The Light of Day (18 page)

We reached the villa a little after five. Miss Lipp told me to sound the horn as I went up the drive.

The reception committee consisted of Harper and Fischer. Hovering in the background, ready to carry luggage, was an old man wearing an apron whom I took to be Hamul, the resident caretaker.

Tufan
had said that
Fächer was
the lessor of
the
villa, but there was no doubt who was the real host there. All Fischer received from the incoming guest was a nod of recognition. Harper got a smile and an 'Ah, my dear Karl'. They shook hands with businesslike cordiality, and then Harper, Miller and Miss Lipp went straight into the house. To Fischer were left the menial tasks of telling Hamul where Miller's bags were to go, and of showing me where to put the car and where I was to steep.

At the back of the villa there was a walled stable yard. Part of the stabling had been converted into a garage with room for two cars. It was empty except for
a Lambretta
motor-scooter.

The
Lambretta
belongs to the cook,' Fischer said; 'see that he does not steal gasoline from the car.'

I followed him across the yard to the rear entrance of the house.

Inside, I had a brief glimpse of the polished wood flooring of a passage beyond the small tiled hallway, before he led the way up a narrow staircase to the top floor. All too obviously we were in the old servants' quarters. There were six small attic cubicles with bare wood floors, bare wood partition walls and a single skylight in the roof for all of them. The sanitary arrangements consisted of an earthenware sink with a water tap in the wall at the head of the stairs. It was stiflingly hot under the low roof and there were dust and cobwebs everywhere. Two of the cubicles showed signs of having been swept out recently. Bach contained an iron bedstead with a mattress and grey blankets. In one there was a battered composition leather suitcase. Fischer showed me the other.

‘You will sleep here,' he said. The chef has the next bed. You will eat your meals with him in the kitchen.'

‘Where is the toilet?'

‘There is a
pissoir
across the yard in the stables.'

'And the bathroom?'

He waved his hand towards the sink. He was watching my face and enjoying himself just a bit too obviously. I guessed that this had been his own wonderful idea of a punishment for the crime of calling him a servant, and that Harper probably did not know of it.
in
any case, I had to protest Without some privacy, especially at night, I could neither use the radio nor write reports.

I had put my bag down on the floor to rest my arm. Now I picked it up and started to walk back the way we had come.

'Where are you going?'

‘To tell Mr Harper that I'm not sleeping here.'

'Why not? If it is good enough for the chef it is good enough for you, a driver.'

'It will not be good enough for Miss Lipp if I smell because I am unable to take a bath.'

"What did you expect—the royal apartment?'

'I can still find a hotel room in Sariyer. Or you can get another driver.'

I felt fairly safe in saying that. If he were to call my bluff I could always back down; but I thought it more likely that I had already called his. The very fact that he was arguing with me suggested weakness.

He glared at me for a moment, then walked to the stairs.

‘Put the car away,' he said. 'It will be decided later what is to be done with you.'

I followed him down the stairs. At the foot of them, he turned off left into the house. I went out to the yard, left my bag in the garage and walked back to the car. When I had put it away, I went into the house and set about finding the kitchen. It wasn't difficult. The passage which I had glimpsed from the back entrance rang along the whole length of the house, with a servants' stairway leading to the bedroom floor, and, on the right, a series of doors which presumably gave the servants access to the various reception rooms in front. There was a smell of garlic-laden cooking. I followed the smell.

The kitchen was a big stone-floored room on the left of the passage. It had an old charcoal range along the rear wall with three battered flues over it, and a heavy pine-wood table with benches in the middle. The table was cluttered with cooking debris and bottles, and scarred from years of use as a chopping block. Empty butcher's hooks hung from the beams. There was a barrel on a trestle, and beside it a sinister-looking zinc ice-box. A doorway to one side gave on to what appeared to be the scullery. A short man in a dirty blue denim smock stood by the range, stirring an iron pot. This was Geven, the cook. As I came in he looked up and stared.

He was a dark, moon-faced, middle-aged man with an up-turned nose and large nostrils. The mouth was wide and full with a lower lip that quivered much of the time as if he were on the verge of tears. The thick, narrow chest merged into a high paunch. He had a three-day growth of beard, which was hardly surprising in view of the fact that he had nowhere to shave.

I remembered that he was a Cypriot and spoke to him in English. 'Good evening. I am the chauffeur, Simpson. Mr
Geven?'

'Geven, yes.' He stopped stirring and we shook hands. His hands were filthy and it occurred to me that Mr Miller was probably going to need his
Entero Vioforme.
'A drink, eh?' he said. 'Thanks.'

He pulled a glass out of a bowl of dirty water by the sink, shook it once and poured some
konyak
from an already opened bottle on the table. He also refilled his own half-empty glass, which was conveniently to hand.

"Here's cheers!' he said and swallowed thirstily. A sentence of
Tuf
an's came into my mind—'He gets drunk and attacks people.' I had not thought to ask what sort of people he usually attacked, the person with whom he was drinking or some casual bystander. 'Are you British?' he asked.

'Yes.'

'How you know I speak English?' An awkward question. 'I didn't know, but I don't speak Turkish.'

He nodded, apparently satisfied. 'You worked for these people before?'

'A little. I drove the car from Athens. Normally, I work there with my own car.'

'Driving tourists?'

‘
Yes
.'

'Are these people tourists?' His tone was heavily ironical.

'I
dont
know. They say so.'

'Ah! ' He winked knowingly and went back to his stirring again. 'Are you by the week?'

'Paid, you mean? Yes.'

