by John Fowles
‘Such scenes belong to the old drama. Not the new.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with what she is.’
‘Perhaps one day you will meet her again. You may indulge your masochistic instincts then.’
We were saved all further argument by the appearance of Maria. She was still an elderly woman, still had a lined face; but she wore a well-cut black suit, a gilt-and-garnet brooch at one lapel. Stockings, shoes with the beginning of high heels, a touch of powder and rouge, lipstick … the sort of middle-class matron of sixty one might see in any fashionable Athens street. She stood with a faint smile -the surprise, the quick-change entrance. Conchis watched me drily.
‘This is Madame Catherine Athanasoulis, who has made a speciality of peasant roles. She has helped me many times before.’
He held out a hand politely for her to come nearer. She advanced with an open-palmed gesture, almost one of regret at having deceived me so completely. I gave her a cold and wide-eyed look; she wasn’t going to have any compliments from me. She reached out a hand. I ignored it. After a moment, she gave a little mock bow of the head.
Conchis said, ‘Les valises?
‘ Tout est prêt.’ She eyed me. ‘Eh bien, monsieur. Adieu.’
She withdrew as composedly as she had come. I had begun to feel something like despair – or shock. I knew Conchis was lying, but he was lying at such length, so circumstantially; and I was to have no relief, because he looked across the gravel.
‘Good. Here is Joe. This is what we call the désintoxication.’
It was the Negro, strolling up from the beach path in an elegant dark-tan suit, a pink shirt, a club tie, dark glasses. He raised an easy hand as he saw us waiting for him and came across the gravel; a smile at Conchis, a dry quirk of the mouth in my direction.
‘This is Joe Harrison.’
‘Hi.’
I said nothing. He gave a little side-glance at Conchis, then reached out a hand. ‘Sorry, friend. Just did what master said.’
He was American, not West Indian. Once more I ignored the hand.
‘With some conviction.’
‘Yeah, well – of course we niggers are all first cousin to apes. You call us eunuchs, we just don’t understand.’ He said it lightly, as if it didn’t matter any more.
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Okay.’
We exchanged a wary look, then he turned to Conchis. ‘They’re coming to pick up the stuff.’
Conchis said, ‘I have some last things upstairs.’
I was left standing there with Joe. More figures appeared on the path, four or five sailors in their navy-blue singlets and white shorts. Four looked like Greeks, but one, with pale blond hair, looked Scandinavian or German. The girls had hardly talked about the crew – they were just ‘Greek sailors’. I felt a new prick of jealousy, and a deeper one of uncertainty – I truly began to feel now that I was discarded, a mere encumbrance … and a fool. They all knew I was a fool. I eyed Joe, who was leaning idly against one of the arches. He seemed a poor bet, but my only one.
‘Where are the girls?’
His dark glasses lazily surveyed me. ‘In Athens.’ But then his look swivelled briefly back towards the doors through which the old man had disappeared. He glanced at me again with the trace of a rueful smile. Then he shook his head, once, with a kind of shared sympathy.
‘What does that mean?’ He gave a small shrug: that was the way it was. I said, ‘You’re speaking from experience?’
He murmured softly, ‘Could be.’
The sailors came up past us and went to the crates. Then Hermes appeared beside the house, carrying more suitcases over the gravel down towards the beach. Maria followed him in her finery, a few steps behind. Joe lounged away from the column and came a step or two towards me, holding out a packet of American cigarettes. I hesitated, then took one, bent to the light he offered. He spoke in a low voice.
‘She said to say sorry.’ I sought his eyes as they lifted from lighting his own cigarette. ‘No bullshit. She meant it. Right?’ Still I stared at him. Once again Iris eyes slipped past me towards the doors, as if he didn’t want to be caught talking confidentially to me. ‘Man, you’re holding a lousy pair against a full house. No chance. Compris?’
