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  The Bridge At Arta

  First published in 1981

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1981-2013

  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 (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2013 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755130510 9780755130511 Print

  0755133153 9780755133154 Kindle

  0755133463 9780755133468 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.

  In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.

  J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

  THE BRIDGE AT ARTA

  Lady Cameron had recognised Charles Hornett at once.

  It was in the departure lounge of Number Two Terminal at Heathrow. She had shown her passport, briefly resigned her handbag for rummaging, and walked through the contraption that rings a bell or flashes a light should one happen to be secreting any substantial metallic object about one’s person. There was something slightly ignominious about this last manoeuvre. Perhaps it suggested to cultivated persons (and on this trip, incidentally, they would all be that) the symbolic driving beneath a yoke which in the ancient world had transformed a free man into a slave. Lady Cameron had once, in a sense, been a slave, and she hadn’t liked it at all.

  Yes, there was Charles – instantly known, although unglimpsed for fifty years. He was among a group of people not themselves labelled (as happens on packaged tours within the simpler reaches of society) but with the distinctive yellow and red tags supplied by Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin dutifully attached to their hand-baggage. So here was another instantaneous discovery. She and Charles were together going to do ‘Sites and Flowers of Thessaly and Epirus’ under the guidance of Professor and Mrs Boss-Baker.

  Lady Cameron had never gone out of her way to avoid a meeting with Charles, and she had from time to time envisaged – with amusement rather than discomposure – various circumstances under which a casual encounter might take place. It hadn’t, indeed, been like that at the beginning; for a long period after their divorce she would have regarded anything of the sort as quite horrible. But after fifty years! It was almost something that ought to take place when each had survived their disaster so long. It would not be a touching occasion, or sentimental in any way. Essentially it would be curious. They would both comport themselves properly, and that would be that.

  Lady Cameron saw a number of familiar faces in the little group.

  There was a pronounced element of reunion in the occasion for many of them. Like Lady Cameron herself, they had ‘been with’ the Boss-Bakers before. Indeed, if you hadn’t ‘been with’ the Boss-Bakers before, you were apt to feel, at least at the start, a bit of an outsider in the party. So what about Charles? He was already talking fluently to two elderly women a little wedged into a corner of the lounge. But as a conversationalist he had always been quick off the mark, and it was quite possible that he was a new boy in the Pipkin and Pipkin fold.

  Mrs Boss-Baker bore down on Lady Cameron with enthusiastic acclaim. This wasn’t because Lady Cameron, being a baronet’s widow, was likely to be the person of most formal consequence in the group. Mrs Boss-Baker was always enthusiastic, although it didn’t prevent her from also being wary and alert. She had a genius for smoothing things over almost before they were ruffled. If you had been promised that your ‘facilities’ would include a proper bath and you found yourself fobbed off with a shower, Mrs Boss-Baker would know in advance precisely how cross you were likely to be, and proceed to action in the light of this knowledge. And nobody could call her shy. Professor Boss-Baker was shy. He was invariably voted, indeed, wholly delightful; he was a marvellous lecturer; and although he claimed competence only over the flowers he was a classical man by training and knew quite as much about the sites as did the young Greek archaeologists commonly turned on to expatiate about them. Only Professor Boss-Baker did have an odd propensity for simply slipping away. At one moment he would be talking charmingly and instructively to the ladies of his party on this wild flower and that, and the next moment he would have disappeared, mysteriously and unaccountably, into a landscape that ought not to have afforded cover for a mouse. His wife, however, was always to hand.

  Mrs Boss-Baker recalled former trips, and Lady Cameron made suitable replies. It gave her time to think about Charles, and also to assess as a whole the party as so far constituted. It was an elderly crowd; indeed it was possible to suppose that she and Charles, both in their mid-seventies, were going to consort with several people a good deal older than themselves. Some of them, it occurred to her, might go in for remembering insignificant so
cial events remote in time. But the small history of Charles Hornett and herself had been very insignificant indeed, and it was only her second marriage that had made her known beyond the bounds of a single parish. So although she had met some of these elderly people on previous trips it was unlikely that any of them would have a story to tell the others about Charles and herself. Which was just as well – trivial although the whole thing was. A divorced couple finding themselves fortuitously on the same tour would come under a good deal of covert scrutiny were their relationship – or former relationship – discovered and bruited abroad.

