The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell Page B

very clear of the moment at which the boats first came into view from the balcony, since it was also the moment at which Rupert was heard shouting that he wasn’t going to be called a fascist by a greasy little Greek gigolo.
    “And that, of course,” said Leonidas, “was altogether too much.”
    The poet had come out of the kitchen looking, as his son described it, all grand and patriarchal, and said they must leave at once: he evidently took it for granted that his stepchildren, as well as his wife and son, would accompany him in his departure. He stood in majestic silence while Lucinda went to call her mother to come down quickly from the terrace. When Dorothea, bewildered, appeared in the drawing-room, he told her only that Rupert’s opinion of him was such that he could no longer accept his hospitality.
    “And we would have left,” said Leonidas. “But Lucian was still on the balcony—poor Lucian, he was really quite keen on seeing the Boat Race—and he noticed something odd going on the towpath. And it was because of Deirdre, of course.” He sighed: he had told me of these events in the light and ironic tone appropriate to an account of social discomfiture recollected in tranquility, and seemed almost to have forgotten that the quarrel between his father and their host had not been the chief catastrophe of the afternoon. “Poor Deirdre. But you will understand, Professor Tamar, that my mother would not have wished to tell the Coroner what Rupert said to my father.”
    The boy looked very graceful and at ease, lying on the grass beside the little temple, and I thought how well the surroundings became him: if the designer of the garden had had the power to choose not only the shrubs, flowers, trees, temples and statuary but also some living inhabitant for his Arcadia, it would have been, I could not doubt, a boy who looked like Leonidas—with the same delicately carved profile, the same grape-black hair, the same olive-tinted smoothness of complexion. There was something about him, all the same, which reminded me that there is a darker side of Arcadia: the gods who have their birthplace in that remote and mountainous region are not the good-natured and reasonable deities who have their home on Olympus, and their purposes are not always benign.
    “I quite understand,” I said, “that your mother would not have cared for so an offensive a remark to be repeated in the newspapers. It seems surprisingly fortunate that nothing was asked which obliged her to mention it. I should have supposed—but I am very ignorant of such matters—that the Coroner would have inquired rather closely about the time immediately preceding your cousin’s death: to establish, for example, exactly how long she had been alone on the roof terrace.”
    “He mostly wanted to know what sort of mood she was in—whether she seemed at all depressed, and so on. We were able to tell him, as it happened, that she had been in unusually good spirits.” There was again an ironical note in his voice, which I could not quite account for. “My mother noticed at lunch how pleased she seemed to be, and asked her if she had something special to be excited about.”
    “And had she?”
    “Yes, so she said. It was still a secret, she said, but when we knew about it it would be a great surprise for us. My mother of course assumed she was talking of some love-affair. But it wasn’t really quite like that. She had the sort of look she used to have when she’d found something out that she knew you didn’t want her to know—it was rather a habit of hers. You could tell, if you knew her, that she meant the surprise to be an unpleasant one for us—something that would make her the center of attention, and make us all wish we’d been nicer to her.”
    “It sounds,” I said, “like a rather disagreeable form of high spirits. But at least you can be satisfied that her death was accidental.”
    He had been lying on his side, looking towards me. He now