The Bridge at Arta Read online

  On the following morning the party, to a man (or woman) heroically declaring itself refreshed and fit for anything, paid a visit to Hosios Loukas. Professor Boss-Baker, declaring himself wholly uninstructed on early Byzantine art, in fact knew at once which were the most approved mosaics, and was charmingly perceptive, if also a little whimsical, in front of them.

  ‘He means business, you know,’ Professor Boss-Baker said of the Christ of The Harrowing of Hell. ‘You can see he won’t let go of Adam easily. Eve is expected to look after herself. And as for David and Solomon – I’m told it’s David and Solomon there on the left – they’re quite clearly just you and me. So you can see how amazement and gratification are expected of us – and quite right, too, of course.’

  There was a murmur of appreciation among the Pipkins – evoked partly by this important artistic object itself and partly by the Professor’s lightness of touch in hinting the propriety of mild reverence before such strange old things. Mrs Pepper ventured to explain with agreeable diffidence why the sun and moon were simultaneously present at the Crucifixion, and her husband translated the inscriptions on several of the mosaics. It was in the middle of this that Charles’s voice was again heard, addressing an unwary individual who had strayed from the company.

  ‘And he had the damned cheek,’ Charles’s voice was heard by all to declare, ‘to propose raising an assessment under Schedule D.’

  Lady Cameron slipped out of the catholicon into the warm sun. Here in mid-April there was already the scent of lemon blossom in the air, and across the groves and orchards the eye travelled to the foothills of Helicon. ‘”Where Helicon breaks down in cliffs to the sea,”’ she murmured to herself. But she wasn’t feeling poetical. She was feeling ashamed. She knew – although she was now almost certain that none of her present companions were aware of her as having been Charles’s wife – that she was going to feel her heart sink every time she heard him speak. It would be her impulse always to edge away from him, as one used to edge away from a rashly-chosen school-friend when she proved liable to talk shaming nonsense.

  On the following day the party ‘did’ Delphi, but Lady Cameron cried off. She had been to Delphi before, and could recall being properly awed by the undeniable numinosity of the site. She had been told, however, that it was now much commercialized. (‘”Not here, O Apollo, are haunts fit for thee,”’ she pronounced, returning to Matthew Arnold’s poem.) And of this she made an excuse to herself for a get-away plan. She ordered sandwiches and summoned a taxi – for she was a capable woman – and proposed to spend the day in solitude on the plateau of Mount Parnassus. But quite this was not to be. Mrs Boss-Baker appeared as she was about to drive off – a Mrs Boss-Baker all conspiratorial fun.

  ‘Please, can I come too?’ Mrs Boss-Baker asked childishly. ‘Oh, I am wicked! Here’s only the second day, and I’m dying for a little time off.’

  Lady Cameron produced the necessary cordial acquiescence, although inwardly she was inclined to be annoyed. Just because she was seventy-four this interfering woman was judging her unfit to go off for a day’s ramble by herself. It was totally insufferable! But then Lady Cameron remembered those two boys at Rugby – paid for year by year at the cost of this sort of eternal vigilance on their parents’ part. If the Boss-Bakers lost a baronet’s doddering old widow over a precipice it was quite certain that Messrs Pipkin and Pipkin wouldn’t be too pleased. So Lady Cameron’s heart warmed towards Mrs Boss-Baker, and they got on excellently together throughout the day.

