So he was relieved when she simply repeated, “An accident. I was clumsy and tripped. I’ve sprained my ankle.”
“I trust it will be well in a fortnight.”
Most women might well have reacted obliquely, but Agnes asked promptly, “Why a fortnight?”
“Because that is all the time you have left. After that I’m afraid you must leave this island.”
For once she thought before she spoke. So she’d been right to think they were tightening up, that the change from a Turk to a slick Greek policeman was an omen of worse things to come. With the water from the underground lake, these slopes were fertile, their inhabitants prosperous, and Turks held good land as well as Greeks. But any Turk with good land was always vulnerable: they caught his land with some crooked lawsuit or maybe he simply lost his water rights. Without water his fields would be useless in weeks.
Silently Agnes Withers swore. She saw world politics with exemplary realism. In the American Congress there was a powerful Greek lobby, but there wasn’t a soul to speak for poor Turks.
But this time she answered almost mildly. “You intend to withdraw my permit of residence?”
“I regret the decision, but I have my instructions.”
It was a lie, for he was a natural bully. In any case he detested this woman. Beating up boys and speaking good Turkish, refusing to employ Greek servants, shooting her mouth about local rackets. His bile rose, but he kept his temper.
So, with a secret struggle, did Agnes; she asked mildly again, “May I know the reason?”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you. It would have to come out in any case if you were foolish enough to complain to your diplomats.” He looked at her. “May I smoke?”
“If you must.”
He lit a cigarette, black and noxious, and Agnes, who loathed tobacco smoke, drew away as far as the bed allowed. Her room was going to stink for a week.
“We have evidence you’re a Turkish agent.”
“Godverdomme,” Agnes said instinctively.
“You consider that opinion extravagant? Then please listen to a little story.” Now his voice had an edge; he was greatly enjoying himself. “Four days ago Turkish fighters flew over here, an outrageous breach of our sovereign airspace. Over this village they dipped and came low.”
“They weren’t saluting me.”
“That is probable. They were reading the message you’d put out on your lawn.”
She knew this was ridiculous, but all Greeks were suspicious, psychopathically edgy, and the charge had a sort of crazy logic. For four days ago had been a Monday, and on Mondays the maid washed the sheets and pillow slips. Being Turkish, she didn’t hang them on lines; she pegged them out on the lawn to dry in the sun.
Agnes knew it was futile to argue with policemen, but silence could be read as admission. “I can only assure you that you’re quite mistaken.”
He didn’t answer her but rose instead; he walked to the window, threw his stub into the garden, and when he returned he was openly menacing.
“I do hope you’ll think it over carefully. Your house will be sold if you haven’t done so and the proceeds remitted freely to England. Your furniture will follow. Consider it. You haven’t, if I may say so, madam, the reputation of a tactful woman, but surely for once discretion is indicated. A discreet disappearance back to England.”
He walked to the door and saluted respectably. “Think it over,” he said. He went away.
Agnes sent for the maid, and she wheeled the bed out to the sunny veranda. The lawn was covered with linen again, and Friday wasn’t a day for washing. The maid saw her puzzled frown and explained.
“There was too much on Monday to do in one go, so I finished the leftovers early this morning.”
“Thank you,” Agnes said. She slept.
She woke from her sleep to the roar of aircraft. They were flying very low again, right over her house in a tight goose V. She could see the star-and-crescent markings.
There was a telephone by her bed and she reached for it, but her hand was still in the air when it rang.
“Lady Withers?”
“Speaking.”
“I see that you do not heed fair warning. I thought it generous to have given a fortnight. Regretfully it is now a week. A week to return to your husband in England.” Like most Greeks, he’d assumed since they lived apart that they weren’t on good terms and had more or less parted. The opposite was in fact the truth.
“Inspector…” Agnes began.
No answer.
She put the receiver down and then dialed, an immediate call to England, to Wiltshire. It came through in an hour, but not Sir William. He was the boss, and it took time to find him. When he was found he said casually, “Nice to hear from you.”
“I don’t think you’re going to think so.”
“No?”
“I’m in serious trouble.”
“You do not surprise me.”
“Can you come down here at once?”
“Of course.”
There hadn’t been even a second of doubt, no talk of his work or important engagements. She knew he had many; she loved him dearly. His voice went on without hint of resentment.
“I’ll get a seat on the overnight flight this evening. Just meet me at die airport, will you?”
“I’ve been shot in the leg.”
“Then get a taxi.”
She met him at five o’clock the next morning, having ordered a car with a Turkish driver. This was partly because she favoured Turks, but also for a more practical reason: with a Turk she could drive to the airport directly, through the no-go land where all Greeks went in convoy. The other way round the hills was much longer.
She eagerly watched him come down the gangway, a spare man in his fifties, not showing his age. It had been a rum sort of marriage, she thought, but successful. He had married her because he’d had to. They had met at a party, and both had been tight. Three weeks later she had known she was pregnant. Distinctly un-Dutch, but she’d also been younger.
He hadn’t been Sir William then, and her own family had been influential. She knew that he’d always been quietly ambitious and her family, if they couldn’t break him, could put his career back by many years. They’d held the gun; William Withers had bowed to it.
She smiled as she remembered it. How Willie had carried the whole thing off! He’d arrived in Amsterdam in style, with a Bentley which he’d happened to own and a manservant whom he’d temporarily hired, where he’d put up in a suite in the Doelen Hotel. He could afford all three since he was comfortably off. Then he’d telephoned to her father politely. The marriage, he understood, was at noon so he’d arrive at the church at a quarter to. Yes, he’d be suitably dressed and attended. He’d remembered to bring a best man.
He’d rung off.
Lady Withers laughed, for she still thought it funny. To a shotgun wedding you took your Purdey, not some miserable pumpgun made in Belgium.
Then he’d driven her off on a formal honeymoon, and on it she had fallen in love with him. Not that that had solved all problems. Her baby had, alas, been born dead, and they’d told her she couldn’t have another. And she hadn’t liked England, or not darkest Wiltshire. They’d had a comfortable house in the guarded Establishment, but Establishment life she had found intolerable, the endless jockeying and the bitchy women. It had been Willie himself who in the end had suggested it. Why didn’t she go and live on that island, the island where they’d spent most of their honeymoon? He’d have his work, which she knew absorbed him, and he’d visit her every six weeks at most. That is, if she wished it.
She’d said she did. The Inspector of Police had been ludicrously wrong. Their married life was a series of honeymoons.