Olura
Authors: Geoffrey Household
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Geoffrey Household
A la Lamia del Iturrigorri
NARRATIVE OF DR PHILIP ARDOWER
CONTINUATION OF DR ARDOWER’S NARRATIVE
I consign these informal records to my safe without corrections or omissions in case they should ever be required as evidence in a Court of Law. I have every reason, however,
to apprehend that Justice has been done and that it will never be seen to have been done.
The opening document is the first half of the narrative of Dr Philip Ardower, which I have chosen to place on top of the file because it presents a lucid picture of his involvement with my dear
ward and goddaughter, Olura Manoli, as well as the distressing and ultimately dangerous predicament in which these two supposedly responsible people became entangled.
The second document is Olura’s own story. When I flew to Spain in response to her obscure and censored appeal, her answers to my questions appeared emotional, over-excited and inclined to
attribute importance to a variety of circumstances which had none whatever. A woman’s accuracy differs from that of a man, and it is often hard to establish the sequence of events when she
considers a mood more vital than a fact and a half-truth more revealing than cold exactitude.
That was the reason why I requested her to write down with the utmost sincerity exactly what had happened. I must admit that I did not require such sincerity to extend to unnecessary details of
her personal life, though, knowing Olura, I should perhaps have expected it. Initially her account covers the same facts as Dr Ardower’s but one might be forgiven for failing, here and there,
immediately to recognise that indeed they are the same.
The third set of papers is the remainder of Ardower’s narrative, which reveals his very natural anxiety for Olura and the consequences of his chivalrous imprudence which made my
intervention as difficult as it was urgent.
During his life Theodore Manoli was closer to me than a brother. Since his death the welfare of his only daughter has been the first responsibility of love. I will not say it has been easy to
discharge. Upon reaching the age of revolt—which seems an imperious necessity to the more intelligent of the younger generation—Olura chose passionately to reject Theodore’s
environment, while preserving his sense of duty, his integrity and his devotion to those he loved. The Establishment was anathema to her. She referred to it with thin lips, like an Orangeman forced
to mention the Roman Church. As for me, her godfather, guardian, trustee and—to carry on my simile—a cardinal not only of the Establishment but the International Establishment, I was
endurable only because the darling had become attached to me at an early age.
As I re-read these documents I perceive recurring in Olura’s character a quality which at the time I put down to her essential femininity, never realising that she had inherited it from
Theodore. Indeed the most perfect illustration of it is her own christening.
Theodore’s handwriting was unintelligible—a fact which even I hesitated to point out to him. Far from being slipshod or undecorative, it was so imposing that a reader attempting to
decipher it for the first time invariably blamed his own stupidity. Even when Theodore, to avoid all possible error, wrote in printed capitals he joined them together with such luxuriance that the
essential word seemed to be engrossed in the priestly script of some high and vanished civilisation.
Upon the birth of his daughter he registered her name as Olivia. For once he was particularly careful with his capitals, and there could be no conceivable doubt that the name was Olura. It was
early in the war, and Theodore was sleeping on a camp bed in the office; so the first he knew of what he had done was at the christening. I remember the loudly whispered protest of her mother when
the parson pronounced the name. Theodore did not turn a hair. He said that it was charming and congratulated his secretary on so delicious a typing error. I am compelled to accuse him of preferring
to accept a mistake rather than the truth about his handwriting; but at the same time I applaud his extraordinary power of instant decision. He never failed to exploit any totally unexpected
situation which was obviously desirable.
Nor indeed did she, on the occasions when she was free to act. I see that inspired inconstancy in her change of—shall I call it?—objective in the Hostal de las Olas, in her impulsive
but often profitable reactions thereafter, in her instinctive realisation that Ardower must be dead and her admirable choice of the right witness to suborn.
That perhaps is the least of the illegalities which I feel bound to record in my personal statement, the fourth and last of these documents. My motives were in no way public-spirited. I do not
share the opinions of Olura, humane and liberal though they are; still less do I share those of the Alliance des Blancs which have no base but hysteria. When, however, such activities as theirs
grossly disturb the peace and happiness of the individual, mere defeat is, I feel, insufficient punishment, and my qualms of conscience are allayed.
