t ever live in a town unless you have to! And I don’t live in London. I live miles away from it, in a country village, just like you.’

  ‘Like Arachova?’ He was vastly surprised. I had long since discovered that to all Greeks England meant London and nothing else. London, the huge, the golden-pavemented, the jacinth-gated.

  ‘Not quite like Arachova.’

  ‘And that is your village, as Arachova is mine.’

  I said: ‘Not quite, Niko. We’ve lost that way of feeling, I’m afraid. How far is this place that we’re making for?’

  ‘Making? Oriste?’

  ‘Going to. The place where Michael died.’ I said it softly, with my eye on Simon’s back where he walked with Stephanos a few yards ahead of us.

  ‘About an hour from here. More, perhaps. It is nearer to Delphi than Arachova. It is in a … I do not know the word, a hollow place, a—’ he stopped and made a scooping gesture.

  ‘A corrie? Like this?’

  ‘Yes. That is it. A corrie, where the rocks have fallen near the foot of a cliff. My grandfather know the way. He tell me it looks to the north-west – that is, away from Delphi and Arachova, towards Amphissa. This track goes along the face of the mountains, and then we leave it and climb up towards these cliffs where the corrie is. I think that many, many years ago there was a road for beasts, but not now. I do not know how far. I have never been, me. My grandfather he know the way. You are tired?’

  ‘No. It’s rather hot, but I’m not tired.’

  ‘In Greece,’ said Niko reflectively, eyeing me, ‘the women are very strong.’

  I thought of the village cafés, with their day-long complement of cheerfully idle men. ‘I imagine they have to be,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Niko misunderstood me, probably deliberately. ‘In Greece the men are tough. Oh, very tough.’

  Somehow, at that moment, Niko’s racy beauty managed to look very tough indeed. His swagger, and the look he gave me, were the plainest possible invitation to the kind of suggestive verbal sparring that the Mediterranean men seem to love. But two could play at the game of misunderstanding. I said cheerfully: ‘Then if we do meet the shade of Angelos on the hill, I shall feel quite, quite safe with you, Niko.’

  ‘How?’ He was momentarily thrown off his stride. ‘Oh, yes! But of course you will be safe with me! I should kill him, you understand. He helped to kill my great-grandfather’s brother’s son Panos, so of course I should kill him. And—’ the swagger gave way again to Niko’s own brand of youthful and art
less high spirits—‘it would be easy, because he is old and I am young.’

  ‘I suppose he’s all of forty,’ I agreed. ‘And just how old are you, Niko?’

  ‘I am seventeen.’

  I said mendaciously: ‘Really? I’d have thought you were much older than that.’

  He flashed me his delighted smile. ‘Would you? Would you really? And how old are you, beautiful miss?’

  ‘Niko! Don’t you know the rules better than that? I’m twenty-five.’

  ‘So old? But you do not look like twenty-five,’ he said generously. ‘It is a good age to be, not? See, this bit is rough. Take my hand, miss.’

  I laughed. ‘I am not as old as all that, Niko. And I’m truly not a bit tired. Just hot.’

  It was indeed very hot. As we climbed steadily north-west the sun beat down on the right, throwing shadows sharp and hard as graphite along the white rock. The track where we walked was only by courtesy a track. It was not steep, cutting at a slant along the great flank of the mountain, but it was very rough, and some of the stones were sharp. We had long since left any trees behind, and the mountainside, unpunctuated now by pine or cypresses, stretched one great wing of burning white from the high hard blue sky down to the dry watercourse deep on our left. Beyond the tortured path of this dead stream, the rock rose again, this time violently blocked in with cobalt shadow. High above, so that to glance at them hurt the eyes, three birds hung, circling slowly and with moveless wings, like some mobile toy on invisible threads. I thought I could hear their faint, sweet mewing. Nothing else broke the silence except the scrape and clink of our feet, and the sound of our breathing.

  The track ran straight up to what looked like a wall of fallen rocks and rubble, and there stopped, obliterated. Stephanos, in front, had halted, and turned to speak to Simon, who was just behind him. He said something, gesturing towards the barricade of rock.

  It looked like a landslip, a great torrent of red and ochreous earth frozen even as it poured down the steep wing of the mountain. It was spiked with broken rock and great white slabs of fallen limestone. Further down the mountainside it fanned out like the delta of a red river. Enormous blocks of stone had hurtled down with it, flung carelessly, as by the hand of an angry god, to dam the narrow gash of the watercourse.