Somehow that convinced me, though totally against my will, more than anything that the old man himself had said. I was almost tempted to give Joe some bitter message back, but before I could frame it, it was too late. Conchis stood in the doorway with a small suitcase. He spoke to one of the sailors in Greek. Joe touched my arm, again almost as if in secret sympathy, and then moved forward to take the case from Conchis’s hand. As he came back past me, he pulled a face.
‘Know the one about the white man’s burden? They make it, we carry it.’
He raised a hand in casual farewell, then set off after Hermes and Maria. The sailors moved off with the crates, and I was left once more alone with Conchis. He opened his hands, unsmiling, almost taunting : I had better believe him now.
I said, ‘You haven’t heard the last of me.’
‘I should not be foolish. Money goes a long way in this country.’
‘And sadism, apparently.’
He examined me one last time. ‘Hermes will return to lock up in a minute.’ I said nothing. ‘You had your chance. I suggest you reflect on what it is in you that caused you to miss it.’
‘Go to hell.’
He said absolutely nothing, simply fixed my eyes, as if he could hypnotize me into a retraction.
I said, ‘I mean that.’
A moment, then he slowly shook his head. ‘You do not know your meaning yet. Or mine.’
Then – he must have known I should not have taken his hand – he moved past me. But at the steps he stopped and turned.
‘I forgot. My sadism does not extend to your stomach. Hermes will give you a packed lunch. It is prepared.’
He was some way across the gravel before I could think of a parting shot. I shouted it after him.
‘Hydrocyanic acid sandwiches?’
But he took no notice. I felt like running after him, catching his arm, detaining him by force, anything; and equally knew myself powerless. Hermes appeared on his way back from the beach, beyond Conchis. I heard the sound of the power dinghy going out on a first ferry to the yacht. The two men stopped, exchanged a word, shook hands, then the donkey-driver came on towards me. Conchis went down out of sight. Hermes stood at the foot of the steps and presented me with his morose wall eye; then lifted a bunch of keys. I spoke in Greek.
‘The two girls – are they on the yacht?’
He frogged his mouth: he did not know.
‘Have you seen them today?’
His chin went up: no.
I turned disgustedly away. Hermes followed me indoors, even up the stairs, but he abandoned me at the door of my bedroom and went off to lock windows and shutters elsewhere … not that I noticed that, because I had no sooner entered my room when I saw that I had been left a parting present. It lay on the pillow: an envelope stuffed full of Greek currency notes. I counted them out: twenty million drachmai. Even allowing for the acute inflation of the time, that was well over two hundred pounds, more than a third of my annual salary. I knew then why the old man had slipped upstairs before he left. The money, with its implicit suggestion that I too could be bought, enraged me; it was the final humiliation. At the same time it was a lot of money. I thought of rushing down to the jetty and throwing it all in his face – there was still time, the powerboat had to unload and return; but I thought only. When I heard Hermes returning, I hastily stuffed the money inside my duffel-bag.
He watched in the doorway while I packed the rest of my few things; and once more followed me downstairs, as if my every movement had to be watched.
A last look round the music-room, at the nail, the mark on the empty wall, where the Modigliani had hung; a moment or two later I was standing alone under the colonnade listening to Hermes while he locked the music-roo
m door from inside. I heard the boat returning below, I was still tempted to go and … but I had to do something positive, rather than symbolic. With any luck I could talk the village police sergeant into letting me use the coastguard station radio. I was beyond caring whether I made a fool of myself. I nursed one last hope – that Conchis had told the twins some new story that made their absence from the island seem plausible to them. It occurred to me that they might have received some equivalent of what he had told me of them, had been persuaded that I was in his pay, lying to Julie throughout … I had to get in touch with them, even if it was finally only to discover that they were as he claimed. But until I heard it straight from them, I would not believe it. I clung to my memory of Julie in the water, Julie at countless moments that must have been sincere; and to her Englishness, all that middle-class and university background we shared. To sell oneself, even to a Conchis, required a kind of humourlessness, a lack of objectivity, a shallowness that lost nothing if it traded decency for luxury, mind for body … but it was no good. However much green English scepticism I tried to set against decadent European venality, I was still left with the mystery of how two such ravishing girls accepted the absence of admirers, kept themselves so in purdah for Conchis; then there was his seeming intellectual hold over Julie, his wealth, a certain air both girls betrayed of being more used to this life of luxury than they pretended. I gave up.
