A Man Over Forty (28 page)

The fight had gone out of O'Halloran too, and he let Palladis lead him to the door. He stood at the top of the steps and said sourly, ‘Throwing cushions at him. Cushions and bottles and anything they could lay their hands on. That's what they thought of him in Seville – and tell him from me that he hasn't seen the last of me yet!'

Balintore, in bed again, was querulous and looked a little fevered. He spoke at great length, and with self-pity, about O'Halloran's invasion, and said that he must not be left alone. ‘He'll watch the house, and if he sees you and Honoria going out, he'll come again, he'll come and pester me again, and though I'm not frightened, it takes too much out of me to have to deal with him!'

‘There's nothing in his threat of blackmail. Nothing to alarm you.'

‘I know that as well as you. But he's a maniac, and now he has the idea that I'm refusing to give him money that he's entitled to. The fact that he's wrong makes no difference to a maniac.'

At midnight Balintore came into Palladis' room and woke him. ‘I can't stay here any longer,' he said. ‘We're leaving tomorrow.'

‘Why?'

‘He's been walking round the house for the last hour. I've been listening to him.'

‘Have you seen him?'

‘It's too dark. But every now and then I've heard his foot-steps.'

‘You've been dreaming.'

‘No.'

‘Well, if he wants to walk about, let him. He can't do any harm.'

‘With gelignite in his possession?'

‘Stay here,' said Palladis, ‘and I'll go and find some whisky.'

He returned in a few minutes with a bottle, two glasses, and a carafe of water. ‘Now let's talk this over,' he said.

Balintore drank deeply and said, ‘I have made up my mind. I thought, to begin with, that I had found refuge here. The sort of refuge I was looking for. But that man has made life intolerable. I'm not going to give him the money he wants, and a thwarted maniac – well, how far's a thwarted maniac from murder? Round the corner from murder: no farther than that.'

‘Now you're talking nonsense.'

‘Your life isn't in danger, mine is.'

Balintore, walking to and fro in a yellow dressing-gown, looked gaunt and feverish. ‘You ought to go back to bed,' said Palladis.

‘I shall, as soon as I've persuaded you that we must leave tomorrow.'

‘Where do you want to go?'

‘Give me another drink.'

‘Will that be good for you?'

‘Give me a drink – and try to remember some of the conversation at that damned dinner-party. There was a ridiculous discussion about prehistoric migrations, and O'Halloran, the fool, said civilization began here, and went east to the Mediterranean. Then Honoria said, ‘Well, that makes sense. I can't imagine anyone leaving Greece to come to Ireland, but to leave Ireland and go to Greece—'

‘I remember.'

‘That's where we're going.'

‘But it's impossible! Nowadays you can't travel spontaneously, you have to make arrangements three or four months ahead. Hotels are booked up, aeroplanes full—'

‘You're very good at making arrangements. You always know someone useful, someone with influence.'

‘I still say it's impossible! You know what a state Honoria's in – I've never seen her so upset – and we can't go off at a moment's notice, and leave her all alone.'

‘Ask her to come too. I daresay she would like a holiday in Greece.'

‘She can't afford it. She's not a rich woman.'

‘She will come as my guest, of course.'

‘Oh, go to bed,' said Palladis.

‘Certainly,' said Balintore, ‘now that has been settled.' He filled his glass again, and taking it with him, returned to his room.

Palladis spent a restless night, and at breakfast told Honoria that he thought Balintore was in danger of a relapse into the nervous condition that had made him leave London early in the year. He repeated some of their midnight conversation, and to his surprise Honoria exclaimed, ‘But oh, how right he is! I feel exactly the same. I would give anything to go away for a month or two.'

‘He suggested that you should come with us. As his guest.'

‘Where?'

‘To Greece.'

‘Oh, no!'

‘You don't want to go there?'

‘I mean it's too good to be true!'

‘You would like to come?'

‘But of course I'm coming?'

‘He wants to leave today.'

Honoria grew thoughtful. ‘No, I can't do that. I'd have to make
some
arrangements. But tomorrow – ask him to wait till tomorrow!'

