But I waited most for whoever had acted Lily. I had to know the owner of that young, intelligent, amused, dazzlingly pretty North European face. I wanted to know what she was doing on Phraxos, where she came from, the reality behind all the mystery.
I waited nearly an hour, and nothing happened. No one came, I heard no sounds. In the end I crept back up to my room. But I had a poor night’s sleep. When Maria knocked on the door at half-past five I woke as if I had a hangover.
Yet I enjoyed the walk back to the school. I enjoyed the cool air, the delicate pink sky that turned primrose, then blue, the still-sleeping gray and incorporeal sea, the long slopes of silent pines. In a sense I reentered reality as I walked. The events of the weekend seemed to recede, to become locked away, as if I had dreamt them; and yet as I walked I had the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth; a knowledge of what it was like physically, moment by moment, to have been young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny. I could not describe it. It was not in the least a literary feeling, but an intensely mysterious present and concrete feeling of excitement, of being in a situation where anything still might happen. As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, changed from being the discovered to the still undiscovered.
26
There was a letter for me. The Sunday boat had brought it.
DEAR NICHOLAS,
I thought you were dead. I’m on my own again. More or less. I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to see you again—the point is, I could. I come through Athens now. I mean I haven’t decided whether you aren’t such a pig that it’s crazy to get involved with you again. I can’t forget you, even when I’m with much nicer boys than you’ll ever be. Nicko, I’m a little bit drunk and I shall probably tear this up anyway.
Well, I may send a telegram if I can work a few days off at Athens. If I go on like this you won’t want to meet me. You probably don’t now as it is. When I got your letter I knew you’d just written it because you were bored out there. Isn’t it awful I still have to get boozed to write to you. It’s raining, I’ve got the fire on it’s so bloody cold. It’s dusk, it’s gray it’s so bloody miserable. The wallpaper’s muave or is it mauve hell with green plums. You’d be sick all down it.
A.
Write care of Ann.
* * *
Her letter came at the wrongest time. I realized that I didn’t want to share Bourani with anyone. After the first knowledge of the place, and still after the first meeting with Conchis, even as late as the Foulkes incident, I had wanted to talk about it—and to Alison. Now it seemed fortunate that I hadn’t, just as it seemed, though still obscurely, fortunate that I hadn’t lost my head in other ways when I wrote to her.
One doesn’t fall in love in five seconds; but five seconds can set one dreaming of falling in love, especially in a community as unrelievedly masculine as that of the Lord Byron School. The more I thought of that midnight face, the more intelligent and charming it became; and it seemed too to have had a breeding, a fastidiousness, a delicacy, that attracted me as fatally as the local fishermen’s lamps attracted fish on moonless nights. I reminded myself that if Conchis was rich enough to own Modiglianis and Bonnards, he was rich enough to pick the very best in mistresses. I had to presume some sort of sexual relationship between the girl and him—to do otherwise would have been naïve; but for all that there had been something much more daughterly, affectionately protective, than sexual in her glance back at him.
I must have read Alison’s letter a dozen times that Monday, trying to decide what to do about it. I knew it had to be answered, but I came to the conclusion that the longer I left it, the better. To stop its silent nagging I pushed it away in the bottom drawer of my desk; went to bed, thought about Bourani, drifted into various romantic-sexual fantasies with that enigmatic figure; and failed entirely, in spite of my tiredness, to go to sleep. The crime of syphilis had made me ban sex from my mind for weeks; now I was not guilty—half an hour with a textbook Conchis had given me to look at had convinced me his diagnosis was right—the libido rose strong. I began to think erotically of Alison again; of the dirty-weekend pleasures of having her in some Athens hotel bedroom; of birds in the hand being worth more than birds in the bush; and with better motives, of her loneliness, her perpetual mixed-up loneliness. The one sentence that had pleased me in her unfastidious and not very delicate letter was the last of all—that simple Write care of Ann. Which denied the gaucheness, the lingering resentment, in all the rest.
I got out of bed and sat in my pajama trousers and wrote a letter, quite a long letter, which I tore up at the first rereading. The second attempt was much shorter and hit off, I thought, the right balance between regretful practicality and yet sufficient affection and desire for her still to want to climb into bed if I got half a chance.
I said I was rather tied up at the school over most weekends; though the half-term holiday was the weekend after next and I might just be in Athens then—but I couldn’t be sure. But if I was, it would be fun to see her.
* * *
As soon as I could I got Méli on his own. I had decided that I had to have a confidant at the school. One did not have to attend school meals with the boys over the weekend if one was off duty, and the only master who might have noticed I had been away was Méli himself, but as it happened he’d been in Athens. We sat after lunch on Monday in his room; or rather he sat chubbily at his desk, living up to his nickname, spooning Hymettus honey out of a jar and telling me of the flesh and fleshpots he had bought himself in Athens; and I lay on his bed, only half listening.
