My Brother Michael Read Free Page A

road on that matter of life and death …
    I waited an hour. The waiter had begun to look askance again, so I pushed aside my untouched letter and gave an order, then sat playing with a plateful ofbeans and some small pink fish while I watched, in an expectancy that gradually gave way to uneasiness, the constant coming-and-going at the café door.
    My motive in waiting hadn’t been quite as straightforward as I had suggested to the proprietor of the café. It had occurred to me that, since I had become involved in the affair through no fault of my own, I might be able to turn it to advantage. When ‘Simon’s girl’ arrived to claim the car, it might surely be possible to suggest – or even to ask outright – that I might be her passenger as far as Delphi. And the possibility of getting a lift up to Delphi was not the only one which had occurred to me …
    So the minutes dragged by, and still no one came, and somehow, the longer I waited, the less possible it seemed to walk out of the café and leave everything to settle itself without me, and the more insidiously did that other possibility begin to present itself. Dry-mouthed, I pushed it aside, but there it was, a challenge, a gift, a dare from the gods …
    At twelve o’clock, when nobody had appeared to claim the car, I thrust my plate aside, and set myself to consider that other possibility as coolly as I could.
    It was, simply, to drive the car up to Delphi myself.
    It was apparent that, for whatever reason, the girl wasn’t coming. Something must have prevented her, for otherwise she would simply have telephoned the garage to cancel the order. But the car – the urgently wanted car – was still there, already an hour and a half late in starting. I, on the other hand, wanted very badly to go to Delphi, and could start straight away. I hadcome straight up from Piraeus off the Crete steamer, and had everything with me that I needed for a short stay in Delphi. I could go up today, deliver the car, have two days there with the money saved on the bus-fare, and come back with the tourist bus on Thursday. The thing was simple, obvious and a direct intervention of providence.
    I picked up the key with fingers that felt as if they didn’t belong to me, and reached slowly for my only luggage – the big brightly-coloured hold-all of Mykonos weaving – that hung on the back of a chair.
    I hesitated with my hand touching it. Then I let the hand drop, and sat, twisting the key over and over, watching with unseeing eyes the way the sun glinted on it as it turned.
    It couldn’t be done. It was just one of those things that couldn’t be done. I must have been mad even to consider doing it. All that had happened was that Simon’s girl had forgotten to cancel the order for the car and claim the deposit. It was nothing to do with me. No one would thank me for intervening in an affair that, in spite of my silly mistake, had nothing whatever to do with me. That phrase
a matter of life and death
– so glib a chorus, so persuasive an excuse to interfere – was only a phrase, after all, a phrase from which I had built up this feeling of urgency which gave me (I pretended) the excuse to act.
In any case, it had nothing to do with me
. The obvious – the only – thing to do was to leave the car standing there, hand over the key, and go away.
    The decision brought with it a sense of relief so vivid,so physical almost, that it startled me. On the wave of it I stood up, picked up the car key, and swung my hold all up to my shoulder. The unfinished letter to Elizabeth lay on the table. I reached for it, and as I folded it over to thrust it into my bag, the sentence caught my eye again.
Nothing ever happens to me
.
    The paper crackled suddenly as my fingers tightened. I suppose moments of self-knowledge come at all sorts of odd times. I have often wondered if they are ever pleasant. I had one such moment now.
    It didn’t last long. I didn’t let it. It was with a sort of resigned