My Brother Michael Read Online Free PDF Page A

staring one another out, one of them preserving a mysterious silence. I had, of course, stalled the engine …
    It became apparent all too soon that it was I, and not the lorry-driver, who would have to back. The whole village – the male portion of it – turned out to tell me so, with gestures. They were charming and delightful and terribly helpful. They did everything except reverse the car for me. And they obviously couldn’t understand why anyone who was in charge of such a car shouldn’t be able to reverse it just like
that
.
    Eventually I reversed it into somebody’s shop doorway.
    The whole village helped to pick up the trestle table, re-hang the rugs, and assure me that it didn’t matter a scrap.
    I straightened up the car and reversed again, into a donkey. The whole village assured me that the donkey wasn’t hurt and that it would stop in a kilometre or so and come home.
    I straightened up the car. This time I churned out a reasonably straight course for ten yards while the village held its breath. Then came a bend in the road. I stopped. I definitely was not prepared to chance reversing over the two-foot parapet into somebody’s garden twenty feet down the hillside. I sat there breathing hard, smiling ferociously back at the villagers, and wishing I had never been born and that Simon hadn’t either. My bolt was shot.
    I had stopped in a patch of sunlight, and the glare from the white walls was blinding. The men crowded closer, grinning delightedly and making gallant and – no doubt fortunately – incomprehensible remarks. The lorry-driver, also grinning, hung out of his cab with the air of a man prepared to spend the whole afternoon enjoying the show.
    In desperation, I leaned over the door of the car and addressed the most forward of my helpers, a stout, florid-looking man with small twinkling eyes, who was obviously vastly delighted with the whole business. He spoke a fluent if decidedly odd mixture of French and English.
    ‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘I do not think I can manage this. You see, it’s not my car; it belongs to a Monsieur Simon, of Delphi, who requires it urgently for business, I – I’m not very used to it yet, and since it’s not mine, I don’t like to take risks … I wonder, could you or one of these gentlemen back it for me? Or perhaps the driver of the lorry would help, if you would ask him? You see, it’s not my car …’
    Some rag of pride led me to insist on this, until I saw he wasn’t listening. The smile had gone from the cheerful sweating face. He said: ‘Who did you say the car was for?’
    ‘A Monsieur Simon, of Delphi. He has hired it from Athens, urgently.’ I regarded him hopefully. ‘Do you know him?’
    ‘No,’ he said, and shook his head. But he spoke a little too quickly, and as he spoke his eyes flickered away from mine. The man at his elbow looked at mesharply, and then asked a question in rapid Greek, where I thought I caught the word ‘Simon.’ My friend nodded once, with that swift flicker of a sidelong look back at me, and said something under his breath. The men near him stared, and muttered, and I thought I saw a new kind of curiosity, furtive, and perhaps even avid, replacing the naïve amusement of a moment ago.
    But this was only the most fleeting of impressions. Before I could decide whether to pursue the inquiry or not, I realised that none of the men were looking at me any more. There was some more of that swift and semi-furtive muttering; the last of the cheery grins had disappeared, and the men who had been crowding most closely round the car were moving away, unobtrusively yet swiftly, bunching as sheep bunch at the approach of the dog. One and all, they were looking in the same direction.
    At my elbow came the fluttering click of ‘nervous beads’, and the stout man’s voice said softly: ‘He will help you.’
    I said ‘Who?’ before I realised he was no longer beside me.
    I turned my head and looked where they all were looking.
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