“Ah!” He winked knowingly and went back to his stirring again. “Are you by the week?”
“Paid you mean? Yes.”
“You had some money from them?”
“For the trip from Athens.”
“Who paid? The Fischer man?”
“The Harper man. You don’t think they really are tourists?”
He made a face and rocked his head from side to side as if the question were too silly to need an answer.
“What are they, then?”
He shrugged. “Spies, Russia spies. Everyone know-Hamul and his wife, the fishermen down below, everyone. You want something to eat?”
“That smells good.”
“It is good. It is for us. Hamul’s wife cooks for him in their room before they come to wait table in the dining room. Then, I cook for the spies. Maybe, if I feel like it, I give them what is left after we eat, but the best is for us. Get two dishes, from the shelf there.”
It was a chicken and vegetable soup and was the first thing I had eaten with any pleasure for days. Of course, I knew that I would have trouble with the garlic later; but, with my stomach knotted up by nerves the way it was, I would have had trouble with anything. Geven did not eat much. He went on drinking brandy; but he smiled approvingly when I took a second helping of the soup.
“Always I like the British,” he said. “Even when you are backing the Greeks in Cyprus against us, I like the British. It is good you are here. A man does not like drinking alone. We can take a bottle upstairs with us every night.” He smiled wetly at the prospect.
I returned the smile. It was not the moment, I felt, to tell him that I hoped not to be sharing the servants’ quarters with him.
And then Fischer had to come in.
He looked at the brandy bottle disapprovingly, and then at me. “I will show you your room,” he said.
Geven held up an unsteadily protesting hand. “ Effendi, let him finish his dinner. I will show him where to sleep.”
It was Fischer’s opportunity. “Ah no, chef,” he said; “he thinks himself too good to sleep with you.” He nodded to me. “Come.”
Geven’s lower lip quivered so violently that I was sure he was about to burst into tears; but his hand also went to the bottle as if he were about to throw it at me. It was possible, I thought, that he might be going to do both things.
I whispered hurriedly: “Harper’s orders, nothing to do with me,” and got out out of the room as quickly as I could.
Fischer was already at the staircase in the passage.
“You will use these stairs,” he said; “not those in the front of the house.”
The room to which he now showed me was at the side of the house on the bedroom floor. He pointed to the door of it.
“There is the room,” he said, and then pointed to another door along the corridor; “and there is a bathroom. The car will be wanted in the morning at eleven.” With that he left, turning off the lights in the corridor as he went.
When he had gone, I turned the lights on again. The corridor had cream lincrusta dadoes with flowered wallpaper above. I had a look at the bathroom. It was a most peculiar shape and had obviously been installed, as an afterthought, in a disused storage closet. There was no window. The plumbing fixtures were German, circa 1905. Only the cold-water taps worked.
The bedroom wasn’t too bad. It had a pair of french windows, a brass bedstead, a chest of drawers, and a big wardrobe. There was also a deal table with an ancient hand-operated sewing machine on it. At the time when women guests in big houses always brought their lady’s maids with them to stay, the room had probably been given to one of the visiting maids.
There was a mattress on the bed, but no sheets or blankets. I knew it would be unwise to complain again. Before I got my bag from the garage, I went back up to the servants’ quarters and took the blankets from the cubicle which Fischer had allocated to me. Then I returned to the room. The car radio transmission wasn’t due until eleven; I had time to kill. I began by searching the room.
I always like looking inside other people’s drawers and cupboards. You can find strange things. I remember once, when I was at Coram’s, my aunt had pleurisy and the District Nurse said that I would have to be boarded out for a month. Some people with an old house off the Lewisham High Road took me in. The house had thick laurel bushes all round it and big chestnut trees that made it very dark. I hated going past the laurel bushes at night, because at that time I believed (in the way a boy does) that a madman with a German bayonet was always lying in wait ready to pounce on me from behind and murder me. But inside the house it was all right. There was a smell of Lifebuoy soap and furniture polish. The people had had a son who had been killed on the Somme, and they gave me his room. I found all sorts of things in the cupboard. There was a stamp collection, for instance. I had never collected stamps, but a lot of chaps at school did and I took one or two of the stamps and sold them. After all, he was dead, so he didn’t need them. The thing I liked most though was his collection of minerals. It was in a flat wooden case divided up into squares with a different piece of mineral in each one and labels saying what they were-graphite, galena, mica, quartz, iron pyrites, chalcocite, flourite, wolfram, and so on. There were exactly sixty-four squares and exactly sixty-four pieces of mineral, so at first I couldn’t see how to keep any of them for myself because the empty square would have shown that something was missing. I did take one or two of them to school to show the chemistry master and try to get in his good books; but he only got suspicious and asked me where I had found them. I had to tell him that an uncle had lent them to me before he would let me have them back. After that, I just kept them in the box and looked at them; until I went back to my aunt’s that is, when I took the iron pyrites because it looked as if it had gold in it. I left a small piece of coal in the square instead. I don’t think they ever noticed. I kept that piece of iron pyrites for years. “Fool’s gold” some people call it.
All I found in the room at Sardunya was an old Russian calendar made of cardboard in the shape of an icon. There was a dark-brown picture of Christ on it. I don’t read Russian, so I couldn’t make out the date. It wasn’t worth taking.
I had the windows wide open. It was so quiet up there that I could hear the diesels of a ship chugging upstream against the Black Sea current towards the boom across the narrows above Sariyer. Until about eight-thirty there was a faint murmur of voices from the terrace in front. Then they went in to dinner. Some time after nine, I became restless. After all, nobody had told me to stay in my room. I decided to go for a stroll.
Just to be on the safe side, in case anyone took it into his head to go through my things, I hid the radio on top of the wardrobe. Then I went down, out through the rear door, and skirted the front courtyard to the drive.
It was so dark there under the trees that I couldn’t really see where I was going, and after I had gone a hundred yards or so I turned back. Miss Lipp, Harper, Miller, and Fischer were coming out onto the terrace again when I reached the courtyard, and Hamul was lighting candles on the tables.
Along the side of the courtyard it was quite dark, and the weeds made it easy to move quietly over the gravel. At the entrance to the stable yard I stopped by the wall to see if I could hear anything they said.
I must have waited there for twenty minutes or more before I heard anything but an indistinct mumble. Then, one of the men laughed loudly-Miller it was-and I heard him saying seven words as if they were the climax of a joke.
“Let the dogs be fed and clothed!” he cackled, and then repeated it. “Let the dogs be fed and clothed!”
The others laughed with him, and then the mumbling began again. I went on in and up to my room.
I made the bed as comfortable as I could with the blankets, and then shaved to save myself the trouble of doing so in the morning.