My Brother Michael Read Free Page B

surprise that I found myself once more at the counter, handing a slip of paper across it to the proprietor.
    ‘My name and address,’ I said rather breathlessly, ‘just in case someone does come for the car later on. Miss Camilla Haven, the Olympias Hotel, Rue Marnis … Tell them I – I’ll take care of the car. Tell them I did it for the best.’
    I was out in the street and getting into the car before it occurred to me that my last words had sounded uncommonly like an epitaph.

2
    It’s a long way to Delphi
.
    E URIPIDES :
Ion
.
    (tr. Philip Vellacott.)
    E VEN if it wasn’t Hermes himself who had brought me the key, the hand of every god in Hellas must have been over me that day, because I got out of Athens alive. More, unscathed.
    There were some sticky moments. There was the shoeblack who was so urgent to clean my shoes that he followed me to the car and clung to the side and would certainly have been hurt when I started off, if only I’d remembered to put the car into gear. There was the moment when I turned – at a cautious ten miles per hour and hugging the left-hand pavement – out of Omonia Square into St Constantine Street, and met a taxi almost head-on on what I thought was his wrong side, till the volume and fervour of his abuse shocked me back on to my own right. Then there was the encounter in the narrow alley with two furious pedestrians who stepped off the pavement without a single glance in my direction. How was I to know it was a one-way street? I was lucky with my brakes that time. Iwasn’t so lucky with the flower-donkey, but it was only the flowers I touched, and the driver was charming about it. He refused the note I hastily held out to him and he actually gave me the flowers I’d knocked out of the donkey’s pannier.
    All things considered, people were very forgiving. The only really unpleasant person was the man who spat on the bonnet as I came hesitatingly out from behind a stationary bus. There was no need for such a display of temper. I’d hardly touched him.
    By the time I got to the main road that leads out of Athens along the Sacred Way I’d found out two things. One was that a few weeks spent in punting around the English country roads in Elizabeth’s old Hillman (Philip, understandably, had never let me touch his car) was not really an adequate preparation for driving through Athens in a strange car with a left-hand drive. The other was that the shabby black car had an unexpectedly powerful engine. If it had been less shabby and ancient-looking – if it had been one of the sleek-winged transatlantic monsters commonly used as taxis in Athens – I should never have dared myself to drive it, but its shabby façade had reassured me. Almost it could have been the old Hillman I’d learned on. Almost. I hadn’t been in it three minutes before I discovered that it had an acceleration like the kick of a jet, and by the time I’d assessed its possibilities as a lethal weapon – which were limitless – it was too late. I was out in the traffic, and it seemed safer to stay there. So I hung on grimly to the wheel, changing hands now and again as I remembered that the gearlevers were on the right, and prayed to the whole Olympian hierarchy as we jerked and nudged our terrified and apologetic way out through the city suburbs, turning at length into the great double road that runs along the coast towards Eleusis and Corinth.
    After the packed and flashing streets, the road seemed open and comparatively empty. This was the Sacred Way: down this wide sea-bordered road the ancient pilgrims had gone with songs and torches to celebrate the Mysteries at Eleusis. This lake now lying to the right was the holy lake of Demeter. Across that bay on the left the island of Salamis lay like a drowned dragon, and there –
there
– Themistocles had smashed the Persian fleet …
    But I looked neither to right nor left as I drove. I had been this way before, and had got the first sharp disillusion over.