by John Fowles
The second cottage had another padlocked bolt on its back door; but though the last one had the bolt, it was simply tied down with a piece of fishing-twine. I struck a match. Half a minute later I was standing inside the cottage, in another bedroom. Nothing in the darkened room looked in the least suspicious. I went through to the kitchen and living-room in front. From it a door led straight through into the cottage next door; another kitchen; beyond it, another musty bedroom. I opened one or two drawers, a cupboard. The cottages were, beyond any possibility of faking, typical impoverished islanders’ homes. The one strange thing was that they were empty.
I came out and fastened the bolt handle with a bit of wire. Fifty yards or so away among the olives I saw a whitewashed privy. I went over to it. A spider’s web stretched across the hole in the ground. A collection of torn squares of yellowing Greek newspaper hung from a rusty nail.
Defeat.
I went to the cistern beside the double cottage, took off the wooden lid and let down an old bucket on a rope that stood beside the white washed neck. Cool air rushed up, like an imprisoned snake. I sat on the neck and swallowed great mouthfuls of the water. It had that living, stony freshness of cistern water, so incomparably sweeter than the neutral flavour of tap-water.
A brilliant red-and-black jumping spider edged along the puteal towards me. I laid my hand in its path and it jumped on to it; holding it up close I could see its minute black eyes, like gig-lamps. It swivelled its massive square head from side to side in an arachnoidal parody of Conchis’s quizzing; and once again, as with the owl, I had an uncanny apprehension of a reality of witchcraft; Conchis’s haunting, brooding omnipresence.
“What really defeated me was this proof that I was not indispensable. I had assumed the ‘experiment’ needed my presence above all; but perhaps it didn’t, and I had been a mere side-plot, discarded as soon as I had tried to gain too much prominence. What riled me most was to find myself apparently in the same category as Mitford, and for no clear reason at all. I felt fear as well, a sharp paranoia. Although he might have found some lie to tell the girls, some reason for my not being able to come that weekend, there remained the possibility that they were all three deceiving me. But how could I believe that now? All those kisses, franknesses, caresses, that token coupling in the night water … no girl could pretend to want and to enjoy such things unless she was a prostitute. It was unthinkable. Perhaps the clue lay in dispensability. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view. But it seemed much more like a piece of gratuitous cruelty, closer to tormenting dumb animals than any true teaching. I was drowned in a sea of mistrust – not only of outward appearances but of deeper motives as well. For weeks I had had a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self-or the linked structures of ideas and conscious feeling that constitute self; and now it was like lying on the workshop bench, a litter of parts, the engineer gone … and not being quite sure how one put oneself together again.
I found myself thinking of Alison, for the first time less with guilt than regret. I almost wished she was there, beside me, for companionship. To talk to, nothing more, like a man friend. I had hardly given her a thought since the return of my unopened letter. Events had already swept her into the past. But now I recalled those moments on Parnassus: the sound of the waterfall, the sun on my back, her closed eyes, her whole body arched to have me deeper … that strange certainty I had always had of knowing, even when she lied, how and why she lied; that she couldn’t lie, in simple fact. Of course it made her, in daily terms, dull and predictable, rather tediously transparent. What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness. That had always been too easy with Alison. And anyway … I stood up and screwed out my promiscuity of mind with my cigarette. She was spilt milk; or spilt semen. I wanted Julie ten times more.
I spent the rest of that afternoon searching the coast eastward of the three cottages, then came back past them to Bourani again, nicely timed for tea under the colonnade. But the place remained as deserted as before. I spent a further hour searching for a note, a sign, anything; it became like the idiot ransacking of a drawer already ten times searched.
At six I set off back to the school, with nothing but a useless rage of frustration. With Conchis; with Julie; with everything.
On the far side of the village there was another harbour, used exclusively by the local fishermen. It was avoided by everyone from the school, and by everyone with any claim to social ton in the village. Many of the houses had been ruthlessly dilapidated. Some were no more than the carious stumps of walls; and the ones that still stood along the broken quays had corrugated iron roofs, concrete patches and other unsightly evidence of frequent mending. There were three tavernas, but only one was of any size. It had a few rough wooden tables outside its doors.
