Bread and Chocolate. Philippa Gregory
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I’m here…’ She swayed towards him, staggering slightly from the rocking of the ship, her clumsiness exaggerated by the three Sexy Rexys she had drunk. ‘Now I’m here – how about a bit of a giggle? Or a bit of a nibble, as you offered? You naughty man! You naughty naughty man!’
She came towards him, as unstoppable as an oil tanker. He shrank back, the narrow cabin bed offering no refuge. Still she came on. He thought wildly of the several hours that it took for a ship to stop at sea, as she surged forwards and fastened her bright wide mouth on his and thrust a cold hand down into the tangle of his clenched pyjamas.
She pulled him out like a bookmark. ‘Whassamatter?’ she asked. ‘You want a little warming up?’
She kissed him again, more insistently, her gin-sweet tongue pressing against his closed lips. ‘Come on,’ she urged him. ‘Let’s have a little fun. Let’s have a laff.’ She reared back and gazed at him unblinkingly. ‘If you’re worried about George, he’s out for the count. Nobody knows I’m here.’ She had quite forgotten her bosom pals of the corridor; but he could imagine them, only too vividly, listening to all of this at the door of his cabin, daring each other to bend and peep through the keyhole.
He tried to rise to his feet but his pyjama trousers, one leg on, one leg off, entangled him and he fell back on his single bunk. ‘I must ask you to leave,’ he said and knew himself to be pompous and powerless.
‘Oh, give us a kiss.’ Once again she insistently fumbled down the front of his trousers. ‘Come on. Warm you up! Cheer you up. Show a girl a good time! Come on!’
He found the strength in his irritation to push her away, and at last got his second foot down the second trouser leg. He pulled the trousers up, tied the cord, and confronted her with more authority. ‘You must go,’ he said. ‘You should never have come in. I did not invite you. Your presence here is a mistake.’
‘Whassamatter? You some kind of pansy?’ she asked, lurching back from him and bumping against the door. He could not now throw the door open, she was clinging to the door knob for support. ‘You some kind of faggot? You some kind of queer? You some kind of Oedipussy? Is that why you’re so keen on him?’
‘Get out,’ he said coldly. ‘Get out and I don’t want to see you again.’
Roughly he pushed her aside so that he could pull open the door. As soon as it opened her two companions tumbled in as if they were enacting some ghastly farce. He stood, glacial and irritated, as they picked themselves up and got themselves out of his cabin. Only when they were all gone, like reprimanded fourth formers, did he sink to his little bunk bed and put his head in his hands and shake from the horror of it, and from the shame of her questing hand, and from the cruelty of her accusations.
They were at Paxi the next day, an unspoiled Greek island, some few miles from the mainland. There could be nothing here to attract her: a tiny harbour, a boat trip to the Blue Caves, a few quayside bars. Nothing more. He could assume she would stay with the cruise ship, drinking cocktails and looking at the enchanting view of pale rocks and rustling olive groves and complaining of boredom.
‘Paxi is principally interesting for the legend that this is where the River Styx flows,’ he said as dryly as he could. She was in the back row with George in attendance. She was silent for once. He imagined that a blinding hangover from three Sexy Rexys was suppressing her usual morning vitality.
‘The River Styx flows from this mortal world into the underworld, as you know. The only way to the underworld is to be ferried across it by the boatman Charon. It is, as you can imagine, a one-way journey.’ He waited for the usual gentle murmur of laughter.
None came. He had lost his audience for this cruise. They were so accustomed to her interpolations of crude jokes that they had lost the taste for mild academic wit. And he had lost his sense of timing. He was no longer confident before them. He was continually waiting for some noisy demand from her table for a joke or for something to cheer them all up. He could hardly hold the floor when he was certain that in a moment, she would be bellowing: ‘After all, what I say is: you’re a long time dead!’
‘Our ship is too big to enter the narrow harbour of Paxi,’ he said when he had left a moment for them to laugh, and they had not laughed. ‘So we will take one of the ship’s launches to pay a brief trip. We will go down the winding and narrow channel to the harbour, and then we will take a short trip to the Blue Caves, returning in time for lunch on board. You may bring cameras and video apparatus, of course. And if I may ask, when we enter the narrow gorge, let us do it in silence. It does have a certain air of mystery, there is a rather special sense of place. Let us be as quiet as we can to enjoy that.’
He had his eye on her. She looked pale under the yellow colour of the fake tan which she applied religiously every morning. ‘For those of you who find the morning sun a little bright there is no need to come,’ he continued. ‘There are better and more interesting sights to be seen later on this trip. This is really nothing more than a little diversion, of interest only to those of you who know the legend of the River Styx and are curious to look at the jaws of death itself – from the comfort of an Aegean Experience launch rather than Charon’s boat!’
Again there was no laugh, but she lifted her heavy head and looked at him, across the room. ‘It’s always dead things with you, isn’t it?’ she demanded, and he felt the attention of the room shift to her. ‘Old things, and dead things. What I say is: it’s all a long time ago!’
He forced himself to smile at her. ‘It’s been my interest, no, my passion, for all my life,’ he said. ‘And I know of nothing more rewarding than the study of the classics.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said as if that confirmed her worst opinion. She winked at her friends. ‘I bet you don’t.’
‘We can go at once,’ he said, speaking to his class over the murmur of their comments on this exchange. ‘Anyone interested in seeing Paxi and the legendary mouth of River Styx on Deck B at once please.’
He had been certain that she would not come, but she was there in a bright pink top which showed the swell of her midriff and seam-stretchingly-tight white Capri pants. She wore her heated rollers in her hair as was her habit before noon, but today she had tied a bright pink turban on top by way of camouflage. He watched the sailor help her into the neat little launch and saw the way she held the man’s gaze and flashed a smile at him as if the man were serving her from desire and not because he was paid to do it.
He said nothing to her, nothing to any of them, as he dropped into the boat himself. He felt as if he was far away from his class, far away from the subject that he loved. He felt as if he would never speak inspiringly of it again.
But he had a job to do. Not a very academically respectable job, not a very well-paying job, but a job which allowed him to come to Greece twice a year, which was more than enough for him who so deeply loved the islands. And sometimes he was able to explain what the place meant to him, how the light that they saw even now on the pale limestone of Paxi was the same that Homer had seen and loved too.
‘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,