by John Fowles
I walked up and down my room, imagining scenes where I had Alison at my mercy.
Beating her black and blue, making her weep with remorse.
And then again, it all went back to Conchis, to the mystery of his power, his ability to mould and wield girls as intelligent as Lily; as independent as Alison. As if he had some secret that he revealed to them, that put them under his orders; and once again I was the man in the dark, the excluded, the eternal butt.
Malvolio. Not a Hamlet mourning Ophelia. But Malvolio.
* * *
I couldn't sleep. I had to do something. I went down to the hall and telephoned Ellenikon again. I knew there were staging flights through at all hours, and there might be someone on the desk. I was lucky: there was. Even luckier, it was an English hostess who had just come off duty, and chanced to pick up the phone on her way to bed.
Yes, she knew about Alison.
"Look, I know this sounds pretty extraordinary, but I'm an old friend of hers and I think I've just seen her."
There was a silence. "But she's dead."
"Yes, I know. I know she's meant to be dead."
"But it was in the papers."
"You saw it?"
"I know lots of people who did."
"Actually in the papers? Or just cuttings they'd been sent?"
Her patience began to break. "I'm terribly sorry but —"
"Do you know anyone who went to the funeral?"
She said, "Are you sure you're all right?"
I wished her good night then; it was useless to go on. I could guess what they had done. Alison would have failed to report for duty one day in London, pleaded ill health or something. A week or two later, the same cuttings would have been sent out, the same forged letters from Ann Taylor.
I turned to the night porter.
"I want a line to London. This number." I wrote it down. A few minutes later he pointed to a box.
I stood listening to the phone burr-burr in my old flat in Russell Square. It went on a long time. At last it was picked up.
"For goodness sake . . . who's that?"
The operator said. "I have a long-distance call for you from Athens."
"From where!"
I said, "Okay, operator. Hello?"
"Who is that?"
She sounded a nice girl, but she was half asleep. Though the call cost me four pounds, it was worth it. I discovered that Ann Taylor had gone back to Australia, but six weeks before. No one had killed herself. A girl the girl on the other end didn't know, but "I think she's a friend of Ann's" had taken over the flat; she hadn't seen her "for weeks." Yes, she had blonde hair; actually she only saw her twice; yes, she thought she was Australian.
Back in my room I remembered the flower in my buttonhole. It was very wilted, but I took it out of the coat I had been wearing and stuck it in a glass of water.
* * *
I woke up late, having finally slept sounder than I expected. I lay in bed for a while, listening to the street noises down below, thinking about Alison. I tried to recall exactly what her expression had been, whether there was any humor, any sympathy, an indication of anything, good or bad, in her small standing there. I could understand the timing of her resurrection. As soon as I got back to London I should have found out; so it had to be in Athens.
And now I was to hunt for her.
I wanted to see her, I knew I wanted to see her desperately, to dig or beat the truth out of her, to let her know how vile her betrayal was. To let her know that even if she crawled round the equator on her knees I could never forgive her. That I was finished with her. Disgusted by her. As disintoxicated of her as I was of Lily. I thought, Christ, if I could only lay my hands on her. But the one thing I would not do was hunt for her.
Then, having a shower, I began to sing. Because the masque was not over. Because, though I would not consciously admit it, Alison was alive. Because I knew there must be a confrontation between us. And I would lure her on, lead her into believing that a reconciliation was possible. I thought, if I ever get a chance of making her fall in love with me again. Such a savage revenge I would have on her. On all of them. That cat. This time I would use that cat.
And I only had to wait. They would bring her to me now.
* * *
I went down to a noon breakfast; and the first thing I discovered was that I did not have to wait. For there was another letter by hand for me. This time it contained just one word: London. I remembered that order in the Earth: Termination by July for all except nucleus. Nucleus, Ashtaroth the Unseen, was Alison.
I went to the travel agency and got a seat on the evening plane; and seeing a map of Italy on the wall, as I stood waiting for the ticket to be made out, I discovered where Subiaco was; and decided that the marionette would make the manipulators of strings wait a day, for a change. When I came out I went into the biggest bookshop in Athens, on the corner of Stadiou, and asked for a book on the identification of flowers. My belated attempt at resuscitation had not been successful, and I had had to throw the buttonhole away. The assistant had nothing in English, but there was a good French flora, she said, which gave the names in several languages. I pretended to be impressed by the pictures, then turned to the index; to Alyssum, p. 69.