  There was, of course, Mrs Boss-Baker. It was quite clear that she never set out on one of these expeditions without doing vigorous homework on the pedigree of her flock. This enabled her never to put a foot wrong. She and her husband, she would cheerfully confide to you, had to hold down the job year after year if their two sons were to continue at their public school. It was only a commendable love of Greece on the part of a small section of the English prosperous classes that stood between these youths and the horrors of comprehensive education. So Mrs Boss-Baker, although she might well know the truth, would be discretion itself.

  ‘Charles, this is after more years than one cares to remember . . .’ Lady Cameron had decided to begin – and for the moment pretty well to end – with that. Later on, she and Charles would work it out that there had formerly been some slight acquaintanceship between them. It would be deception – but deception of a civilised sort, designed to obviate any occasion of embarrassment to other people. And perhaps she had better not turn to Charles at once. For one thing, it didn’t look as if he had yet noticed her; for another, the Peppers were now in evidence, and had. The Peppers frequented the enterprises of Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin with an assiduity suggesting both uncommon physical vitality and enormous wealth. Yet they were a weedy couple, and it was demonstrably not to the ‘higher’ clergy that the Reverend Mr Pepper belonged. So there was something enigmatical about the Peppers, although a modicum of light was perhaps cast on it by Mrs Boss-Baker’s occasional discreet reference to Mrs Pepper as coming of ‘people very well known in the City’. Lady Cameron conversed for a few minutes with the Peppers. Mr Pepper, as usual on these occasions, retained his somewhat shabby clerical attire. But this effect he had a little lightened – as again was his custom – by superimposing upon it a new and therefore immaculate panama hat. Such objects, Lady Cameron vaguely believed, nowadays cost about as much as an air ticket to Athens.

  And now for Charles, Lady Cameron resolved. He was still talking to the two women in a corner. But no: that was incorrect. It was the same corner, but a different brace of women. And as Lady Cameron approached they moved away. It had been a shade odd, she thought. Could they conceivably have been aware of an awkward moment as in prospect? Or was it simply that Charles still . .? But there was no time for speculation, and Lady Cameron’s prepared words were on her lips. They died there. Charles, planted squarely in front of her, was looking at her absolutely blankly. For a moment she supposed that this was what used to be called the cut direct; that Charles was simply going to refuse to know her. Then the truth came to her. He hadn’t recognised her. He was totally failing to recognise her now. It was rather a bewildering situation. Curiously, too, it was an intensely humiliating one.

  Mrs Boss-Baker was at their side. The admirable woman had sensed some contretemps from afar and on the instant, and now she was performing an introduction.

  ‘Lady Cameron,’ she said, ‘may I introduce Mr Hornett? Mr Hornett has not been with us before, but has travelled extensively in the Far East. Mr Hornett, this is Lady Cameron, who has been President of the Alpine Flower Society.’ Having thus provided two little spring-boards towards acquaintanceship, Mrs Boss-Baker departed on some further diplomatic mission. She would keep it up untiringly until their flight was called and they had all been settled in their seats.

  ‘How do you do?’ Charles said with the perfunctory air (which Lady Cameron well remembered) of one getting through a useless preliminary. ‘I’m afraid I know nothing about alpine flowers. But I can tell you something I remember about my tactics when I decided I had as much information as I needed about the plans I had been working on when I was in Persia.’

  ‘In Persia?’ It was in a tone of well-bred interest that Lady Cameron contrived to respond to this prolix remark. Inwardly, she was overwhelmed. Charles was just as he had been. And how could it be otherwise? Leopards don’t change their spots, nor bores their blotches. Her former husband’s egotism, so mysteriously masked during their brief courtship, had calamitously revealed itself in the earliest days of their marriage. And now (if the thing were possible) he was even more of a monomaniac than he had proved to be fifty years ago.

  ‘Of course I hadn’t believed a word they told me,’ Charles was saying. ‘I’m not a fool, and it was as simple as that. I didn’t believe a word of it.’ Charles’s tone had now become aggressive, resentful, aggrieved – although what he was embarking upon was plainly an anecdote designed to show how he had triumphed over enemies. ‘I rather fancy I always know just where I stand when I find that it’s with cattle of that sort that I have to deal.’

