“It recalls,” Alleyn said, “Tchékhov reading aloud to Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts players.”
This observation was received with loud applause from the Baroness. Sophy and Alleyn crowded up to Grant.
“You shall suffer for this,” Grant said between his teeth. “Both of you.”
“On the book, on the book, all on the book!” gaily chanted the Baroness. “Nobody to move. Gerrit, you must step a little back and Mr. Dorne, are you there, please?”
“Oh, God, yes, I’m here.”
“Good. Good. And so, all are ready? Freeze, please. I shoot.”
The camera clicked but the darkness was uninterrupted. The Baroness, who had uttered what was no doubt a strong expletive in her own language, now followed it up with a reproach to her husband. “What did I tell you, my darlink! They are useless these local bulps. No! Do not answer. Do not move. I have another in my pocket. Not to move anybody, please, or speak. I find it.”
Sophy giggled. Major Sweet immediately groped for her waist.
“Serve you bloody well right,” whispered Grant to Sophy. He had detected this manoeuvre. From somewhere not far away but beyond the Mithraeum there came the sound, distorted as all sounds were in that region, by echoes, as of a high-pitched voice.
There followed a seemingly interminable interval broken after a time by a distant thud as of a heavy door being shut. The Baroness fiddled and muttered. Kenneth detached himself from the group and took a flashlight shot of the god. He was urged back into position and at last the Baroness was ready.
“Please. Please. Attention. Freeze, please. Again, I shoot.”
This time the light flashed, they were all blinded and the Baroness gave out loud cries of satisfaction and insisted upon taking two more. Against mounting impatience the group was then re-formed with the Baroness replacing her husband and over-hanging Major Sweet like some primitive earthmother. The Baron had better luck with his flashlamp and all was accomplished.
“Although,” he said, “it would have been nicer to have included our cicerone, would it not?”
“Must say, he’s taking his time,” Major Sweet grumbled. “Damned odd sort of behaviour if you ask me.”
But Kenneth pointed out that Sebastian Mailer was probably keeping his aunt company in the atrium. “After all,” he said to Grant, “he handed over to you, didn’t he?”
Grant, under pressure from the Van der Veghels, now moved into the area of light and with every sign of extreme reluctance read the Mithraic passage from Simon to this most strangely assorted audience. He read rapidly and badly in an uninflected voice, but something of the character of his writing survived the treatment.
“—Nothing had changed. The dumpy god with Phrygian cap, icing-sugar ringlets, broken arms and phallus rose from his matrix of stony female breasts. A rather plebeian god one might have said, but in his presence fat little Simon’s ears heaved with the soundless roar of a sacrificial bull, his throat and the back of his nose were stung by blood that nineteen centuries ago had boiled over white-hot stone, and his eyes watered in the reek of burning entrails. He trembled and was immeasurably gratified.”
The reading continued in jerks to the end of the appropriate passage. Grant shut the book with a clap, passed it like a hot potato to the Baroness and hitched his shoulders against obligatory murmurs from his audience. These evaporated into an uneasy silence.
Sophy felt oppressed. For the first time claustrophobia threatened her. The roof seemed lower, the walls closer, the regions beyond them very much quieter as if the group had been deserted, imprisoned almost, so many fathoms deep in the ground. “For tuppence,” she thought, “I could do a bolt like Lady Braceley.”
Grant repeated his suggestion that the others might like to explore and that he himself would remain for ten minutes in the Mithraeum in case anyone preferred to rejoin him there before returning to the upper world. He reminded them that there were side openings and an end one, leading into surrounding passages, and the insula.
Kenneth Dorne said he would go up and take a look at his aunt. He seemed to be more relaxed and showed a tendency to laugh at nothing in particular. “Your reading was m-a-a-r-velous,” he said to Grant and smiled from ear to ear, “I adore your Simon.” He laughed immoderately and left by the main entrance. Major Sweet said he would take a look-see round and rejoin them above. “I have,” he threatened, “a bone to pick with Mailer. Extraordinary behavior.” He stared at Sophy. “Thinking of looking round at all?” he invited.
“I think I’ll stay put for a moment,” she said. She did not at all fancy roaming in a Mithraic gloaming with the Major.
Alleyn said he, too, would find his own way back and the Van der Veghels, who had been photographing each other against the Sacrificial altar, decided to join him, not, Sophy thought, entirely to his delight.
Major Sweet left by one of the side doors. Alleyn disappeared behind the god, enthusiastically followed by the Van der Veghels. They could be heard ejaculating in some distant region. Their voices died and there was no more sound except, Sophy fancied, the cold babble of that subterranean stream.
“Come and sit down,” Grant said.
She joined him on one of the stone benches.
“Are you feeling a bit oppressed?”
“Sort of. “
“Shall I take you up? There’s no need to stay. That lot are all right under their own steam. Say the word.”
“How kind,” Sophy primly rejoined, “but, thank you, no. I’m not all that put out. It’s only—”
“Well?”
“I’ve got a theory about walls.”
“Walls?”
“Surfaces. Any surfaces.”
“Do explain yourself.”
“You’ll be profoundly unimpressed.”
“One never knows. Try me.”
“Mightn’t surfaces — wood, stone, cloth, anything you like — have a kind of physical sensitivity we don’t know about? Something like the coating on photographic film? So that they retain impressions of happenings that have been exposed to them. And mightn’t some people have an element in their physical make-up — their chemical or electronic arrangements or whatever — that is responsive to this and aware of it.”
“As if other people were colour-blind and only they saw red?”
“That’s the idea.”
“That would dispose rather neatly of ghosts, wouldn’t it?”
“It wouldn’t be only the visual images the surfaces retained. It’d be emotions too.”
“Do you find your idea an alarming one?”
“Disturbing, rather.”
“Well — yes.”
“I wonder if it might fit in with your Simon.”
“Ah,” ejaculated Grant, “don’t remind me of that, for God’s sake!”
“I’m sorry,” Sophy said, taken aback by his violence.
He got up, walked away and with his back turned to her said rapidly: “All right, why don’t you say it! If I object so strongly to all this show-off why the hell do I do it? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Come on. Isn’t it!”
“If I am it’s no business of mine. And anyway I did say it. Up above.” She caught her breath. “It seems ages ago,” said Sophy. “Ages.”
“We’ve dropped through some twenty centuries, after all. And I’m sorry to have been so bloody rude.”
“Think nothing of it,” Sophy said. She looked up at the sharply lit head of Mithras. “He is not very formidable after all. Plump and placid, really, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t it odd, though, how those blank eyes seem to stare? You’d swear they had pupils. Do you suppose—”
She cried out. The god had gone. Absolute darkness had closed down upon them like a velvet shutter.