And there it was, facing page 69: thin green leaves, small white flowers, Alysson maritime . . par fum de miel . . . from the Greek a (without) and lyssa (madness). Called this in Italian, this in German.
In English: Sweet Alison.
Part Three
La triomphe de la philosophie serait de jeter du jour sur l'obscurité des voies dont la providence se sert pour parvenir aux fins qu'elle se propose sur l'homme, et de tracer d'après cela quelque plan de conduite qui put faire connaitre a ce maiheureux individu bipède, perpétnellement ballotté par les caprices de cet étre qui dit-on le dirige aussi despotiquement, to manière dont il taut qu'il interprète les décrets de cette providence sur lui.
—De Sade, Les Infortunes de to Vertu
68
Rome.
In my mind Greece lay weeks, not the real hours, behind. The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of luxury, a cosmetic of the overindulged senses, between the light, the truth, and their real selves. I couldn't stand the loss of the beautiful nakedness, the humanity of Greece, and so I couldn't stand the sight of the opulent, animal Romans; as one sometimes cannot stand one's own face in a mirror.
Early the morning after my arrival I caught a local train out towards Tivoli and the Alban hills. After a long bus ride I had lunch at Subiaco and then walked up a road above a green chasm. A lane branched off into a deserted glen. I could hear the sound of running water far below, the singing of birds. The road came to an end, and a path led up through a cool grove of ilex, and then tapered out into a narrow flight of steps that twisted up around a wall of rock. The monastery came into sight, clinging like an Orthodox Greek monastery, like a martin's nest, to the cliff. A Gothic loggia looked out prettily over the green ravine, over a little apron of cultivated terraces falling below. Fine frescoes on the inner wall; coolness, silence.
There was an old monk in a black habit sitting behind the door through to an inner gallery. I asked if I could see John Leverrier. I said, an Englishman, on a retreat. Luckily I had his letter ready to show. The old man carefully deciphered the signature, then nodded and silently disappeared down into some lower level of the monastery. I went on into a hall. A series of macabre murals: death pricking a young falconer with his longsword; a medieval strip-cartoon of a girl, first titivating herself in front of a glass, then fresh in her coffin, then with the bones beginning to erupt through the skin, then as a skeleton. There was the sound of someone laughing, an old monk with an amused face scolding a younger one in French as they passed through the hall behind me. Oh, si tu penses que le football est un digne su jet de meditation . . .
Then
another monk appeared; and I knew, with an icy shock, that this was Leverrier. He was tall, very close-cut hair, with a thin-checked brown face, and glasses with "standard" National Health frames; unmistakably English. He made a little gesture, asking if it was I who had asked for him.
"I'm Nicholas Urfe. From Phraxos."
He managed to look amazed, shy, and annoyed, all at the same time. After a long moment's hesitation, he held out his hand. It seemed dry and cold; mine was stickily hot from the walk. He was nearly four inches taller than myself, and as many years older, and he spoke with a trace of the incisiveness that young dons sometimes affect.
"You've come all this way?"
"It was easy to stop off at Rome."
"I thought I'd made it clear that —"
"Yes you did, but . . ."
We both smiled bleakly at the broken-ended sentences. He looked me in the eyes, affirming decision.
"I'm afraid your visit must still be considered in vain."
"I honestly had no idea that you were . . ." I waved vaguely at his habit. "I thought you signed your letters . . ."
"Yours in Christ?" He smiled thinly. "I am afraid that even here we are susceptible to the forces of antipretention."
He looked down, and we stood awkwardly. He came, as if impatient with our awkwardness, to a kinder decision; some mollification.
"Well. Now you are here — let me show you round."
I wanted to say that I hadn't come as a tourist, but he was already leading the way through to an inner courtyard. I was shown the traditional ravens and crows, the Holy Bramble, which put forth roses when Saint Benedict rolled on it — as always on such occasions the holiness of self- mortification paled in my too literal mind beside the vision of a naked man pounding over the hard earth and taking a long jump into a blackberry bush . . . ow! yarouch! . . . and I found the Peruginos easier to feel reverence for.
