by John Fowles
It was like being a champion at tennis, and condemned to play with rabbits, as well as having always to get their wretched balls out of the net for them. I would look out of the window at the blue sky and the cypresses and the sea, and pray for the day’s end, when I could retire to the masters’ wing, lie back on my bed and sip an ouzo. Bourani seemed greenly remote from all that; so far, and yet so near; its small mysteries, which grew smaller as the week passed, no more than an added tang, or hazard, in its other promise of civilized pleasure.
15
This time he was waiting for me at the table. I dumped my duffel bag by the wall and he called for Maria to bring the tea. He was much less eccentric, perhaps because he had transparently determined to pump me. We talked about the school, about Oxford, my family, about teaching English to foreigners, about why I had come to Greece. Though he kept asking questions, I still felt that he had no real interest in what I was saying. “What interested him was something else, some syndrome I exhibited, some category I filled. I was not interesting in myself, but only as an example. I tried once or twice to reverse our roles, but he again made it clear that he did not want to talk about himself. I said nothing about the glove.
Only once did he seem really surprised. He had asked me about my unusual name.
‘French. My ancestors were Huguenots.’
‘Ah.’
‘There’s a writer called Honore d’Urfé ̶ ’
He gave me a swift look. ‘He is an ancestor of yours?
‘It’s just a family tradition. No one’s ever traced it. As far as I know.’ Poor old d’Urfé; I had used him before to suggest that centuries of high culture lay in my blood. Conchis’s smile was genuinely warm, almost radiant, and I smiled back. ‘That makes a difference?’
‘It is amusing.’
‘It’s probably all rubbish.’
‘No no, I believe it. And have you read L’Astrée?’
‘For my pains. Terrible bore.’
‘Oui, un peu fade. Mais pas tout à fait sans charmes.’ Impeccable accent; he could not stop smiling. ‘So you speak French.’
‘Not very well.’
‘I have a direct link with le grand siècle at my table.’
‘Hardly direct.’
But I didn’t mind his thinking it, his sudden flattering benignity. He stood up.
‘Now. In your honour. Today I will play Rameau.’
He led the way into the room, which ran the whole width of the house. Books lined three walls. At one end there was a green-glazed tile stove under a mantelpiece on which stood two bronzes, both modern. Above them was a lifesize reproduction of a Modigliani, a fine portrait of a sombre woman in black against a glaucous green background.
He sat me in an armchair, sorted through some scores, found the one he wanted; began to play; short, chirrupy little pieces, then some elaborately ornamented courantes and passacaglias. I didn’t much like them, but I realized he played with some mastery. He might be pretentious in other ways, but he was not posing at the keyboard. He stopped abruptly, in midpiece, as if a light had fused; pretension began again.
‘Voilà.’
‘Very charming.’ I determined to stamp out the French ‘flu before it spread. ‘I’ve been admiring that.’ I nodded at the reproduction.
‘Yes?’ We went and stood in front of it. ‘My mother.’
For a moment I thought he was joking.
‘Your mother?’
‘In name. In reality, it is his mother. It was always his mother.’ I looked at the woman’s eyes; they hadn’t the usual fish-like pallor of Modigliani eyes. They stared, they watched, they were simian. I also looked at the painted surface. I belatedly realized I was not looking at a reproduction.
‘Good lord. It must be worth a fortune.’
‘No doubt.’ He spoke without looking at me. ‘You must not think that because I live simply here I am poor. I am very rich.’ He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is. I stared at the picture again. ‘It cost me … nothing. And that was charity. I should like to say that I recognized his genius. But I did not. No one did. Not even the clever Mr Zborowski.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Modigliani? I met him. Many times. I knew Max Jacob, who was a friend of his. That was in the last phase of his life. He was quite famous by then. One of the sights of Montparnasse.’
I stole a look at Conchis as he gazed up at the picture; he had, by no other logic than that of cultural snobbery, gained a whole new dimension of respectability for me, and I began to feel much less sure of his eccentricity and his phoniness, of my own superiority in the matter of what life was really about.
‘You must wish you’d bought more from him.’
‘I did.’
‘You still own them?’
‘Of course. Only a bankrupt would sell beautiful paintings. They are in my other houses.’ I stored away that plural; one day I would mimic it to someone.
‘Where are your … other houses?’
‘Do you like this?’ He touched the bronze of a young man beneath the Modigliani. ‘This is a maquette by Rodin. My other houses. Well. In France. In the Lebanon. In America. I have business interests all over the world.’ He turned to the other characteristically skeletal bronze. ‘And this is by Giacometti.’
