The Shortest Way to Hades (23 page)

“There is no need,” I said kindly, “to look so anxious. Your conduct is quite understandable: the interference of your relative in your affairs must have been most irritating.”

“We wouldn’t have minded,” said Lucian, “but it’s so beastly for Mama. Rupert writes to Father saying we’re behaving badly and Father writes to Mama and says she can’t have brought us up properly and Mama gets all upset. It’s terribly unfair, because she has brought us up properly—well, she tried.”

“You may think,” said Lucinda, “that we’re not terribly well brought up. But it isn’t Mama’s fault.”

“I believe,” I said, “that you are very fond of your mother, and would go to great lengths to protect her from any distress?”

To this they both vigorously assented.

“And we didn’t keep the camera,” said Lucinda. “We gave it to Oxfam.”

There was a further question which I should have liked to ask them; but I thought, despite the impression I had made on them, that they would not have given me a truthful answer. With the photographs again in my possession, I left the Fairfax twins and made my way, by a discreetly circuitous route, to another cafe further down the Liston, where I sat at a table shaded from the sun by a wide blue canopy.

Men in white had begun to gather beside the Esplanade, some young, some middle-aged. The older men—these, presumably, were the Writers and Artists—were dressed in conventional white flannels; the younger ones—those qualified, I supposed, by ties of blood rather than personal accomplishment to play for one or other of the two sides—had preferred to wear shorts. They hoped, perhaps, to impress with the shapeliness of their legs those tourists of the female sex who were now beginning to take afternoon refreshments at the tables in the Liston; though Julia, most susceptible of tourists, has been heard to say that the traditional cricketing costume, if worn by a young man of graceful figure, is of all forms of masculine dress the one most conducive to desire. (But that, I seem to remember, was under the influence of some particular attachment.)

Looking across to the far side of the Esplanade, I observed a motor-car draw up there, of moderate size and rather shabby, and a tall, dark man emerge from the door nearest to the driving seat. Though I had not the privilege of any personal acquaintance with Constantine Demetriou, I thought that I would instantly have known him, even had he not been accompanied by Camilla and his wife and son. I would not have doubted, even at such a distance, that this was a man of no ordinary sort, but one marked out by some kind of greatness. I cannot say precisely what it was that produced this effect: though tall, he was not in truth so much above average height as to account for the impression he gave of Olympian stature: but he walked across the Esplanade like a man who treads an immortal path, in the footsteps of Homer and Aeschylus.

The Writers and Artists welcomed him with enthusiasm. With a certain air of ceremony, he settled Dolly at a table close by the edge of the cricket pitch, in the shade of a thick-leaved acacia tree, with Camilla and Leonidas on either side of her; the group was completed by the Fairfax twins, who strolled across from the Liston to join them. The poet himself continued to go to and fro among the players, no doubt with words of encouragement and exhortation for his team.

There was as yet no sign of Sebastian and Selena, and Constantine seemed once or twice to look anxiously at his watch.

At last, however, I saw them hurrying towards the cricket pitch from the southern end of the Esplanade, Selena every few yards or so giving a little skip to keep pace with Sebastian’s longer stride. She was wearing the dress of sky-blue cotton which I had admired on a previous occasion, and Sebastian had somehow provided himself with clothing of suitable whiteness for the activities of the afternoon. Constantine waved, and went a little way to meet them.

They joined the group at the edge of the cricket pitch, Leonidas yielding to Selena his place beside his mother. The reunion seemed an occasion for much laughter and many embraces: I could hardly think it a suitable moment to break in on the gathering with dark warnings of malice and danger. Which might, after all, be quite unfounded: the theory which in London I had held with such conviction had begun, in the sunlit warmth of Corfu, to seem like a morbid and improbable fancy. Moreover, I was persuaded that there was nothing to fear until they all returned to the Villa Miranda. I accordingly resolved to remain where I was, awaiting an opportunity to speak privately to Selena.

