Free Greek Fire by Winston Graham Page B

who stared fixedly at him. Mme Lascou was not present. Anya sat on George’s right, some distance from Gene. They had only spoken a few words in private, when Gene had said: “I’ve hired a car for tomorrow.”
    â€œWhat to do?”
    â€œTo take you to Delphi, if you will come.”
    â€œThank you, no.”
    â€¦ They fed on caviare, coq au vin, fresh woodland strawberries flown in from Corfu; and the conversation was as cultured as the meal. There were three or four very good talkers present; but Gene, speaking Greek now, rose to the mood and held his own. Perhaps only Anya, withdrawn tonight and communing more with herself than other people, perceived the paradox, saw the off-hand wit stemming from the eastern seaboard of the New World, expressing itself in the tongue of Aristophanes.
    And George watched them both. George watched everyone with his soft fluid movements and sharp astigmatic eyes. No one could ignore that he was master of the evening: he led the talk, fed it, conducted it down safe and popular avenues, the perfect chairman you’d say, perhaps that was how be had come to lead his party, and then perhaps not, the velvet glove was not empty.
    The number was small for splinter groups; when Maurice Taksim asked Gallanova about her early years as a ballerina, everyone listened to her story of the Yugo-Slav ballet after the war. She spoke of her own poverty and early struggles, and Mme Telechos said: “Ah, d’you remember the inflation here? When I sent my son to school he went with his pockets crammed with bank-notes to pay his tram fare. Do you remember when a newspaper cost ten thousand million drachmae?”
    â€œThat time must never come again,” said Jon Manos, but conventionally as if he didn’t believe it ever could, for him.
    â€œWe had our troubles in Istanbul,” said Taksim, “but of course they do not compare. Were you here, George?”
    â€œIt is always interesting to hear how a rich man became rich,” said Gallanova, turning her much photographed profile to the candle-light. “ Would it bore you to tell us how it happened to you, M. Lascou? Or have you always been wealthy?”
    â€œHappened is the correct word. It happened to me. After the war I borrowed money and invested it in real estate. Regrettable though it may seem, the successive inflations helped me, and I built more and more flats and offices. Then I was able to buy factories in Piraeus and Salonika. It was all very easy once the start was made.”
    Everyone murmured in polite disbelief.
    â€œI don’t ever quite understand,” said Taksim, “ why you have bothered to enter politics. Why grub in the gutter now you have money to live on the heights?”
    George shrugged. “After a white, when you have enough of it, money becomes unimportant. Then you seek something else—an outlet possibly for idealism.”
    â€œAnd you find it—you find idealism in politics? You must sift the dregs closely.”
    â€œI don’t find idealism in politicians, but I can find it in political thought. I find scope for it in the situation in Greece today. We do not lack brains in the Vouli but we lack reflective brains. Not one in twenty of my fellow deputies attempts to understand Greece outside Athens or the mission of Greece in the world today.”
    A man at the end of the table said: “ I don’t see what you personally hope to do.”
    George sipped his claret. “It is not what one personally hopes to do, it is what one must attempt if one has any vision of the future at all. A nation is not divisible. We share the common lot.”
    â€œWe need another Metaxas,” said General Telechos. “ There was a man.”
    Everyone looked at him. Lascou said: “Metaxas tried to do too much too quickly. No one knows now whether the end would have justified his means.”
    â€œThe end appears to be justifying Tito’s