This Rough Magic

  ‘I’m not angry.’ For the first time he took his eyes off me. He mounted a step to pull the door open, and looked out into the blackness. What he saw appeared to satisfy him, but when he turned back he didn’t shut the door.

  ‘Well, now you are here you might as well enjoy it. I can’t leave the tiller much longer, so come along out. That’s not a very thick coat, is it? Try this.’ And he pulled open the cupboard and produced a heavy navy duffel coat, which he held for me.

  ‘Don’t bother, mine will do.’ I stood up and reached for my own coat, with the torch in the pocket, then remembered how wet it was. For the life of me I couldn’t think offhand of any reason for the soaked skirt where I had knelt in the puddles of water. I dropped the coat back on the bunk. ‘Well, thanks awfully, yours’ll be warmer, I suppose. It sounds like quite a windy night now.’

  As he held it for me to put on, I smiled up at him over my shoulder. ‘Have you forgiven me? It was a silly thing to do, and you’ve a right to be furious.’

  ‘I wasn’t furious,’ said Godfrey, and smiled. Then he turned me round and kissed me.

  Well, I had asked for it, and now I was getting it. I shut my eyes. If I pretended it was Max … no, that wasn’t possible. Well, then, someone who didn’t matter – for instance that rather nice boy I’d once had an abortive affair with but hadn’t cared about when it came to the push … But that wouldn’t work either. Whatever Godfrey was or wasn’t, he didn’t kiss like a rather nice boy …

  I opened my eyes and watched, over his shoulder, the lovely, heavy lamp swinging about a foot away from his head. If I could manoeuvre him into its orbit … I supposed there were circumstances in which it was correct, even praiseworthy, for a girl to bash a man’s head in with a lamp while he was kissing her …

  The Aleister gave a sudden lurch, and yawed sharply. Godfrey dropped me as if I had bitten him.

  ‘Put the lamp out, will you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He ran up the steps. I blew the lamp out, and had the glass back in a matter of seconds, but already the Aleister was steady again, and Godfrey paused in the doorway without leaving the cabin, and turned back to hold a hand down to me.

  ‘Come out and see the stars.’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  His voice sharpened a fraction. He wasn’t as calm as he made out. ‘What is it?’

  ‘My hankie. It’s in my own coat pocket.’ I was fumbling in the dimness of the quarter berth among the folds of coat and blanket. The torch dropped sweetly into the pocket of the duffel coat; I snatched the handkerchief, then ran up the steps and put a hand into his.

  Outside was a lovely windswept night, stars and spray, and black sea glinting as it rushed up to burst in great fans of spindrift. Dimly on our left I could see the coast outlined black against the sky, a mass of high land blocking out the stars. Low down there were lights, small and few, and seemingly not too far away.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘About half a mile out from Glyfa.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘You know how the coast curves eastwards here along the foot of Mount Pantokrator, towards the mainland? We’re about halfway along the curve …’

  ‘So we’re running east?’

  ‘For the moment. Off Kouloura we turn up into the strait.’

  (‘I reckoned we were about half-way over,’ Spiro had said, ‘in the strait between Kouloura and the mainland.’)

  ‘You’ll feel the wind a bit more when we get out of the lee of Pantokrator,’ said Godfrey. ‘It’s rising quite strongly now.’ He slipped an arm round me, friendly, inexorable. ‘Come and sit by me. She won’t look after herself for ever. Do you know anything about sailing?’

  ‘Not a thing.’ As he urged me towards the stern seat, my eyes were busily searching the dimly seen cockpit. Only too well did I know there was no handy weapon lying about, even if that lover-like arm would have allowed me to reach for it. But I looked all the same. It had occurred to me that he probably carried a gun, and I had already found out that there was nothing in the pocket nearest me, the left; if he got amorous again it might be possible to find out if it were in the other pocket … As he drew me down beside him on the stern seat I pulled the duffel coat round me for protection against his hands, at the same time relaxing right into the curve of his shoulder. I was thinking that if he wore a shoulder holster he would hardly have cuddled me so blithely to his left side, and I was right. There was no gun there. I leaned cosily back, and set myself to show him how little I knew about sailing. ‘How fast will it go?’