  There was a lake and there was a deserted village. (‘Goldsmith in Phocis,’ Lady Cameron said – to the bewilderment of Mrs Boss-Baker, who was not literary.) They walked through irises and tiny forget-me-nots and sheets of blue veronica; chats and pipits and buntings enlivened the immediate scene; falcons and vultures hovered; in the distance the Muses’ haunt lay under brilliant sunlit snow. It was a perfect day, and ought to have been totally absorbing. Yet for Lady Cameron it wasn’t quite that. Ought she to have stuck it out? She asked herself the question again and again as it returned to her from its hiding place half-a-century back. Had she hung on, could she have broken through the dreadful prison of self-absorption that Charles had constructed for himself? Its walls had thickened over the years, and were certainly impregnable now. Even at the time of her first horrified realisation of his malady – for it was certainly that – she had judged it to be already so. But she had been very young – and might she not have been wrong? And to have stood before an altar with a man, taking tremendous vows – and then to have divorced him merely because he was a bore! And that had been it. Not, of course, in law. Only in queer places in America could you at that time have parted with a husband for such a reason. She had detected poor Charles in sporadic low amours – and had hardly blamed him in the least. It would have been unfair to do so, since her own going to bed with him had proved mutually unrewarding. But it was something upon which she was entitled to seize, and she had seized upon it – unscrupulously, she now told herself. It had, naturally, all been very uncomfortable. In those days any sort of airing adultery in court had been very uncomfortable indeed.

  Thus did Lady Cameron, sharing her sandwiches with Mrs Boss-Baker on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, meditate a distant past. She knew that it wasn’t a very effective meditation, in the sense of being one that might lead to a changed course of conduct. She knew that she couldn’t have done other than she had done, and that if it could all happen again she would do it again. And she had stuck it out – for quite long enough to know. Why, for two whole years it was almost literally true that she had been reduced to silence – since from dawn to dusk there had scarcely been an opportunity of getting a word in edgewise! And how different it had been with her second husband. She and Donald had been endlessly interested each in the other. They had chattered together like happy children through a long married life.

  Mrs Boss-Baker did not intrude upon these periods of abstraction on the part of her companion. From time to time their conversation strayed from the birds and flowers to one or another member of their party – sometimes not without amusement, but predominantly on the proper note of cordial regard. Mrs Boss-Baker said nothing about Mr Hornett. Was this because he was fast becoming such a pain in the neck (Lady Cameron had a brother who would have used this phrase) that any reference to him had tacitly been voted taboo? Or was it because Mrs Boss-Baker had indeed done her homework only too well? Lady Cameron didn’t much mind. Only she was coming to feel a little sorry for Charles. Surely through the terrible bars he had forged for himself he sometimes peered out and was aware of the figure he cut? Yes – she told herself again – she might have done something about it once, but it was too late now. The weird fact of his continued failure to identify her surely spoke of a pathological condition of a formidable sort, not to be resolved by amateurs.

  The taxi reappeared, and in half an hour restored the two wanderers to their companions. Mrs Pepper, it seemed, had taken a photograph of the Castalian Spring, but was apprehensive that she had superimposed it upon one of the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaea. Another lady was triumphing in the discovery of an unfamiliar bee-orchid, pronounced by Professor Boss-Baker to be quite a surprise in this habitat. A third had stolen some bay leaves, and was inquiring whether it would be a further misdemeanour to smuggle them into England. Lady Cameron joined the group she judged likeliest to suggest a preliminary glass of ouzo before changing for dinner. Fortified by this, she ventured to speculate anew to herself on what would happen were she to confront Charles with the revelation that she was his former wife. She decided that it would be merely wounding and bewildering, and therefore a wicked and silly thing to do.

  It was the agreeable custom of Professor Boss-Baker to spend half an hour or so after dinner talking about the following day’s prospects to any members of his party who cared to gather around. He did this with the most casual air, but in fact was contriving to keep a cunning balance of interest between one sort of activity and another. Every
body was going to get a fair share of their sort of thing. The botanical ladies (who were in a majority) would be afforded ample scampering grounds for hunting down the rarer flora of the region. But the archaeologically minded, and those who (like the Peppers) were deeply versed in the Glory that was Greece, and again those more modish persons who were becoming well-seen in Byzantine art: all would be catered for in the most accommodating fashion. Professor Boss-Baker performed this task in a slightly throwaway manner which – as has been recorded – was judged very delightful in an overpoweringly learned man.