At our first meeting it seemed to me odd that a woman of obvious sophistication should insist on dressing like Red Riding Hood. I remember arguing it out with myself—for
want of anything better—as our two solitary figures approached each other across a waste of sand which should have been glittering particles of reflected sunlight and in fact was a melancholy
yellow under the stormy sky.
The cloak and hood were, I admitted, practical enough when one had packed only summer clothes and yet foresaw the probable need of something warm and decorative. So what was wrong? Too
conspicuous. But women liked to be conspicuous, provided they did not achieve originality by being out of fashion. A good point for her. So long as she looked attractive she didn’t care
whether she was in fashion or not. Very well! But had she any right to sail among the mediocrities of the hotel like a great lady? She was too young to be a great lady. The crimson cloak and hood
suggested Disneyland rather than a Duchess.
She had arrived a couple of days before, and since then had kept very much to herself. Already she was plainly adored by the
maïtre d’hotel
and her waiter, but to the rest of
us she gave no more than shy smiles in passing. I formed the impression that she was on her guard rather than shy, that she faintly resented the interest she aroused. She looked courageous, but as
if she couldn’t afford, even in that easiest of hotels, to leave the necessity for courage in her bag upstairs.
She was walking up the estuary, in full sail over the deserted beach with the gusty north-west wind behind her. I was plugging along towards her with my eyes half-shut against the stinging
squalls of sand above high water mark. As we passed I wished her good-morning without shortening my stride, and was surprised when she stopped. It was reasonable enough that she should; but I had
been over-impressed by her air of hesitant privacy. I expected nothing but the shy smile.
We chatted for a moment about the hotel and the weather, and then she asked me what was at the head of the estuary. I had found, I told her, nothing but marsh; it was impossible to cross over to
the other side without swimming or going miles round by the road.
‘I see why you wanted to,’ she said.
The little village of Maya across the water beckoned an invitation, and not merely because it
was
across the water. Outcrops of rock had forced the estuary into a curve. At the bottom
of the loop was a small new-moon beach with boats drawn up on it. The anchorage was so sheltered and the sands so steep that there was no necessity for a quay. Two gay villas, of the type you can
never buy because the owner’s grandchildren would be so disappointed, crowned the rocky headlands, and a single street of red roofs straggled up from the comfortable quadrilateral of the
waterside inn. It had a little terrace with a green awning over it, and announced its speciality to be Prawns and Lobsters.
‘I’m told one can wade across easily at low tide,’ I answered. ‘But the channel is still too deep to tackle without a swim-suit. I was looking for a shallow higher up the
river. They say the prawns are marvellous at that pub.’
She asked when low tide was. In something less than a couple of hours, I told her. And even then the wind at the mouth of the river would add another foot to the depth.
‘It looks as if we could get over just upstream from that boat,’ she said.
It didn’t look like anything of the sort. There was a quite considerable fishing launch anchored in the channel, which had not yet begun to heel over though the keel was probably touching
sand. But she wanted to go. Therefore it was possible.
‘Let’s try!’ she said.
It is never any use arguing about wind, tide and the clock when a woman has decided that you are unenterprising and that they will all obey her. I observed, perhaps drily, that I saw she was a
romanticist.
‘And you?’ she retorted. ‘Weren’t you looking for a crossing too?’
‘But that was greed.’
‘Oh, was it? Your prawns are going to taste exactly like any others!’
The intelligence behind that reply was exciting. So, outside the hotel, was she. Shorten her a good six inches, and her graceful, high-breasted body could be compared to that of some lovely
Latin peasant with a jar on her head. One couldn’t call her slim in the sense of those revolting, so-called vital statistics, with their dead, unmoving 34s and 26s like the readings on a
pressure gauge, which are flung at us by every newspaper and advertisement and mean absolutely nothing to me. The figures were as irrelevant to her as to classical Greek sculpture or to one of
Lely’s provocative lovelies at the court of Charles II. For the rest, I took notice of that fairish hair in some fashionably thick arrangement, the large grey eyes, the straight but utterly
unaggressive nose. The mouth might have been a little too full for some, and the upper lip a little too long for others; but any of them at any age would have been enchanted to look at a
non-existent river crossing with her.