Medusa

‘These cups, they’re for shooting then, are they?’ He couldn’t help noticing them. He was standing right next to the pinewood cabinet I had purchased to house them and Gloria, our help, was a determined silver polisher. We talked about Shotley for a moment, then Soo butted in again, asking him how it had been when he was being trained there. From that they progressed to Malta. It was her mother who was Maltese. Her father had been a naval officer posted to Malta back in the days when there was a C-in-C Med and an old frigate fitted out as the Commander-in-Chief’s yacht for showing the flag and entertaining. He had been the Navigating Officer on board and though she had been far too young to remember anything about it, she was always ready to talk of the parties he had described on the open lamplit deck.

It was past nine before we finally left, and though it was barely a mile away, by the time we had found a place to park the car and had walked through the quarry, somebody had already lit the bonfire. The effect was magic, the flames lighting the great square stone buttresses, flickering over the lofty limestone roof, shadows dancing on the moonlit cliffs, so that the whole effect was like some wild biblical scene. In the great rectangular cavern itself the dirt base of it had been levelled off to provide a makeshift dance floor round which chairs had been placed and trestle tables bright with cloths and cutlery and bottles of wine.

The band began to play just as we found our table. Manuela came over, and, while Soo was introducing Lloyd Jones, Petra and I were momentarily on our own. ‘You wanted to talk to me,’ I said.

‘Did I?’ Her eyes were on the movement of people towards the dance floor, her foot tapping, her body moving to the beat of the music.

‘Now, what have you discovered?’ I asked her. ‘Another of those hypostilic chambers or is it an underground temple to the Earth Mother like that place in Malta?’

‘The Hypogeum?’ She shook her head. ‘No, nothing like that. Just a charcoal drawing. But it could be a lot older. I’ve only seen part of it. I don’t know whether it represents a deer, a horse, a bison or a mammoth. I don’t know what it is. A woolly rhinoceros perhaps.’ She gripped hold of my arm. ‘Come on, let’s dance. I’ll settle for a woolly rhinoceros and tell you the rest while we’re dancing.’

But she couldn’t tell me much. ‘You’ll have to see it for yourself. I think it’s early man — cave-dwelling man — but of course I don’t know. Not yet.’

‘Then why consult me? I don’t know the difference between the drawings of early man and a potholer’s graffiti.’

She hesitated, then said, ‘Well, it’s not just that I’ve unearthed what looks like a section of a cave painting, it’s the fact that people have been digging in that cave.’

‘Archaeologists, you mean?’

‘No, no. People who haven’t the slightest idea they’ve uncovered anything. And if they did know, I imagine they couldn’t care less. The charcoal drawing was only uncovered because they had been clearing a roof fall, and part of the drawing has already been sliced away when they were shovelling the rubble clear. They’ve dug out a hole I think I could have wriggled through, but I wasn’t going to risk that on my own, it looked too unsafe.’ And she added, ‘I could hear water slopping around, Mike, and there was a draught of air. I think they’ve opened up a way through to the sea. But why?’ She stared up at me, her body close against mine. ‘Do you think that’s what they were up to, cutting a way through to the sea?’

‘How do I know?’ I said. ‘I’d have to see it …’

‘Exactly. That’s why I want you to come over there with me. Now. Before they have time to block it up, or do whatever it is they plan to do with it. They may be working on it this minute, so if we went now …’

‘What — right in the middle of the party? I can’t leave Soo, and anyway — ’

‘Well, afterwards. As soon as the party is over.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s quite out of the question.’ And I told her the sensible thing would be to wait for daylight and then go back in with the curator from the museum or somebody from the Mayor’s Office, one of the planning officials. It crossed my mind that this might have some connection with the squatters who had been sleeping in the villa Lennie was repairing, but I didn’t tell her that. ‘Wait till the morning,’ I said again, ‘and take one of the local authority officials in with you.’

‘No.’ She stopped abruptly, standing back from me in the middle of that dancing throng staring me in the face. ‘Tonight. Please.’ And then in a rush: ‘You know how things work here, or rather don’t — not always. It could be days before any official bothered to come out. They’re not interested in caves and digs. A few people are, Father Pepito for instance, but none of the officials I know, not really, and I want somebody to see it now, before the charcoal outline of that figure is totally destroyed or the roof collapses again. Please, Mike. It’s important to me.’