But on the following evening, in Dublin, Honoria came down in tears to the bar of the Hibernian Hotel and told them, ‘It's all off, and I can't come. Oh, I'm so miserable!'

‘What has happened?'.

‘I rang up Kevin at school, and discovered they've been trying to telephone to me all afternoon. Kevin fell downstairs this morning and broke his leg, badly. You can't blame him, they're horrible stairs – he's in one of those old, dark houses – but I wish he hadn't been in such a hurry. But there it is, and now, instead of going to Greece—'

She sniffed, and blew her nose. ‘But I've no right to be sorry for myself, I ought to feel sorry for Kevin. Poor boy, he does love the summer half, and now he won't be able to play cricket, so it will all be wasted.'

‘Where will you stay?' asked Palladis.

‘His tutor has asked me to stay with them – so kind, and he's got a very nice wife, I don't know how she puts up with him – oh, I'll be all right. But it won't be like going to Greece, will it?'

They dined sadly and without appetite. Balintore, who had complained of a headache while driving to Dublin, ordered champagne to comfort Honoria; who talked with a shallow gaiety except when she fell into melancholy silence. After dinner Balintore tried to cure his headache with brandy.

In the morning they flew to London; where, regretfully, they said goodbye to Honoria, and in his chambers in Albany Balintore went to bed. Palladis telephoned to the doctor who had previously attended him.

Between The classical assurance of a blue Hellenic sky and the ruined nobility of Pentelic marble – warm to the touch under a noonday sun – the modern world, like flies on a cracked but enduring sweetness, moved in resdess inquiry, pious or bewildered, bored and dutiful and loudly ecstatic, and took photographs of each other and the Erechtheum with equal enthusiasm.

Balintore stepped out of the line of sight of a camera held in the firm red hands of a corpulent tourist from Bremen, and was angrily reproved for getting in the way of a cropheaded young man from Minneapolis who was pointing his at a Caryatid. A blonde and bony lady from Zurich, in a summer frock of starched aggressive cleanliness, politely asked him to move away and let her take a picture of the Caryatides
enéchelon;
and a student from Ghana, his sable skin gleaming in the sun, protested volubly when Balintore cast his shadow on the base of a broken column. Nervously he looked this way and that for a lane of escape, and felt like a condemned prisoner whose firing party, numbering several hundred, stood round him on every side. Whichever way he faced, he was confronted by the black, accusing muzzle of a camera.

He had lost Palladis. Together they had climbed the steps of the Propylaea, and together stood and looked with awe at the eroded grace of the Parthenon. But then a chattering procession of school-children had separated them, and when he turned to say ‘A forest of marble under a frozen canopy', he found himself speaking to an indignant lady from Clermont-Ferrand who said her light-meter wasn't working properly.

He looked for Palladis on both sides of the Temple of Athene, and on its terrace thought the great view over the Saronic Gulf would be the better if there were fewer people to share it; but all the Acropolis was as crowded as the approaches to Wembley on Cup Final day – and a group of burly young men, who might well be a football team on holiday, jostled him to make room for themselves in a solidly smiling group: they had come to be photographed.

Dodging accusing cameras – wincing at their threat – he continued his search, and found Palladis at last smoking a cigarette on a convenient plinth near the Museum.

He spoke angrily and said, ‘I've been looking for you for half an hour.'

‘A little while ago I was talking to a young German who had lost his wife. They have only been married for forty-eight hours, and she has, he told me, no sense of time or direction. He was very agitated.'

‘My God, I'm tired!'

‘Sit down and have a cigarette.'

Balintore's hands were trembling, and he wore a look of pain or mental stress that Palladis thought exaggerated. It was nearly three weeks since they had left Ireland – even Palladis' wide acquaintance with people of influence had failed to get them accommodation in any shorter time – and Balintore's doctor had told him he was physically fit to travel anywhere. His recurrent fever had subsided, and he had had no more headaches. But he still complained, sometimes absurdly, of bad dreams.

