Bread and Chocolate Page 3

  ‘This is a very special place,’ he said softly into the microphone as the launch moved away from the side of the gently rocking ship. ‘Greek legend has it that when a man is dead his soul comes down this narrow gorge and is met here, perhaps exactly here, by a dark boat, guided by the boatman Charon. This is the River Styx and no man ever comes back from his silent journey over these dark waters.’

  The cliffs were very narrow on either side of the blue lapping water, the olive trees bowed over their reflection at the water’s edge, the cypress trees stood like dark exclamation marks on the horizon. There was no sound but the faint puttering of the outboard motor of the launch, and he let the silence linger, wondering if he could hear at the back of it the beat of Charon’s oars.

  ‘COO-EEE!’ He was so startled that he dropped the microphone and it made a loud popping noise as it hit the teak deck. But the noise she made was even louder. ‘COO-EEE!’

  She turned around to him, quite unaware of the sudden thudding of his heart. ‘No echo,’ she complained. ‘No echo. I thought you said this place had a famous echo?’

  ‘I said nothing about an echo,’ he said in sudden passion. ‘I said a lot, a great deal, about this being the very mouth of death itself. And you come here and bellow Coo-eee!’

  She gleamed at him and he saw how his anger thrilled her. It was his defeat in the game she had been playing with him. She had caught him on the raw and thus she had won.

  ‘Ooo!’ she said. ‘Oooo! Pardon me for breathing!’ She turned to her husband. ‘He snapped me head off, didn’t he?’ she asked. George nodded, looking reproachfully at him. ‘All I said was Coo-eee. Testing for the echo. And he snapped my head off.’

  ‘I’ll have a word,’ George said lugubriously. ‘With the purser or the captain. Crew can’t talk to passengers like that.’

  The lecturer turned away, his face burning, he bent to pick up his microphone and looked towards the back of the boat where the wake twisted in the narrow blue channel like a silver corkscrew. Hopeless to try and invoke the dark magic of Charon for these people. Hopeless to try to give them a sense of the fear and the longing for the River Styx. Pointless to talk to them about the belief that once you crossed the river you remembered nothing – for what did she remember anyway?

  ‘I am sorry the microphone is out of order,’ he said shortly, and retreated behind the steering wheel where she mouthed: ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ at him.

  That night at dinner, as bad luck would have it, she was seated at his table. Officers and lecturers were rotated around the dining room so that guests had a chance to enjoy their company on every night of their voyage. He found he could hardly speak to her with anything resembling civility. He had already had a brief interview with the purser who told him that a complaint had been made by a guest about his inadequacy as a teacher, and worse – his personal rudeness. Pointless to defend himself by saying that the woman was a barbarian; she was a guest on the cruise, her whims must be accommodated. He spent the evening trying to humour her and found himself treated to a lecture on Indian erotic art.

  ‘Mucky buggers,’ she said with delight. ‘You should see the things we saw on the temple carvings, and smiling all the time like butter wouldn’t melt. We were very surprised, George and I, not thinking of Indians like that. As you don’t. But I said to George, it just goes to show that it’s the quiet ones that are the worst. But I shan’t look Mr Patel at the bottom of our road in the face again, I can tell you. Not now I know what I know.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘More wine?’

  He had a fancy that the only way to stop this unending flow of the trivial and the obscene was to pour things down her throat. Already she had eaten a huge five-course dinner with coffee and brandy and now he was encouraging her to drink more. If George would only take her to their cabin! But George was muttering about a nice game of cards and she was declaring that she thought she’d have a bit of a dance, and he could see that she would ask him to dance with her and he would have to accept.

  ‘I think I’ll call it a Ladies Excuse Me,’ she announced and rose to her feet. ‘Because I’m no lady, and I hope you’ll excuse me.’

