MARY STEWART
My Brother Michael
www.hodder.co.uk
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Also by Mary Stewart
About the Author
First published in Great Britain in 1959 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © 1959 by Mary Stewart
The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN: 978 1 444 71113 4
Book ISBN: 978 1 444 71123 3
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For KIM in loving memory
If you cannot love the Greeks,
you cannot love anything.
Rex Warner
Author’s Note
The quotations from Professor Gilbert Murray’s translation of The Electra of Euripides appear by kind permission of Messrs. Allen & Unwin. I am also indebted to the Editors of the Penguin Classics for permission to use extracts from Sophocles and Euripides in translations by E. F. Watling and Philip Vellacott; to Messrs. Faber & Faber for their leave to use the lines from Dudley Fitts’ translation of The Frogs of Aristophanes; and to the Clarendon Press, Oxford, for the lines from Ingram Bywater’s translation of Aristotle On the Art of Poetry.
If it were possible to do so adequately, I should like here to thank my friends in Greece – especially Electra and her family – for their very great kindness to me during my visits to their country; and I must add a particular note of thanks for those people in Delphi itself who helped me to gather information for this book: Mr. George Vouzas, of the Apollan Hotel; Mario, who showed me round; ‘Pete’ Gerousis, who patiently answered all my questions; and the caretaker of the studio, who assured me that ‘things like that could never happen in Delphi.’ I believe him. At any rate, they never did.
M. S.
‘The result of my own visits to Greece and the impact of that wonderful country on a mind steeped in the classics, My Brother Michael was my love affair with Greece.’ Mary Stewart
1
Why, woman,
What are you waiting for?
SOPHOCLES: Electra.
(tr. E. F. Watling.)
Nothing ever happens to me.
I WROTE the words slowly, looked at them for a moment with a little sigh, then put my ballpoint pen down on the café table and rummaged in my handbag for a cigarette.
As I breathed the smoke in I looked about me. It occurred to me, thinking of that last depressed sentence in my letter to Elizabeth, that enough was happening at the moment to satisfy all but the most adventure-hungry. That is the impression that Athens gives you. Everyone is moving, talking, gesticulating – but particularly talking. The sound one remembers in Athens is not the clamour of the impatiently congested traffic, or the perpetual hammer of pneumatic drills, or even the age-old sound of chisels chipping away at the Pentelic marble which is still the cheapest stone for building … what one remembers about Athens is the roar of talking. Up to your high hotel window, above the smell of dust and the blare of traffic it comes, surging like the sea below the temple at Sunion – the sound of Athenian voices arguing, laughing, talk-talk-talking, as once they talked the world into shape in the busy colonnades of the Agora, not so very far from where I sat.
It was a popular and crowded café. I had found a table at the back of the room near the bar. All along the outer wall big glass doors gave on to the pavement, standing open to the dust and din of Omonia Square which is, in effect, the commercial centre of Athens. It is certainly the centre of all the noise and bustle of the city. The traffic crawled or surged past in a ceaseless confusion. Crowds – as jammed as the traffic – eddied on the wide pavements. Knots of men, most of them impeccably dressed in dark city clothes, discussed whatever men do discuss at mid-morning in Athens; their faces were lively and intent, their hands fidgeting unceasingly with the little loops of amber ‘nervous beads’ that the men of the Eastern Mediterranean carry. Women, some fashionably dressed, others with the wide black skirt and black head-covering of the peasant, went about their shopping. A donkey, so laden with massed flowers that it looked like a moving garden, passed slowly by, its owner shouting his wares in vain against the hurly-burly of the hot morning streets.
I pushed my coffee cup aside, drew again at my cigarette, and picked up my letter. I began to read over what I had written.
You’ll have had my other letters by now, about Mykonos and Delos, and the one I wrote a couple of days ago from Crete. It’s difficult to know just how to write – I want so much to tell you what a wonderful country this is, and yet I feel I mustn’t pile it on too thick or you’ll find that wretched broken leg that prevented your coming even more of a tragedy than before! Well, I won’t go on about that, either … I’m sitting in a café on Omonia Square – it’s about the busiest place in this eternally busy city – and calculating what to do next. I’ve just come off the boat from Crete. I can’t believe that there’s any place on earth more beautiful than the Greek islands, and Crete’s in a class by itself, magnificent and exciting and a bit grim as well – but I told you about it in my last letter. Now there’s Delphi still to come, and everyone, solo and chorus, has assured me that it’ll be the crown of the trip. I hope they’re right; some of the places, like Eleusis and Argos and even Corinth, are a bit disappointing … one leaves oneself open to the ghosts, as it were, but the myths and magic are all gone. However, I’m told that Delphi really is something. So I’ve left it till last. The only trouble is, I’m getting a bit worried about the cash. I suppose I’m a bit of a fool where money is concerned. Philip ran all that, and how right he was …
Here a passing customer, pushing his way between the tables towards the bar-counter, jogged my chair, and I looked up, jerked momentarily out of my thoughts.
