In case they came to look for her, she said she would go to the flower shop beside the Old Palace, but when she reached the corner she hurried into the gardens through the side entrance and went to the Judas grove. As Alan had promised, the trees had blossomed for Easter. She stood for a full minute taking in the rosettes of wine-mauve flowers that covered the leafless wood, devouring them in mind like someone who gazes into a lighted window at a feast, then she hurried to the shop and bought carnations for Yakimov.
With nothing else to do in a city where life was ebbing to a stop, the three sat on and watched the sun move off the square. It was late in the afternoon when the hearse and carriage drew up before the hotel.
‘They’ve done him proud,’ Guy said.
Four black horses, with silver trappings and tails to the ground, drew a black hearse of ornamental wood and engraved glass, surmounted by woeful black cherubs who held aloft black candles and black ostrich plumes. These splendours pleased the mourners but they did not please the hotel management. As soon as sighted, a porter came pelting down the steps to order them round to the back entrance.
While Alan and the Pringles stood in the kitchen doorway Dobson arrived in a taxi and joined them. The undertakers had taken the flimsy coffin up to the bathroom and the living listened to the arguments and the scraping of wood as it was manoeuvred down the grey and grimy cement stairway.
Dobson, sniffing the smell of cooking-fat, rubbed his head-fluff ruefully and said: ‘This is really too bad!’
‘It could be worse,’ Guy said. ‘Chekov died in an hotel and they smuggled him out in a laundry basket.’
The coffin edged round into view and reached the hall where the bearers, placing it on the ground, lifted the lid so all might see that Yakimov and his possessions were intact.
‘We forgot to close his eyes,’ Harriet said in distress and, looking into them for the last time, saw they had lost their lustre. Despite his greed, his ingratitude, his long history of unpaid debts, he had a blameless look and she found herself moved by his corpse, wrapped there in the Czar’s old coat, as she had never been moved by him in life. He had died demurring, but it had been a gentle demur and the gaze that met hers was mild, a little bewildered but resigned to the mischance that had finished him off. Her own eyes filled with tears. She turned away to hide them; the coffin lid was replaced, the carnations placed upon it, and the cortège set out.
Dobson had asked the English popa Father Harvey to conduct the service: ‘After all,’ he said, ‘Yaki must have been Orthodox.’
‘But Russian Orthodox, surely?’ said Alan.
‘His mother was Irish,’ Harriet said. ‘So he may have been a Catholic.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Dobson. ‘Harvey’s a dear fellow and won’t hold it against him.’
They drove at a solemn pace past the Zappion and the Temple of Zeus and came to a district that no one except Alan had visited before. Above the cemetery wall, tall cypresses rose into the evening blue of the sky. Father Harvey had already arrived. In his popa’s robes, with his blond beard, his blond hair knotted behind the veil that fell from his popa’s hat, he led the funeral procession through the gate into the graveyard quiet.
There had been no one to buy a plot for Yakimov. The Legation was paying for the funeral, but the coffin would have only temporary lodging in the ground. Alan mentioned that he had had to identify the remains of a friend who had died while on holiday in Athens.
‘What was there to identify?’ Dobson asked.
‘Precious little. Bodies disintegrate quickly in the dry summer heat; soon there’s nothing but dust and a few powdery bones and bits of cloth. They put it all into a box and place it in the ossuary. I prefer that. I don’t want to lie mouldering for years. And think of the saving of space!’
‘There’ll be no one to identify Yakimov,’ Harriet said.
Alan sadly agreed.
There would be no one left who had known him in life or remembered that the scraps of cloth lying among his long, fragile bones, had been a sable-lined greatcoat, once worn by the doomed, unhappy Czar of all the Russias.
Passing among the trees and shrubs, they came on small communities of graves that seemed like gatherings of friends, silent a moment till the intruders went by. When the ceremony was over, Harriet fell behind the party of mourners and, walking soundlessly on the grass verges, lingered to look at the statues and photographs of the dead. She did not want to leave this sequestered safety, where the ochre-golden light of the late sun rayed through the cypresses and gilded the leaves.
The richness of the enclosing greenery secluded her and gave her a sense of safety. When the men’s voices passed out of hearing, a velvet quiet came down so she could imagine herself dead and immaterial in a region where the alarms of the present could affect her no more than those of the past. She wandered away from the direction of the gate, unwilling to leave.
Guy called her. She came to a stop beside a stone boy seated on a chair. Guy called again, breaking the air’s intimate peace, and she felt her awareness contract and concentrate upon the destructive and futile hazards outside.
Guy came through the trees, reproving her: ‘Darling, do come along. Dobson has to get back to the Legation. There’s a lot to be done there.’
On the return journey, Harriet asked what they were doing up at the Legation.
‘Oh!’ Dobson gave a gasp of amusement at the ridiculous ploys of life. ‘We’re burning papers. We’re sorting out the accumulation of centuries. All the important, top-secret documents written by all the important top-secret characters in history are being dumped on a bonfire in the Legation garden.’
Alan was returning with him to help in this task so the Pringles, dropped in the centre of Athens, found themselves alone.
Guy was certain that Ben Phipps would be waiting for them at the Corinthian, but there was no sign of him.
‘Let’s try Zonar’s.’
They walked quickly in the outlandish hope that Tandy might, after all, be there. But he was not there. And Ben Phipps was not there. The table was unoccupied. Disconcerted, disconsolate, they stood and looked at it. What they missed most was Tandy’s welcome. He had liked them; but he had liked everyone, in a general way, as some people like dogs, and might have excused himself by saying: ‘They are company.’ He had been in Athens only ten days and in that time had become a habit. Now he had gone, it was as though a familiar tree had been cut down, a landmark lost.
They felt no impulse to sit down without him. While they stood on the corner of University Street, some English soldiers came and began to set up a machine-gun.
‘What on earth’s happening?’ Guy asked.
‘Martial law,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’d go in if I were you. There’s a report that the fifth column mean to bump off all the British.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
The sergeant laughed: ‘Tell you the truth, I don’t, neither.’
The Greeks seated in the café chairs watched apathetic, as the gun was placed in position, resigned to anything that might happen in a city passing out of control.
Standing there with nothing to do, nowhere to go, Harriet could see from his ruminative expression that Guy was trying to think of some duty or obligation that might protect him from the desolation in the air. Fearful of being left alone, she caught his arm and said: ‘Please don’t leave me.’
‘I ought to go to the School,’ he said. ‘I’ve left some books there; and the students might come to say good-bye.’
‘All right. We’ll go together.’
The sun had dropped behind the houses and long, azure shadows lay over the roads. With time to waste, the Pringles strolled back to Stadium Street where other machine-guns stood on corners. Soldiers were patrolling the pavements with rifles at the ready. Most of the shops had shut and some were boarded and battened as a precaution against riots or street-fighting. Yet, apart from the guns, the soldiers and the boarded shops, there was no visible derangement of life. There was no violence; there were no demonstrations; simply, the everyday world was running down.