‘Are you serious?’
‘My dear Ben, you think the question of the moment is: Will the Germans get here? If you worked in the News Room you would be required to ponder a question of infinitely greater import: how soon can we get Pinkrose’s lecture into the bookshops?’
‘So he’s no longer concerned about his safety?’
‘Never speaks of it.’
‘Think he’s got an escape route up his sleeve?’
‘If he has, I’d like to know what it is. A lot of people have to be got out of Greece: British subjects, committed Greeks, refugee Jews; four or five hundred, and quite a few children.’
‘I thought the children went on the evacuation boat?’
‘Not all. Several women wouldn’t leave their husbands. And life goes on. English babies have been born since the boat went.’
‘What has the Legation got in mind?’
‘We must wait and see.’
There were two narrow beds in the Pringles’ room. Guy and Harriet had not slept apart since their marriage but now they would have the width of the room between them. Each felt cold alone, the covers were thin; and sandflies came in through the broken mesh of the window screens.
In the middle of the night Harriet woke and heard Guy moaning. He had been reading, propped up with a pillow, and had fallen asleep with the light on. She could see him struggling in sleep as against a tormentor. She crossed the room to where his bed stood under one of the windows and saw the sandflies shifting, as he struck out at them, in a flight leisurely but elusive. A moment later they attacked him again. He did not wake up but was conscious of her, and whimpered: ‘Make them go away.’
She had bought a new box of pastilles and, after placing them on the table, the bed-head and the window-sill, lit them so the smoke encircled him like a cheval-de-frise. The pillow had dropped to the floor. She put it under his head, then stood at the end of the bed and watched while the flies dispersed. He sank back into sleep, murmuring: ‘David has not come.’
She said: ‘He may come tomorrow.’
From some outpost of sleep, so distant it was beyond the restrictions of time, he answered with extreme sadness: ‘He won’t come now. He’s lost.’
‘Aren’t we all lost?’ she asked, but he had gone too far to hear her.
Back in bed, she thought of the early days of their marriage when she had believed she knew him completely. She still believed she knew him completely, but the person she knew now was not the person she had married. She saw that in the beginning she had engaged herself to someone she did not know. There were times when he seemed to her so changed, she could not suppose he had any hold on her. Imagining all the threads broken between them, she thought she had only to walk away. Now she was not sure. At the idea of flight, she felt the tug of loyalties, emotions and dependencies. For each thread broken, another had been thrown out to claim her. If she tried to escape, she might find herself held by a complex, an imprisoning web, she did not even know was there.
Rumours, that the authorities did not deny, grew more coherent. By Sunday they had taken on the substance of truth. It was Palm Sunday and the beginning of Easter week, but no one gave much thought to Easter this year. It was a dull, chilly day with a gritty wind that seemed to carry anxiety like an infection. Everyone was out of doors, moving about the main streets, restless, aimless and asking what was happening.
Alan Frewen, walking from the Academy with the Pringles, was several times stopped by English people who lived at Psychico or Kifissia and usually spent their Sundays at home.
This Sunday, like everyone else, they had caught suddenly and for no reason they could name, the frisson of alarm. They had felt themselves drawn to the city’s centre, imagining that someone there might tell them something. Alan, as Information Officer, would know what was going on. Again and again he was asked to deny the rumour that German mechanized forces were driving almost unopposed through the centre of Greece. It could not be true. Everyone knew the fall of Salonika had been inevitable. The northern port was too near the frontier. It could not be held. But this talk of the British being in retreat! British resistance was not so easily broken. The stories must be the work of fifth columnists?
Alan, listening with sombre sympathy, agreed that the fifth columnists were doing their worst. It was true the British had withdrawn from the Florina Gap, but that, likely enough, was part of a plan. He did not think anyone need feel unduly anxious. The British were not beaten yet.
People accepted his comfort, realizing that he was doing his best but knew no more than they did themselves. They thanked him, looked cheerful, and went off in search of other informants.
One man, Plugget, with a mottled face, wiry moustache and the brisk yap of a terrier dog, did not play his part so well. The Pringles had never seen him before. He worked for an English firm but had married a Greek and associated chiefly with Greeks, but now, like everyone else, had come out in search of news. He rejected Alan’s consolation out of hand.
‘Don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Things look bad, and I think they’re worse than bad. I don’t like it at all. What’s going to happen to us? And what did our chaps come here for? Retreating without a shot fired! What’s the idea? They just caused trouble, and now they’ll be getting out and leaving us to face the music. Not a shot fired! It’s the talk of the town,’ he insisted, while his wife stood on one side looking ashamed for him.
‘If that’s the talk of the town, it’s being put round by fifth columnists,’ said Alan.
‘You’re deceiving yourself, Frewen. There aren’t all that number of fifth columnists. It’s a terrible business. We went to see a lad in hospital, relation of the wife. He’d just been sent down from a field depot. He said it’s chaos up there.’
At last, in need of comfort themselves, Alan and the Pringles were able to move on to Zonar’s. Tandy, who had gone inside out of the wind, was seated with Yakimov and Ben Phipps at a short distance from a party of English women which included Mrs Brett and Miss Jay. At the sight of Alan, Mrs Brett jumped to her feet and hurried to him, calling out: ‘What’s the news? They say our lads are on the run. You can tell me the truth. I’m English. I shall keep my head.’
Standing over her with his mountainous air of pity, Alan let her repeat over and over again: ‘I’m not alarmed. No, I’m not alarmed. If we’re in a fix, don’t hesitate to let me know.’
When his chance came, Alan said slowly and firmly: ‘It’s a perfectly orderly withdrawaclass="underline" a piece of strategy. They’ve decided to reinforce the Olympus Line.’
Mrs Brett gave a cry of rapture: ‘I knew it was something like that. I’ve been telling everyone it was something like that. And we can rely on the Olympus Line, can’t we? That’s where the Australians are.’ She returned to her friends shouting: ‘I told you so … nothing to worry about …’ but her manner was too confident, too much what might be expected from an Englishwoman who sees calamity ahead.
Ben Phipps watched her with a sour approval and when Alan sat down, asked: ‘Have you any reason for making that statement?’
‘We must hope while we can.’
‘Nothing definite, then?’
‘Nothing. And you?’
‘Nothing at all. And probably won’t be. They could keep us in the dark till the Jerries walk in. That’s what happened in Salonika. There was a camp full of Poles: no one told them, no one did anything about them. Some of the English did a last-minute bolt, but they got no warning. It could happen here.’