This Rough Magic Read Free

English. Will you show her the way down to the beach when you’ve cleared away, please?’
    ‘Of course! I shall be pleased!’
    She looked more than pleased, she looked so delighted that I smiled to myself, presuming cynically that it was probably only pleasure at having an outing in the middle of a working morning. As it happened, I was wrong. Coming so recently from the grey depressions of London and the backstage bad tempers of failure, I wasn’t able as yet to grasp the Greek’s simple delight in doing anyone a service.
    She began to pile the breakfast dishes on her tray with clattering vigour. ‘I shall not be long. A minute, only a minute …’
    ‘And that means half an hour,’ said my sister placidly, as the girl bustled out. ‘Anyway, what’s the hurry? You’ve all the time in the world.’
    ‘So I have,’ I said, in deep contentment.
    The way to the beach was a shady path quilted with pine needles. It twisted through the trees, to lead outsuddenly into a small clearing where a stream, trickling down to the sea, was trapped in a sunny pool under a bank of honeysuckle.
    Here the path forked, one track going uphill, deeper into the woods, the other turning down steeply through pines and golden oaks towards the sea.
    Miranda paused and pointed downhill. ‘That is the way you go. The other is to the Castello, and it is private. Nobody goes that way, it is only to the house, you understand.’
    ‘Whereabouts is the other villa, Mr Manning’s?’
    ‘On the other side of the bay, at the top of the cliff. You cannot see it from the beach because the trees are in the way, but there is a path going like this’ – she sketched a steep zigzag – ‘from the boat-house up the cliff. My brother works there, my brother Spiro. It is a fine house, very beautiful, like the Signora’s, though of course not so wonderful as the Castello.
That
is like a palace.’
    ‘So I believe. Does your father work on the estate, too?’
    The query was no more than idle; I had completely forgotten Phyllida’s nonsense, and hadn’t believed it anyway, but to my intense embarrassment the girl hesitated, and I wondered for one horrified second if Phyllida had been right. I did not know, then, that the Greek takes the most intensely personal questions serenely for granted, just as he asks them himself, and I had begun to stammer something, but Miranda was already answering:
    ‘Many years ago my father left us. He went over there.’
    ‘Over there’ was at the moment a wall of trees laced with shrubs of myrtle, but I knew what lay beyond them; the grim, shut land of Communist Albania.
    ‘You mean as a prisoner?’ I asked, horrified.
    She shook her head. ‘No. He was a Communist. We lived then in Argyrathes, in the south of Corfu, and in that part of the island there are many such.’ She hesitated. ‘I do not know why this is. It is different in the north, where my mother comes from.’ She spoke as if the island were four hundred miles long instead of forty, but I believed her. Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.
    ‘You’ve never heard from him?’
    ‘Never. In the old days my mother still hoped, but now, of course, the frontiers are shut to all, and no one can pass in or out. If he is still alive, he must stay there. But we do not know this either.’
    ‘D’you mean that no one can travel to Albania?’
    ‘No one.’ The black eyes suddenly glittered to life, as if something had sparked behind their placid orbs. ‘Except those who break the law.’
    ‘Not a law I’d care to break myself.’ Those alien snows had looked high and cold and cruel. I said awkwardly: ‘I’m sorry, Miranda. It must be an unhappy business for your mother.’
    She shrugged. ‘It is a long time ago. Fourteen years. I do not even know if I remember him. And we have Spiro to look after us.’ The sparkle again. ‘He works for Mr Manning, I told you this –