The Shortest Way to Hades (17 page)
Read The Shortest Way to Hades Online
Authors: Sarah Caudwell
“Oh dear,” she said, “it seems to be Deirdre’s. Do you think it’s been there ever since—?”
“Undoubtedly.” I said. “She would have put it in the cupboard when she arrived for the Boat Race party and no one has since thought to move it. I don’t quite know how she came by the photographs, but I fear we may easily guess how she hoped to use them. And that, my dear Julia, solves the last of the mysteries.”
Ragwort raised an eyebrow.
“Deirdre’s letter. I think we may safely assume that what Julia construed as an appeal for help was in truth a prelude to blackmail. It would be not inconsistent with the impression we have been given of Deirdre’s character; and she would no doubt have thought—she was very young, after all—that this picture was sufficiently compromising for Julia to pay money for it. You had better give the photographs to me—if you keep them, Julia, you will mix them up with some set of papers you are dealing with and cause alarm to your instructing solicitors.”
We were afterwards joined by Timothy and Cantrip and in their company spent an agreeable evening, at the end of which Timothy kindly offered me the hospitality of his flat. I rose late and breakfasted at leisure, reflecting with some complacency on the successful conclusion of my inquiry. I thought myself a trifle at fault in directing my mind too little to the point mentioned by Selena—that a person murderously resolved to secure possession of the Remington-Fiske estates, being more remote in the succession than both Deirdre and Camilla, would not necessarily have disposed of them in order of seniority; but since Deirdre’s death had not been achieved by malice, the point seemed an academic one.
Towards noon—Selena, I supposed, was by then already under sail on the blue waters of the Ionian—I went out into Middle Temple Lane and turned my steps towards Fleet Street. The news-vendor on the corner of these two thoroughfares was already offering for sale the earliest edition of the evening paper. I paused to glance at the placard proclaiming the latest news:
HEIRESS FEARED DROWNED IN SAILING ACCIDENT
I purchased a copy of the paper and looked for the “Stop Press” column; but for some reason I scarcely needed to read it to feel certain that the headline referred to Camilla Galloway.
There is a sense in which my inquiry had been successful. Its purpose, as my readers will recall, had been to stop Julia talking about Sir Thomas More: in this it had succeeded. It is right, however, to confess immediately that my conclusions were entirely erroneous. In reaching them, I had too uncritically accepted a view of Deirdre’s death which accorded with my own preconceived opinion, banishing from my mind those curious features of the unhappy incident which were left unexplained: an error all the more culpable in that the facts were already known to me which should have led to a virtual certainty of the truth, requiring only a trivial piece of commonplace research to be confirmed beyond question. I blame myself much for my failure of judgment; though I could hardly have foreseen how dangerous it would prove to persons whom I held in affection.
The news of Camilla’s sailing accident did not persuade me, for more than a moment or two, to reconsider my opinion. Dismissing as irrational my sense of uneasiness, I concluded merely that the descendants of the late Sir James Remington-Fiske were peculiarly inclined to misadventure. Fuller and more accurate accounts of the incident appeared in due course in the English newspapers. I refrain, however, from setting out any of these
in extenso,
since there is nothing in them which is not also related in Selena’s letters to Julia: these, being most material to my narrative, must be placed before my readers in their entirety.
The first arrived some ten days later, on a day when I happened again to find myself in London. Looking into the Corkscrew at an early hour of the evening, I discovered Julia on the point of reading it, and willingly accepted her offer to do so aloud.
SV
Kymothoe
at anchor in the bay of Mourtos.
Sunday afternoon.
Dear Julia,
I have been obliged to put in here by unrest among the crew, namely Sebastian. I had meant to take advantage of a nice westerly breeze to press on northwards to Corfu; but the crew claimed the sea was too rough for sailing on and threatened strike action. I pointed out that lying in the cockpit and reading aloud from the
Odyssey
—these being his principal duties—did not actually constitute an essential contribution to the smooth running of the vessel. It was further represented to me, however, that it would be wrong to pass by Mourtos without a second glance, since it was the scene of the great sea-battle which marked the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and changed the history of the Western world; and had a taverna where we could eat grilled prawns. I yielded to these arguments against my better judgment.
I must tell you a most extraordinary story I have heard about Camilla Galloway. It may perhaps have been mentioned in the English newspapers; but I don’t imagine they would have thought it worth reporting in detail.
The first I heard of it was at Preveza.
Preveza is on the west coast of mainland Greece, on the north side of the Gulf of Amvrakikos. We arrived there on Friday morning, collected the necessary papers from the shipping office and took possession of the
Kymothoe.
