The sirens sounded. People said from table to table: ‘Here it comes!’ but the raid was the usual raid on the Piraeus. It lasted a long time. When Guy and Harriet reached home, a rosy smoke was welling up out of the harbour. A little crowd of local people were gathered, dark and coagulate, on the hill behind the villa. Dazed after the long day of sun and air, too tired to feel curiosity about anything, the Pringles went unsuspecting to bed. In the small hours, an explosion flung them out of bed.
Guy felt his way up from the floor but Harriet lay under the repeated roaring reverberations, imagining herself flattened beneath the water of a broken dam. Guy tried to pull her up but she clung to the floor, the only security in a disintegrating world. The house quivered. A second explosion overlay the echoes of the first and, as the stupendous clamour rose to a climax, there came from some other dimensions of time the clear, fine tinkle of breaking glass.
Guy managed to lift Harriet and seat her on the edge of the bed. Her chief emotion was indignation. ‘This really is too much,’ she said and Guy laughed helplessly. She dropped back on the bed, hearing above the final sibilations of sound, the howls of dogs; and then, when quiet eventually came, a scandalized chattering.
There were still people watching on the hill. Guy said he would go out and see what had happened. ‘Do you want to come?’ he asked.
‘Too tired,’ she whispered and, putting her face into a pillow, went at once to sleep.
Anastea arrived at breakfast-time garrulous with the horrors she had seen. Guy had been told that a ship, set on fire during the raid, had exploded. Anastea said the explosion had wiped out the Piraeus. The harbour was in ruins. Everyone was dead. Yes, everyone; everyone. Not a soul moved in the town. If she and her husband had not gone last year to Tavros, they would be dead, too. But they had gone. They had had to go because their house was pulled down over their heads They had been martyred by the authorities, but now they knew that God was planning to preserve them. It was a great miracle and Anastea, crossing herself, declared that her faith had been renewed. Then she went all over the story again.
Guy could make nothing of it. What sort of ship was it that, exploding, convulsed the city like the explosion of a planet?
Harriet shook her head, feeling detached from the problem. She said: ‘I think the blast blew me out of my body; I haven’t come back yet.’
On the Piraeus road the homeless were wandering along, carrying bundles or pushing anything that could be pushed. Those that had given up were seated round the bus stop and Guy tried to question them but, too dazed to answer, they merely shook their heads. The Pringles joined the refugees walking through the glass from street lights, windows and motor cars. It was an opalescent day that seemed, like the people about them, tremulous with shock.
At Monastiraki, they parted. Harriet went on to the office while Guy turned off to the School. Each learnt something about the events of the night.
The exploded ship had been carrying a cargo of TNT. It was to be unloaded on Sunday but, for no known reason, the unloading had been delayed. Left by the dockside, it had been set on fire during the raid and a British destroyer tried to tow it out to sea. The tow rope broke.
The two ships were still in the harbour when the explosions came. The destroyer and all aboard her had been annihilated.
‘It was sabotage,’ shouted Ben Phipps when he came into the News Room.
Alan shook his head unhappily but did not deny it.
Harriet thought of the sailor they had seen seated on high with a bottle in his hand and a carnation behind his ear. Likely enough, he had been one of the crew of the lost destroyer. ‘A doomed man,’ she thought, a man upon the brink of death. And Surprise, too. She remembered them as valiant but insubstantial, as though already retreated a degree or two from life. But they were all upon the brink of death. In her shocked state, she felt she had gone too far and might never return to reality.
‘The rope broke three times,’ said Phipps. ‘Three times! Think of it. A rope intended for just such an emergency. It broke three times.’
Yakimov, exhausted by fear and lack of sleep, asked in a faint voice: ‘But who would do it, dear boy?’
‘Who do you think? Pro-Germans, of course. Fifth columnists. The town’s full of them. Just now they’re ringing round all the offices to say more explosions are coming. Worse explosions. They say: “You wait until tonight.” People are so unnerved they’ll believe anything. Work’s at a standstill. There’s a real danger of panic.’
Yakimov was amazed at what he heard. ‘But where do they come from, these pro-Germans?’
‘They’ve been here all the time.’
‘All the time,’ murmured Yakimov and the others, abashed, felt that Greece was a stranger country than they knew. Living here among allies, smiled on, they had imagined themselves loved. But not all the friends were friends; nor the allies, allies. Some who had smiled just as warmly as the rest had been following a different banner and applauding, in secret, the exploits of the other side.
‘How about the Phaleron do?’ Ben asked. ‘Was it cancelled?’
‘On the contrary,’ Alan told him. ‘It was a great success. And why not? I imagine quite a few of the Major’s guests are hoping to shake Hitler by the hand.’
‘And how did the lecture go?’
‘I only know that Miss Gladys looks as though she’s passed through a mystical experience. She did not mention the explosion. It was nothing compared with Pinkrose’s performance. I said: “What was the lecture like?” She replied in a muted voice: “Awe-inspiring.” Anyway, it’s flattened Pinkrose. She came in to tell me that he’d be staying for a few days at Phaleron to recoup.’
Harriet was to meet Charles at tea-time. During the morning she held to this fact as a sleep-walker might hold to a banister. She would not go out into the troubled streets. She sent the boy to buy her a sandwich and remained in the News Room until four o’clock. She arrived early at the Corinthian, not expecting to find Charles. He was already there.
She said: ‘I’m early.’
‘I thought you might come early.’
She sat down and asked: ‘What is the news?’
‘I don’t need to tell you about the explosion.’
‘I’ve heard the whole story. What else? Any rumours?’
‘Nothing good.’
He was holding a book. She put out her hand to take it from him, but he shut it and placed it on the sofa out of her reach. He was frowning slightly as though trying to recall something, examining her face as though whatever it was, was there.
Gazing at each other, they seemed on the brink of revelation but there was nothing to be said. If they began to converse now, it would take a life-time, and they had no time in which to begin.
Suddenly, like someone forced to confess under duress, he said: ‘I love you.’
When she did not reply, he said: ‘I suppose you knew that?’ He insisted against her silence: ‘Didn’t you? … Didn’t you?’
Unable to speak, she nodded and his face cleared. Now, his expression implied, he had given her everything; there were no grounds for any sort of excuses or delays.