by John Fowles
‘Constantly, during that first visit, I was shocked, as a would-be socialist. And ravished, as an homme sensuel. Givray-le-Duc was nothing more nor less than a vast museum. There were countless galleries, of paintings, of porcelain, of objets d’art of all kinds. A famous library. A really unsurpassed collection of early keyboard instruments. Clavichords, spinets, virginals, lutes, guitars. One never knew what one would find. A room of Renaissance bronzes. A case of Breguets. A wall of magnificent Rouen and Nevers faience. An armoury. A cabinet of Greek and Roman coins. I could inventory all night, for he had devoted all his life to this collecting of collections. The Boulles and Rieseners alone were enough to furnish six smaller chateaux. I suppose only the Hertford Collection could have rivalled it in modern times. Indeed when the Hertford was split up, de Deukans had bought many of the best pieces in the Sackville legacy. Seligmann’s gave him first choice. He collected in order to collect, of course. Art had not then become a branch of the stock market.
‘On a later visit he took me to a locked gallery. In it he kept his company of automata – puppets, some almost human in size, that seemed to have stepped, or whirred, out of a Hoffman story. A man who conducted an invisible orchestra. Two soldiers who fought a duel. A prima donna from whose mouth tinkled an aria from La Serva Padrona. A girl who curtsied to a man who bowed, and then danced a pallid and ghostly minuet with him. But the chief piece was Mirabelle, la Maitresse-Machine. A naked woman, painted and silk-skinned, who when set in motion lay back in her faded four-poster bed, drew up her knees and then opened them together with her arms. As her human master lay on top of her, the arms closed and held him. But de Deukans cherished her most because she had a device that made it unlikely that she would ever cuckold her owner. Unless one moved a small lever at the back of her head, at a certain pressure her arms would clasp with vice-like strength. And then a stiletto on a strong spring struck upwards through the adulterer’s groin. This repulsive thing had been made in Italy in the early nineteenth century. For the Sultan of Turkey. When de Deukans demonstrated her “fidelity” he turned and said, “C’est ce qui en elk est leplus vraisemblable.” It is the most lifelike thing about her.’
I looked at Lily covertly. She was staring down at her hands.
‘He kept Madame Mirabelle behind locked doors. But in his private chapel he kept an even more – to my mind – obscene object. It was encased in a magnificent early-medieval reliquary. It looked much like a withered sea-cucumber. De Deukans called it, without any wish to be humorous, the Holy Member. He knew, of course, that a merely cartilaginous object could not possibly survive so long. There are at least sixteen other Holy Members in Europe. Mostly from mummies, and all equally discredited. But for de Deukans it was simply a collectable, and the religious or indeed human blasphemy it represented had no significance for him. This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.
‘We never discussed religion or politics. He went to Mass. But only, I think, because the observance of ritual is a form of the cultivation of beauty. In some ways, perhaps because of the wealth that had always surrounded him, he was an extremely innocent man. Self-denial was incomprehensible to him, unless it formed part of some aesthetic regimen. I stood with him once and watched a line of peasants labouring a turnip-field. A Millet brought to life. And his only remark was, “It is beautiful that they are they and that we are we.” For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have pricked the conscience of even the vulgarest nouveau riche, were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence.
‘Altruistic behaviour – what he termed “le diable en puritain” – upset him deeply. For instance, since the age of eighteen I have refused to eat wild birds in any form at table. I would as soon eat human flesh as I would an ortolan, or a wild duck. This to de Deukans was distressing, like a false note in a music manuscript. He could not believe things had been written thus. And yet there I was, in black and white, refusing his pâté d’alouettes and his truffled woodcock.
‘But not all his life was to do with the dead. He had an observatory on the roof of his chateau, and a well-equipped biological laboratory. He never walked out in the park without carrying a small etui of test-tubes. To catch spiders. I had known him over a year before I discovered that this was more than another eccentricity. That he was in fact one of the most learned amateur arachnologists of his day. There is even a species named after him: Theridion deukansii. He was delighted that I also knew something of ornithology. And he encouraged me to specialize in what he jokingly called ornithosemantics – the meaning of bird-sound.
‘He was the most abnormal man I had ever met. And the politest. And the most distant. And certainly the most socially irresponsible. I was twenty-five – your age, Nicholas, which will perhaps tell you more than anything I can say how unable I was to judge him. It is, I think, the most difficult and irritating age of all. Both to be and to behold. One has the intelligence, one is in all ways treated as a grown man. But certain persons reduce one to adolescence, because only experience can understand and assimilate them. In fact de Deukans, by being as he was – certainly not by arguing – raised profound doubts in my philosophy. Doubts he was later to crystallize for me, as I will tell you, in five simple words.
‘I saw the faults in his way of life and at the same time found myself enchanted. That is, unable to act rationally. I have forgotten to tell you that he had manuscript after manuscript of unpublished music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To sit at one of the magnificent old harpsichords in his musicarium – a long rococo gallery in faded gold and pomona green, always in sunlight, as tranquil as an orchard – such experiences, such happiness, always give rise to the same problem: of the nature of evil. Why should such complete pleasure be evil? Why did I believe that de Deukans was evil? You will say, “Because children were starving while you played in your sunlight.” But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfil itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a higher pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.