She is a 25-foot Snapdragon, small enough to be handled by two people, but with plenty of space below decks and everything one needs to be comfortable—a well-designed little galley and a proper lavatory and shower, quite separate and private, with room to stand upright there as well as in the cabin. I really think, Julia, that even you—well, no, perhaps not.
Our destination is Ithaca, but by a roundabout route: northwards between Corfu and the mainland coast until we round the northern end of Corfu, then southwards again. This is a longish voyage under sail in a fortnight, and of course I don’t want to motor any more than I have to: it seemed to me that if we were going to see anything of Ithaca we should waste no time, but set sail as soon as we were properly provisioned.
I could see no reason for lingering in Preveza—it looked like a very ordinary fishing port, all whitewash and cobblestones, such as one might see anywhere on the Mediterranean, and distinguished only by the unusually pungent smell from the harbor. I was told by the crew, however, that in ancient and medieval times it had been a place of great strategic importance and that in the surrounding waters a battle had been fought which had changed the history of the world; I was also reminded that it was nearly lunch-time. (It’s rather extraordinary that whenever the crew wants to stop for lunch we find ourselves at the scene of a battle which has changed the history of the world—there are judges I know who would think it a most remarkable coincidence.)
We accordingly went ashore and ate moussaka and Greek salad at a taverna overlooking the Gulf, while the crew told me all about the battle. It appears that Aktion, on the south side of the Gulf, is the same place as Actium, where Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra and started the Roman Empire—the Greeks, as is their custom, have changed the name to confuse foreign visitors. (Attempts were made to persuade me that it had really been called Aktion all along; but Shakespeare calls it Actium, so I dismissed these as subversive.)
After this it was too late to make any serious start on our voyage—we could not have been sure of making a safe harbor before nightfall. We spent the afternoon dawdling about inside the Gulf, getting used to the foibles of the
Kymothoe
and from time to time stopping for a swim. The sky was clear and the winds very light, so much so that I eventually had to use the motor to take us back to Preveza. The water, however, was a good deal choppier than one would expect in such weather. I began to wonder why, and what conditions would be like outside the Gulf. While we were drinking our first ouzo at a bar by the quayside, I instructed the crew (whose duties include those of interpreter) to engage the barman in conversation about the weather.
This was how we came to hear that on the previous night there had been a violent storm, in which a yacht owned by an Englishwoman had been lost and all those on board her drowned. Or almost drowned. Or one drowned, and the others almost—our informant was rather vague about the details. Of course I didn’t know, at that stage, that it had anything to do with Camilla.
We put to sea early on the following morning, having taken such steps as we respectively thought prudent to ensure a safe voyage: that is to say, I had listened to the weather forecast and checked that the engine was working, and the crew had poured a glass of retsina over the bows as a libation to Poseidon.
“Sebastian,” I said, “you have always told me that you are a dialectical materialist, and do not believe in gods of any kind.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But it does no harm to be on the safe side.”
The gods seemed to show less gratitude than they might have done for these attentions—a brisk west wind and the after-effects of the storm combined to produce in the sea outside the Gulf a distinct bumpiness, which caused the crew to feel not quite well. He lay in the cockpit, groaning, and unable to attend to the duties previously mentioned—namely, the reading aloud of the
Odyssey.
I tried to divert his mind by asking why Homer always speaks of the wine-dark sea, when the Mediterranean is such a striking shade of blue, and whether this meant that the Greeks of that period drank some kind of dark blue wine. The crew, however, showed no enthusiasm for this interesting question, but continued to lie in the cockpit and groan.
You will perhaps think it heartless of me, but I was enjoying myself more than if the sea had been entirely smooth. I don’t know how to describe to you, Julia, how splendid it is being at the helm of a sailing-boat in a firm wind on the open sea—there’s nothing like it in the world. I suppose one might compare it to having a very good day in court—I don’t mean when it all goes well from the start, but the sort of day when the judge begins by thinking your witnesses are liars and there’s a House of Lords decision against you, and you bring him round gradually to taking a more sensible view and finding in your favor: well, it’s something like that, but better.
“I didn’t know,” said Julia, amazed at understanding her friend so little, “that Selena thought anything was better than that.”