Once before, coming back from one of my solitary winter walks, I had gone there for a drink; I remembered the taverna-keeper was loquacious and comparatively easy to understand. By island standards, and perhaps because he was Anatolian by birth, conversable. His name was Georgiou; rather foxy-faced, with a lick of grey-black hair and a small moustache that gave him a comic resemblance to Hitler. On Sunday morning I sat under a catalpa and he came up, obsequiously delighted to have caught a rich customer. Yes, he said, of course he would be honoured to have an ouzo with me. He called one of his children to serve us … the best ouzo, the best olives. Did things go well at the school, did I like Greece … ? I let him ask the usual questions. Then I set to work. Twelve or so faded carmine and green caïques floated in the still blue water in front of us. I pointed to them.
‘It’s a pity you do not have any foreign tourists here. Yachts.’
‘Ech.’ He spat out an olive-stone. ‘Phraxos is dead.’
‘I thought Mr Conchis from Bourani kept his yacht over here sometimes.’
‘That man.’ I knew at once that Georgiou was one of the village enemies of Conchis. ‘You have met him?’
I said no, but I was thinking of visiting him. He did have a yacht then?
Yes. But it never came to this side of the island.
Had he ever met Conchis?
‘Ochi.’ No.
‘Does he have houses in the village?’
Only the one where Hermes lived. It was near a church called St Elias, at the back of the village. As if changing the subject I asked idly about the three cottages near Bourani. Where had the families gone?
He shook his hand to the south. ‘To the mainland. For the summer.’ He explained that a minority of the island fishermen were semi-nomadic. In winter they fished in the protected waters off Phraxos; but in summer, taking their families with them, they wandered round the Peloponnesus, even as far as Crete, in search of better fishing. He returned to the cottages.
He pointed down and then made drinking gestures. ‘The cisterns are bad. No good water in summer.’
‘Really – no good water?’
‘No.’
‘What a shame.’
‘It is his fault. He of Bourani. He could make better cisterns. But he is too mean.’
‘He owns the cottages then?’
‘Vevaios.’ Of course. ‘On that side of the island, all is his.’
‘All the land?’
He ticked off his stubby fingers: Korbi, Stremi, Bourani, Moutsa, Pigadi, Zastena … all names of bays and capes around Bourani; and apparently this was another complaint against Conchis. Various Athenians, ‘rich people’, would have liked to build villas over there. But Conchis refused to sell one metre; deprived the island of badly needed wealth. A donkey loaded with wood tripped down the quay towards us; rubbing its legs together, picking its fastidious way like a model. This news proved Demetriades’s complicity. It must have been common gossip.
‘I suppose you see his guests in the village?’
But he shrugged. ‘Isos.’ Perhaps. He did not know.
Then I had a piece of luck. A little old man appeared from a side-alley and came behind Georgiou’s back; a battered old seaman’s cap, a blue canvas suit so faded with washing that it was almost white in the sunlight. Georgiou threw him a glance as he passed our table, then called.
‘Eh, Barba Dimitrakil Ela.’ Come. Come and speak with the English professor.
The old man stopped. He must have been about eighty; very shaky, unshaven, but not totally senile. Georgiou turned to me.
‘Before the war. He was the same as Hermes. He took the mail to Bourani.’
I pressed the old man to take a seat, ordered more ouzo and another meze.
‘You know Bourani well?’
He waved his old hand; he meant, very well, more than he could express. He said something I didn’t understand. Georgiou, who had some linguistic resourcefulness, piled our cigarette boxes and matches together like bricks. Building.
‘I understand. In 1929?’
The old man nodded.
‘Did Mr Conchis have many guests before the war?’
‘Many, many guests.’ This surprised Georgiou; he even repeated my question, and got the same answer.
‘Foreigners?’
‘Many foreigners. Frenchmen, Englishmen, all.’
‘What about the English masters at the school? Did they go there?’
‘Ne, ne. Oloi.’ Yes, all of them.
‘You can’t remember their names?’ He smiled at the ridiculousness of the question. He couldn’t even remember what they looked like. Except one who was very tall.
‘Did you meet them in the village?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes.’
‘What did they do at Bourani, before the war?’
‘They were foreigners.’
Georgiou was impatient at this exhibition of village logic. ‘Ne, Barba. Xenoi. Ma ti ekanon?
‘Music. Singing. Dancing.’ Once again Georgiou didn’t believe him; he winked at me, as if to say, the old man is soft in the head. But I knew he wasn’t; and that Georgiou had not come to the island till 1946.
