by John Fowles
‘I didn’t realize you were English.’
‘I spent the first nineteen years of my life in England. Now I have Greek nationality and my mother’s name. My mother was Greek.’
‘You go back to England?’
‘Rarely.’ He jumped swiftly on. ‘Do you like my house? I designed and built it myself.’
I looked round. ‘I envy you.’
‘And I envy you. You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.’
His face was without the offensively avuncular smile that usually accompanies such trite statements; and something intent about the look he gave me made it clear he did not mean it tritely.
‘Well. Now I will leave you for a few minutes. Then we shall have a look round.’ I had risen with him, but he gestured me down again. ‘Finish the cakes. Maria will be honoured. Please.’
He walked into the sunlight at the edge of the colonnade, stretched his arms and fingers, and with another gesture to me to help myself passed back inside the room. From where I was sitting I could see one end of a cretonne-covered sofa, a table with a bowl of milky flowers on it. The wall behind was covered by bookshelves, from the ceiling to the floor. I stole another kourabiè. The sun was beginning to float down on the mountains, and the sea glittered lazily at the foot of their ashy, opaque shadows. Then there was an unannounced shock of antique sound, a rapid arpeggio, far too real to come from a radio or record. I stopped eating, wondering what new surprise I was being presented with.
There was a moment’s silence, perhaps to leave me guessing. Then came the quiet plangent sound of a harpsichord. I hesitated, then decided that two could play the independence game. He played quickly, and then tranquilly; once or twice he stopped and retook a phrase. The old woman came and silently cleared away, without once looking at me, even when I pointed at the few cakes left and praised them in my stilted Greek; the hermit master evidently liked silent servants. The music came clearly out of the room, and flowed round me and out through the colonnade into the light. He broke off, repeated a passage, and then stopped as abruptly as he had begun. A door closed, there was a silence. Five minutes passed, then ten. The sun crept towards me over the red tiles.
I felt I ought to have gone in earlier; that now I had put him in a huff. But he appeared in the doorway, speaking.
‘I have not driven you away.’
‘Not at all. It was Bach?’
‘Telemann.’
‘You play very well.’
‘Once, I could play. Never mind. Come.’ Hisjerkiness was pathological; not only as if he wanted to get rid of me, but of time itself.
I stood up. ‘I hope I shall hear you play again.’ He made a little bow, refusing the invitation to invite. ‘One gets so starved of music here.’
‘Only of music?’ He went on before I could answer. ‘Come now. Prospero will show you his domaine.’
As we went down the steps to the gravel I said, ‘Prospero had a daughter.’
‘Prospero had many things.’ He turned a dry look on me. ‘And not all young and beautiful, Mr Urfe.’
I smiled tactfully, thinking he must be referring to memories of the war, and left a little silence.
‘You live alone here?’
‘What some would call alone. What others would not.’
It was said with a kind of grim contempt, and he stared ahead as he spoke. Whether to mystify me once more or because there was no more to be said to a stranger, I couldn’t tell.
He walked rapidly on, incessantly pointing things out. He showed me round his little vegetable-garden terrace; his cucumbers, his almonds, his long-leaved loquats, his pistachios. From the far edge of the terrace I could see down to where I had been lying only an hour or two before.
‘Moutsa.’
‘I haven’t heard it called that before.’
‘Albanian.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Snout. Because of the cliff over there.’
‘Not very poetic for such a lovely beach.’
‘The Albanians were pirates, not poets. Their word for this cape was Bourani. Two hundred years ago it was their slang word for gourd. Also for skull.’ He moved away. ‘Death and water.’
As I walked behind him, I said, ‘I wondered about the sign by the gate. Salle d’attente.’
‘The German soldiers put it there. They requisitioned Bourani during the war.’
‘But why that?’
‘I think they had been stationed in France. They found it dull being garrisoned here.’ He turned and saw me smile. ‘Precisely. One must be grateful for the smallest grain of humour from the Germans. I should not like the responsibility of destroying such a rare plant.’
‘You know Germany?’
‘It is not possible to know Germany. Only to endure it.’
‘Bach? Isn’t he reasonably endurable?’
He stopped. ‘I do not judge countries by their geniuses. I judge them by their racial characteristics. The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not. That is why I forgive the Jews and the Anglo-Saxons their countless vices. And why I should thank God, if I believed in God, that I have no German blood.’
We had come to an arbour of bourgainvillaea and morning glory at the end of the kitchen-garden terrace, set back and obliquely. He gestured me in. In the shadows, in front of an outcrop of rock, stood a pedestal. On it was a bronze manikin with a grotesquely enormous erect phallus. Its hands were flung up as well, as if to frighten children; and on its face it had a manic-satyric grin. It was only eighteen inches or so high, yet it emitted a distinct primitive terror.