“And you, Nicholas, you had a nice weekend?”
“I met Mr. Conchis.”
“You… no, you are joking.”
“You are not to tell the others.”
He raised his hands in protest. “Of course, but how… I can’t believe it.”
I gave him a very expurgated version of the visit the week before, and made Conchis and Bourani as dull as possible.
“He sounds as stupid as I thought. No girls?”
“Not a sign. Not even little boys.”
“Nor even a goat?”
I threw a box of matches at him. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.
“He’s asked me over next week again. As a matter of fact, Méli, I wondered, if I do two preps for you… would you do my noon to six on Sunday?” Sunday duty was easy work. It meant only that one had to stay inside the school and stroll through the grounds a couple of times.
“Well. Yes. I will see.” He sucked the spoon.
“And tell me what to tell the others, if they ask. I want them to think I’m going somewhere else.”
He thought a minute, waved the spoon, then said, “Tell them you are going to Hydra.”
Hydra was a stop on the way to Athens, though one didn’t have to catch the Athens boat to go there, as there were often caïques doing the run. It had an embryonic artistic colony of sorts; the kind of place I might plausibly choose to go to. “Okay. And you won’t tell anyone?”
He crossed himself. “I am as silent as the… the what is it?”
“Where you ought to be, Méli. The bloody grave.”
* * *
I went to the village several times that week, to see if there were any strange faces about. There was no sign of the three people I was looking for, although there were a few strange faces: three or four wives with young children sent out to grass from Athens, and one or two old couples, dehydrated rentiers, who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia.
One evening I felt restless and walked down to the harbor. It was about eleven at night and the place, with its catalpas and its old black cann
ons of 1881, was almost deserted. After a Turkish coffee and a nip of brandy in a kapheneion I started to walk back. Some way past the hotel, still on the few hundred yards of concrete “promenade,” I saw a very tall elderly man standing and bending in the middle of the road, apparently looking for something. He looked up as I approached—he was really remarkably tall and strikingly well dressed for Phraxos; evidently one of the summer visitors. He wore a pale fawn suit, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, an old-fashioned white Panama hat with a black band, and he had a small goatee beard. He was holding by its middle a cane with a meerschaum handle, and he looked gravely distressed, as well as naturally grave.
I asked in Greek if he had lost anything.
“Ah pardon… est-ce que vous parlez français, monsieur?”
I said, yes, I spoke some French.
It seemed he had just lost the ferrule of his stick. He had heard it drop off and roll away. I struck a few matches and searched round, and after a little while found the small brass end.
“Ah, très bien. Mille mercis, monsieur.”
He produced a pocketbook and I thought for a moment he was going to tip me. His face was as gloomy as an El Greco; insufferably bored, decades of boredom, and probably, I decided, insufferably boring. He didn’t tip me, but placed the ferrule carefully inside the wallet, and then politely asked me who I was, and, fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn’t French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos pittoresque, mais mains belle que Délos.
After a few moments more of this platitudinous chat we bowed and went our ways. He expressed a hope that we might meet again during the remaining two days of his stay and have a longer conversation. But I took very good care that we didn’t.
* * *
At last Saturday came. I had done the two extra duties during the week to clear my Sunday, and was thoroughly exhausted with the school. As soon as the morning lessons were over and I had snatched a quick lunch I headed towards the village with my bag. Yes I told the old man at the gate—a sure method of propagating the lie—I was off to Hydra for the weekend. As soon as I was out of sight of the school I cut up through the cottages and round the back of the school onto the path to Bourani. But I didn’t go straight there.
I had speculated endlessly during the week about Conchis, and as futilely as endlessly. I thought I could discern two elements in his “game”—one didactic, the other aesthetic. But whether his cunningly mounted fantasies hid ultimately a wisdom or a lunacy I could not decide. On the whole I suspected the latter. Mania made more sense than reason.
I had wondered more and more during the week about the little group of cottages at Agia Varvara, the bay east of Bourani. It was a wide sweep of shingle with a huge row of athanatos, or agaves, whose bizarre twelve-foot candelabra of flowers stood facing the sea. I lay on a thyme-covered slope above the bay, having come quietly through the trees, and watched the cottages below for any sign of unusual life. But a woman in black was the only person I saw. Now I examined it, it seemed an unlikely place for Conchis’s “assistants” to live. It was so open, so easy to watch. After a while I wound my way down to the cottages. A child in a doorway saw me coming through the olives and called, and then the entire population of the tiny hamlet appeared—four women and half a dozen children, unmistakably islanders. With the usual peasant hospitality they offered me a little saucer of quince jam and a thimbleful of raki as well as the glass of cistern water I requested. Their men were all away far to the south, fishing. I said I was going to see o kyrios Conchis, and their surprise seemed perfectly genuine. Did he ever visit them? Their heads all went back swiftly together, as if the idea was unheard of. I had to listen to the story of the execution again—at least the oldest woman launched out into a welter of words among which I heard “mayor” and “Germans”; and the children raised their arms like guns.