  ‘About eight knots.’

  ‘Oh?’ I let it be heard that I had no idea what a knot was, but didn’t want to expose my ignorance. He didn’t enlighten me. He settled the arm round me, threw his cigarette overside, and added:

  ‘Under sail, that is. Six or seven under power.’

  ‘Oh?’ I had another shot at the same intonation, and was apparently successful, because he laughed indulgently as he turned to kiss me again.

  The Aleister tilted and swung up to a cross-sea, and the boom came over above us with the mainsail cracking like a rifle shot. It supplied me with an excuse for the instinctive recoil I gave as his mouth fastened on mine, but next moment I had hold of myself, and responded with a sort of guarded enthusiasm while my open eyes watched the boom’s pendulum movements above our heads, and I tried to detach my mind from Godfrey, and think.

  What he was doing was obvious enough: not being sure yet of my innocence, he hadn’t wanted to risk leaving me unguarded while he got the mainsail in and took the Aleister along under power. All he could do was hold her as she was, head to the wind, the engine ticking over, the idle mainsail weathercocking her along, until he had decided what to do with me. It was just my luck, I thought sourly, stroking his cheek with a caressing hand, that the wind was more or less in the direction he wanted. If he was aiming (as I supposed he was) for the same place as on the night he had tried to drown Spiro, then he must still be pretty well on course.

  A sudden gust on the beam sent the Aleister’s bows rearing up at an angle that brought the boom back again overhead with a creak and a thud, and Godfrey released me abruptly, his right hand going to the tiller. And as he moved, leaning forward momentarily, I saw my weapon.

  Just beyond him, hanging on its hooks behind the stern cockpit seat, was the sloop’s lifebelt, and attached to this by a length of rope was the smoke flare … a metal tube about a foot long, with a drum-shaped float of hollow metal about two-thirds of the way up its length. It was heavy enough, and deadly enough in shape, to make a formidable weapon if I could only manage to reach it down from the hook where it hung a foot to my side of the lifebelt. The rope attaching it was coiled lightly over the hook, and would be some ten or fifteen feet long – ample play for such a weapon. It only remained to get hold of it. I could hardly reach past him for it, and would certainly get no chance to use it if I did. If I could only get him to his feet for a moment, away from me …

  ‘Why do you leave the sail up?’ I asked. ‘I’d have thought it ought to come down if the engine was going.’

  ‘Not necessarily. I’ll want to take her in under sail soon, and in the meantime she’ll take care of herself this way.’

  ‘I see.’ It was all I could do, this time, to sound as if I didn’t. I saw, all right. He would take her in under sail for the same reason that he had taken her out: for silence. And it was pretty obvious where we were heading. We were making for the Albanian coast with our cargo; and ‘in the meantime’ I, no doubt, would be shed as Spiro had been shed. After I had gone he could spare both hands for the Aleister.

  I took a deep breath of the salt air, and leaned my head confidingly against his shoulder. ‘Heavenly, isn’t it? I’m so glad I stowed away, and that you’re not really angry with me about it. Look at those stars … that’s a thing one misses terribly in London now; no night sky; only that horrible dirty glare from five million sodium lamps. Oughtn’t you to have a light, G
odfrey?’

  ‘I ought, but I don’t. As long as I don’t meet anyone else breaking the law, we see them, so there’s no harm done.’

  ‘Breaking the law?’

  I thought he was smiling. ‘Running without lights.’

  ‘Oh. You’re taking photographs, then? Of the dawn?’ I giggled. ‘What’ll Phyl say this time, I wonder, when I land home with the milk?’

  ‘Where is she tonight? Did she know you’d come out?’

  ‘She’s out with friends at the Corfu Palace. I got a note from her when I got in, and it was too late to join them, so I just stayed home. I … felt kind of blue. We’d had such a lovely day, you and I, I just couldn’t stay in the house, somehow.’

  ‘Poor Lucy. And then I was foul to you, I’m so sorry. Anybody know where you are?’

