The Breaking Point (35 page)

He went straight over to the feelie expert and held out his wrists.

‘Get a jerk on it,’ he said. ‘We’ve wasted enough working time already on this damn-fool gadget of yours.’

The expert spat out his gum and fixed the wires. His assistant wheeled up the barker into position. Then the expert turned on a switch and watched the dial.Vanda Grey was looking on from her chair. She did not believe it, of course, but someone had called her up from International to say Barry Jeans had been seen the day before on Poncho beach. There had never been any rumours before. He looked wonderful, though. It might be true. If it was, there might be some fun in three weeks’ time when they went on location to Arizona.

The expert switched off the connexion, and murmured something to his assistant. The assistant scribbled some figures on a pad. The expert took the pad, and handed it to the director. The director glanced at it, and then walked over to the production manager, and May, and the boys.

‘We’ll go ahead,’ he said.

The Menace had clocked Force A.

The Chamois

W
e were told there were chamois in the Pindus. The report came to us in a roundabout way. A member of the British school of archaeology in Athens, writing to Stephen about the season’s ‘dig’, reported that he had dined with a friend, John Evans, who had been staying in one of the monasteries at Meteora. During his three-day visit, a man from Kalabaka with supplies for the monastery told one of the monks that a bus-driver, bringing passengers over the pass from Malakasi, had stopped for his usual five minutes at the store, and picked up a rumour from the store-keeper that wood-cutters had seen a doe and kid flit past the young beech-growth about five hundred yards away. The story was as vague as that. Yet it was enough to make Stephen cancel our Austrian plans, and book seats on the Athens plane for the following week.

This is what it means to be a fanatic - but a fanatic, that is to say, in a very special sense. It has little in common with the obsession of the politician or the artist, for instance, for both of these understand in a greater or lesser degree the impulse which drives them. But the sportsman-fanatic - that is another matter entirely. His thoughts fixed solely on a vision of that mounted trophy against the wall, the eyes now dead that were once living, the tremulous nostrils stilled, the sensitive pricked ears closed to sound at the instant when the rifle-shot echoed from the naked rocks, this man hunts his quarry through some instinct unknown even to himself.

Stephen was a sportsman of this kind. It was not the skill needed that drove him, nor the delight and excitement of the stalk itself, but a desire, so I told myself, to destroy something beautiful and rare. Hence his obsession with chamois.

Chamois, as all sportsmen know, have become scarce through the years.They are hardly seen today in Switzerland and Austria. Stephen tried to explain the reasons once. The break-up of the big estates, two world wars, promiscuous shooting by peasants which would have been forbidden in the old days, and the growing popularity of the Alps, and indeed of every region of mountains amongst climbers and tourists - all this has led to a general trampling and desecration of land once sacred to the chamois.

He is the shyest of all creatures. He shuns human beings, and does not mix with other deer. Always on the alert for anything that may threaten his safety, his note of warning is a curious shrill whistle; and the first hint of danger will send him headlong to the highest and most inaccessible crags. The buck lives alone at all times of the year, except in the late fall, in the brief rutting season, when the chemical change in his blood drives him to the doe.This, according to Stephen, is the moment to catch him; this is when he falls a prey. Watchfulness, intuition of danger, that sixth sense which normally keeps him safe, all these lie in abeyance because of the urge for a mate. He deserts the narrow ledges and the steep cliff faces, and follows the little herd of does and yearlings, the secretive shy mothers who have no need of him until now; and then blood answers blood, the chase begins, the wild scamper over rock and precipice, the little kids surprised at the sudden fever of their mothers, so quickly stirred and put to flight by the black stranger. For he is black in winter, the adult chamois buck: the reddish-yellow summer coat has gone, and the thick protecting fur covers him, the wave of long hair rising on his back like a crest.

