"You're too old now," she said. "You'll always be too old." And she turned and went below, leaving him with a shocked look on his face.
"Christ!" he breathed. "I should have left that bitch years ago. All the things I've done to keep her happy. ." His face had crumpled, a sad, tired face on the verge of tears. "To hell with her! You, too-to hell with you both!" And he went into the wheelhouse, standing there, staring at the chart, anything to drive out the loneliness that was in him.
He was a failure and he knew it, and I was sorry for him. "I'm going ashore again now," I said.
He nodded, not saying anything, not looking at me, a shut look on his face. God! I thought. Loneliness must be a terrible thing, the loneliness of a marriage gone wrong. And I had contributed to it. Without thinking I had thrust them over the edge of neutrality into open hostility. I felt guilty. But there was nothing I could do about it. If it hadn't been me, it would have been somebody else. Probably had been. Probably she'd thrown herself at other men,
I got back into the dinghy then and rowed towards the Levkas shore, leaving Coromandel drifting, with him standing there alone in the wheelhouse, not caring any longer. There was only Vassilios in the gut now. The others had gone up to the cave. He helped me ashore, and when I reached the platform I found them clustered around the tent, the old man's notebooks lying on the ground and Holroyd standing with the stone lamp in his hand. "Do you know what this is?" he asked me and there was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice.
"Yes," I said.
"Where did he get it?" He was looking at me intently, holding the thing in his two hands carefully as though it were some fragile piece of glass. "Brought it with him, I suppose-like those skull fragments."
"I don't think so."
"No?" He sounded doubtful. "I've seen stone lamps like these in the museum at Les Eyzies and at the Grotte de la Mouthe." He turned it in his hands, looking down at it with extraordinary intensity, like a connoisseur examining some precious antique. "Are you sure he didn't bring it with him?"
"Why are you so interested?" I asked.
He stared at it a moment longer, and then he put it down on the ground, carefully, and with obvious reluctance. "Do you know what it was used for?" he asked.
"To light their cave-shelters, I imagine."
He nodded. "But in the Vezere-at de la Mouthe and in some of the other caves-their cave artists used these lamps to light their work. That's how they painted in the dark recesses of their cave temples." He had turned and was staring towards the shadowed hollow of the overhang. "We'll go up there, shall we, and have another look?"
"There's nothing there," I said. "Just the cave blocked by a rock fall."
He was looking at me, trying to read a motive behind my
words. "Winters tells me Dr. Van der Voort was working night and day to clear it. Why?"
I shrugged, not wishing to excite his interest further. There was the sound of an outboard in the channel, a small boat headed for the gut. I could see Sonia in the bows so it must be Pappadimas. "I'll be up at the cave," Holroyd said, and he started up the slope, his white shirt flapping round his legs.
"It don't make sense to me," Zavelas said, "leaving his camera and his notes." He bent down and picked up one of the notebooks. "Know what language this is?" he asked, handing it to me. I opened it to see the familiar spidery writing, but no meaning to the words. "It sure ain't English."
"No," I said, sensing his uneasiness. As an ex-policeman he was intrigued by the mystery of my father's disappearance, but overlying that were his political responsibilities and the notebooks worried him. They worried me, too, for I knew they weren't written in Afrikaans.
He glanced at his watch and then at the channel. The white of a bow wave showed beyond the northern tip of Meganisi. "Kotiadis?" I asked.
He nodded. "I think so." He sounded relieved, anxious to hand the problem over to higher authority.
Sonia's reaction to the news, which she had heard from Vassilios, was one of absolute disbelief that my father's disappearance was deliberate. "Something's happened-an accident. He would never have left this place till he had got through that rock fall. You know that, Paul. You said last night that he was obsessed by the need to break through it. How could you possibly think he would abandon it?" She was breathless from her hurried climb, her voice coming in quick gasps. "Have you searched the rocks?" And she added, "I sent Pappadimas to search the channel, just in case."
I did my best to calm her. He'd disappeared once before. Why not again? With Holroyd in the vicinity I thought anything was possible. As for an accidental fall, he was as surefooted as a goat. But she didn't believe me. "You say Professor
Holroyd was already here when you arrived. Have you thought what might have happened when he met Dr. Van der Voort? Suppose …" she stared at me, her meaning obvious.
"Then we'd have found his body floating in the water."
"Not if he was unconscious. And Professor Holroyd may have been here before-during the night." It was what she wanted to believe-anything, even murder, rather than face the alternative that the old man's mind had given way.
"Holroyd's surprise at finding him gone was genuine," I said.
But she wouldn't accept that. "Something terrible has happened. I feel it. I feel it here." And she banged her hand against her firm little breasts. And then quite suddenly she turned on me as though I were to blame. "You don't want to believe me, do you? You leave me money for him, and you think that's that. You don't want to be involved in any trouble." The way she said it reminded me of Florrie hitting out at her husband and it made me suddenly mean.
"You tell me I'm running out on him once more, and by Christ I'll give you a hiding you won't forget."
"You said it, I didn't," she flashed.
Zavelas put his big hand on my shoulder. "I think we go up to the cave now."
Holroyd was down at the far end, close by the rock fall, brushing at the wall with his handkerchief. He had a torch in his hand and he moved it back and forth the way my father had done. "Do you see?" he cried, turning to us as we crowded the entrance of the cave. He didn't bother to conceal his excitement. "Look!" And he began to trace it for us with his finger. It was the rhinoceros the old man had traced for me- the rump, the tail, the two hind legs. "Some sort of animal," he said. "Do you see it?"
"Yes, I see it," Sonia said and her voice seemed to mirror his own excitement.
"That lamp," Holroyd went on, addressing himself to me. "Now we know what it was used for and that he found it here."
But all I could think of was the rhinoceros. Some sort of animal. Holroyd didn't know what it was-couldn't know, for the forelegs, all the head, were hidden by the rock fall. Or was this another outline? Had the old man found more animals etched deeper in the cave? "Give me the torch," I said and grabbed it from him, peering along the wall. But there was the elephant, a few feet nearer the entrance and coated thick with a new layer of dust. I heard Sonia's voice behind me exclaim, "Lieve help! Surely that's an animal. I can see the dome of its head." She caught hold of my arm. "It's what I told you — he'd never have left this place of his own accord."
I brushed her hand away and turned the torch on the cave end, on to the fall itself. The rocks were pale-coloured, sharp-edged, but that didn't prove anything. A new fall would look no different from the old fall opened up. But he'd a crowbar here and his geological hammer. The beam of the torch revealed no sign of any tools, and when I directed it above our heads it showed the roof, badly cracked and faulted. "Epikin-dynos-sigha!" Zavelas exclaimed. "Is dangerous."
"It must have been that earth tremor," I said, and I swung the beam of the torch back to the lines marking the rump of the rhinoceros. "Two nights ago he showed me the whole outline. He had just cleared it-the head, the horn, the whole animal. Now look at it, and he was working here all day yesterday." I turned to Holroyd. "Better collect Cartwright and Hans and start digging. Can you get some of your own people down here?" I asked Zavelas.