‘I’m staggered. Here on Phraxos.’
‘Why not?’
‘Thieves?’
‘If you have many valuable paintings, as I have – I will show you two more upstairs later – you make a decision. You treat them as what they are – squares of painted canvas. Or you treat them as you would treat gold ingots. You put bars on your windows, you lie awake at night worrying. There.’ He indicated the bronzes. ‘If you want, steal them. I shall tell the police, but you may get away with them. The only thing you will not do is make me worry.’
‘They’re safe from me.’
‘And on Greek islands, no thieves. But I do not like everyone to know they are here.’
‘Of course.’
‘This picture is interesting. It was omitted from the only catalogue raisonné of his work I have seen. You see also it is not signed. However – it would not be difficult to authenticate. I will show you. Take the corner.’
He moved the Rodin to one side and we lifted the frame down. He tilted it for me to see. On the back were the first few lines of a sketch for another painting, then scrawled across the lower half of the untreated canvas were some illegible words with numbers beside them, added up at the bottom, by the stretcher.
‘Debts. That one there. “Toto.” Toto was the Algerian he bought his hashish from.’ He pointed. ‘“Zbo.” Zborowski.’
I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man; and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs, and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million. Conchis watched me.
‘This is the side the museums never show.’
‘Poor devil.’
‘He would say the same of us. With much more reason.’
I helped him put the frame back.
Then he made me look at the windows. They were rather small and narrow, arched, each one with a centre pillar and a capital of carved marble.
‘These come from Monemvasia. I found them built into a cottage. So I bought the cottage.’
‘Like an American.’
He did not smile. ‘They are Venetian. Of the fifteenth century.’ He turned to the bookshelves and pulled down an art book. ‘Here.’ I looked over his shoulder and saw Fra Angelico’s famous ‘Annunciation’ ; and at once knew why the colonnade outside had seemed so familiar. There was even the same white-edged floor of red tiles.
‘Now what else can I show you? My harpsichord is very rare. It is one of the original Pleyels. Not in fashion. But very beautiful.’ He stroked its shining black top, as if it were a cat. There was a music stand on the far side, by the wall. It seemed an unnecessa
ry thing to have with a harpsichord.
‘You play some other instrument, Mr Conchis?’
He looked at it, shook his head. ‘No. It has sentimental value.’ But he sounded quite unsentimental.
‘Good. Well. Now I must leave you to your own devices for a while. I have some correspondence to deal with.’ He gestured. You will find newspapers and magazines over there. Or books – take what you want. You will excuse me? Your room is upstairs… if you wish?’
‘No, this is fine. Thank you.’
He went; and I stared again at the Modigliani, caressed the Rodin, surveyed the room. I felt rather like a man who has knocked on a cottage door and found himself in a palace; vaguely foolish. I took a pile of the French and American magazines that lay on a table in the corner and went out under the colonnade. After a while I did something else I hadn’t done for several months: I began to rough out a poem.
From this skull-rock strange golden roots throw
Ikons and incidents; the man in the mask
Manipulates. I am the fool that falls
And never learns to wait and watch,
Icarus eternally damned, the dupe of time …
He suggested we look over the rest of the house.
A door led into a bare, ugly hall. There was a dining-room, which he said he never used, on the north side of the house, and another room which resembled nothing so much as a second-hand bookshop; a chaos of books – shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of magazines and newspapers, and one large and evidently newly arrived parcel that lay unopened on a desk by the window.
He turned to me with a pair of calipers in his hand.
‘I am interested in anthropology. May I measure your skull?’ He took my permission for granted, and I bent my head. As he gently pinched it, he said, ‘You like books?’
He seemed to have forgotten, but perhaps he hadn’t, that I had read English at Oxford.
‘Of course.’
‘What do you read?’ He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook.
‘Oh … novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism.’
‘I have not a single novel here.’
‘No?’
‘The novel is no longer an art form.’
I grinned.
‘Why do you smile?’
‘It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn’t know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘ “Do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?” No serious answer was expected.’
‘I see. It was not serious.’
‘Not at all.’ I looked at the notebook. ‘Are my measurements interesting?’
‘No.’ He dismissed that. ‘Well – I am serious. The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.’ He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. ‘I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since.’ I remembered my own small destroying; and thought, grand gestures are splendid – if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. ‘Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?’
‘For fun?’
‘Fun!’ He pounced on the word. ‘Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.’
I see.
‘For this.’ A life of Franklin Roosevelt. ‘This.’ A French paperback on astrophysics. ‘This. Look at this.’ It was an old pamphlet – An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679. ‘There, take that and read it over the weekend. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels ever written.’
