My Brother Michael Read Online Free PDF

man was coming slowly down a steep stepped alley that led uphill between the houses on my right.
    He was about thirty years old, dark-haired and tanned like all the others in the group near the car, but his clothes, no less than his air and bearing, made him look unmistakably English.
    He was not tall, an inch or two under six feet,perhaps, but he was broad in the shoulder, and held himself well, with a sort of easy, well-knit movement that spoke of training and perfect physical fitness. I thought him good-looking; a thinnish sun-browned face, black brows, straight nose, and a hard mouth; but just at the moment his expression was what Jane Austen would have called repulsive – meaning that, whatever thoughts held him in that slightly frowning abstraction, it was obvious that he didn’t intend them to be disturbed.
    He seemed to be hardly aware of where he was, or what he was doing. A child scampered up the steps and pushed by him, apparently unnoticed. A couple of hens flapped across under his feet without making him pause. A hanging plant splashed petals in a scarlet shower over the white sleeve of his shirt, but he made no move to brush them away.
    When he reached the foot of the alley-way he paused. He seemed to come abruptly out of his preoccupation, whatever it was, and stood there, hands thrust into the pockets of his flannels, surveying the scene in the street. His eyes went straight to the group of men. I saw the slight frown disappear, and the brown face became a mask, remote, cold, reflecting oddly the wariness that I had seen in the villagers. Then he looked straight at me, and it was with something of a shock that I met his eyes. They weren’t dark, as I had expected. They were grey, very clear and light, and violently alive.
    He came down the last step and crossed to the door of the car. The group melted away from us. He took nomore notice of them than he had of the hens, or the falling geranium petals.
    He looked down at me. ‘You seem to be in trouble. Is there anything I can do?’
    ‘I’d be terribly grateful if you
could
help me,’ I said. ‘I – I’ve been trying to back the car.’
    ‘I see.’ I thought I heard amusement behind the pleasant voice, but his face still expressed nothing. I said bleakly: ‘I was trying to get it to go
there
.’ ‘There’ was a space beyond the curve of the road which, about fifty yards back, looked as remote as the moon.
    ‘And she won’t go?’
    ‘No,’ I said shortly.
    ‘Is there something wrong with her?’
    ‘Just,’ I said bitterly, ‘that I can’t drive.’
    ‘Oh.’ It was amusement.
    I said quickly: ‘It’s not my car.’
    Here the lorry-driver leaned out of his cabin and shouted something in Greek, and the Englishman laughed. The laugh transformed his face. The mask of rather careful indifference broke up, and he looked all at once younger and quite approachable, even attractive. He shouted something back in what sounded to me like excellent Greek. At any rate the lorry-man understood, because he nodded and withdrew into his cab, and I heard the lorry’s engine begin to roar.
    The newcomer laid a hand on the door.
    ‘If you’ll allow me, perhaps I can persuade her to go.’
    ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ I said bitterly, as I movedover. ‘I was told this was a man’s country. It’s true. Go ahead.’
    He got into the car. I found myself hoping that he would miss the gears, forget to start the engine, leave the handbrake on – do even a single one of the damned silly things I’d been doing all day, but he didn’t. To my fury the car moved quietly backwards, slid into the cobbled space beyond the corner, paused about two inches away from a house wall, and waited there politely for the lorry to pass.
    It approached with an appalling noise and a cloud of black smoke. As it drew level, its driver, leaning out of his cab, yelled something at my companion and sent a grinning black-eyed salutation to me that somehow, without a word