I heard Hermes come out by the seldom-used door with the dolphin knocker under the side-colonnade, and start locking it. I decided: the faster I set things in motion, the better. I turned and marched for the gate, jumping off the edge of the colonnade on to the gravel. Hermes called sharply from the door.
‘The food, kyrios!’
I waved a hand at him without stopping: to hell with food also. I saw his donkey, bulging sacks already tied to its back, tethered beside the cottage door. As if in some idiotic fear of not carrying out Conchis’s orders to the letter, the islander ran down the colonnade and over the bare earth to where the beast was tethered. I went on past, taking no notice of him, though I half saw that he snatched something from the shade inside the doorway. Then I heard his hurried footsteps on the gravel behind me. I turned to wave him angrily away again. But I stopped, my hand frozen.
What he held out was a rush basket. It was one I had seen before, beside Julie, during our long Sunday together. I stared slowly up from it to Hermes’s eyes. He held it a shade closer, coaxingly, for me to take. Then he said in Greek, You must. For the first time since I had known him, there was the ghost of a smile on his face.
Still I hesitated. Then I dropped my duffel-bag and took the basket and pulled it open: two apples, two oranges, two packages wrapped in white paper and neatly tied – and beneath, half hidden, the gold foil of the neck of a bottle of French champagne. I shifted one of the sandwich packets to see the label: Krug. I looked up with what must have seemed a childish bewilderment. He said one word.
‘Perimeni.’
She waits.
Then he nodded behind him, back towards the cliffs east of the private beach. I looked, expecting to see a figure. In the silence I heard the boat returning from the yacht. This time Hermes pointed, then repeated the same word.
You do not know my meaning yet.
To preserve some semblance of dignity, I walked as far as the steps across the gulley; but there I could hold back no longer and raced down them, and up the other side. The statue of Poseidon stood in the sun, but on this occasion somewhat less than majestically. A home-made notice, flapping in the breeze like a forgotten garment on a line, had been suspended from the outstretched arm. It showed only an indicating hand, but it pointed through the trees towards the cliffs. I strode down through the bushes into the pines.
56
Almost at once I spotted her through the thin trees. She stood at the cliff-edge, in pale blue trousers, a dark-blue shirt, a pink sun-hat, and she was looking towards me. I waved, and she waved back – but then, to my surprise, instead of coming towards me, she turned and went out of sight down the steep slope immediately above the sheer cliff. I was too relieved, too elated, to think much of it – perhaps she wanted to signal to the yacht that all was well. I broke into a run. Not twenty-five seconds passed between my first seeing her and my arrival at where she had stood … and where I now stood myself incredulously. The ground fell away steeply for some twenty yards before it came to the lip of the cliff proper. There was nowhere to hide, a litter of small rocks and scree, a few patches of scrub not a foot high; but she had completely disappeared. No one as conspicuously dressed … I dropped the basket and my duffel-bag and went along the top of the slope in the direction she had taken … but it was pointless. There were no large rocks, no secret gulleys. I scrambled down to the very edge of the cliff, but only a trained climber could have descended there, and then only with a rope.
It was a reversal of all physical reason. She had vanished into thin air. I stared down at the yacht. The dinghy was being hoisted aboard, I could see at least ten people on deck, crew and passengers; the long hull was already on the move and heading slowly along to where I stood, as if I was to be publicly mocked one last time.
Then without warning there was a stage cough behind me. I jerked round – to an extraordinary sight. Some fifteen yards behind me, half way up the slope, Julie’s head and shoulders had emerged from the ground. Her elbows were on the ground itself and behind her head, like some sinister and grotesque black halo, was a jagged circle. But there was nothing sinister about her mischievous face.