  He mounted such an occasion on the evening before their arrival at Arta. Arta, it seemed, was stuffed with history – mainly of the ecclesiastical order. There were little churches all over the place, acting as a kind of supporting chorus to one big one. The Panagia

  Parigoritissa – which somebody had told him meant the Virgin of Consolation – was a very rum thirteenth-century effort indeed: so rum that they mustn’t mistake it for a bank and try to cash their traveller’s cheques in it. Once inside the unlikely cube they would be in the presence of a naked architecture which was quite breathtakingly strange. There would be a guide who would have a great deal to say about it. In fact, what with cyclopean walls, and the palace of the Greek metropolitan, and mosques and synagogues thrown in, they would be hurried round for the whole day after their arrival if they cared to be. So it had occurred to him that it might be a good idea to drive straight to the bridge before going to their hotel.

  ‘Is it an important bridge?’ one of the botanical ladies asked. Bridges were not her thing, but she had been brought up to respect objects adequately starred in Baedeker or Michelin.

  ‘It has a certain historical interest,’ Professor Boss-Baker said mildly. ‘The river, you know, is the ancient Arachthos. Not long ago – or not long ago as one reckons time in these parts – it marked the frontier between Greece and Turkey. It’s a Turkish bridge, although that fact is probably ignored locally. But it was treated as neutral ground, and what happened when it required repair, I don’t know. It’s a handsome and picturesque structure – on nine semicircular arches, if I remember aright.’

  ‘But isn’t there a legend?’ Mrs Pepper asked. ‘I’m sure I’ve read somewhere about the legend of the bridge at Arta.’

  ‘There’s certainly a legend, and it’s even older than this particular bridge is. Like the trade winds, such things move with the sun from country to country, changing a little as they go.’

  ‘Like ballads,’ one of the botanical ladies said with a flash of erudition in an unexpected field.

  ‘Just so. And it’s in a Greek folk ballad – not, I believe, a particularly ancient one – that the legend hitches on to the bridge at Arta. But it’s a slightly macabre affair, I’m afraid.’ Professor Boss-Baker glanced round his auditory – which was, of course, predominantly female – in a hesitant way. But this was a merely teasing manoeuvre, since he had every intention of telling his story. ‘The bridge-builder got into trouble every time his work neared completion. At the final and critical moment, when the principal keystone was just about to be slipped into place, the whole affair fell down. It kept on happening until one night along came a raven and had a word with him. The raven was some sort of tutelary spirit, I imagine, and it told him just what to do. He must immure in the foundations – alive, needless to say – the first living creature that came in sight. This might have been a goat or a donkey, I suppose, but as things turned out it was the builder’s wife. So there was no help for it. Professional success and duty were paramount, and in she went.’

  ‘How extremely horrible!’ one of the botanical ladies said.

  ‘Well, yes.’ Professor Boss-Baker was delighted at having elicited this reaction. ‘And it wasn’t, if the ballad is to be believed, any sort of sharp and short occasion. There is some difficulty in lowering the unfortunate woman into position, and she makes a long and lugubrious speech while the job is going on. One gets the impression of a somewhat insistently talkative person. She enters, in fact, on a good deal of family history. Two of her sisters, it seems, were married to bridge-builders, and precisely this fate overtook them. It seems improbable, one must admit. But that sort of thing is constantly happening in ballads the world over, is it not? I believe it’s known as the technique of incremental repetition. However, the bridge got completed; it’s there to this day; and we’re all going to stand on it and meditate the tale. I don’t know whether it can be said to have a moral.’

  ‘I rather think it has,’ Mr Pepper said. He had perhaps observed that some of the ladies were really shocked by Professor Boss-Baker’s recital, and aimed at offering some droll comment upon it. ‘Prudent wives will keep clear of their husbands’ work. For my part, I deprecate the suggestion. Long may my own wife continue to find time and inclination to cast a critical eye over my sermons.’