The twenty-three-yard strip of coconut matting which is the island’s substitute for the carefully tended green wickets of England was rolled out in the center of the pitch and secured to the bare brown earth. Though too far away to be certain which side had won the toss, I supposed that it must have been the Artists, since they went in to bat first: on the Corfu ground, I am told by those who understand such matters, this is almost always an advantage, obliging the other side to waste their energies in the field in the hotter part of the day and to face the bowling when the deceptive shadows of evening have begun to reach toward the wicket.

Constantine, however, gave no impression of feeling that luck was against him, but set his field in the bold and heroic style which shows confidence in the favor of the gods: the majority of his team were gathered closely round the batsman, hopeful of catches, and those left to wander in the outfield had an exiled, solitary look. I gathered that Constantine was not of that school of thought which holds that in limited over matches, such as are played in Corfu, the primary object of the fielding side should be to contain the scoring rate rather than to take wickets.

His strategy seemed at first to be vindicated by success, for the opening batsmen were swiftly and inexpensively dismissed. The Artists had scored fourteen runs for two wickets when their captain took his place at the crease—a bushy-bearded, barrel-shaped man, with whom I had a slight acquaintance. The vigor and panache of his painting had earned him, if not an international reputation, one which at any rate extended beyond the shores of his native island. He brought the same qualities to his batsmanship: if, as he notoriously believed, the true function of the brush was to transfer as large a quantity of paint as possible to the canvas, the function of the bat was by the same token to hit every ball bowled, of whatever speed or length, as hard as possible towards the boundary. This technique, if there were any justice in the game, would have cost him his wicket half a dozen times before he reached double figures; but there is none, and he survived.

Constantine began to look anxious. In spite of bowling changes and the reluctant withdrawal of fielders to the depopulated outfield, the painter could not be dislodged and continued to score freely. He did manage, in his eagerness to score at the end of each over the single run required to retain the bowling, to run out two of his partners; but it was plainly too much to hope that the whole team would be similarly disposed of. At the end of the seventeenth over, when the Artists’ score had reached the eighties, Constantine shrugged his shoulders, as if willing to try anything once, and threw the ball to his son.

Not following the fashion of his contemporaries, Leonidas was dressed in flannels, but with a shirt slashed like a tunic from arm to waist: a design intended, no doubt, to give greater ease of movement, but also affording to the onlookers, when he ran up to bowl, a tantalizing glimpse of bare brown flesh. I thought how fortunate it was that Julia was not with me.

The first ball he bowled was what an
aficionado
would have described, I believe, as being of a good length and pitching on the off stump: the painter hit it for four runs, finding a gap in what is termed the leg side field. Anticipating a similar stroke, Constantine moved a fieldsman ten yards to the right. The second ball was again of good length and pitching on the off stump: again the batsman hit it for four—through the space left vacant by the fieldsman. Looking dejected, the boy turned and went back to begin his run-up for a third time: once more he bowled a ball well pitched up on the off stump. The batsman, seeing how closely it resembled its predecessors, stepped forward to deal with it in a similar manner; but on this occasion it turned shyly, almost coquettishly, away, leaving the bat to pass through empty air; and then moved back again to continue on its way towards the off stump. The painter, as he walked back to the Liston, shook his head sadly at Leonidas, as if deploring that one so young should be capable of such duplicity.

The Artists were in due course dismissed for a total of a hundred and thirty-one runs—a respectable score for the ground, but by no means invincible, requiring the Writers to score at a rate of precisely four runs an over in order to secure victory. Leonidas had taken four wickets. Sebastian had done nothing in particular to distinguish himself or bring glory on the name of his College and University; on the other hand, he had done nothing to bring them into disrepute, which is more than can always be said of my colleagues travelling abroad.

Tea was taken. I use the expression in a conventional sense, to signify the interval between one innings and the next, since players and spectators alike preferred for the most part to refresh themselves with lager. I felt for a moment a certain uneasiness at the thought of Sebastian and Selena taking food or drink in the midst of the Demetriou family; but the waiter brought a number of bottles and glasses on the same tray, and there seemed no way of anyone foreseeing who would drink from which.