  He could feel himself rising, driven by the rigour of good manners, against his will, against his instinct. He could feel his miserable face setting in a rictus of a polite smile. He knew in the very depths of his aching bones that the moment they arrived on the dance floor two equally awful things could happen: either, the band would play a slow dance and he would receive the full weight of her into his arms, and she would thrust her thigh between his legs and press against him, and tickle the back of his neck with her long fingernails, and lean back and smile at him knowingly, supremely confident that he was aroused by this assault instead of miserably longing for the privacy of his bed. Or – and perhaps worse – the band would burst into the Birdie Dance and he would have to flap his arms like wings and wiggle his bottom like a hen while she, the author of his discomforts, would scream with laughter and shout her mantra: ‘I love a laff, me.’

  But just as he opened his reluctant arms to receive her she checked. Her bronze-stained face went suddenly white, as if with a shock. She recoiled and her hands went to her throat as if she were choking. She let out one honking cry and she fell backwards, tipping up the table and pulling down the tablecloth in a shower of drinks and glasses.

  ‘Fetch the doctor!’ he shouted, and knelt to loosen her clothing. It could not be done. Her gown was so low-cut as to be non-existent to the middle of her cleavage. But still she plucked at her throat and cawed like a fallen crow.

  The doctor was at her side, taking her pulse, listening for a breath. He started emergency respiration and the band, not knowing what they should do, started a foxtrot, thought better of it and staggered to a stop. The first-aid team came running in with a stretcher, and the doctor and George got either end of her and lifted her like a slumped gaudy sack.

  The lecturer followed, like a ghost drawn behind her, longing to know what the end might be. He waited outside the medical centre, smoking a cigarette cadged from a passing crewman, and heard them trying over and over again to start that fatty heart beating in that lazy body. In the end the door opened and the doctor emerged, yellow light spilling out behind him.

  ‘We lost her, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘She’s sailing down the river.’

  And the lecturer, who had never had an unkind thought nor said an unkind word in his life before, threw his head back to the slip of the white moon and called to her soul as she crossed the River Styx:

  ‘COO-EEE.’

  The Favour

  ‘Lady Ygraine?’

  She stopped at the whisper from the doorway. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked sharply.

  A man stepped out of the shadow. Brown hair, brown eyes, a warm appealing smile. ‘Me,’ he said.

  ‘David,’ she said coolly. ‘What is it you want? I am on my way to the hall.’

  He nodded. Everyone in the castle was invited to feast with the lord and his lady on this night before the tournament. The fighting men would drink deeply, laughing heartily at jokes that were old, at jests which were not funny, hiding from each other the deep coldness of fear that gripped their bellies.

  ‘I wanted a word with you,’ he said. ‘Several words.’

  He put his hand out to draw her towards the doorway where they would be out of sight of the big double doors leading into the hall. She stiffened and drew back.

  ‘David St Pierre, I am not lingering with you on stairways or in darkened doorways,’ she said. ‘I have to go to dinner. My lady mother will be looking for me and if I am late I will be whipped. You do me no favour by keeping me here.’

  He dropped his hand at once and stepped to the side, out of her way.

  ‘I would not have you hurt, sweetheart,’ he said quickly.

  She gasped at the endearment. ‘I’m not your sweetheart,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Never will be. David, you know this full well. Why d’you keep to
rmenting me and teasing yourself with this? You’re the poorest knight in the country. Your horse is a laughing stock. Your castle is some tumbled-down ruin God knows where. My lady mother and my father look a good deal higher for me than some poor knight on the Border marches. And you know it.’

  He nodded. ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘But I feel …’

  ‘Feel!’ she said abruptly. ‘What have you or I to do with feelings! When I am wed and have three heirs in the cradle I will have time for feelings. But for now I must know obedience to my mother’s will and nothing else.’

  ‘You’re very young,’ he said softly. His voice held a world of tenderness. ‘Very young and very lovely. I don’t want to see you married to some great lord who will use you, and beat you, and breed sons on you.’

  Ygraine tossed her head and the veil from her tall headdress brushed across his face like the shadow of a kiss. ‘What would you have me do?’ she asked him. ‘What would you have me do? I didn’t choose this life, I didn’t make it so that men are lords and women their servants.’