His bedroom extended almost the seaward width of the house, like the music-room below. At one end was a bed – a double bed, I noticed – and a huge wardrobe; at the other, a closed door led through into what must have been a very small room, a dressing-room perhaps. Near that door stood a strange-looking table, the top of which he lifted. It was (I had to be told) a clavichord. The centre of the room was fitted out as a kind of sitting-room and study. There was another tiled stove, and a desk littered with the papers he must have been working on, and two armchairs upholstered in pale brown to match a chaise-longue. In a far corner, a triangular cabinet full of pale-blue and green Isnik ware. Flooded with evening light, it was altogether a more homely room than the one downstairs, and by contrast pleasantly free of books.
But its tone was really set by its two paintings: both nudes, girls in sunlit interiors, pinks, reds, greens, honeys, ambers; all light, warmth, glowing like yellow fires with life, humanity, domesticity, sexuality, Mediterraneity.
‘You know him?’ I shook my head. ‘Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died.’ I stood in front of them. He said, behind me, ‘These, I paid for.’
‘They were worth it.’
‘Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason.’
I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.
Conchis moved out on to the terrace, and I followed him. By the westward of the two french doors stood a small Moorish ivory-inlaid table. It carried a bowl of flowers set, as if votively, before a photograph.
It was a large picture in an old-fashioned silver frame. A girl in an Edwardian dress stood by a vase of roses on an improbable Corinthian pedestal, while painted foliage drooped sentimentally across the background. It was one of those old photographs whose dark chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces; of a period when women had bosoms, not breasts. The young girl in the picture had a massed pile of light hair, and a sharp waist, and that plump-softness of skin and slightly heavy Gibson-girl handsomeness of feature that the age so much admired.
Conchis saw me giving it a lingering glance. ‘She was once my fiancée.’
I looked again. The photographer’s name was stamped floridly in gold across the bottom corner – a London address.
‘You never married her?’
‘She died.’
‘She looks English.’
‘Yes.’ He paused, surveying her. The girl seemed absurdly historical, standing by the pompous vase in front of the faded, painted grove. ‘Yes, she was English.’
I looked at him. ‘What was your English name, Mr Conchis?’
He smiled one of his rare smiles; like a monkey’s paw flashing out of a cage. ‘I have forgotten.’
‘You never married at all?’
He remained staring down at the photograph, then slowly shook his head.
‘Come.’
A table stood in the southeast corner of the parapeted L-shaped terrace. It was already laid with a cloth, presumably for dinner. We looked over the trees at the superb view, the vast dome of light over land and sea. The mountains of the Peloponnesus had turned a violet-blue, and Venus hung in the pale-green sky like a white lamp, with the steady soft brilliance of gaslight. The photo stood in the doorway, placed rather in the way children put dolls in a window to let them look out.
He sat against the parapet with his back to the view.
‘And you? You are engaged?’ In my turn I shook my head. ‘You must find life here very lonely.’
‘I was warned.’
‘A good-looking young man of your age.
’
‘Well, there was a girl, but
‘But?’
‘I can’t explain.’
‘Is she English?’
I thought of the Bonnard; that was the reality; such moments; not what one could tell. I smiled at him.
‘May I ask you what you asked me last week? No questions?’
‘Of course.’
We sat in silence then, that same peculiar silence he had imposed on the beach the Saturday before. At last he turned to the sea and spoke again.
‘Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.’
‘To live alone?’
‘To live. With what you are. A Swiss came to end his days here -many years ago now – in an isolated ruined cottage at the far end of the island. Over there, under Aquila. A man of my age now. He had spent all his life assembling watches and reading about Greece. He had even taught himself classical Greek. He repaired the cottage himself, cleared the cisterns, made some terraces. His passion became – you cannot guess – goats. He kept one, then two. Then a small flock of them. They slept in the same room as he did. Always exquisite. Always combed and brushed, since he was Swiss. He used to call here sometimes in spring and we would have the utmost difficulty in keeping his seraglio out of the house. He learnt to make excellent cheeses – they fetched good prices in Athens. But he was alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He died in 1937. A stroke. They did not discover him till a fortnight later. By then all his goats were dead too. It was winter, so you see the door was fastened.’
His eyes on mine, Conchis grimaced, as if he found death a joker. His skin clung very close to his skull. Only the eyes lived. I had the strange impression that he wanted me to believe he was death; that at any moment the leathery old skin and the eyes would fall, and I should find myself the guest of a skeleton.
