Guy smiled while they ate their baklava, but Harriet, aware of his hidden longing to be gone, could not enjoy it. When Alan suggested coffee, she said: ‘Perhaps we ought to go. It’s getting late.’
‘Oh, very well.’ Alan eased himself up, groaning, and as he balanced on his feet, he gave a slow, dejected salute to the sideboard on which the coffee cona stood. Seeing the disappointment beneath the humour, Harriet, who had felt the need to indulge Guy, now felt resentful of his impatience to be elsewhere. She decided she would not go to Aleko’s. Bored by politics, she was becoming less willing to accept Guy’s chosen companions in order to gain Guy’s company.
Yakimov had also finished supper. Lounging in an old basket-chair, over which he had spread his sable-lined greatcoat, he was sipping a glass of Kümmel.
‘Whither away?’ he asked, more alive to their departure than he had been to their arrival.
Alan said: ‘We’re going to Aleko’s.’
‘Indeed, dear boy! And where is that?’
‘Behind Omonia Square. A little café, patronized by progressives. Like to come?’
‘Think not. Not quite simpatico. Not quite the place for your poor old Yak.’
They had to walk to Constitution Square in search of a taxi and, as he limped along, Alan suggested more than once that Aleko’s might be left for another night. Guy would not hear of it. Seeing a taxi pass the top of the square, he pursued and caught it and brought it back.
Giving him no time to over-persuade her, Harriet now said: ‘I won’t come. I’m going back to the hotel to bed.’
‘Just as you like. I won’t be late.’ Guy, bouncing to be off, caught Alan’s arm and pulled him into the taxi before he, too, could excuse himself; then, slamming the door shut, he shouted: ‘Aleko’s. Omonia Square.’
Watching the taxi drive off, Harriet marvelled at Guy’s vigour and determination in the pursuit of his political interests. Why could he not bring as much to the furtherance of his own career. He was eager – too eager, she sometimes thought – to give, to assist, to sympathize, to work for others, but he had little ambition for himself.
When she first met him, she had imagined he needed nothing but opportunity; now she began to suspect he did not want opportunity. He did not want to be drawn into rivalry. He wanted amusement. He also wanted his own way, and, to get it, could be as selfish as the next man. But he was always justified. Yes, he was always justified. If he had no other justification, he could always fall back on some morality of his own.
She walked despondently back to the hotel, beginning to fear that he was a man who in the end would achieve little. He would simply waste himself.
PART TWO
The Victors
9
One evening, in the steel-blue chill of the November twilight, the church bells began to ring. They had been silent for nearly a month. No bell in Greece would sound while one single foreign invader remained on Greek soil. Now the whole of Athens was vibrant with bells. People came running into the streets, crying aloud in their joy, and when Harriet went out to the landing, she heard the chambermaids shouting to one another from floor to floor.
The Italians had been driven back. The Greeks had crossed the Albanian frontier. Greek guns were trained on the Albanian town of Koritza and Greek shells were falling in the streets. All that had happened, but the bells had not rung. What could have caused them to ring now?
Harriet threw up the landing window and looked out in search of an answer. One of the chambermaids, seeing her there, shouted to her in Greek. When Harriet shook her head to show she did not understand, the girl lifted a hand and slapped it down on the window-silclass="underline" ‘Koritza,’ she shouted. ‘Koritza.’
So Koritza had fallen. It was a victory. The first Greek victory of the war. As Harriet laughed and clapped her hands, the girl caught her about the waist and swung her round in a near hysteria of delight.
Outside it was almost dark but the black-out was forgotten. The Italians were much too busy now to take advantage of a few lighted windows. Someone began speaking on the wireless. The voice, rapid, emotional, pitched in triumph, began coming from all the lighted windows and doorways, and people in the streets cheered whenever the word ‘Koritza’ was spoken. Another voice came very loud from the square, speaking over an uproar of shouting, music, applause, with the bells pealing above it all. Harriet could not bear to stay in, but was afraid to go out for fear that Guy would return for her.
The winter was setting in. There were still bright days, but mostly the sky was white with cold and a wind, high, sharp and gritty, swept the dust along the pavements. The night before it had poured with rain. When Harriet went to the gardens she saw the palm fronds blown from side to side like shocks of hair. The paths, that a week before had been warm and quiet, were now draughty channels, so cold that she realized if she did not get a coat, she would soon have to stay indoors.
Having left Guy with his books, contemplating a lecture on Ben Jonson, she hurried back to get him out to the shops and found him gone. He had left no message. She knew he had gone to Aleko’s.
Guy had taken her there once but the visit had depressed her. She liked the Greek boys but was shy with them – being so constituted she could cope with only one or two people at a time; but Guy, she saw, was having the time of his life. He was an adolescent among adolescents, and they were all elevated by the belief that, together, they would reform the world. She was made uneasy by their faith in certain political leaders, their condemnation of others, the atmosphere of conspiracy and her own guilty self-doubt. She was an individual and as such had no hope of reforming the world. The stories that inspired them – stories of injustice and misery – merely roused in her a sense of personal failure.
‘But you must sacrifice your individuality,’ Guy told her. ‘It’s nothing but egoism. You must unite with other right-thinking, self-abnegating people – then you can achieve anything.’
The idea filled her with gloom.
Guy, who was learning demotic Greek, could already discuss abstract ideas with the students in their own language. He amazed them.
One of the boys said to Harriet: ‘He is wonderful – so warm, cordial and un-English! We have elected him an honorary Greek.’ As an honorary Greek, admired and made much of, Guy was at Aleko’s all the time.
Harriet, out of it and a little jealous, refused to go to the café again. Guy told her she was ‘a-political’. Alan Frewen had been similarly condemned. He was, Guy said, the sort of man who thinks the best government is the one that causes him least inconvenience. So much for Alan; but Alan, unaware that his epitaph had been spoken, continued to invite them as though he saw himself the friend of both.
When the telephone rang in the bedroom, it was Alan, calling from his office: ‘I’ve heard that Athens is en fête. No night for cold mutton at the Academy. How about coming to Babayannis’? If there’s anything to celebrate, that’s where everyone goes.’
‘I’m worried about Guy,’ Harriet said. ‘I think he must be at Aleko’s.’
‘I’ll call with a taxi. We’ll roust out the old bolshie on the way.’
When she joined Alan in the taxi, he told the driver to go through the Plaka. ‘I want you to see something,’ he said to Harriet. They turned into the square where the loudspeaker was singing out: ‘Anathema, anathema …’ The curse, of course, was on those who said that love is sweet: ‘I’ve tried it,’ said the song. ‘And found it poison.’ But the curse was also on those who had imagined Greece was there for the taking. The Italians had tried it and they, too, had found it poison.