‘Have you lost something? Can I help you?’
‘Christ almighty.’
I climbed closer, stopped six feet from where she still grinned up at me. Her skin was much browner, now approached her sister’s degree of tan. I could see the circle behind her was an iron lid, like a hinged drain-cover. Stones had been cemented all round its upper rim. Julie herself was in a vertical iron tube sunk into the ground. Two wire hawsers ran down from the lid, some counterbalance system. She bit her lips, and curled a beckoning finger.
‘Won’t you come into my parlour, said the
It was apt. There was a real spider on the island that made neat little trapdoors on every bank; I’d watched the boys trying to entice them out. But suddenly her voice and expression changed.
‘Oh you poor thing – what’s happened to your hand!’
‘He didn’t tell you?’ She shook her head, concerned. ‘Not to worry. It’s past history now.’
‘It looks horrid.’
She climbed out. We stood a moment, then she reached, took the scarred hand and examined it, looked solicitously up into my eyes. I smiled.
‘That’s nothing. Wait till you hear the dance he’s led me over this last twenty-four hours.’
‘I rather thought he might.’ She looked down at the hand again. ‘But it’s bearable now?’
‘When I get over the shock.’ I nodded at the hole in the ground. ‘What the hell is it?’
‘The Germans. In the war.’
‘Oh God. I should have guessed.’
The observation post … Conchis would have simply concealed the entrance, blocked off the front slits. We went beside it. The hole plunged down into darkness. I could see a ladder, massive counterweights at the end of the wires, a dim patch of concrete floor at the bottom. Julie reached and tipped the lid. It fell smoothly down to ground level, where the incrusted and projecting stones on the upper side fitted the surrounding ones like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. One would never have seen it; one might just, walking over the lid, have noticed an odd fixity about the stones – but even then the neck was in a little prominence one would ordinarily have skirted.
I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’
‘You surely didn’t think; I would –’ but she broke off.
‘Just half an hour ago he told me you were his mistress. That I’d never see you again.’
‘His mistress!’
‘And June as well.’
‘But you can’t have believed him!’ I received her first serious, or nearly serious, look. ‘If you believed him for a moment I’ll never speak to you again.’
A moment later my arms were round her and our mouths had met. It was brief, but agreeably convincing. She pulled her head gently away.
‘I think we’re being watched.’
I looked back down to the yacht; and released her body, but not her hands.
‘Where’s June?’
‘Guess.’
‘I’m beyond guessing.’
‘I’ve had a long walk today. A lovely walk.’
‘The village? Hermes’s house?’
‘We’ve been there since Friday. So close to you. It was awful.’
‘Maurice … ?’
‘Has lent it to us for the summer.’ Her smile deepened. ‘I know. I’ve been pinching myself as well.’
‘Good God. This other thing he was planning?’
‘Abandoned. He suddenly announced one evening that he hadn’t time for it. There was some talk about next year, but… ‘ she gave a little shrug. That was to be the cost of our happiness. I sought her eyes.
‘You still want to stay?’
She held my eyes a second, then bowed her head. ‘If you think we could stand each other just as ordinary people. Without all the excitement.’
‘That’s so silly I’m not going to answer it.’
She smiled up. ‘Then it looks as if you’re stuck with me.’
The siren of the yacht sounded. We turned, hand in hand. It had come opposite us, some three hundred yards offshore. Julie raised an arm and waved; and after a moment I did the same. I could make out Conchis and Joe, with Maria’s black figure between them. They raised their arms and waved back. Conchis called towards a man in the bows. There was an ascending plume of smoke, a report, a tiny black object hurtling skywards. It climbed, slowed, then burst. A shower of incandescent stars glittered for a few moments with an explosive crackle against the azure; then another, then a third. Fireworks, for the end of a theatre. A prolonged moan on the siren, more waving arms. Julie put her hands to her mouth and kissed them out to the yacht, I waved again. Then the long white hull began to curve away from the coast.