On their return to Albany he had heard, with consternation, that Polly Newton had repeatedly called to ask if he was in residence, or if she could be given his address. ‘But that,' said the porter, ‘we couldn't do, because we didn't know it ourselves – and even if we could, we wouldn't, of course, not without your instructions – but in consequence of not knowing where you were, I'm afraid, sir, that you're going to get a shock when you see your letters. There must be hundreds.'

‘When did Miss Newton last come here?'

‘About a fortnight ago, sir, as far as I can recollect.'

‘I'm still not feeling very well—'

‘I'm sorry to hear that, sir.'

‘– and I'll be going away again as soon as possible. So while I'm here – it will only be a few days, I hope – I don't want any visitors. No visitors at all: you understand?'

In a great accumulation of letters there were three addressed in Polly's handwriting. These Balintore burnt, unopened. Palladis dealt with the rest, tearing most of them into a large laundry-basket but paying a couple of dozen bills.

‘Strangely enough,' he said, ‘your financial position is sound. You're not quite as well off as you were last year, but the re-investments I suggested have all done well, and you've no need to worry. You spent a lot of money in Jamaica and New York, but very little in Ireland, and you've saved a few pounds on postage. If we had been living here I would have had to reply to all these letters, and what a waste of time and money that would have been. Nowadays most people only write letters to give their secretaries something to do.'

But though Balintore had no financial anxiety, he worried about Miss Newton's pertinacity, and refused to go out until Palladis had reconnoitred and made sure that she was not lying in wait for him.

In Ireland, feeling with some reason that he had treated her not ungenerously, he had been able – or nearly able – to dismiss her from his mind. But now, made suddenly aware that she had not forgotten him, he began to reproach himself for his abrupt desertion, and said to Palladis, with shame and horror in his voice, ‘She may be in love with me! You never know with a woman, do you? Well, about other women – those women I married – I had no compunction at all, because I was quite sure, long before we separated, that they were as glad to get rid of me as I was to be rid of them. But Polly – well, I was tired of her, because of that damned memory of hers, but perhaps I didn't give her a fair chance to tire of me. And I blame myself for that. I should have been more patient.'

‘Do you think she fell deeply, genuinely in love with you?'

‘She talked so much, it's very hard to tell.'

‘You should have read her letters.'

‘No, I don't like women's letters. They're too self-indulgent – and damned ungrammatical when they're not damned untrue.'

‘Well, try to forget her.'

‘I wish I could!'

But the bad dreams which the explosion at Turk's Court had started, were now complicated by another pursuer; and Balintore's sleep was harassed alternately by a roaring Irishman who demanded money, and a weeping girl who cried for love. Palladis sympathized, but found it difficult to show a
continued interest in the content of the dreams; which Balin-tore insisted on telling him. His distress was obvious, and after a good night's sleep his relief was unconcealed, sometimes even exuberant; but to Palladis it seemed that he encouraged his unhappiness by memorizing and elaborating it. He would turn his recollection of a dream into a formal narrative, and sometimes decorate descriptions of a nightmare's landscape with an apt – or too apt – quotation.

One morning, at the breakfast-table, he was relating, in some detail, a visionary flight – the morass that held him, the snow-slope that betrayed him, the forest that bewildered him – then, after noisily drinking his coffee – ‘and so on, “down the labyrinthine slopes of my own mind”.'

‘Francis Thomson,' said Palladis, ‘wasn't running away from an Irish geologist.'

‘No,' said Balintore. ‘No, he wasn't.'

He put down his cup, and went to his room without finishing either his story or his breakfast.

That was three days before they left for Athens, where an agent had found them rooms at the Athenee Palace. They arrived in the early evening, dined late at a rowdy tavern in the Plaka, and the following morning Balintore said, ‘I've had the best night's sleep since we left Ireland.'

‘Foreign travel or a long voyage is still good medicine,' said Palladis.

‘On the other hand,' said Balintore, ‘it may be that God has turned his back on me.'

‘Apollo rules here,' said Palladis – and then both were distracted by a loud English voice from the table behind them, where a family of four were breakfasting. It was a ringing female voice, and decisively it announced, ‘The Parthenon can wait! The first thing Moira and I are going to do is to look for a good hairdresser.'