Whether from a fixed regard for the quality of English batsmanship or because he thought it an honor proper to be accorded to a guest, Constantine selected Sebastian to be one of the opening batsmen. His partner was a dark man of saturnine appearance, whom I recognized with a slight effort of memory as an amateur historian of the Byzantine era and the author of a despondent epic novel set in that period: he batted cautiously, guarding his wicket as carefully as his sister’s honor from the brutal onslaughts of the bowler, but betraying no consciousness that the game was one which involved the scoring of runs. In spite of his caution, however, he was caught at square leg off the first ball of the fifth over. The spectators observed his departure with not unmixed regret; and Sebastian was joined at the crease by his captain.

Though I profess no expertise in the subtleties of the game, I had sufficiently often been persuaded to lend the encouragement of my presence at College and University matches at once to recognize the high quality of Constantine’s batmanship. He played with a fluency and majestic elegance I had seldom seen equalled. His eye and speed, no doubt, were not what they had been in his youth; but I thought that in his prime he could hardly have found himself outclassed in any side he chose to play for.

Sebastian also, as if inspired by his example, began to play with a sparkle and stylishness I had not known him to possess. It commonly happens, I have seen it often, that two batsmen playing together for the first time are unable, whatever their individual talents, to score with much rapidity: one calls for a run; his partner hesitates; the first retreats; the second sets forth down the wicket; the first shouts “No”; the second, according to temperament, goes back cursing under his breath or forward cursing at the top of his voice; at best there is no run, at worst there is a run-out. With Constantine and Sebastian there was none of this: between them there seemed to be so perfect a sympathy as to preclude such misunderstandings; and despite a defensive field they maintained a scoring rate approaching six runs an over.

It may be that some of my readers would wish me to give a full description of this agreeable interlude, relating in detail the particular attributes of each ball bowled and each stroke played. Regretfully, I must disappoint them: such an account would not be germane to my narrative, nor is mine the pen to undertake such a task. The partnership ended in the nineteenth over, when Sebastian fell victim to an interesting and original interpretation of the leg before wicket rule on the part of one of the umpires—who was, I now remembered, a cousin of the barrel-chested painter. Sebastian, being a well-brought-up young man, walked back without argument or reproach to rejoin the group gathered round Dolly at the edge of the cricket pitch.

I had hoped that when his innings was concluded Selena might be tempted to pay less attention to the game—perhaps to wander about a little, looking at the shop windows of the Liston, and so providing me with an opportunity of private conversation with her. She chose, however—whether from motives of politeness, or because the game had reached a sufficiently dramatic stage to engage her interest—to remain in her place beside Dolly. I resigned myself to making, if I could not speak to her before the match was concluded, a less discreet approach than I had hoped.

Aristotle, I suppose, would have approved of cricket—a game which peculiarly demonstrates how a moment’s error may bring down the protagonist from the heights of prosperity to the depths of disaster. At ten minutes past six o’clock the Writers seemed in an enviable position: a mere forty runs needed for victory; thirteen overs in which to make them; eight wickets standing; and their captain still at the crease in apparently invincible form. By half past the hour matters were very different.

The two batsmen who succeeded Sebastian (a minor poet and the nephew, I believe, of the epic novelist) were out of form or out of luck; their wickets fell before the score reached a hundred. Leonidas played a charming little innings, giving signs of having inherited something of his father’s talents; but he played at a ball which his father would have left to its own devices, and was caught behind the wicket with only a dozen runs to his credit. Four further batsmen (of whose literary achievements or connections I am unable to give particulars) came and went without making much contribution to the total; and the Writers, at the fall of their penultimate wicket, still needed six runs to win.

The influential critic and belles-lettriste who occupied eleventh place in the batting order, though undoubtedly familiar with Aristotelian principles, had assumed at some much earlier stage that his services would not be called on and that there was no reason to reject the generous offers of lager made by those anxious for his goodwill. After an unsteady progress to the wicket he stood leaning heavily on his bat, evidently grateful for its support, and smiled with hazy benevolence at those about him. When the bowler began to hurl projectiles in his direction, he took no offense at this unfriendly conduct but gently waved his bat in the air in what seemed to be a gesture of forgiveness and good fellowship. By some dispensation of Providence his wicket survived the three balls which remained of the over.