Bread and Chocolate. Philippa Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ for lunch on board. You may bring cameras and video apparatus, of course. And if I may ask, when we enter the narrow gorge, let us do it in silence. It does have a certain air of mystery, there is a rather special sense of place. Let us be as quiet as we can to enjoy that.’

      He had his eye on her. She looked pale under the yellow colour of the fake tan which she applied religiously every morning. ‘For those of you who find the morning sun a little bright there is no need to come,’ he continued. ‘There are better and more interesting sights to be seen later on this trip. This is really nothing more than a little diversion, of interest only to those of you who know the legend of the River Styx and are curious to look at the jaws of death itself – from the comfort of an Aegean Experience launch rather than Charon’s boat!’

      Again there was no laugh, but she lifted her heavy head and looked at him, across the room. ‘It’s always dead things with you, isn’t it?’ she demanded, and he felt the attention of the room shift to her. ‘Old things, and dead things. What I say is: it’s all a long time ago!’

      He forced himself to smile at her. ‘It’s been my interest, no, my passion, for all my life,’ he said. ‘And I know of nothing more rewarding than the study of the classics.’

      ‘Oh yeah,’ she said as if that confirmed her worst opinion. She winked at her friends. ‘I bet you don’t.’

      ‘We can go at once,’ he said, speaking to his class over the murmur of their comments on this exchange. ‘Anyone interested in seeing Paxi and the legendary mouth of River Styx on Deck B at once please.’

      

      He had been certain that she would not come, but she was there in a bright pink top which showed the swell of her midriff and seam-stretchingly-tight white Capri pants. She wore her heated rollers in her hair as was her habit before noon, but today she had tied a bright pink turban on top by way of camouflage. He watched the sailor help her into the neat little launch and saw the way she held the man’s gaze and flashed a smile at him as if the man were serving her from desire and not because he was paid to do it.

      He said nothing to her, nothing to any of them, as he dropped into the boat himself. He felt as if he was far away from his class, far away from the subject that he loved. He felt as if he would never speak inspiringly of it again.

      But he had a job to do. Not a very academically respectable job, not a very well-paying job, but a job which allowed him to come to Greece twice a year, which was more than enough for him who so deeply loved the islands. And sometimes he was able to explain what the place meant to him, how the light that they saw even now on the pale limestone of Paxi was the same that Homer had seen and loved too.

      ‘This is a very special place,’ he said softly into the microphone as the launch moved away from the side of the gently rocking ship. ‘Greek legend has it that when a man is dead his soul comes down this narrow gorge and is met here, perhaps exactly here, by a dark boat, guided by the boatman Charon. This is the River Styx and no man ever comes back from his silent journey over these dark waters.’

      The cliffs were very narrow on either side of the blue lapping water, the olive trees bowed over their reflection at the water’s edge, the cypress trees stood like dark exclamation marks on the horizon. There was no sound but the faint puttering of the outboard motor of the launch, and he let the silence linger, wondering if he could hear at the back of it the beat of Charon’s oars.

      ‘COO-EEE!’ He was so startled that he dropped the microphone and it made a loud popping noise as it hit the teak deck. But the noise she made was even louder. ‘COO-EEE!’

      She turned around to him, quite unaware of the sudden thudding of his heart. ‘No echo,’ she complained. ‘No echo. I thought you said this place had a famous echo?’

      ‘I said nothing about an echo,’ he said in sudden passion. ‘I said a lot, a great deal, about this being the very mouth of death itself. And you come here and bellow Coo-eee!’

      She gleamed at him and he saw how his anger thrilled her. It was his defeat in the game she had been playing with him. She had caught him on the raw and thus she had won.

      ‘Ooo!’ she said. ‘Oooo! Pardon me for breathing!’ She turned to her husband. ‘He snapped me head off, didn’t he?’ she asked. George nodded, looking reproachfully at him. ‘All I said was Coo-eee. Testing for the echo. And he snapped my head off.’

      ‘I’ll have a word,’ George said lugubriously. ‘With the purser or the captain. Crew can’t talk to passengers like that.’

      The lecturer turned away, his face burning, he bent to pick up his microphone and looked towards the back of the boat where the wake twisted in the narrow blue channel like a silver corkscrew. Hopeless to try and invoke the dark magic of Charon for these people. Hopeless to try to give them a sense of the fear and the longing for the River Styx. Pointless to talk to them about the belief that once you crossed the river you remembered nothing – for what did she remember anyway?

      ‘I am sorry the microphone is out of order,’ he said shortly, and retreated behind the steering wheel where she mouthed: ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ at him.

      

      That night at dinner, as bad luck would have it, she was seated at his table. Officers and lecturers were rotated around the dining room so that guests had a chance to enjoy their company on every night of their voyage. He found he could hardly speak to her with anything resembling civility. He had already had a brief interview with the purser who told him that a complaint had been made by a guest about his inadequacy as a teacher, and worse – his personal rudeness. Pointless to defend himself by saying that the woman was a barbarian; she was a guest on the cruise, her whims must be accommodated. He spent the evening trying to humour her and found himself treated to a lecture on Indian erotic art.

      ‘Mucky buggers,’ she said with delight. ‘You should see the things we saw on the temple carvings, and smiling all the time like butter wouldn’t melt. We were very surprised, George and I, not thinking of Indians like that. As you don’t. But I said to George, it just goes to show that it’s the quiet ones that are the worst. But I shan’t look Mr Patel at the bottom of our road in the face again, I can tell you. Not now I know what I know.’

      ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘More wine?’

      He had a fancy that the only way to stop this unending flow of the trivial and the obscene was to pour things down her throat. Already she had eaten a huge five-course dinner with coffee and brandy and now he was encouraging her to drink more. If George would only take her to their cabin! But George was muttering about a nice game of cards and she was declaring that she thought she’d have a bit of a dance, and he could see that she would ask him to dance with her and he would have to accept.

      ‘I think I’ll call it a Ladies Excuse Me,’ she announced and rose to her feet. ‘Because I’m no lady, and I hope you’ll excuse me.’

      He could feel himself rising, driven by the rigour of good manners, against his will, against his instinct. He could feel his miserable face setting in a rictus of a polite smile. He knew in the very depths of his aching bones that the moment they arrived on the dance floor two equally awful things could happen: either, the band would play a slow dance and he would receive the full weight of her into his arms, and she would thrust her thigh between his legs and press against him, and tickle the back of his neck with her long fingernails, and lean back and smile at him knowingly, supremely confident that he was aroused by this assault instead of miserably longing for the privacy of his bed. Or – and perhaps worse – the band would burst into СКАЧАТЬ