  From Mr Pepper, this was quite a sally, and it was strongly approved of. Lady Cameron, however, was among those not much amused by the story – or rather by the slightly morbid notion of a kind of tourist attraction having been manufactured out of it. She would have been glad enough not herself to have to visit the bridge at Arta. But this, she saw, could not be, since the coach was going to take the whole party straight there at the end of their next day’s run. She glanced across at Charles, whom as usual on these after-dinner occasions she had contrived a little to distance. He had actually listened in silence to Professor Boss-Baker’s narrative. He even appeared to have been much struck by it.

  Perhaps because of the build-up it had received, the bridge at Arta proved rather a flop. Unlike Delphi, or Dodona, or even the charming island where Ali Pasha had lived so unspeakably scandalous a life (and which is still in the charge, most improperly, of half a dozen extremely personable young men), the bridge and its environs were by no means heavy with the spirit of place, whether numinous or otherwise. The Arachthos flowed in a rapid but well-conducted way beneath its arches; on its banks there were a few old men fishing and a few young couples making not particularly passionate love; at one end there were some broken-down farm buildings and a low pot-house of the most unpromising sort. But the parapet was of a height convenient for leaning upon and its stone was warm from the sun. People lit cigarettes, or took photographs, or talked about English gardens. The more elderly exchanged information about ailments or grandchildren. Nobody much thought about the bridge-builder’s wife. There was perhaps a slight impatience to board the coach again, be driven on to their hotel and discover whether in Arta bathrooms had baths or not.

  Lady Cameron did again think of the ballad. Professor Boss-Baker had told her that, although there was almost certainly no woman’s skeleton imprisoned beneath her feet, it was likely enough that some member of the brute creation had been unkindly done by at an appropriate stage in the bridge’s fashioning. She disliked the idea of such a ritual, and as a consequence walked the full length of the structure and got on innocent earth again. It was possible to follow the farther bank for some way downstream to a point from which the bridge would appear at least pleasingly picturesque. In this interest she strolled on, not much regarding the time, or reflecting that she had injudiciously sundered herself from her fellow-travellers. But this she suddenly found was not entirely so. Immediately in front of her the figure of a man had emerged abruptly from behind a tree – perhaps having withdrawn there for some trivial private purpose. And this last circumstance absurdly lent a small additional edge of unease to the disconcerting fact that the man was Charles.

  ‘Oh, Lady Cunningham!’ Charles said in his perfunctory way. He hadn’t bothered to acquire more than random approximations to the names of any members of the party. ‘I wonder whether I left my camera on my seat when I got out of the bus. And I happened to have an eye on the driver and I don’t think I saw him lock the doors as he ought to have done. I can tell you something about how I came by that camera in a way I’m rather proud of.’ Charles didn’t sound proud; he sounded, as he always did, immensely agg
rieved about something that he would communicate to you in due course. And that – Lady Cameron suddenly remembered – had really been it. It had been the constant note of discontent and self-commiseration accompanying Charles’s solipsistic maunderings that had put the final lid on things. And this had continued, like the drone on a bagpipe, through all the varied exigencies, whatever they had been, of the past fifty years of his life! It was a horrible thought: much more horrible, even, than the thought of a woman buried in a bridge.

  Lady Cameron tried to think of something to say. So far, she had been very successful in avoiding Charles, and this sudden encounter with him in near solitude almost frightened her. Tête-á-tête like this, it was surely impossible that he shouldn’t recognise her at last. She felt, too, as she had not felt before, that on her own part it was demeaning to continue concealing her identity as if she were ashamed of it. She even wondered how she had conceivably justified the deception to herself in the first place. Yet she knew that this was only a matter of a momentary failure of nerve. Why should she take any step that involved having more to do with Charles than the odd coincidence of their both being on this Pipkin and Pipkin affair made necessary?

  ‘I think we had better go back to the coach,’ Lady Cameron said.