A crowd of customers – all male – seemed to be gathering at the bar for what looked like a very substantial mid-morning snack. It appeared that the Athenian business man had to bridge the gap between breakfast and luncheon with something rather more sustaining than coffee. I saw one plate piled high with Russian salad and thick dressing, another full of savoury meatballs and green beans swimming in oil, and innumerable smaller dishes heaped with fried potatoes and small onions and fish and pimentoes, and half a dozen things I didn’t recognise. Behind the counter was a row of earthenware jars, and in the shadow
of their narrow necks I saw olives, fresh from the cool farm-sheds in Aegina and Salamis. The wine-bottles on the shelf above bore names like Samos and Nemea and Chios and Mavrodaphne.
I smiled, and looked down again at the page.
… but in a way I’m finding it wonderful to be here alone. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean you! I wish like anything you were here, for your own sake as well as mine. But you know what I do mean, don’t you? This is the first time for years I’ve been away on my own – I was almost going to say ‘off the lead’ – and I’m really enjoying myself in a way I hadn’t thought possible before. You know, I don’t suppose he’d ever have come here at all; I just can’t see Philip prowling round Mycaenae or Cnossos or Delos, can you? Or letting me prowl either? He’d have been all set to dash off to Istanbul or Beirut or even Cyprus – anywhere, in short, where things are happening, not centuries ago in the past, but now – and even if they weren’t happening, he’d make them.
Fun, yes, it was always fun, but – oh, I’m not going to write about that either, Elizabeth, but I was right, absolutely right. I’m sure of it now. It wouldn’t have worked, not in a million years. This trip on my own has shown me that, more clearly than ever. There’s no regret, only relief that perhaps, now, I’ll have time to be myself. There, now I’ve admitted it, and we’ll drop the subject. Even if I am quite shatteringly incompetent when I am being myself, it’s fun, and I muddle along somehow. But I do admit …
I turned the page, reaching forward absently with my left hand to tap ash from my cigarette. There was a paler circle showing still against the tan at the base of the third finger, where Philip’s ring had been. In ten days of Aegean sunshine it had begun to fade … six long years fading now without regret, leaving behind them a store of gay memories that would fade, too, and a sneaking curiosity to know if the beggar-maid had been really happy once she was married to King Cophetua …
But I do admit there’s another side to this Great Emancipation. Things do seem a trifle dull occasionally, after so many years spent being swept along in Philip’s – you must admit – magnificent wake! I feel just a little bit high and dry. You’d have thought that something – some sniff of an adventure – would have happened to a young woman (is one still young at twenty-five?) marooned on her own in the wilds of Hellas, but no: I go tamely from temple to temple, guide-book in hand, and spend the rather long evenings writing up notes for that wonderful book I was always going to write, and persuading myself I’m enjoying the peace and quiet … I suppose it’s the other side of the picture, and I’ll adjust myself in time. And if something exciting did happen, I wonder just what sort of a showing I’d make – surely I’ve got some talent for living, even if it looked feeble beside his overplus? But life never does seem to deliver itself into the hands of females, does it? I’ll just finish up as usual in the hotel bedroom, making notes for that book that’ll never get written. Nothing ever happens to me.
I put down the cigarette and picked up my pen again. I had better finish the letter, and on a slightly different note, or Elizabeth was going to wonder if I wasn’t, after all, regretting the so-called emancipation of that broken engagement.
I wrote cheerfully: On the whole, I’m doing fine. The language wasn’t a difficulty after all. Most people seem to speak a bit of French or English, and I have managed to acquire about six words of Greek – though there have been sticky moments! I haven’t managed the money quite so well. I won’t pretend I’m exactly broke yet, but I rather let myself go in Crete – it was worth it, ye gods, but if it means passing up Delphi I shall regret it. Not that I can miss Delphi. That’s unthinkable. I must get there somehow, but I’m afraid I may have to scamp it in a one-day tour, which is all I can afford. There’s a tour bus on Thursday, and I think I’ll have to be content with that. If only I could afford a car! Do you suppose that if I prayed to all the gods at once …?
Someone cleared his throat just above me. A shadow crept half-apologetically across the page.
I looked up.
It wasn’t the waiter, trying to winkle me out of my corner table. It was a little dark man with patched and shabby dungarees, a greasy blue shirt, and a hesitant smirk behind the inevitable moustache. His trousers were held up with string, which it appeared he didn’t trust, because he held on to them firmly with one grimy hand.
I must have looked at him with a chilly surprise, because the apologetic look deepened, but instead of going away he spoke in very bad French.
He said: ‘It is about the car for Delphi.’
I said stupidly, looking down at the letter under my hand: ‘The car for Delphi?’
‘You wanted a car for Delphi, non?’
The sun had probed even into this corner of the café. I peered at him against it. ‘Why, yes, I did. But I really don’t see how—’
‘I bring it.’ One grimy hand – the one that wasn’t holding up his trousers – waved towards the blazing doorway.