  The question was casual, almost caressing, and it went off like a fire alarm. I hesitated perhaps a second too long. ‘Miranda was in the house. I told her I was coming out.’

  ‘To the boat-house?’

  ‘Well, no. I didn’t know that myself, did I?’

  He did not reply. I had no way of knowing whether my wretched bluff had worked. The cool uncommitted tone – pleasant enough – and the cold sensuality of his love-making, gave no clue at all to what he felt, or planned to do. It was a personality from which normal human guesses simply glanced off. But whether or not he had accepted my innocence, I had reckoned that nothing I could say would make any difference to my fate. The only weapon I held so far against him was the knowledge I possessed: that Spiro was alive, that Godfrey might be accused of Yanni’s murder, that Adoni and Miranda had seen the packages, and that Miranda had watched him carrying them to the boat-house, and must know where I was now. And finally, that Godfrey on his return would certainly be met by Max, Adoni and (by now) the police, who this time would not be prepared to accept easily any story he might dream up. In plain words, whether he killed me or not, his game was up.

  The trouble was, it worked both ways. If it made no difference what he did with me, then obviously his best course would be to kill me, and make his getaway (surely already planned for) without going back at all into the waiting hands of Max and the Greek police.

  So silence was the only course. It was faintly possible that, if he believed me innocent he might abandon his mission and take me home, or that I might be able to persuade him to relax his watch on me for long enough to let me get hold of the more tangible weapon that hung beyond his right shoulder …

  I said quickly: ‘Listen. What’s the matter with the engine? Did you hear that?’

  He turned his head. ‘What? It sounds all right to me.’

  ‘I don’t know … I thought it made a queer noise, a sort of knocking.’

  He listened for a moment, while the engine purred smoothly on, then shook his head. ‘You must be hearing that other boat – there’s one over there, see, north-east of us, out from Kentroma. You can hear it in the gusts of the wind.’ His arm tightened as I twisted to look, pulling away as if to get to my feet. ‘It’s nothing. Some clapped-out old scow from Kentroma with a pre-war engine. Sit still.’

  I strained my eyes over the black and tossing water to where the light, dim and rocking, appeared and disappeared with the heaving sea. Up-wind of us, I was thinking; they’d never hear anything: and if they did, they’d never catch the Aleister with her lovely lines and silken engine.

  Suddenly, only a short way from us, a flash caught my eye, a curve and splash of light where some big fish cut a phosphorescent track like a line of green fire.

  ‘Godfrey! Look!’

  He glanced across sharply. ‘What?’

  I was half out of my seat. ‘Light, lovely green light, just there in the sea! Honestly, it was just there …’

  ‘A school of fish or some such thing.’ His tone was barely patient, and I realised with a jerk of fear that his mind was moving towards some goal of its own. ‘You often see phosphorescence at night hereabouts.’

  ‘There it is again! Could it be photographed? Oh, look! Let me go a moment, Godfrey, please, I—’

  ‘No. Stay here.’ The arm was like an iron bar. ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve had the answer to one question already. But that leaves me with another. Why did you come?’

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘I know what you told me. Do you expect me to believe you?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you—’

  ‘I’ve kissed women before. Don’t ask me to believe you came along because you wanted to be with me.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I admit I wasn’t expecting it to be quite like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know quite well.’

  ‘I believe I do. But if you follow a man round and hide in his bed and play Cleopatra wrapped in a rug you can hardly expect him to say it with lace-edged Valentines.’

  It was like acid spilling over a polished surface, to show the stripped wood, coarse and ugly. There had been splashes of the same corrosive this afternoon. If there had been light enough to see by, he would have caught me staring.

  ‘Do you have to be so offensive? I know you were annoyed, but I thought you’d get over that, and if you want the truth I can’t see why you should mind so damned much if someone does have a look at your boat. I’ve told you exactly what happened, and if you don’t believe me, or if you think I should fall straight into bed with you here and now, you can just think again. It’s not a habit of mine.’

  ‘Then why did you behave as if it were?’