I discovered absolutely nothing about the summer of 1951, though I discovered a little more about Leverrier. He was at Sacro Speco for only a few weeks, having just finished his novitiate at some monastery in Switzerland. He had been to Cambridge and read history, he spoke fluent Italian, he was "rather unjustifiably believed to be" an authority on the pre-Reformation monastic orders in England, which was why he was at Sacro Speco — to consult sources in the famous library; and he had not been back to Greece since he left it. He remained very much an English intellectual, rather self-conscious, aware that he must look as if he were playing at being a monk, dressing up, and even a little, complicatedly, vain about it.
Finally he took me down some steps and out into the open air below the monastery. I perfunctorily admired the vegetable and vineyard terraces. He led the way to a wooden seat under a fig tree a little farther on. We sat. He did not look at me.
"This is very unsatisfactory for you. But I warned you."
"It's a relief to meet a fellow victim. Even if he is mute."
He stared out across a box-bordered parterre into the blue heat of the sunbaked ravine. I could hear water rushing down in the depths.
"A fellow. Not a victim."
"I simply wanted to compare notes."
He paused, then said, "The essence of . . . his . . . system is surely that you learn not to 'compare notes." He made the phrase sound repellent; cheap. His wanting me to go was all but spoken. I stole a look at him.
"Would you be here now if . . ."
"A lift on the road one has already long been traveling explains when. Not why."
"Our experiences must have varied very widely."
"Why should they be similar? Are you a Catholic?" I shook my head. "A Christian even?" I shook my head again. He shrugged. He had dark shadows under his eyes, as if he was tired. "But I do believe in . . . charity?"
"My dear man, you don't want charity from me. You want confessions I am not prepared to make. In my view I am being charitable in not making them. In my position you would understand." He added, "And at my remove you will understand."
His voice was set cold; there was a silence.
He said, "I'm sorry. You force me to be more brusque than I wish."
"I'd better go."
He seized his chance, and stood up.
"I intend nothing personal."
"Of course."
"Let me see you to the gate."
We walked back; into the whitewashed door carved through the rock, up past doors that were like prison cells, and out into the hall with the death murals.
He said, "I meant to ask you about the school. There was a boy called Aphendakis, very promising. I coached him."
We lingered a little in the loggia, beside the Peruginos, exchanging sentences about the school. I could see that he was not really interested, was merely making an effort to be pleasant; to humiliate his pride. But even in that he was self-conscious.
We shook hands.
He said, "This is a great European shrine. And we are told that our visitors — whatever their beliefs — should leave it feeling . . . I think the words are 'refreshed and consoled." He paused as if I might want to object, to sneer, but I said nothing. "I must ask you once again to believe that I am silent for your sake as well as mine."
"I'll try to believe it."
He gave a formal sort of bow, more Italian than English; and I went down the rock staircase to the path through the ilexes.
I had to wait till evening in Subiaco for a bus back. It ran through long green valleys, under hilltop villages, past aspens already yellowing into autumn. The sky turned through the softest blues to a vesperal amber-pink. Old peasants sat at their doorways; some of them had Greek faces, inscrutable, noble, at peace. I felt, perhaps because I had drunk almost a whole bottle of Verdicchio while I waited, that I belonged, and would forever belong, to an older world than Leverrier's. I didn't like him, or his religion. And this not liking him, this halfdrunken love of the ancient, unchangeable Greco-Latin world seemed to merge. I was a pagan, at best a stoic, at worst a voluptuary, and would remain forever so.
Waiting for the train, I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo-blue hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten thousand Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realized that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem.
69
If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a gray-blue sky; and I could hear people saying "Lovely day, isn't it?" But all those tired greens, grays, browns . . . they seemed to compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks — how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face.
I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o'clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialed Ann Taylor's number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited; the idea that Alison would be waiting for me. Some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour.
; At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor's flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions. I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.
Footsteps.
A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.
I backed.
"Terribly sorry. Wrong flat." I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, "It's all right. Second floor." I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.
I walked back to the pub, and later I went to an Italian restaurant Alison and myself had used to go to. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers' staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless . . . speciesless.
