Guy listened blank-faced to his listed virtues and at the end, said only: ‘We’ll need some money.’
‘Must go into that,’ Toby examined the chit beside his glass and brought out a handful of small change.
‘Leave that to me.’ Guy said.
‘Oh, all right. Must get back to the School; have a busy day. Got to lecture again at twelve. Now, don’t worry. Just wait till you hear from us.’ Toby called a taxi and was gone.
‘He was sent after us,’ Harriet said. ‘He rang Dubedat and Dubedat said: “Go after them, you damned fool. Keep them sweet. Stop them making a move on their own.” They don’t want us to see Gracey, that’s clear. But why?’
‘Really, darling!’ Guy deplored her suspicion of her fellow-men. ‘They’re not conspirators. They do owe me something, and Dubedat probably saw it that way.’
‘They don’t want us here.’
‘Why shouldn’t they want us here?’
‘For several reasons. If Gracey can get you, he might not want them. There is also the fact you know too much.’
Guy laughed: ‘What do I know?’
‘You know they bolted from Rumania in a funk.’
‘They lost their nerve. It could happen to anyone. They couldn’t possibly think we would mention that. They know they can trust us.’
‘But can we trust them? I don’t think we should wait to hear from them. We should find out where Gracey is and go to see him.’
‘Do we know anyone who knows Gracey?’
She shook her head and slid her hand into Guy’s hand. ‘Apart from Yakimov, we have no friends.’
They sat for some moments, hand in hand, reflecting upon their position, then Harriet, glancing in through the café window gave a laugh: ‘There is another person here who’s known to us; someone, what’s more, who might know Gracey.’
‘Who is it?’
‘He’s inside there, eating cakes.’
Guy looked round to see a little man seated at an indoor corner table. The collar of his greatcoat was up round his ears, his trilby hat was pulled down to his eyes; his shoulders were raised as though against a draught. His hands were gloved. Using a silver fork, he was putting pieces of mille-feuille in through his collar to his mouth. Nothing of his person was visible but a blunt, lizard-grey nose: the nose of Professor Lord Pinkrose who had also bolted from the dangers of Bucharest.
‘Pinkrose,’ Guy said without enthusiasm.
Sent out to lecture in Rumania at a disastrous time, Pinkrose had blamed Guy, as much as anyone, for what he found there. The Pringles could hope for little from him.
Suddenly a familiar voice called: ‘Dear boy!’ and Pinkrose was forgotten. Guy, giving a cry, jumped up and extended his arms to Yakimov, who tottered into them.
‘What a glad sight!’ Yakimov sang on a note of tender rapture. ‘What a glad sight! The dear boy well and safely here among us!’
They now suffered idleness. With the air growing cooler and more delicate each day, Harriet refused to sit around waiting for word from Dubedat, and said: ‘Let’s see the sights while we have the chance.’
Guy, uneasy at being taken outside the area of communication, paid a brief visit to the Museum. Next day he agreed, unwillingly, to go up to the Parthenon. Climbing the steps between the ramshackle houses of the Plaka, he could take no pleasure in their character, their coloured shutters, the scraps of gardens and the unknown trees. Several times he came to a stop and, like Lot’s wife, gazed back towards the centre of the town where a message might be arriving for him. He was, whether he liked it or not, a non-combatant in the midst of war and he felt that only work could excuse his civilian status. Now even his work had been taken from him.
Unhappy for him, Harriet said: ‘If we don’t hear from those two by tomorrow, you must go to the Legation and ask to be put into touch with Gracey. That should settle things one way or the other.’
‘It could settle them the worst possible way. If Gracey does not want to see me, I’d be told to take the first boat to Alexandria. We’d just have to go. As it is, Dubedat may do something for us. We have to trust him,’ Guy said, though there was no trust on his face.
Seeing him held against the blade of reality, forced to deduce that belief in human goodness was one thing, dependence upon it quite another, Harriet felt an acute pity for him. When he paused again, she said: ‘Would you rather go back?’ She had brought him up here against his inclination and had lost her pleasure in the expedition because he could not share it.
He said: ‘No. You want to see the Parthenon. Let’s get it over.’
He plodded on in the growing heat. They walked without speaking round the base of the Acropolis hill and climbed up to the entrance. As they passed through the Propylaea into sight of the Parthenon, Guy stopped in amazement and gave a murmur of wonder. Harriet, with her long sight, had seen the temple clearly enough while wandering in Athens. Set on its hill, it was always surprising the eye, like a half-risen moon. Guy, myopic, saw it now for the first time.
He pulled down his glasses, trying to elongate his sight by peering through the oblique lenses, then he began making his way cautiously over the rough ground. She ran ahead, transported as though on the verge of a supernatural experience. Imagining there was some magical property in the placement of the columns against the cobalt sky, she went from one to another of them, pressing the palms of her hands upon the sun-warmed marble. From a distance the columns had a luminous whiteness; now she saw that on the seaward side they were bloomed with an apricot colour. In a state of wonder, she moved from column to column, touching each as though it were a friend. When Guy reached her, she pointed towards the haze of the Piraeus and said: ‘Can you see the sea?’
She watched him pull down his glasses again and was moved, remembering he had told her that when he was a little boy he dared not let his parents know that he was short-sighted because the cost of glasses would have caused a crisis in the household. At school he had not been able to see the blackboard and had been regarded as a dull boy until a perceptive master discovered what the trouble was.
‘With the sea so near, we can escape,’ she said. ‘There’s always a boat of some sort.’
After a long look in the direction of the sea, Guy said: ‘I can’t swim.’
‘You can’t?’
‘I didn’t even see the sea until I was eighteen.’
‘But wasn’t there a swimming-bath?’
‘Yes, but it frightened me – the echo and that strange smell.’
‘Chlorine. A very sinister shade of yellow, that smell. I don’t like it either.’
They sat on the top step facing the Piraeus and the distant shadow of the Peloponnesus, and Harriet thought with dismay of the fact that Guy could not swim. There was no safety in the world. Here, on the summit of the Acropolis, she saw them shipwrecked in the Mediterranean and pondered the problem of keeping Guy afloat.
As for Guy, he sat still for four minutes then looked at his watch and said: ‘I think we should go back. There might be something.’
When they reached the hotel, the porter handed Guy an envelope. Inside there was a card on which the words ‘At Home’ were engraved. Mr Dubedat and Mr Lush invited Mr and Mrs Guy Pringle that evening to take a drink at an address in Kolonaki.
The flat occupied by Dubedat and Toby hung high on the slopes above Kolonaki Square. The Pringles, admitted by a housekeeper and left on a terrace to await their hosts, looked across the housetops and saw Hymettos. The terrace, marble-tiled, with an inlaid marble table, wrought-iron chairs and trained creepers covering the overhead lattice, impressed Harriet who, looking to where the wash of pink-cream houses broke against the pine-speckled hillside, thought that Toby and Dubedat had done very well for themselves. The district had an air of wealth without ostentation: the most expensive sort of wealth.