'You had some money from them?'

‘For the trip from Athens.'

‘Who paid? The Fischer man?’

‘The Harper man. You don't think they really are tourists?'

He made a face and rocked his head from side to side as if the question were too silly to need an answer.

‘What are they, then?'

He shrugged. 'Spies, Russia spies. Everyone know— Hamul and his wife, the fishermen down below, everyone. You want something to eat?'

‘That smells good.'

'It
is
good. It is for us. Hamul's wife cooks for him in their room before they come to wait table in the dining-room. Then I cook for the spies. Maybe, if I feel like it, I give them what is left after we eat, but the best is for us. Get two dishes, from the shelf there.'

It was a chicken and vegetable soup and was the first thing I had eaten with any pleasure for two days. Of course, I knew that I would have trouble with the garlic later; but, with my stomach knotted up by nerves the way it was, I would have had trouble with anything. Geven did not eat much. He went on drinking brandy; but he smiled approvingly when I took a second helping of the soup.

'Always I like the British,' he said. 'Even when you are backing the Greeks in Cyprus against us, I like the British. It is good you are here. A man does not like drinking alone. We can take a bottle upstairs with us every night.' He smiled wetly at the prospect.

I returned the smile. It was not the moment, I felt, to tell him that I hoped not to be sharing the servants' quarters with him. And then Fischer had to come in.

He looked at the brandy bottle disapprovingly, and then at me. 'I will show you your room,’ he said.

Geven held up an unsteadily protesting hand.
'Efendi,
let him finish his dinner. I will show him where to sleep.'

It was Fischer's opportunity. 'Ah no, chef,’ he said; 'he thinks himself too good to sleep with you.’ He nodded to me. 'Come.'

Geven's lower lip quivered
sa
violently that I was sure he was about to burst into tears; but his hand went to the bottle as if he were about to throw it at me. It was possible, I thought, that he might be going to do both things.

I whispered hurriedly: 'Harper's orders, nothing to do with me,' and got out of the room as quickly as I could.

Fischer was already at the staircase in the passage.

'You will use these stairs,' he said; 'not those in the front of the house.'

The room to which he now showed me was at the side of the house on the bedroom floor. He pointed to the door of it.

There is the room,' he said, and then pointed to another door along the corridor; 'and there is a bathroom. The car will be wanted in the morning at eleven.' With that he left, turning off the lights in the corridor as he went.

When he had gone, I turned the lights on again. The corridor had cream lincrusta dadoes with flowered wallpaper above. I had a look at the bathroom. It was a most peculiar shape and had obviously been installed, as an afterthought, in a disused storage closet. There was no window. The plumbing fixtures were German,
circa
1905. Only the cold water taps worked.

The bedroom wasn't too bad. It had a pair of french windows, a brass bedstead, a chest of drawers and a big wardrobe. There was also a deal table with an ancient hand-operated sewing-machine on it. At the time when women guests in big houses always brought their ladies' maids with them to stay, the room had probably been given to one of the visiting maids.

There was a mattress on the bed, but no sheets or blankets. I knew it would be unwise to complain again. Before I got my bag from the garage, I went back up to the servants' quarters and took the blankets from the cubicle which Fischer had allocated to me. Then I returned to the
room.
The car radio transmission wasn't due until eleven; I had time to kill. I began by searching the room.

I always like looking inside other people's drawers and cupboards. You can find strange things. I remember once, when I was at Coram's, my aunt had pleurisy and the district nurse said that I would have to be boarded out for a month. Some people with an old house off the Lewisham High Road took me in. The house had thick laurel bushes all round it and big chestnut trees that made it very dark. I hated going past the laurel bushes at night, because at that time I believed (in the way a boy does) that a madman with a German bayonet was always lying in wait ready to pounce on me from behind and murder me. But inside the house it was all right. There was a smell of Lifebuoy soap and furniture polish. The people had had a son who had been killed on the
Somme,
and they gave me his room. I found all sorts of things in the cupboard. There was a stamp collection, for instance. I had never collected stamps, but a lot of chaps at school did and I took one or two of the stamps and sold them. After all, he was dead, so he didn't need them. The thing I liked most though was his collection of minerals. It was in a flat wooden case divided up into squares with a different piece of mineral in each one and labels saying what they were—graphite, galena, mica, quartz, iron pyrites, chalcocite,
fluorite,
wolfram and so on. There were exactly sixty-four squares and exactly sixty-four pieces of mineral, so at first I couldn't see how to keep any of them for myself because the empty square would have shown that something was missing. I did take one or two of them to school to show the chemistry master and try to get in his good books; but he only got suspicious and asked me where I had found them. I had to tell him that an uncle had lent them to me before he would let me have them back. After that, I just kept them in the box and looked at them; until I went back to my aunt's, that is, when I took the iron pyrites because it looked as if it had gold in it. I left a small piece of coal in the
square
instead. I don't think they ever noticed, I kept that piece of. iron pyrites for years. ‘Fools gold', some people call it.

All I found in the room at Sardunya was an old Russian calendar made of cardboard in the shape of an ikon. There was a dark brown picture of Christ on it. I don't read Russian, so I couldn't make out the date. It wasn't worth taking.

I had the windows wide open. It was so quiet up there that I could hear the
diesels
of a ship chugging upstream against the Black Sea current towards the boom across the narrows above Sariyer. Until about eight-thirty there was a faint murmur of voices from the terrace in front Then they went in to dinner. Some time after nine, I became restless. After all, nobody had told me to stay in my room. I decided to go for a stroll.