‘You know what it is?’ He was standing close behind me.
‘Pan?’
‘A Priapus. In classical times every garden and orchard had one. To frighten away thieves and bring fertility. It should be made of pearwood.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘I had it made. Come.’ He said ‘Come’ as Greeks prod their donkeys; as if, it later struck me, I was a potential employee who had to be shown briefly round the works.
We went back towards the house. A narrow path zigzagged steeply down from in front of the colonnade to the shore. There was a small cove there, not fifty yards across at its cliffed mouth. He had built a miniature jetty, and a small green and rose-pink boat, an open island boat with an engine fitted, was tied up alongside. At one end of the beach I could see a small cave; drums of kerosene. And there was a little pump-house, with a pipe running back up the cliff.
‘Would you like to swim?’
We were standing on the jetty.
‘I left my trunks at the house.’
‘A costume is not necessary.’ His eyes were those of a chess-player who has made a good move. I remembered a joke of Demetriades’ about English bottoms; and the Priapus. Perhaps this was the explanation: Conchis was simply an old queer.
‘I don’t think I will.’
‘As you please.’
We moved back to the strip of shingle and sat on a large baulk of timber that had been dragged up away from the water.
I lit a cigarette and looked at him; tried to determine him. I was in something not unlike a mild state of shock. It was not only the fact that this man who spoke English so fluently, who was seemingly cultured, cosmopolitan, had come to ‘my’ desert island, had sprung almost overnight from the barren earth, like some weird plant. It was not even that he conformed so little to what I had imagined. But I knew that there must really be some mystery about the previous year, some deliberate and inexplicable suppression on Mitford’s part. Second meanings hung in the air; ambiguities, unexpectednesses.
‘How did you first come here, Mr Conchis?’
‘Will you forgive me if I ask you not to ask me questions?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good.’
And that was that. I bit my lip. If anyone else had been there I should have had to laugh.
Shadows began to fall across
the water from the pines on the bluff to our right, and there was peace, absolute peace over the world; the insects stilled and the water like a mirror. He sat in silence with his hands on his knees, apparently engaged in deep-breathing exercises. Not only his age but everything about him was difficult to tell. Outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet he watched me; even when he was looking away, he watched me; and he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to me, yet he watched and he waited. So we sat there in the silence as if we knew each other well and had no need merely to talk; and as a matter of fact it seemed in a way to suit the stillness of the day. It was an unnatural, but not an embarrassing, silence.
Suddenly he moved. His eyes had flicked up to the top of the small cliff to our left. I looked round. There was nothing. I glanced back at him.
‘Something there?’
‘A bird.’
Silence.
I watched his profiled face. Was he mad? Was he making fun of me? I tried to make conversation again.
‘I gather you’ve met both my predecessors.’ His head turned on me with a snake-like swiftness, accusingly, but he said nothing. I prompted. ‘Leverrier?’
‘Who told you this?’
For some reason he was terrified about what we might have said of him behind his back. I explained about the sheet of notepaper, and he relaxed a little.
‘He was not happy here. On Phraxos.’
‘So Mitford told me.’
‘Mitford?’ Again the accusing stare.
‘I suppose he heard gossip at the school.’
He searched my eyes, then nodded, but not very convincedly. I smiled at him, and he gave me the trace of a wary smile back. We were playing obscure psychological chess again. I apparently had the advantage, but I didn’t know why.
From the invisible house above came the sound of the bell. It rang twice; then after a moment, three times; then twice again. It clearly had a meaning, and it gave a voice to the peculiar state of tension that seemed to pervade both the place and its owner, and which clashed so oddly with the enormous peace of the landscape. Conchis stood at once.
‘I must go. And you have a long walk.’
Halfway up the cliff, where the steep path broadened, there was a small cast-iron seat. Conchis, who had set a quickish pace, sat down gratefully on it. He was breathing hard; so was I. He patted his heart. I put on a look of concern, but he shrugged.
‘When you grow old. The annunciation in reverse.’ He grimaced. ‘Not to be.’
We sat in silence and got our breaths back. I watched the yellowing sky through the delicate fenestrations in the pines. The sky in the west was hazy. A few evening wisps of cloud were curled high, tranced over the stillness of the world.
Then once more out of the blue he said quietly, ‘Are you elect?’
‘Elect?’
‘Do you feel chosen by anything?’
‘Chosen?’
‘John Leverrier felt chosen by God.’
‘I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.’
‘I think you may be.’
I smiled dubiously. ‘Thank you.’
‘It is not a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.’
‘And what chooses me?’
‘Chance wears many faces.’