  ‘I would have you listen to your heart,’ he said. The lilt in his voice was like that of a travelling storyteller. ‘I would have you listen to your heart and see if it doesn’t bid you to love me, and come to me. And see then whether I would be your master – or whether we would live as two birds in an apple tree.’

  She laughed aloud like a child, throwing her head back in genuine amusement. He grinned back at her, watching the light play on her bare throat and pale skin.

  ‘Hedge sparrows in a gorse bush more like,’ she said. Her smile to him was suddenly warm. ‘I’d die of cold in your hovel and then you’d see sense and wed a girl who could bring you a dowry big enough to rebuild your tower.’

  He shook his head, suddenly serious. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I shall love only this one time. I shall love only you, in all my life. I love you; and if I can’t have you then no other woman will do for me. No other bride, no other love. No-one, from this day onward.’

  She was silenced by that pledge, by the seriousness of his tone. ‘David?’ she said, uncertainly.

  ‘D’you know what I would like?’ he asked.

  She stepped a little closer to hear his low voice.

  ‘D’you know what I would like above anything else?’

  She shook her head, her eyes on his mouth. Their faces were very close.

  ‘I should like to wear your glove on my lance tomorrow at the jousting so that they know, so that they all know, that whatever the hopes of your mother, whatever the usual way of doing things, that you are promised to me and I to you. They can rage then, or they can yield. I should like to carry your favour.’ He paused and gave her a little smile. ‘It is a fair exchange, Ygraine. You carry my heart.’

  ‘I don’t carry it where everyone can see it!’ she retorted. ‘I would be shamed before the whole castle, David. You’re a dreamer. You’ve been too long in the wilds of the north. You’ve forgotten what real life is like.’

  He nodded. ‘But what if we made a new real life? What if we decided on different rules, on marriage for love, on children raised in our home, not sent away for training as you were, as I was?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘There’s no other life for me,’ she said sadly. ‘You can have your dreams, my David. But I have to marry as my mother bids me. I never asked for your heart. I never smiled on you more than courtesy commanded.’

  He put his hand forward and took her chin. He turned her face up so that she met his eyes. Her eyes were a deep blue, almost violet.

  ‘Liar,’ he said tenderly.

  The deep crimson blush came up from her neck up to her forehead and died away again, leaving her pale. He saw that her mouth was trembling as if she were about to cry, and he remembered that she was still very young, and that when she had first smiled on him he had been a friend, her only friend in the huge formal castle. And she had been a little girl.

  ‘We were both just children then,’ he said quickly. ‘You did nothing wrong.’

  ‘I was so lonely,’ she said. Her voice was very quiet, he could scarcely hear her.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You were such a little girl to be sent away to learn your manners. I never knew how they could bear to part with you.’

  She flashed a look up at him, he saw her dark eyelashes were wet. ‘And you were the scruffiest squire any lord was ever cursed with,’ Ygraine said mischievously. ‘All legs and darned hose!’

  He nodded. ‘You were the only one in the castle more scared than me,’ he said. ‘I used to shrink like a mouse when my lord looked at me.’

  ‘And now?’ she asked. ‘Now you want to defy him, and defy his lordship my father, and all of them? You want me to love you in defiance of all of them? You’ve found a lot of courage from somewhere, little squire David.’

  He grinned. ‘I want us two mice to run away from this great trap. I want to steal you away to my tumble-down castle and show you the great northern skies which stretch forever. I want to take you to the seas where the waves come rolling in higher than a knight on horseback. I want to take you up to the tops of the hills where only the purple heather grows and only the golden eagles are higher. And I want to love you, Ygraine. I want to love you as if there were no such thing as marriage contracts and dowries and laws between a man and a maid. I want to fold you into my heart.’

  He broke off. She had been listening to him with her eyes on the stone floor beneath his boots. The silk trailing from her hat trembled slightly. She shook her head.