When Stephen talked about stalking chamois his whole expression changed. The features became more aquiline, the nose sharpened, the chin narrowed, and his eyes - steel blue - somehow took on the cold brilliance of a northern sky. I am being very frank about my husband. He attracted me at those times, and he repelled me too. This man, I told myself when I first met him, is a perfectionist. And he has no compassion. Gratified like all women who find themselves sought after and desired - a mutual love for Sibelius had been our common ground at our first encounter - after a few weeks in his company I shut my eyes to further judgement, because being with him gave me pleasure. It flattered my self-esteem. The perfectionist, admired by other women, now sought me. Marriage was in every sense a
coup
. It was only afterwards that I knew myself deceived.

Some men are born adult, without the redeeming and endearing faults of childhood; Stephen was one of them. Born and bred in the hard home of a Scots father and an Italian mother - none of your beautiful opera singers, but the daughter of a Milan industrialist - he shook off all family ties at fifteen, and began earning his living in a shipping office in Glasgow. Those early days would make a book, and it may get written one day, but not now. Now I want to tell how we sought the chamois.

Stephen handed me the letter across the breakfast table, and said briefly, ‘I shall telegraph Bruno right away and say we have changed our plans.’ Bruno was the Austrian friend who, at great trouble to himself and with much forethought and care, had arranged the shoot in his own Alpine district, solely to please Stephen. Chamois had been the bait. Deer in plenty would not have tempted him: it must be chamois.

‘What’s the difference,’ I asked, ‘between chamois in Austria and chamois in northern Greece?’

The sport meant nothing to me. I went for adventure, for mountain air. Stephen was welcome to go off by himself all day, either alone or with other friends armed with rifles. My holiday worked in, a breathing-space, stock taking for a woman who had not borne children.

‘The difference,’ said Stephen, his blue eyes colder than ever, ‘lies in the rarity of the prey. I have never heard of anyone who has shot chamois in the Pindus, or anywhere else in Greece.’

‘Then probably the story is not true,’ I suggested. ‘The wood-cutters saw a wild goat, and mistook it for a chamois.’

‘Probably,’ said Stephen, but he got up from the breakfast-table, and a few minutes afterwards I heard him give out the telegram on the phone to his friend in Austria.

I watched his back, and the powerful shoulders. He looked taller than his six feet two inches because of his build, and his voice became impatient as he spelt out the Austrian address, which the telephone operator did not immediately understand. It held the same impatience with a mentality less quick and incisive than his own that had been apparent to me ten years previously, when we had become engaged. He had taken me to see that austere house of his near Portland Place - a far cry from the shipping office in Glasgow, for he was head of the London office by then - and the trophies on the wall. I wondered straight away how he could sit at peace there, of an evening, with the row of heads staring down at him. There were no pictures, no flowers: only the heads of chamois. The concession to melody was the radiogram and the stack of records of classical music.

Foolishly, I had asked, ‘Why only chamois?’

He answered at once, ‘They fear Man.’

This might have led to an argument about animals in general, domestic, wild, and those which adapt themselves to the whims and vagaries of the human race; but instead he changed the subject abruptly, put on a Sibelius record, and presently made love to me, intently but without emotion. I was surprised but pleased. I thought, ‘We are suited to one another. There will be no demands. Each of us will be self-contained and not beholden to the other.’

All this came true, but something was amiss. There was a flaw - not only the non-appearance of children, but a division of the spirit. The communion of flesh which brought us together was in reality a chasm, and I despised the bridge we made. Perhaps he did as well. I had been endeavouring for ten years to build for myself a ledge of safety.

‘So we are going to Greece?’ I said to Stephen that evening, when he came home rather later than usual, and threw down the air-tickets and a brochure and a map. ‘You’ve definitely made up your mind, although you haven’t confirmed the rumour about the chamois seen near a mountain pass?’

‘I have confirmed the rumour,’ said Stephen. ‘I traced the fellow Evans to a bank in Athens, and put through a call to him. He says the story is true. The monk at Meteora had spoken since to the bus-driver himself. The driver is a brother-in-law of the man who owns the store and saw the wood-cutters.There are no wild goats in the area. It was chamois all right.’

