“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 half-drunken 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 off-put, 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.
I went and had one more look at the flat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.
* * *
The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The flat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July—ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.
“Must have been sharing,” said the clerk.
And that was that.
And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her?
* * *
But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone calls, not the smallest sign.
I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps that they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; then it angered me that I was worried.
The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the wall, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that.
At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist’s board. It was a scruffy attic “flat” over two floors of sewing rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the 1930s vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been “a close friend”—”God, the times I’ve had to put him to bed, poor sod.” I didn’t believe her. “Dylan slept (or slept it off) here” is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her—”My name’s Joan, everyone calls me Kemp.” Kemp’s intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place.
“Okay,” she said at the door, after I’d agreed to take the rooms. “As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week.”
“Good Lord.”
She nodded. “Them.” I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner.
* * *
I also bought an old MG. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw’s Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and—at least to begin with—stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone.
A long August passed, and I had fits of acute depression, fits of torpid indifference. I was like a fish in stale water, stifled by the grayness of England. Just as I looked back, Adam after the fall, to the luminous landscapes, the salt and thyme of Phraxos, I looked back to the events of Bourani, which could not have happened, but which had happened, and found myself, at the end of some tired London afternoon, as unable to wish that they had not happened as I was to forgive Conchis for having given me the part he did. Slowly I came to realize that my dilemma was in fact a sort of de facto forgiveness, a condonation of what had been done to me; even though, still too sore to accept that something active had taken place, I thought of “done” in a passive sense.
70
I thought in the same way of Lily. One day I nearly crashed, breaking hard at the glimpse of a girl with long blonde hair walking down a side street. I swerved the car into the curb and raced after her. Even before I saw the plain face I knew it was not Lily. But if I had rushed after the girl in the side street it was because I wanted to face Lily, to question her, to try to understand the ununderstandable; not because I longed for her. I could have longed for certain aspects of her, for certain phases—but it was that very phasality that made her impossible to love. So I could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one’s life, and yet still hate her for what she had done.
* * *
But I had to do something while I waited, while I absorbed the experience osmotically into my life. So throughout the latter half of August I pursued the trail of Conchis and Lily in England; and through them, of Alison.
It kept me, however tenuously and vicariously, in the masque; and it dulled my agonizing longing to see Alison. Agonizing because a new feeling had seeded and was growing inside me, a feeling I wanted to eradicate and couldn’t, not least because I knew the seed of it had been planted by Conchis and was germinating in this deliberate silence and absence he had surrounded me with; a feeling that haunted me as the embryo grows in the reluctant mother’s womb, sweeping her day and night, that I despised, disproved, dismissed, and still it grew, with rage, then in green moments melting her with… but I couldn’t say the word.
And for a time it lay buried under inquiries, conjectures, letters.
* * *
The newspaper cuttings. Different type from that of the Holborn Gazette, where the inquest report would have appeared; and did not appear.
Foulkes pamphlet. Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis’s are not.
Theatre costumier’s. I tried Berman’s and one or two others, without the least success.
Earthquakes. There were earthquakes in 1884 and 1892 in the Ionian Islands. In a tragic way that part of Conchis’s story was confirmed just before I began my research. On August 9, 1953, 450 people died in the Ionian disaster.
Military history. Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones.
DEAR MR. URFE,
I’m afraid your letter does ask, as you say yourself, for the impossible. The units engaged in the Neuve Chapelle set piece were mostly regular ones. I think it most unlikely that any Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment volunteers would have seen that engagement, even under the circumstances you suggest. But of course we have poor detailed records of that chaotic time, and I can’t hazard more than an opinion.
I can find no trace in the records of a captain called Montague. Usually one is on safer ground with officers. But perhaps he was seconded from one of the county regiments.
De Deukans. No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at.
The fire at Givray-le-Duc on August 17, 1922. Unreported in The Times and the Telegraph. Perhaps not surprisingly, as I found Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider Theridion deukansii: doesn’t exist, though there is a genus Theridion.
Seidevarre. Letter from Johan Fredriksen.
DEAR SIR,
The mayor of Kirkenes has passed to me, who is the schoolmaster, your letter to answer. There is in Pasvikdal a place of the name Seidevarre and there was in that place many years from now a family of the name Nygaard. I am very sorry we do not know what is become with this family.
I am very pleased to help you.
Lily’s mother. I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find either an Ansty Cottage or a Silver Street. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I’d once known two girls from Cerne Abbas—twins, very pretty, but I’d forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried—she knew everyone in the village and couldn’t think who it could have been. The “headmaster” at the primary school: in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters had been intercepted on Phraxos; and a reply sent to England for posting.
Charles-Victor Bruneau. Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Conchis.
Conchis’s costume at the “trial.” On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and passed an antique shop on my way to the hotel. Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them was a man dressed exactly as Conchis had been; even to the same emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words Le Sorcier—the sorcerer. The shop was shut, but I took its address and later they sold me the card by post; a “nice eighteenth-century card.”
It gave me a sharp shock when I first saw it—I looked round, as if it had been planted there for me to notice; as if I was being watched.
The “psychologists” at the trial. I tried the Tavistock Clinic and the American Embassy. All the names totally unknown, though some of the institutes exist.
Nevinson. This was the man whose Oxford college was in a book in the school library. The Bursar’s Office at Balliol sent me an address in Japan. I wrote him a letter. Two weeks later I had a reply.
Faculty of English,
Osaka University
DEAR MR. URFE,
Thank you for your letter, it came, as it were, from the distant past, and gave me quite a surprise! But I was delighted to hear that the school has sur
vived the war, and I trust you have enjoyed your stay there as much as I did.
I had forgotten about Bourani. I remember the place now, however, and (very vaguely!) the owner. Did I have a violent argument with him once about Racine and predestination? I have an intuition, no more, that I did. But so much has flowed under the bridges since those days.
Other “victims” before the war—alas, I can’t help you. The man before me I never met. I did know Geoffrey Sugden, who was there for three years after me. I never heard him refer especially to Bourani.
If you are ever in this part of the world, I should be delighted to talk over old times with you, and to offer you, if not an ouzo, at least a sake pou na pinete.
Yours sincerely,
DOUGLAS NEVINSON
The incident on the ridge. When the kapetan called me prodotis (traitor). Of course they knew one day I would know what treachery they meant.
Wimmel. In late August, a piece of luck. One of my teeth began to hurt and Kemp sent me to her dentist to have it seen to. While I was in the waiting room I picked up an old film magazine of the previous January. Halfway through I came on a picture of “Wimmel.” He was even dressed in Nazi uniform. Underneath there was a caption paragraph. Ignaz Pruszynski, who plays the fiendish Town Commandant in Poland’s much praised film of the Resistance, Black Ordeal, in real life played a very different role. He led a Polish underground group all through the Occupation, and was awarded the Polish equivalent of our own Victoria Cross.
Hypnotism. I read a couple of books on this. Conchis had evidently learnt the technique professionally. It was “virtually impossible” to get the person hypnotized to do acts that “run deeply counter to his moral beliefs.” But post-hypnotic suggestion, implanting commands that are carried out on a given signal after the subject has been woken from the hypnotic state and is in all other ways back to normal, was “perfectly feasible and frequently demonstrated.”
The Magus Page 59
