One day Harriet saw the kittens. She had crossed the wasteland as far as the first of the shacks and when she reached it, she found it derelict. The cat was a wild cat. The kittens were plain, starved creatures, tabby and white, and Harriet wondered how the mother had managed to bring them up; but they played happily in the sunlight, not knowing they were among the underprivileged of the world. One day when Harriet went to feed them, they had gone. The cat was there, perplexed and anxious, but the kittens had disappeared.
When she returned home on the afternoon of Charles’s departure, Harriet had the cat in mind. It gave her some sort of attachment to life. She had fed it before out of a sense of duty to a creature in need; now, suddenly, she felt love for it, and began to fear that in her absence some harm could have come to it. She went first to the large grocery shop in University Street and queued for bread. It was a shop that in peace-time sold only the finest European foods. Now the shelves were empty. Behind the counter there were some boxes of dried figs and a sack of butter-beans. Harriet was allowed a few grammes of each, and because she was English the assistant opened a drawer and took out a strip of salted cod. He cut off a small piece and she accepted it as a sign of favour, although she felt she had no right to it.
Back at the villa, she found Anastea in the kitchen. A little skeleton of a woman in a black cotton dress and head-scarf, she was sitting on a stool, her hands lying in her lap, upwards, so Harriet could see the hard, pinkish skin of the palms scored over with lines, like the top of an old school desk. Her work was finished; she was free to go home, but she preferred to remain amid the splendours of the rich people’s home.
Harriet kept the food in her bag and took it to the bathroom where she cut the fish with scissors and soaked it in the wash-hand basin. When she had got some of the salt from it, she took it to the wood and fed the cat.
28
Some time during the night an anti-aircraft gun was placed on the hill behind the villa.
Guy had almost reached the bus-stop next morning when the sirens sounded. At once the new gun opened up, so close that the noise was shattering. He hurried to the villa where he found Harriet, who had been in the bath, crouching naked under the stairs while Anastea, on her knees near by, was swinging backwards and forwards, hitting the floor with her brow and crossing herself, while she muttered prayers in an ecstasy of terror. The two women were completely unhinged by the uproar overhead.
As Guy stared at them in wonder and compassion, Harriet flung herself upon him crying: ‘What is it? What is it?’
‘Good heavens, it’s only an anti-aircraft gun.’ His own nerves were untouched by the racket but after two hours of it – the raid was the longest of the war – Harriet had become used to it while he, trapped inactive in the villa, felt he could bear no more.
‘We can’t live here with this banging away at all hours. The house has become unlivable-in,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to find somewhere else.’
Harriet, who could scarcely face another move, felt the responsiblity of the cat and said: ‘It’s scarcely worth leaving now. We’ve stuck it so long, we might just as well stick it to the end. Besides, where can we go?’ Many hotels had been requisitioned by the British military and those that remained had been packed by repeated waves of refugees. She said: ‘We can’t afford the Corinthian or the King George; even if we got into a small hotel, heaven knows what we’d have to pay now.’
The raid over, they went up to the roof and watched smoke rising in black, slow, greasy clouds from somewhere along the coast. Anastea, who had followed them, said the smoke came from Eleusis where there was a munitions factory. The sight seemed to inspire her and she began to talk very quickly, making gestures of appeal at Guy. Apparently she was urging him to do something, but it was some time before he understood that men of the district were cutting an air-raid shelter in the rock by the Ilissus. The shelter was to contain seats which would be reserved for those who could pay for them. Anastea had learnt this from the men that morning. When she said she could not afford a seat, they told her to ask Guy to buy her one. How much were the seats? Guy asked and she replied, ‘Thirty thousand drachma.’ Guy and Harriet looked at one another and laughed. The sum seemed fantastic to them, but it had no reality for Anastea. Foreigners who could afford a villa with bathroom and kitchen could afford anything.
‘Do you think the men were pulling her leg?’ Harriet asked. ‘It’s probably thirty drachma.’
But Anastea insisted that the sum needed was thirty thousand. When Guy explained that it was far beyond anything he could afford, Anastea’s face fell dolefully.
‘How old do you think she is?’ Guy asked when she had gone downstairs.
‘She looks eighty but perhaps she’s not much more than seventy.’ Whatever she was, she had been aged out of calculable time by work, hardship and near-starvation. Harriet wondered would she herself, when half a century or more had passed, be so eager to preserve her life. Not long ago, she had spoken of life as a fortune that must be preserved, yet already its riches seemed lost – not squandered or misapplied, but somehow forfeit as a result of misunderstanding. She did not think that any explanation could bring them back and did not, in fact, know what explanation to give.
When Guy set out again, he asked her if she were coming into Athens, too. She could think of no reason for going: she had no job, nothing to do and would have to spend her time walking about in streets that could hold nothing for her. At least, if she remained, she had the cat.
Guy said, as he had said often before: ‘I’ll get back early.’
She laughed unbelievingly, having no faith in these promises, and found him watching her with the same quizzical but detached concern that he had accorded her when she told him Charles had gone.
‘Of course I will,’ he assured her. ‘Tell Anastea to try and find something for supper. We’ll eat at home, shall we?’
‘All right.’ She was pleased, but his insistence that he would indeed return disconcerted her like a solution of a problem that had come too late. The problem did not affect her any longer: it had not been solved but it had, she felt, been bypassed. Much more to the point these days was the question of what to give the cat. She sent Anastea to the shops and when the old woman was safely out of the way, she went to the kitchen and collected some scraps of food, but the cat was not in the wood. She walked to the hut where the kittens had lived. The cat was not there. She stood for a long time calling it, but in the end gave up the search, supposing it had gone off on a food-hunt of its own.
The evening was one of the few that they had spent in their living-room with its comfortless, functional furniture. The electric light was dim. Shut inside by the black-out curtains, Harriet mended clothes while Guy sat over his books, contemplating a lecture on the thesis: ‘A work of art must contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.’
‘Who said that?’ Harriet asked.
‘Coleridge.’
‘Does life contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise?’
‘If it doesn’t, nothing does.’
‘But you think it does?’
‘It must do.’
‘You’re becoming a mystic,’ she said and after a long pause, added: ‘There are so many dead bodies in the ruins of Belgrade, people have stopped trying to bury them. They just cover them with flowers.’