  ‘Now, look—!’ I broke off, and then laughed. At all costs I mustn’t let him force a showdown on me yet. I would have to let anger go, and try a bit more sweet apology. ‘Look, Godfrey, forget it! I’m sorry, it’s silly to blame you, I did ask for it … and I was putting on a bit of an act in the cabin, I admit it. That was silly, too. But when a woman gets in a jam, and finds herself faced with an angry male, it’s an instinct to use her sex to get her out of it. I haven’t shown up a bit well tonight, have I? But I never thought you would be quite so furious, or quite so … well, quick off the mark.’

  ‘Sexually? How little you know.’

  ‘Well, you’ve had your revenge. I haven’t felt so idiotic and miserable since I remember. And you needn’t worry that I’ll follow you around again … I’ll never face you by daylight again as long as I live!’

  He did not answer, but to my stretching senses it was as if he had laughed aloud. I could feel the irony of my words ring and bite in the windy air. A little way to starboard the trail of green fire curved and flashed again, and was gone. I said: ‘Well, after that, I suppose I must ask you to ruin your trip finally and completely, and take me home.’

  ‘No use, my dear.’ The words were brisk, the tone quite different. I felt a quiver run through me. ‘Here you are, and here you stay. You’re coming the whole way.’

  ‘But you can’t want me—’

  ‘I don’t. You came because you wanted to – or so you say – and now you’ll stay because I say you have to. I’ve no time to take you back, even if I wished to. You’ve wasted too much of my time as it is. I’m on an urgent trip tonight and I’m running to schedule—’

  ‘Godfrey—’

  ‘– taking a load of forged currency across to the Albanian coast. It’s under the cabin floor. Seven hundred thousand leks, slightly used, in small denominations; and damned good ones too. If I’m caught, I’ll be shot. Get it?’

  ‘I … I don’t believe you, you’re ribbing me.’

  ‘Far from it. Want to see them?’

  ‘No. No. I’ll believe you if you like, but I don’t understand. Why? What would you do a thing like that for?’

  Kentroma was abeam of us now, about the same distance away. I thought I saw the faint outline of ghostly foam very near, and the loom of land, and my heart leapt; but it vanished. A small rocky islet at most, lightless, and scoured by the wind. As we ran clear of it I fel
t the sudden freshening kick of the wind, no longer steady from the east but veering and gusting as the mountains to either side of the strait caught and volleyed the currents of air.

  And there, not so far off now, were the lights of Kouloura, where the land ended and the strait began …

  I dragged my mind back to what he was saying.

  ‘… And at the moment the situation in Albania is that anything could happen, and it’s to certain interests – I’m sure you follow me? – to see that it does. The Balkan pot can always be made to boil, if you apply heat in the right place. You’ve got Yugoslavia, and Greece, and Bulgaria, all at daggers drawn, all sitting round on the Albanian frontier, prepared for trouble, but none of them daring to make it.’

  ‘Or wanting to,’ I said sharply. ‘Don’t give me that! The last thing Greece wants is any sort of frontier trouble that she can be blamed for … oh!’

  ‘Yes, I thought you might see it. Dead easy, isn’t it? A lovely set-up. Communist China sitting pretty in Albania, with a nice little base in Europe, the sort of foothold that Big Brother over there’d give his eye teeth to have. And if the present pro-Chinese Government fell, and the fall was attributed to Greece, there’d be a nice almighty Balkan blow-up, and the Chinese would be out and Russia in. And maybe into Greece as well. Get it now?’

  ‘Oh, God, yes. It’s an old dodge, Hitler tried it in the last war. Flood a country with forged currency and down goes the Government like a house of cards. How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Ferrying the currency? For some time now. This is the last load. D-Day is Good Friday; it’s to filter as from then, and believe you me, after that the bang comes in a matter of days.’ He laughed. ‘They’ll see the mushroom cloud right from Washington.’

  ‘And you? Where will you see it from?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll have a ringside seat, don’t worry – but it won’t be the Villa Rotha. “G. Manning, Esq.” will be vanishing almost immediately … You wouldn’t have got your trip out with me on Saturday after all, my dear. A pity, I thought so at the time. I enjoyed our day out; we’ve a lot in common.’