  ‘No?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said very softly.

  ‘May I wear your glove inside my breastplate tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘No-one will know, Ygraine. And I am …’ He hesitated, then he told her the truth. ‘I am afraid.’

  She moved towards him at that, a sudden quick movement as if she would have reached for him, and held him, and loved him at last. But there was a rattle from the doorway of the great hall behind them, and she checked herself like a young horse wrenched to one side by a hard rein.

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘Let me pass, David.’ She stepped past him and went towards the noise and the smoke and the brightness of the great hall where men feasted and drank because tomorrow was the tournament and some of them would be in danger, and many of them would be hurt.

  David was unlucky in his draw, he was matched against Sir Mortimor, a great weighty man who had once killed an opponent. David bowed to the lord and then rode past the box where the ladies were sitting. With his helmet under his arm and his brown hair all rumpled he looked very much like the young page who had befriended Ygraine when she had first come to the castle. He was wearing a white surcoat over his armour, Ygraine saw the tiny darn that she had sewn for him at the bottom. Their eyes met and he smiled at her as if he had not a care in the world. She smiled back, a smile of common politeness, from one acquaintance to another. That brief look had told her at once that he was afraid.

  If she had heard of a knight who was afraid before jousting she would have called him a coward and despised him. It was not part of the knightly code to know fear. If she had heard of a woman who lingered in a darkened hallway and listened to a young man tell her he loved her she would have called her shameless, and wondered how she dared. Ygraine shook her head. Nothing was as simple as she had been taught.

  The sun was very bright on the jousting ground, it flashed on the polished swords of the knights and glared into Ygraine’s narrowed eyes. The ladies’ box was shielded by a red and white striped awning, underneath it was as hot as a tent. Ygraine’s gown was tight, her high conical headdress made her neck stiff. She watched David’s horse trot away to the far end of the list. It looked a very long way to ride in the hot sunlight, in full armour. His page gave him his lance and David hefted it easily, testing the balance. There was no glove tied to the head of his lance. There was no glove hidden, tucked inside his breastplate over his heart. In the ladies’ box, sitting still, as she had been trained, with her stiff
swanlike neck and her aching blank face, Ygraine gave a tiny shrug. She was not allowed to do anything that would damage her chances of marriage. David should have known better than to ask.

  Sir Mortimor had a great bay warhorse, which had seen half a dozen battles and a thousand jousting tournaments. His armour was well polished and dented in half a dozen places. He was an old man, more than forty, but hale and red-cheeked as a winter apple. When his squires heaved him up on his horse he guffawed like a master out for a day’s wolf-hunting. His surcoat was white with the bright red cross of an old crusader. David, at the other end of the field, put on his helmet. He did not look again towards Ygraine.

  ‘I don’t like young St Pierre’s chances against Sir Mortimor,’ Lady Delby said languidly. The awning over their heads flapped as a sudden cool breeze blew in. It chilled Ygraine.

  ‘Sir Mortimor won’t hurt him,’ Liza Fielden said comfortably. ‘Why, St Pierre is little more than a boy. Knighted only two years, isn’t he? Sir Mortimor will just knock him off his horse for the sport.’

  ‘It’s a bad matching,’ Lady Sara said. ‘I don’t like to see a young man knocked out. He’s a pleasant youth, St Pierre. I’ve begged my lord to take him into our company often enough.’

  ‘He’s an independent young puppy,’ Lady Delby said abruptly. ‘Disobeying his father’s dying wish and refusing to marry, hiding himself in some cold ruin in the Marches for half the year.’ She paused and slid a spiteful sideways glance at Ygraine. ‘A handsome youth, don’t you think, Ygraine?’

  Ygraine flushed scarlet but she kept her voice steady. ‘I like him well,’ she said. ‘When I was sent to this castle I was only seven years old, and friendless. He found me when I was lost one day in the woods on the west side. He put me up on his horse and led it home. I was glad of his kindness that day, and others.’