  Charles continued in this vein without any sign of stopping. It was all hideously of the past, and yet present here and now. She had been buried under this, stifled by it, crushed by it as by a cartload of stone, when she had been no more than a young bride. But now there was a bizarre super-addition to the burden. He still hadn’t a clue about her. He still believed her to be a stranger – an empty pot, a blank sheet or tabula rasa, for the reception, for the remorseless inscribing or incising, of all this compulsive self-absorption.

  Lily Cameron had been a beauty. She liked to believe that people still spoke of her as a handsome woman. Was she in brutal truth an unrecognisable ruin? Charles wasn’t. Age had not withered him nor custom staled his infinite monotony. And again she had that dreadful sense of humiliation. Feebly, she told herself that his eyesight might have become defective – and his hearing, surely, as well. But that was a wholly unnecessary conjecture. As a young man his self-regard had been a literal thing. Even on their bridal night he probably hadn’t really seen her. So why should he be seeing her now?

  Nor, presumably, had he ever thought of her after they had parted, or acquainted himself with her subsequent fortune in any regard. Her second married name would mean nothing to him. Hence this strange situation. There seemed no reason why it should not continue through the fortnight that lay ahead. That, certainly, would be the most comfortable thing: that when they parted here at Heathrow he should be in the same state of ignorance as held him now. But would playing it that way be quite – well, spirited? Ought there not to be, at some time during their trip, a dénouement to this small absurd episode? Lady Cameron, who owned a sense of style, was not at all sure that it oughtn’t to be so.

  The flight to Athens was called, and the Pipkin and Pipkin party – individually scurrying or at leisure according to their degree of experience as pilgrims – made their way down the long sloping corridor leading to their plane. Lady Cameron, it need scarcely be related, secured herself a seat comfortably remote from Charles Hornett.

  ‘Sites and Flowers’ didn’t, as it happened, begin too well. Athens duly appeared below them, and the Acropolis was glimpsed. Both disappeared; a little later both turned up again; and a little later still they were plainly over nowhere in particular. Then the captain’s voice announced with careful indifference that there was trouble at Alexandria, and that Athens was in a bit of a fuss as a result. For the time being, in fact, Athens would have nothing to do with them. So they were now on their way to Salonika, which it was to be hoped would prove more hospitable, as their endurance was running out. This last was an ambiguous expression, since it might refer either to human patience or to aviation fuel. Mr Pepper, who had a map, announced that Salonika appeared to be about two hundred miles away.

  In circumstances such as these the English are not, i
ndeed, tight-lipped, since anything of the kind may indicate nervous strain. Rather they are low-keyed. The Pipkin and Pipkin party, although their ears were alert to catch the first spluttering of an engine which would draw upon them an Icarian fate in the Aegean now so unexpectedly expansed beneath them, conversed quietly from time to time on indifferent topics. Or they all did this except Charles Hornett – who conversed, or rather monologised, un-intermittently and in a penetrating voice to the two unfortunate ladies of his first acquaintance. His subject, being that of a battle fought with a recalcitrant Inspector of Taxes in the previous year, could have been only of a somewhat confined interest to his hearers, but this didn’t prevent Charles from according it a saga-like breadth of treatment. Mrs Boss-Baker (who had just been constrained to announce to her charges that tea and biscuits had run out on the plane, but that drinking water was still in moderate supply) must already have been aware that in Mr Hornett (widely travelled in the Far East though he might be) she had a first-class problem on her hands.

  Salonika made no bones about receiving them, and after half an hour even permitted them to disembark – although it then immediately incarcerated them in an enormous glass box. The acoustics of this were notable as combining great resonance with the qualities of an echo-chamber of the kind favoured by the BBC when in quest of eerie effects. It was just right for Charles, who lived up to its opportunities for something under three hours. The party was then embarked again, flown back to Athens, given a meal in a restaurant distinguishably over-taxed and appalled by their arrival, and then driven for three hours in a coach through magnificent scenery which was unfortunately invisible. Finally, at two o’clock in the morning, they tumbled into bed in a hotel which the less bemused or better informed understood to be in the neighbourhood of Delphi. For a few quite appreciable periods during this Odyssey Charles was out of action. He owned the enviable faculty of being able to fall asleep at will, and to wake up fifteen minutes later, restored and alert for new exertions. During this nocturnal journey, too, he made the happy discovery that the coach in which the succeeding twelve days were to be largely spent was half as big again as the Pipkin and Pipkin crowd required. This meant that he could move round the vacant seats in turn – ‘chatting’ (as he would have outrageously expressed it) to a succession of small captive audiences.