But when we got back on board Florrie was much too concerned over the fact that Dr. Gilmore wanted to stay with the ship to have worried about Sonia. "He seems to think the whole voyage will be a downhill run like we had from Corfu. Bert's tried to explain to him what it's like when conditions are bad, but he doesn't seem to understand. Says he's too old to mind what happens to him now and he's enjoying himself. You must talk to him, Paul."
Dr. Gilmore was in the saloon, small, bird-like and very determined. "My dear fellow, you must understand that I've never had a real holiday in my life. And you're going into the Aegean, something I've always dreamed of." And he added, "You needn't worry that I'll be a nuisance."
"Florrie's afraid you'll be seasick and die on her."
"That's very thoughtful of her." His eyes glinted with laughter.
"Just practical," I said, and tried to make him realize what it was like to be really seasick, how violent the movement could be when beating. "You could be thrown out of your bunk, break your arm or your ribs." But it was no use. He had made up his mind. What is more he had offered to pay Bert over and above the charter.
"I told you, I think, that I had had a piece of luck-financially. It was the football pools. Quite a long time ago now. I used to do them for fun, a change from teaching youngsters how man evolved from the Pliocene into the Pleistocene. It's rather funny really-a Reader in Anthropology landing a shared win in a football pool. I handed it all over to one of my least successful students who had gone into merchant banking and now it's quite a respectable sum. My pension, you see, doesn't really run to Mediterranean cruises, but I always promised myself that when I did retire I'd use this money to do the travelling I had always wanted to do."
It was hopeless to argue with him, and when I broke it to him that my father had withdrawn into himself and didn't want to see anybody, he accepted it without any sign of surprise. "Well, that settles it," he said finally. "You'll have to take me with you."
Florrie grumbled, of course. "This is a sailing ship, not a boarding house." But since we couldn't dump him ashore on Meganisi against his will, she had to accept the situation.
We sailed at first light the following morning, motoring round the north-west corner of the island and south through the Meganisi Channel to give Dr. Gilmore a sight of the dig behind Tiglia Island. The three small orange sleeping tents had blossomed on the beach beside the blue mess tent. But there was no sign of life in the camp and the cave itself was obscured by the rock pinnacle, only the outer edge of the platform visible. Gilmore, still in his dressing gown, stood propped against the wheelhouse door, looking at it through the big ex-German U-boat binoculars until we were out of the channel and had altered course for Atoko Island and the entrance to the Gulf of Patras. "I don't understand it," he said almost petulantly as he finally lowered the glasses. "It's not like Pieter to give up so easily."
"What else could he do?" I asked.
"He could fight."
We should have kno^vn. We should have known, both of us, that that was just what he was doing. But now that I was at sea again I thought this was the end of my involvement with his affairs. My mind was on other things and it never occurred to me that the voyage would be no more than an interlude.
PART THREE
It was Sonia who gave us the first indication that Holroyd had dug up something of real significance. This was in a letter to Dr. Gilmore, dated April 29, which we found waiting for us at the Port Captain's office at Pythagorion.
But that was later, after we had had nearly a month of the most perfect sailing, and by then I had almost forgotten about my father. The demands and routine of a boat at sea, particularly in enclosed waters like the Aegean, concentrate the mind to the exclusion of all but the immediate problems of navigation and seamanship. Add to this the world that daily opened before our gaze, a world of islands and little ports and coves where life had hardly changed since the days of Odysseus, and it is little wonder that I became so engrossed in it that for a time I was scarcely conscious even of my own predicament and was able to shut out of my mind the real object of the voyage.
Once through the Corinth Canal, we seemed to sail into
the past. Athens and the Acropolis, then east down the gulf to Sounion. Here, amongst the salt-white columns of Poseidon's temple high on its promontory, we had our first glimpse of the islands, seeing them as the old Greek sailors saw them, milestones on the voyage to the Turkish coast. We said our own prayers to the god of sea and earthquake, and then we were slanting out in their wake, a full meltemi blowing from the north-east, the boat heeled, the sea hard and white, and Kith-nos growing large over the bows. Tinos then and Mykonos, and Delos all to ourselves in the tiny cove of Fourni, with only just room to swing to our anchor, and Mount Cynthus, birthplace of Apollo, with its Sacred Way and the ruins of ancient cities falling to the sea, the fantastic beauty of the lionesses in moonlight. And then down through the 14-foot passage in half a gale to Naxos, the largest of the islands.
And apart from the ruins and the beauty of the villages, all newly whitewashed and spread across the high flanks of the islands like drifts of snow, and the long walks inland, there was always the sea. As the water got warmer, we were goggle fishing and Bert was diving. Even Dr. Gilmore was swimming every day, and in the evenings he talked, endlessly and fascinatingly, about man's origins, about the Greeks and the people whose ruins we were seeing daily. He was a mine of information and I envied those who had had him for a tutor, he made it all so interesting.
But after Naxos, it was time to head east to the Dodecanese. And now Samos and the object of the voyage began to loom. As a result, I was keyed-up, already a little tense, when on the afternoon of May 5, we motored into the old harbour of Pythagorion, built by a tyrant named Polycrates some 2,500 years ago. Beyond the town, hillsides climbed in hunched shoulders rising to precipitous heights, the whole island lush with spring growth, the fresh green of fruit trees contrasting with the darker green of the pines that clothed the upper slopes. And away to starboard, where the lower eastern end of the island met the Turkish shore, was the narrow gut of the Straits, a lighthouse on a rocky islet showing as a white pin-
point in the middle. I still did not knoAv how I was to explain a night rendezvous with a Turkish fishing boat to the Barretts. It went against the grain deliberately to mislead them, and Dr. Gilmore's presence aggravated the problem.
As we entered the kidney-shaped inner harbour the original limestone quays gleamed like polished ivory in the sun. We moored stern-on at the northern end to a bollard that was a stone column taken from Polycrates' old capital. Fishermen's nets, hung out to dry on the eastern harbour wall, made bright splashes of blue and purple and orange under the trees. With a feeling almost of reluctance I accompanied Bert to the Harbour Office to find the cable I expected waiting for me.
But instead of giving me time and date of rendezvous, it announced that "my friends" had been delayed and advised continuing the cruise south to Rhodes. Information and funds available Bank of Greece Rodos May 25.
My first reaction was one of relief. But it only postponed the moment when I would either have to think up a convincing lie or else take Bert into my confidence.
"Good news I hope," he said.
"It's from Borg," I told him. "Some Turkish friends of his. Wants us to meet them about the end of the month."