Maria, then? They saw her, of course? But no, they never saw her. She is not a Phraxiot, one of them said.
Then the music, the songs in the night? They looked at one another. What songs? I was not surprised. Very probably they went to bed and woke with the sun.
“And you,” asked the grandmother, “are you a relation of his?” They evidently thought of him as a foreigner.
I said I was a friend. He has no friends here, said the old woman, and with a faint hostility in her voice she added, bad men bring bad luck. I said he had guests—a young girl with fair hair, a tall man, a younger girl so high. They had seen them? They had not. Only the grandmother had even been inside Bourani; and that was long before the war. Then they had their way and asked me the usual series of childish but charmingly eager questions about myself, about London, about England.
I got free in the end, after being presented with a sprig of basil, and walked inland along the bluff until I could climb onto the ridge that led to Bourani. For some time three of the barefoot children accompanied me along the seldom-used path. We topped a rocky crest among the pines, and the distant flat roof of the house came into sight over the sea of trees ahead. The children stopped, as if the house was a sign that they should go no further. I turned after a while and they were still wistfully standing there. I waved, but they made no gesture in return.
27
I went with him and sat in his music room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. All through tea I had waited for some indication on his part that he knew I had seen the girl—as he must have known, for it was obvious that the nocturnal concert had been given to announce her presence. But I intended to follow the same course of action as I had over the earlier incident: to say nothing until he gave me an opening. Not the slightest chink had appeared in our conversation.
Conchis seemed to me, no expert, to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to “interpret,” to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played—I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool, shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions. It was the first time I had heard him play great music, and I was moved as I had been by the Bonnards; moved in a different way, but still moved. The mystery of the old man dwindled, and his humanity rose uppermost. It came to me as I listened that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. Conchis had spoken of meeting his future, of feeling his life balanced on a fulcrum, when he first came to Bourani. I was experiencing what he meant; a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. It was an awareness of a new kind of potentiality, one very different from my old sense of the word, which had been based on the illusions of ambition. The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. It was certainly not a moment of new moral resolve, or anything like it; I suppose our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be; for all that, it felt like a step forward—and upward.
He had finished, was watching me.
“You make words seem shabby things.”
“Bach does.”
“And you.”
He grimaced, but I could see he was not unpleased, though he tried to hide it by marching me off to give his vegetables their evening watering.
* * *
An hour later I was in the little bedroom again. I saw that I had new books by my bedside. There was first a very thin volume in French, a bound pamphlet, anonymous and privately printed, Paris, 1932; it was entitled De la communication intermondial
e. I guessed the author easily enough. Then there was a folio: Wild Life in Scandinavia. As with The Beauties of Nature of the week before, the “wild life” turned out to be all female—various Nordic-looking women lying, standing, running, embracing among the fir forests and fjords. There were lesbian nuances I didn’t much like; perhaps because I was beginning to take against the facet in Conchis’s polyhedral character that obviously enjoyed “curious” objects and literature. Of course I was not—at least I told myself I was not—a puritan. I was too young to know that the having to tell myself gave the game away; and that to be uninhibited about one’s own sexual activities is not the same as being unshockable. I was English; ergo, puritan. I went twice through the pictures; they clashed unpleasantly with the still-echoing Bach.
Finally there was another book in French—a sumptuously produced limited edition: Le Masque Français au Dixhuitième Siècle. This had a little white marker in. Remembering the anthology on the beach, I turned to the page, where there was a passage bracketed. It read:
“Aux visiteurs qui pénétraient dans l’enceinte des murs altiers de Saint-Martin s’offrait la vue delectable des bergers et bergères qui, sur les verts gazons et parmi las bosquets, dansaient et chantaient entourés de leurs blancs troupeaux. Ils n’étaient pas toujours habillés des costumes de l’époqua. Quelquefois us étaient vétus a la romaine ou a la grecque, at ainsi réalisait-on des odes de Théocrite, des bucoliques de Virgile. On parlait méme d’évocations plus scandaleuses, de charmantes nymphes qui las nuits d’été fuyaient au clair de lune d’étranges silhouettes, moitié homme, moitié chèvre…” [1]
The Magus Page 17