My eyes followed the gesture, bemusedly. There was indeed a car, a large shabby-looking black affair, parked at the pavement’s edge.
‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand—’
‘Voilà!’ With a grin, he fished what was patently a car key from his pocket, and dangled it above the table: ‘This is it. It is a matter of life and death, I understand that – oh, perfectly. So I come as quick as I can—’
I said with some exasperation: ‘I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about.’
The grin vanished, to be replaced by a look of vivid anxiety. ‘I am late. This I know. I am sorry. Mademoiselle will forgive me? She will be in time. The car – she does not look much, but she is good, oh, a very good car. If mademoiselle—’
‘Look,’ I said patiently, ‘I don’t want a car. I’m sorry if I misled you, but I can’t hire one. You see—’
‘But mademoiselle said she desired a car.’
‘I know I did. I’m sorry. But the fact is—’
‘And mademoiselle said it was a matter of life and death.’
‘Madem – I didn’t. You said that. I’m afraid I don’t want your car, monsieur. I regret. But I don’t want it.’
‘But mademoiselle—’
I said flatly: ‘I can’t afford it.’
His face lighted at once with a very white-toothed and singularly attractive grin. ‘Money!’ The word was contemptuous. ‘We do not speak of money! Besides,’ he added with great simplicity, ‘the deposit is already paid.’
I said blankly: ‘Deposit? Paid?’
‘But yes. Mademoiselle paid it earlier.’
I drew a breath that was three parts relief. It wasn’t witchcraft after all, nor was it an intervention of the ironic gods of Greece. It was a simple case of mistaken identity.
I said firmly: ‘I’m sorry. There has been a mistake. That is not my car. I didn’t hire it at all.’
The dangling key stilled for a moment, then swung in front of me with unimpaired vigour. ‘It is not the car mademoiselle saw, no, but that one was bad, bad. It had a – how do you say? – a crack in it that the water came out.’
‘A leak. But—’
‘A leak. That is why I am late, you see, but we get this car, oh so good, since mademoiselle say it is so urgent a matter that Monsieur Simon have the car at Delphi straight away. You leave straight away you are in Delphi in three hours – four hours …’ his look lingered on me momentarily, summing me up … ‘five hours maybe? And then perhaps all is well with Monsieur Simon, and this matter of—’
‘Life and death,’ I said. ‘Yes, I know, But the fact remains, monsieur, that I don’t know what you’re talking about! There is some mistake, and I’m sorry. It was not I who asked for the car. I gather that this, er, Monsieur Simon’s girl was to have been in this café waiting for the car …? Well, I can’t see anybody here at present who might fill the bill …’
He spoke quickly, so quickly that I realised afterwards he must have followed my rapid French only sketchily, and was pounc
ing on a phrase that made sense – the sense he wanted to hear. The key still swung on his finger-tip as if it was hot and he wanted to drop it. He said: ‘That is it. This café. A young lady sitting alone. Half past ten. But I am late. You are Simon’s girl, yes?’
He looked, with that bright brown uncomprehending gaze, so like an anxious monkey that my near-exasperation vanished, and I smiled at him, shaking my head, and summed up one of my six hard-learned words of Greek. ‘Ne,’ I said, as forcefully as I could. ‘Ne, ne, ne.’ I laughed and held out my cigarette-case. ‘I’m sorry there’s been a muddle. Have a cigarette.’
The cigarette seemed to be an amazing cure-all for worry. The lines vanished magically from his face. The vivid smile flashed. The key dropped with a jingle in front of me while the hand that wasn’t holding up his pants reached for my cigarette-case. ‘Thank you, mademoiselle. It is a good car, mademoiselle. Have a good journey.’
I was feeling in my bag for matches, and not until I raised my head did I really take in what he’d said. And by then it was too late. He had gone. I caught a glimpse of him sliding through the crowd at the café door like a whippet let off a string, then he vanished. Three of my cigarettes had gone too. But the car key lay on the table in front of me, and the black car still stood outside in the violent sunlight.
It was only then, as I sat gaping like an idiot at the key, the car, and the sunlight on the cloth where a moment ago the little man had cast a shadow, that I realised that my momentary piece of showing-off was likely to cost me pretty dear. I remembered a little sickly that, in Greek, ne means yes.
Of course I ran after him. But the crowd surged and swayed on the pavement, regardless, and there was no sign in any direction of the shabby messenger of the gods. My waiter followed me anxiously on to the pavement, ready to grab, I suppose, if I showed signs of taking off without paying him for my coffee. I ignored him and peered earnestly in all directions. But when he showed signs of retreating to bring up reinforcements to escort me personally back to my table and the bill, I judged it time to give up the search. I went back to my corner, picked up the key, threw a quick worried smile at the still-pursuing waiter, who didn’t speak English, and pushed my way towards the barcounter to seek out the proprietor, who did.