But then he stood, although his hand rested momentarily on my shoulder, as if to reassure me; to say it did not matter. We climbed the rest of the hill. At last we were on the gravel by the side colonnade. He stopped.
So.
‘Thank you very much indeed.’ I tried to get him to return my smile, to confess that he had been pulling my leg; but his brooding face was drained of humour.
‘I make two requests of you. One is that you tell no one over there that you have met me. This is because of certain events that happened during the war.’
‘I’ve heard about that.’
‘What have you heard?’
‘The story.’
‘There are two versions of the story. But never mind now. For them I am a recluse. No one ever sees me. You understand?’
‘Of course. I shan’t tell anyone.’
I knew what the next request would be: not to visit him again.
‘My second request is that you come here next weekend. And stay Saturday and Sunday nights. That is, if you do not mind the walking back early on Monday morning.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much. I’d love to.’
‘I think we have many things to discover.’
‘ “We shall not cease from exploration”?’
‘You read that in the book on the beach?’
‘Didn’t you leave it for me to read?’
‘How should I have known you were coming?’
‘I had a feeling someone was watching me.’
His dark-brown eyes burnt into mine; he took a long moment to reply. The faintest ghost of a smile.
‘Do you feel you are being watched now?’
And once again his eyes flicked past my shoulders, as if he could see something inside the trees. I looked round. The pines were empty. I looked back at him; a joke? He was still smiling, a small dry smile.
‘Ami?’
‘I merely wondered, Mr Urfe.’ He held out his hand. ‘If for some reason you cannot come, leave a message at Sarantopoulos’s for Hermes. It will get here the next day.’
Looking as wary as he had begun to make me, I took his hand. He retained it beyond courtesy. There was a stronger pressure in his grip, a quizzical searching in his eyes.
‘Remember. Hazard.’
‘If you say.’
‘Go now.’
I had to smile. It was too absurd – the invitation, then this curt dismissal, as if I had exhausted his patience. But he would concede nothing, and in the end I gave him a dry little bow and thanked him for the tea. All I received was a dry little bow in return. I could only make my exit.
After fifty yards I looked back. He was still standing there, master of his domaine. I waved and he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture, one foot slightly advanced, as if in some kind of primitive blessing. When I looked back again, just before the trees hid the house, he had disappeared.
Whatever else he was he was not like anyone else I had ever met. Something more than mere loneliness, mere senile fantasies and quirks, burnt in his striking eyes, in that abrupt, probing then dropping conversation, in those sudden oblique looks at nothing. But I certainly didn’t think, as I went into the trees, that I should have the apparent answer within another hundred yards.
14
Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-coloured glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman’s glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label with the words Mireille, gantière embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before – musky, old-fashioned, like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he’d been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me.
Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn’t imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn’t imagine; and who she was, I couldn’t imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister – perhaps someone weak-minded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me – that explained the old man’s quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nerv
ous strangeness. He knew she was ‘out’; it explained the second place at the tea-table, and the mysterious bell.
I turned round, half-expecting to hear a giggle, a rather inane giggle; and then as I looked at the thick shadowy scrub near the gate, and remembered the grim reference to Prospero, a more sinister explanation came to me. Not weak-mindedness, but some terrible disfigurement. ‘Not all young and beautiful, Mr Urfe.’ I felt, for the first time on the island, a small cold shiver of solitary-place fear.
The sun was low and night comes with near-tropical speed in Greece. I didn’t want to have to negotiate the steep north-side paths in darkness. So I hung the glove neatly over the centre of the top bar of the gate and went on quickly. Half an hour later the charming hypothesis occurred to me that Conchis was a transvestite. After a while I began, for the first time in months, to sing.
I told no one, not even Méli, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about the mysterious third person in the house. I decided that a weak-minded wife was the most likely answer; it would explain the seclusion, the taciturn servants.
I tried to make up my mind about Conchis too. I was far from sure that he was not just a homosexual; that would explain Mitford’s inadequate warning, though not very flatteringly to me. The old man’s nervous intensity, that jerking from one place to another, one subject to another, hisj aunty walk, the gnomic answers and mystifications, the weird flinging-up of his arms when I left – all his mannerisms suggested, were calculated to suggest, that he wanted to seem younger and more vital than he was.
There remained the peculiar business of the poetry book, which he must have had ready to puzzle me. I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday, far out in the bay, and he could easily have slipped the things on to the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water. But it seemed an oddly devious means of introduction. Then what did my being ‘elect’ mean – our having ‘many things to discover’ ? In itself it could mean nothing; in regard to him it could mean only that he was mad. And ‘Some would say I lived alone’: I remembered the scarcely concealed contempt with which he had said that.