‘And so I began to comprehend the selfishness of this solitary man. More and more I came to see that his blindness was a pose and yet his pose was an innocence. That he was a man from a perfect world lost in a very imperfect one. And determined, with a monomania as tragic, if not quite so ludicrous, as Don Quixote’s, to maintain his perfection. But then one day – ‘
Conchis never finished his sentence. With an electrifying suddenness a horn clamoured out of the darkness to the east. I thought immediately of an English hunting-horn, but it was harsher, more archaic. Lily’s previously wafting fan was frozen, her eyes on Conchis. He was staring out to sea, as if the sound had turned him to stone. As I watched, his eyes closed, almost as if he was silently praying. But prayer was totally foreign to his face.
The horn broke the tense night again. Three notes, the middle the highest. They echoed faintly from some steep hillside inland, the primitive timbre seeming to wake the landscape and the night, to summon from an evolutionary sleep.
I said to Lily, ‘What is it?’
She held my eyes for a moment; with a strange hint of doubt, as if she half suspected me of knowing perfectly well what it was.
‘Apollo.’
‘Apollo!’
Again the horn was blown, but at a higher pitch, and closer, too close to the house now for me to see anything, because of the parapet, even if it had not been night. Conchis still sat with his oblivious face. Lily stood and held out a hand.
‘Come.’
I let her lead me to where we had stood before, at the eastern end of the terrace. She stared down into the trees, and I glanced at her profile.
‘Someone seems to be mixing metaphors.’
She couldn’t quite press the smile out of her mouth. My hand was gently squeezed.
‘Be good. Watch.’
The gravel, the clearing, the trees: I could see nothing unusual.
‘I just wish I had a programme. That’s all.’
‘How very dull of you, Mr Urfe.’
‘Nicholas. Please.’
But whatever answer she might have given to that was forestalled. From somewhere between the house and Maria’s cottage there came a beam of light. It was not very strong, from a small electric torch. In it, some sixty yards away on the edge of the pines, a figure stood like a marble statue. With a new shock I realized that it was that of an absolutely naked man. He was just near enough for me to make out the black pubic hair, the pale scape of his penis; tall, well-built, well cast to be Apollo. His eyes seemed exaggeratedly large, as if they had been made up. On his head there was a glint of gold, a crown of leaves; laurel-leaves. He was facing us, immobile, with his yard-long horn, a narrow crescent with a flared end, held slightly out from his waist in his right hand. It struck me after a few seconds that his skin was an unnatural white, almost phosphorescent in the weak beam, as if his body as well as his face had been painted.
I looked back: Conchis still sat as before … then at Lily, who watched the figure without expression, yet with a kind of intentness – as if she had seen this rehearsed, and was now curious to see the full performance – that silenced any desire in me to be facetious. The charade itself shocked me less than the revelation that I was not the only young male at Bourani. I knew that at once.
‘Who is he?’
‘My brother.’
‘I thought you were meant to be an only child.’
The Apollo figure raised his horn sideways and blew a different note, sustained, yet more urgent, as if calling lost hounds.
Lily said slowly, without taking her eyes from him, ‘That is in the other world.’ And then, before I could challenge her further, she pointed to our left, beyond the cottage. A faint light shape came running out of the dark tunnel where the track to the house emerged from the trees. The torch-beam moved to her – it was a girl, and she too was naked, except for antique sandals that were laced up her calves; or perhaps not quite naked – either the pubic hair had been shaved or she wore some kind of cache-sexe. Her hair was bound back in a classical style, and as with the Apollo her body and face seemed unnaturally white. She was running too quickly for me to see her features. She threw a look back as she came towards us, she was being chased.
She ran towards the sea, between the Apollo and the two of us standing on the terrace. Then a third figure appeared behind her. Another man, running out of the trees and down the track. He was got up as a satyr, in some kind of puffed-out hairy tights, goat-haunches ; and he had the traditional head, a beard, two stubby horns. His naked torso was dark, almost black. As he ran closer, gaining on the girl, I had my next shock. A huge phallus rose from his loins. It was nearly eighteen inches long, far too massive to be meant realistically, but it was effectively obscene. I suddenly remembered the painting in the bowl of the kylix in the room below us; and also remembered I was a long way from home. I felt unsure, out of my depth, a lot more innocent and unsophisticated at heart than I liked to pretend. I slid a quick look at the girl beside me. I thought I detected a faint smile, a kind of excitement at cruelty, even when being mimed, that I did not like; it was very remote from the Edwardian ‘other world’ whose clothes she still wore.
I looked back at the nymph, at her white back and dishevelled hair, her seemingly near-exhausted legs. She plunged into the trees going down towards the sea, and disappeared – and then, in a coup de théâtre, a much stronger beam shone out from directly beneath where we stood. Standing there, in the place where the first girl had just disappeared, a place where the ground rose a little before falling abruptly towards the beach, was yet another, the most striking figure of all, a woman in a long saffron chiton. It had a blood-red hem where it ended at the knees. On her feet were black buskins with silver greaves, which gave her a grim gladiatorial look, in strange contrast to the bare shoulders and arms. Again the skin was unnaturally white, the eyes elongated by black make-up, and the hair was also elongated backwards in a way that was classical yet sinister. Over her shoulders she had a silver quiver and in her left hand, a silver bow. Something in her stance, as well as the distorted face, was genuinely frightening.
