∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧
Forty
Mrs Pargeter had contemplated the possibility of death many times. It was a prospect which caused her anger rather than anguish. She had a great taste for life and wanted as large a helping of it as could be cajoled out of the Great Dinnerlady in the Sky.
The idea that her life was about to end was deeply unappealing. Though aware that her happiest days – those spent in the company of the late Mr Pargeter – were probably past, there were still a great many things she wanted to do, a great many experiences she wanted to cram in before that final shutter fell.
Though she had survived close calls in the past, this time there really did seem little she could do to ameliorate her situation. Larry Lambeth still showed no signs of movement and he was not near enough for her to test whether a jogging toe might rouse him.
She was also now disconcertingly aware of the stiff breeze that came directly off the sea and found a route through the broken windows of the hut. Nor was she reassured by the glimpsed sight, through the thin light of morning, of Spiro and Sergeant Karaskakis up-ending petrol cans over the scrub some hundred yards away on the seaward side. Once the match was dropped, it would be a matter of seconds before the flames reached the tinder-dry hut.
Annoyance still remained her dominant emotion. Death by fire was not her preferred mode of exit from the life she so fervently embraced. Joan of Arc had never figured as one of her heroines. Self-centred, silly adolescent girl, in Mrs Pargeter’s view. Nowadays it wouldn’t have been hearing voices; she’d have drawn attention to herself by anorexia nervosa.
These angry musings were interrupted by a sound from Conchita, and Mrs Pargeter realised that, through the restrictions of her gag, the poor girl was trying to scream. Dear oh dear, thought Mrs Pargeter, I’m being very selfish here. I have at least worked out a philosophy about death. I’ve thought it through, while this poor kid’s only in her twenties, she can’t feel there’s been enough in her life yet to justify a premature departure from it. I must reassure her.
“Don’t worry, Conchita, it’ll be all right,” she said meaninglessly.
Suddenly there was a low line of flame in front of the outlines of Spiro and Stephano, and within seconds all the view from the windows had turned angry orange. The match had been dropped.
The terrified sounds from behind Conchita’s gag redoubled in intensity. Time perhaps, Mrs Pargeter thought, for a tactical lie. If she could only calm the girl and keep her cheerful for a couple of minutes, it would all be over. The smoke in that enclosed place would probably asphyxiate them before they felt the real force of the flames.
“It’s all right, love,” she reassured, with no basis of truth whatsoever. “Larry had warned Yianni we were coming up here. He’s waiting nearby. He’ll save us.”
This did something to steady Conchita, though of course it didn’t comfort Mrs Pargeter much. Nor did the flames racing towards the hut, grotesquely parodying the warmth and brightness by which package tours to Corfu are sold.
Well, it’s been a good life, she concluded, with a little nod of thanks towards the late Mr Pargeter for making it so.
Then she had a thought.
Pagan, ridiculous, yes, but she wasn’t in a position to take too long in assessing the pros and cons of any course of action.
She’d tried prayer. All that had brought her had been release from Sergeant Karaskakis and his replacement by Spiro. Out of the frying pan, all too literally into the fire.
But then maybe her prayers had been misaddressed. When in Rome and all that… Got to abide by local customs, after all, haven’t you?
And it couldn’t do any harm.
“St Spiridon!” Mrs Pargeter loudly supplicated. “Please save our lives!”
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧
Forty-One
Now of course the wind could have been about to change at that moment, anyway. Winds do change all the time for no particular reason – it’s regarded as part and parcel of the job, if you happen to be born a wind – and they are particularly prone to variation near the sea shore.
But the speed with which those flames, at one moment about to swallow up the wooden hut, had in the next changed their minds and retreated, leaving only skeletal vestiges of smouldering brush in their wake, did seem more than coincidental.
Mrs Pargeter was not by nature superstitious, but thereafter she always felt a particular affection for the memory of St Spiridon and, in subsequent moments of extremity, was more than once heard to invoke his name.
The recession of the flames, which consumed lustily everything they found in their path to the point of the headland, coincided with the return to consciousness of Larry Lambeth. After a few minutes of reorientation, he released the two women from their bonds.
As they were easing their stiffened limbs, they heard approaching shouts and saw a crowd hurrying up from the village. Arming themselves with branches of brushwood, the men of Agios Nikitas attacked the fire’s last pockets of resistance.
And soon they heard drawing near the drone of the first fire-fighting aeroplane.
By romantic serendipity, it was Yianni who first entered the hut to check if anything was alight in there. And a romantic novelist might have observed, from the enthusiasm with which she threw herself into his arms, that the only flame therein was the one that burned in Conchita’s heart.
It was only when the last sparks of the real fire were being extinguished that the bodies were found.
Sergeant Karaskakis, fleeing from the flames, had stumbled over the cliff edge and broken his neck on the rocks below.
Spiro, by contrast, had stood his ground and the flames had consumed him so thoroughly that he could only be identified by a process of elimination.
St Spiridon had not only answered Mrs Pargeter’s prayer, but had also, with a godlike facility for killing two birds with one stone, contrived at the same time to fulfil the prophecy of the older Spiro Karaskakis.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧
Forty-Two
It was the last evening of the fortnight’s package. Last visits had been paid to favourite beaches. The minimarket had been raided for souvenirs – sponges, ceramic drink mats, ‘No Problem’ T-shirts, lighters with outlines of Corfu on them, pencils topped by white-skirted soldiers, and a good few ouzo bottles in the shape of classical Greek columns. A few people had even bought retsina, under the mistaken impression that it would taste the same when they got it home.
And now everyone had homed in on their favourite taverna for that last celebratory meal. Before the end of the evening a good few would have pushed the boat out by ordering what the menu inaccurately called lobster ‘because, after all, it’s our last night’, others would have made the unwise decision to give the old Greek brandy a bashing ‘because, after all, it’s our last night’, while yet more would have made rash promises to taverna-owners and waiters that they ‘really would be back next year’.
And the taverna-owners and waiters of Agios Nikitas would have nodded and smiled farewell with those assurances of undying friendship which they would accord impartially to every departing visitor of the summer, before they retired to Agralias to spend the winter moaning about the decline in the tourist trade.
Though she had been well looked after at the Hotel Nausica, it did not occur to Mrs Pargeter to spend her last evening anywhere other than Spiro’s taverna. Or rather Yianni’s taverna, as it now was.
The young man had come to the inheritance by an easier route than his predecessor, but already showed signs of a new maturity in handling its responsibilities. With the help of his aunt Theodosia, who was taking the first faltering steps back to normal life, he promised to be a good businessman.