Hammond Innes - Medusa

I should have refused, but the moon was high, the night so beautiful, and I was curious. I did make some effort to discourage her. ‘It’s almost midnight,’ I said. Too late to go messing around in those caves in the dark. And you’re not dressed for it.’

‘That’s soon remedied,’ she said. ‘Oh, come on. You promised.’

‘I did no such thing,’ I told her, but she had already turned to Soo, who was standing there with Lloyd Jones close beside her. ‘Why don’t you come, too — both of you?’ And she added, it’ll be fun, going there now. The moon’s almost full. It’ll be quite light. Anyway, it won’t matter in the cave itself. If it were broad daylight we’d still need torches.’

I thought Soo would be furious, but instead, she seemed to accept it. Maybe the two of them had already talked about it when they had gone off together to the girls’ latrine at the end of the meal. At any rate, she didn’t say anything. She had hold of Lloyd Jones’s arm and seemed in a much happier frame of mind, humming to herself as we walked down the grass-grown track to the road where I’d left the car.

There was no wind, the sky clear and the moon a white eye high in the sky as I turned the car off the Villa Carlos road on to the steep descent to Cala Figuera. ‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful!’ Petra exclaimed. ‘I love it when it’s still, like this, nothing stirring on the water, and Mahon a white sprawl above it. Sometimes I wake up in the night and pull back the tent flap. It looks like an Arab town then, so white, and everything reflected in the water. It’s so beautiful.’

‘Malta is better,’ Soo cut in. ‘What do you think, Gareth? You’ve just come from there.’ She was sitting in the back with him. ‘The buildings are so much more impressive, so solid. You haven’t seen Malta, have you, Petra? Compared with Valetta and Grand Harbour — well, you can’t compare them, can you, Gareth? Mahon is just a little provincial port.’

‘But still beautiful.’ Petra’s tone, though insistent, was quite relaxed. ‘And from Bloody Island I can see the whole sweep of it.’

‘I don’t think beautiful is the right word for a port,’ Lloyd Jones said. ‘Not for Malta anyway.’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw him turn to Soo. ‘Impressive now. I think impressive is the word. Those old strongholds, the great castles of the Knights that withstood the Turks and the German bombs.’ And he added, ‘But Gozo — Gozo is different somehow. I took a boat out to Gozo. That really is beautiful.’

I looked at them in the mirror. They were sitting very close together and she nodded, smiling happily. I think it was her smile that prompted him to say, ‘I’ve been thinking, you know, about this visit to Cales Coves.’ He leant forward suddenly, speaking to Petra and myself. ‘I saw the inlets this afternoon, but I was only there a short while. It would be nice to see them by moonlight. And it’s not far off my way back to Fornells, so I’ll join you if I may.’

We had reached the end of the road and I turned the car on to the raw gravel of our new car park. We were facing the water then, close beside his little Fiat, and there was a yacht coming in under motor, her mains’l a white triangle in the moonlight as she moved steadily across the crouched outline of the hospital ruins.

‘If Gareth is going,’ Soo said suddenly, ‘then I’m going too.’

‘It’s your bedtime,’ I told her. ‘Remember what the doctor said. You shouldn’t have been dancing really.’

‘Well, I’m not going to be left behind on my own, that’s definite.’ And then, as Lloyd Jones helped her out, she was asking Petra whether she could lend her anything. But she had come ashore with all the clothes she needed. ‘You never know,’ she said as she retrieved her holdall from under the trestle table in the chandlery. ‘It can blow up pretty fast here and you only get caught out at a party once with a full gale blowing and nothing to change into. I’ve never forgotten it. I got soaked to the skin and so cold …’ She went with Soo up the stairs and into the bedroom.

Lloyd Jones followed them with his eyes, and when the door was shut he seemed suddenly ill-at-ease, as though unhappy at being left alone with me. ‘I’ll get you something more suitable to wear,’ I said and went into the back premises, where I found him a spare sweater of mine and an old pair of working pants.

We made a quick change right there in the chandlery. ‘You knew I was a Naval officer.’ He was staring at me. ‘The moment I arrived here, you knew. Do you have a rank? you asked.’ I didn’t say anything, an awkward silence growing between us. Then he went on, ‘When I arrived here this morning — yesterday morning now — there was a man here, a short man in overalls and sweater. He was coming out of the door there.’

‘Carp,’ I said. ‘His name’s Carpenter.’

‘An employee of yours? English, isn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where from?’

‘A little place on the East Coast. Felixstowe Ferry.’

He nodded. ‘Thought I recognised him.’ He was standing quite still, staring at me. ‘So you know the whole stupid story?’

‘About your being found clinging to a buoy off the Deben entrance? Yes.’ And I asked him why he had ducked his head inside his car to avoid speaking to Carp. ‘He was one of the men who rescued you, wasn’t he? In fact, he says it was he who cut you down.’

‘Yes.’ There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘it sounds silly, you know, but it’s not something I’m very proud of — Navy officer found half frozen to death and roped to a buoy off a North Sea estuary. The media had a lot of fun at my expense, and seeing the man coming out of your door — it was a hell of a shock. I just didn’t want to be reminded of the episode.’

Soo’s voice called to ask if we were ready. ‘Well, take Benjie out for a pee, will you, and Petra says to remind you about torches.’

I slipped a sweater over my head, ‘I see your point,’ I told him, ‘but it’s no excuse for not even saying hullo. He was very hurt.’

He shrugged, ‘I’m sorry.’

The little dog had been shut in the store where he had a box to sleep in when we were out, and after I had taken him down the road to do his stuff, I went into the store with him and searched out the spare torches I kept with our boat gear. By the time I had found them, and some spare batteries, Soo and the other two were waiting for me out on the road. ‘You take Petra,’ she said as I locked the door. ‘I’ll show Gareth the way. We’ll meet you on the track down into the cove. Okay?’ And she took hold of Lloyd Jones’s arm, steering him across to his Fiat, as though afraid I might object.

‘Well, she seems quite happy about it, now we’re all going,’ Petra said as we got into the car. ‘But you’d better tell Gareth to stay with her while we’re in the cave. It’s one of those entrances that are halfway up the side of the ravine and the last part is a bit of a climb.’

It was just past twelve-thirty by the dashboard clock as I took the old Jag through San Clemente and out on the four-kilometre straight to the Binicalaf turn-off, the moon so bright we could see the talayot to the left of the road very clearly, a huge cairn of interlocking stone blocks. Shortly after that I turned left, past the Biniadris development and another talayot, Petra talking all the time about the cave drawings she had seen when studying in France. The one we were going to see now reminded her of Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne, the entrance to it similarly placed, halfway up a cliff.

‘When they’d opened up Font-de-Gaume they found a series of chambers with pictures of animals on the walls, chiefly reindeer and mammoth. And there was another cave, Rouffignac, much longer, and older I think. The drawings there were of rhinoceros and bison as well as mammoths, and the floor was pock-marked with the pits of hibernating bears, like small craters.’ She laughed at the recollection, and then, suddenly urgent again: ‘Most of those drawings were from way back in time, Mike, at least 17,000 years ago, and if the little bit of a drawing Fm going to show you is really that of a woolly rhinoceros, then it’ll be at least as old as those Dordogne paintings.’