She stood there for several moments, cold and outraged and ominously barring the way. Then she reached back with her free hand and with a venomous quickness pulled an arrow out of the quiver. But before she could fit it to the bow-string, the beam tracked back to the arrested satyr. He stood spectacularly terrified, his arms flung back and his head averted, the mock phallus – in the better light I could see it was jet black – still erect. It was a pose without realism, yet dramatic. The beam swept back to the goddess. She had her bow at full stretch, the arrow went. I saw it fly, but lost it in the darkness. A moment later the beam returned to the satyr. He was clutching the arrow – or an arrow – to his heart. He fell slowly to his knees, swayed a second, then slumped sideways among the stones and thyme-bushes. The stronger torch lingered on him, as if to impress the fact of his death; then it was extinguished. Beyond, in the weaker original beam, Apollo stood impassively, surveying, a pale marmoreal shadow, like some divine umpire, president of the arena. The goddess began to walk, a striding huntress walk, her silver bow held in one hand by her side, towards him. They stood facing us for a moment, then each raised a free hand, the palm bent back, in a kind of final tableau, a grave salutation. It was another effective gesture. It had a fleeting, but genuine, dignity, the farewell of immortals. But then the remaining light went out. I could still just distinguish the two pale shadows, turning away now with the rather mundane haste of actors eager to get offstage while the lights are down.
Lily moved, as if to distract me from this more pedestrian side of things.
‘Excuse me one moment.’
She crossed towards where Conchis sat. I saw her bend over and whisper something. Then I looked back to the east. A dark shape moved towards the trees: the satyr. There was a tiny sound from the colonnade below, someone had accidentally bumped into a chair and made its legs scrape. Four other actors, two people doing the lighting … the mechanics of the mounting of this and the other incidents began to seem quite as uncanny as truly supernatural happenings. I tried to imagine what connection there was between the elderly man on the road by the hotel, the ‘pre-haunting’, and this scene I had just witnessed. I thought I had grasped, during Conchis’s telling, the point of the caractère of de Deukans. He had been talking of himself and me – the parallels were too close for it to mean anything else. ‘And discouraged every kind of question … ‘how unable ‘I was to judge him’ … ‘very few friends and no relations’ … but where did that tie in with this latest episode?
Plainly it was an attempt at the sort of ‘scandalous evocation’ mentioned in Le Masque Français. At that level I could laugh at it, and at any attempt to resurrect the psychic nonsense. But more and more I smelt some nasty drift in Conchis’s divertimenti. That phallus, the nakedness, the naked girl… I had an idea that sooner or later I was going to be asked to perform as well, that this was some initiation to a much darker adventure that I was prepared for, a society, a cult, I didn’t know what, where Miranda was nothing and Caliban reigned. I also felt irrationally jealous of all these other people who had appeared from nowhere to poach in ‘my’ territory, who were in some way in conspiracy against me, who knew more. I could try to be content as a spectator, to let these increasingly weird incidents flow past me as one sits in a cinema and lets the film flow past. But even as I thought that, I knew it was a bad analogy. People don’t build cinemas for an audience of one, unless they mean to use that one for a very special purpose.
At last Lily straightened from where she had stood bent beside Conchis, talking in a low voice to him. She came back towards
me. There was a little sliver of knowingness in her eyes now: an unmistakable curiosity to see how I had reacted to this latest development. I smiled and made a little movement of the head: I was impressed, but not fooled … and I was very careful to show her that I was not shocked, either. She smiled.
‘I must go now, Mr Urfe.’
‘Congratulate your friends on their performance.’
She pretended to be taken aback, and her eyelids fluttered as if she knew she was being teased.
‘You surely did not suppose they were merely performing?’
I said gently, ‘Come off it.’
But I received no answer. Her eyes had the tiniest trace of a smile, and then she very delicately bit her lips, before touching her skirt and dropping me the ghost of a curtsey.
‘When shall I see you again?’
Her eyes flicked back towards Conchis, though her head did not move. Once again I was to believe we were in collusion together.
‘That depends on when I am next woken from my immemorial sleep.’
‘I hope it’s very soon.’
She raised her fan to her lips, just as she had with the recorder brush, and pointed surreptitiously back to Conchis. I watched her disappear into the house, then I went and stood across the table from him. He seemed recovered from his trance. His eyes were even more intense than usual, like black phosphorus, almost leechlike; much more the eyes of a scientist checking the result of an experiment, the state of the guinea-pig, than of a host seeking approval from a guest after a spectacular entertainment. I knew he knew I was confused, even though I looked down at him from behind my chair with the same small sceptical smile I had tried on Lily. Somehow I also knew that he no longer expected me to believe what I was supposed to believe. I sat down, and still he stared, and I had to say something.