We made reasonable progress, close-reaching at a speed of about five knots on a course almost due north and parallel to the coast of Epirus: this is what the books on navigation would call “an aggressive littoral”—an almost unbroken line of oatmeal-colored cliffs dropping straight down into the sea, with occasional clumps of dark green scrub, like undernourished spinach, trying to scrape a living from the cracks in the limestone. I intended at first to press straight on to Parga; but seeing that there was no prospect of the crew making lunch, still less eating it, while we were still under sail, I decided to put in at Ayios Ioannis, a little harbor some twenty miles north of Preveza. When the crew was sufficiently recovered to take an interest in things, I showed him that according to the chart we were at the mouth of a river called the Akheron.
Julia turned pale and lit a Gauloise.
This was thought to be news of most sinister significance: the Akheron, it seems, is really the Acheron, known to all students of classical mythology to have its source in Hades, the Kingdom of the Dead: further libations were insisted on, this time to the gods of the Underworld. (It is the duty of a ship’s captain to respect the religious sensibilities of the crew, though I did think it rather a pity to waste so much retsina.)
All this reminded me that there was a temple nearby which the crew had expressed a wish to see—a place called the Necromantion, dedicated in ancient times to the cult of the Underworld. Although we had meant to visit it by bus or car from Parga, it occurred to me that it might be even easier to reach it from Ayios Ioannis. With this in mind we went ashore, and were supplied by the local grocery not only with retsina and goat’s milk cheese, but also with the services of a boatman—the son-in-law of the grocer’s cousin—who was willing, for a modest consideration, to row us up the Acheron.
The crew read to me, as we were rowed along between banks of willow trees, from Book XI of the
Odyssey
, which describes the voyage of Odysseus into the Underworld. With a following wind and some rather vague sailing directions from Circe, it seems to have taken him only twenty-four hours; but one of his men still managed to arrive before him, having fallen when drunk from the roof of Circe’s palace and so found a much shorter way to Hades.
Everyone thinks, says the crew—and you, having had a classical education, will no doubt be included in his concept of “everyone”—everyone thinks that Odysseus sailed westwards to reach the Underworld, and that the Kingdom of Hades can accordingly be located somewhere in the area of Manhattan Island; but that is on the strength of what Odysseus told the Phaecians. It is to be noted (says the crew) that all the really unlikely stories in the
Odyssey
—the magic and monsters and giants and wizards and impressionable goddesses living alone on islands—all these stories are the ones told by Odysseus himself at the fireside of King Alcinous, when invited by the Phaecians to sing for his supper by telling them of his travels: under such conditions, the most truthful of travellers might embroider a little. To others he gives a less colorful account of his adventures; and I was called on to notice that on such occasions, though he says nothing about Hades, he often mentions having spent some time in Thesprotia—the region where the cult of the Underworld was practiced and through which we were at that moment travelling.
This doesn’t mean that I can claim to have made the same journey as Odysseus. Ah, no—the crew remembered just in time that he is a serious classical scholar and that it would not be respectable for him to believe that anything in Homer ever actually happened. The most he will let me say is that in Homer’s time there would have been a temple on the same site as the Necromantion, dedicated to the same cult, which people would have visited to hear prophecies from the ghosts of the dead; and that Book XI of the
Odyssey
may be regarded as a fanciful and poetic account of such a pilgrimage.
I was rather baffled by the business about prophecies: I couldn’t see why the ghosts of the dead should know any more about the future than anyone else—rather less, I would have thought. The crew, admitting the force of my objection, suggested that the oracle might have been used to reveal the truth about any mysterious death, especially where murder was suspected: “For it must be supposed,” he said, forgetting again about being a classical scholar, “that it is those who have died young, or by violence, or by the treachery of those who should have protected them, whose unquiet ghosts would gather closest to the banks of the Acheron, pale with the thirst for blood and wailing to be avenged.”
We picnicked beside the Acheron on bread and goat’s milk cheese washed down with retsina, and afterwards climbed up to the Necromantion: a temple built of polygonal blocks of stone, of massive size and irregular in shape, which are fitted together without cement or mortar to produce something like a cartwheel pattern. The chief attraction is to clamber down a rickety iron staircase to a sort of underground chamber, its roof formed by a series of rough stone arches, which is said to be the place where the prophecies were made. The only lighting is from a dim electric light bulb at the far end from the staircase: very sinister and atmospheric, but in view of the uneven floor also rather hazardous. Three-quarters of the way along one comes without warning to a shallow trench—no more ancient, I dare say, than the staircase or the electric light bulb, but supposed to have been used for sacrifices: I managed to avoid it; but the crew stumbled on the edge and scraped his wrist quite badly. I bathed the wound in retsina, however, which I suppose from its taste to have strong disinfectant qualities, and there seem to be no ill-effects.