A smile should be a means of communication. It is not always, though, and it was not with Stephen when he spoke of chamois. The smile was secretive, an answer to a question which he put to himself, but without pleasure. Then he left the living-room and went to the music-room - we called it that because of the radiogram, and the television, and my piano, an odd juxtaposition of objects that bore a relation to one another - and I knew he was standing there, looking up at the chamois trophies on the wall. There were twenty altogether, including three does and two kids shot in error. They were all exquisitely cured and mounted, a silver plate beneath each head giving the date and place of the kill. As I said before, chamois are scarce these days. They retreat more and more to the inaccessible crags. There are no longer the big chamois drives in Switzerland, and for stalking you must know your territory, and your host too, for these matters are not easily arranged.

When Stephen returned from the music-room he was wiping his hands on a rag, and I knew from his same smile that he had been cleaning his rifle. It was not the comforted smile of one pottering with a favourite hobby - the photographic expert, the Sunday painter, the carpenter - or even the country well-being of the sportsman before an annual partridge drive (I had brothers once who shot). This was a killer’s smile, obeying an impulse deep within himself.

‘Snap out of it,’ I said suddenly.

He looked across at me, startled, as I was myself, by the curious note of urgency in my voice.

‘Snap out of what?’ he asked.

‘This obsession with chamois,’ I said. ‘It isn’t balanced.’

I thought for a moment that he would hit me. The look of terror - and it was terror, swiftly and indecently unmasked - came and went at the speed of thought, to be replaced by anger, the cold anger of a man caught off guard.

‘You don’t have to come with me,’ he said. ‘Make your own plans. I’m going. Do as you please.’

He did not reply to my attack, though. The answer was evasion.

‘Oh, I’ll come, right enough,’ I said. ‘I may be in search of something myself, for all you know.’

I did the irritating, wifely thing of tidying, snapping off the dead head of a flower, straightening a cushion, but I felt his eyes on my back. It was not a comfortable sensation. However, the tension passed, and at dinner we were on our usual easy footing of mutual tolerance, and this continued through the days that followed before our departure.

A certain date in mid-October found us on the plane for Athens.The letter of regret and disappointment from our friend in Austria had been thrown, almost unskimmed, into the waste-paper basket. Instead, new contacts, arranged through Stephen’s own shipping firm, had fixed our itinerary in Greece. Use people, whenever you can, as a means to an end. This was one of Stephen’s maxims. Drop them when they no longer serve your purpose.

I do not give the year of this particular October in case there should be any recognition of individuals. It is enough to say that it was in the early fifties, there was as yet no Cyprus question, the summer had been hot, and there had been two earthquakes.

It might have been mid-summer still when we landed to drop and pick up passengers in Rome. As we stood on the hot tarmac the sun was merciless, and the ugly high buildings fringing the airport, alternating with waste land, gave off a yellow glare. How different was Athens. A cool serenity seemed to come to us even in the aircraft, as we stared down on Corinth bathed in the afterglow of sunset; and the airport - at the time I speak of - was like a casual provincial station, with attendants in shirt-sleeves smiling, handling passports and baggage checks as though all time were theirs and would endure forever.

A rattling bus took us into Athens. I liked my husband’s company when travelling. He never fussed, tickets were not mislaid, and he left me to sort impressions for myself. There was no elbow jerking, no sudden exclamations at new things perceived. But later, over a drink or at dinner, we would find we had usually noticed the same points of beauty or interest. This thread of appreciation was one of our few links.

That evening we were met at the airport terminus by a Greek from the shipping firm contacted by Stephen - his name was inevitably George - and taken to our hotel. Once bathed and changed, we were joined by Stephen’s archaeologist friend, whom I will call Burns, and the John Evans who had stayed at Meteora and first passed on the rumour of the chamois. They had come to take us out to dinner. These arrangements were all part of Stephen’s clocklike mind, his talent for seizing upon the essential.

There was to be no ambling in Athens for us, no strolling on the Acropolis. Later, when we returned from the Pindus, if we had the time, said Stephen, but meanwhile one certainty alone lay ahead of us, the knowledge that tickets had already been taken on the train leaving Athens for the north the following morning. I can remember still the look of bewilderment on the face of young John Evans, an expert on Byzantine churches; and even Burns, who knew something of Stephen’s vagaries, was shocked at what must have seemed excess of passion.