‘What kind of singing and dancing?’
He didn’t know; his rheumy eyes seemed to search for the past, and lose it. But he said, ‘And other things. They acted in plays.’ Georgiou laughed out loud, but the old man shrugged and said indifferently, ‘It is true.’
Georgiou leant forward with a grin. ‘And what were you, Barba Dimitraki? Karayozis?’ He was talking about the Greek shadowplay Punch.
I made the old man see I believed him. ‘What kind of plays?’
But his face said he didn’t know. ‘There was a theatre in the garden.’
‘Where in the garden?’
‘Behind the house. With curtains. A real theatre.’
‘You know Maria?’
But it seemed that before the war it had been another housekeeper, called Soula, now dead.
‘When were you last there?’
‘Many years. Before the war.’
‘Do you still like Mr Conchis?’
The old man nodded, but it was a brief, qualified nod. Georgiou chipped in.
‘His eldest son was killed in the execution.’
‘Ah. I am very sorry. Very sorry.’
The old man shrugged; kismet. He said, ‘He is not a bad man.’
‘Did he work with the Germans in the Occupation?’
The old man raised his head, a firm no. Georgiou made a hawk of violent disagreement. They began to argue, talking so fast that I couldn’t follow them. But I heard the old man say, ‘I was here. You were not here.’
Georgiou turned to me with a wink. ‘He has given the old man a house. And money every year. The old man cannot say what he really thinks.’
‘Does he do that for the other relatives?’
‘Bah. One or two. The old ones. Why not? He has millions.’ He made the corruption gesture, meaning conscience money.
Suddenly the old man said to me, ‘Mia phora … once there was a big paneyiri with many lights and music and fireworks. Many fireworks and many guests.’
I had an absurd vision of a garden party: hundreds of elegant women, and men in morning-dress.
‘When was that?’
‘Three, five years before the war.’
‘Why was this celebration?’
But he didn’t know.
‘Were you there?’
I was with my son. We were fishing. We saw it up in Bourani. Many lights, many voices. Kai ta pyrotechnimata.’ And the fireworks.
Georgiou said, ‘Yah. You were drunk, Barba.’
‘No. I was not drunk.’
Try as I did, I could get nothing more out of the old man. So in the end I shook them both by the hand, paid the small bill, tipped Georgiou heavily, and walked back to the school.
One thing was clear. There had been Leverrier, Mitford, and myself; but then others whose names I did not yet know back in the ‘thirties; a long line. It gave me a return of great expectations; and the courage to face whatever new was being prepared in that now uncurtained theatre over on the far side.
I returned to the village that evening, and climbed up the narrow cobbled streets that led to the back of the village; past warrens of whitewashed walls, peasant interiors, through tiny squares shaded by almond trees. Great magenta sprays of bougainvillaea flamed in the sun or glowed in the pale evening shadows. It was a sort of kasbah area of the village, a very pretty kasbah, with its cross-glimpses of the plumbago-blue six-o’clock sea below, and the gold-green pine-covered hills above. People sitting outside their cottages greeted me, and I collected the inevitable small Pied Piper chain of children, who subsided into giggles if I looked at them and waved them away. When I came to the church I went in. I wanted to justify my presence in the quarter. It was densely gloomy, with a miasma of incense over everything; a row of ikons, sombre silhouettes set in smoky gold, stared down at me, as if they knew what an alien I was in their cryptlike Byzantine world.
After five minutes I came out. The children had mercifully disappeared, and I could take the alley to the right of the church. On one side there were the round cylinders of the church apses, on the other a wall eight or nine feet high. The alley turned and the wall continued. But halfway along it there was an arched gateway: a keystone with the date 1823 on it, and above that a place where there had once been a coat of arms. I guessed that the house inside had been built by one of the pirate ‘admirals’ of the War of Independence. There was a narrow door let into the right-hand of the two gate-doors, with a slit for letters. Above it, stencilled white on black on an old bit of sheet metal, was the name ‘Hermes Ambelas’. To the left the ground fell away behind the church. There was no way of looking over the wall from that side. I went to the small door and pushed it gently to see if it gave. But it was locked. The islanders were notoriously honest, thieves unknown; and I could not remember having seen an outer gate locked like that anywhere else on Phraxos.
The rocky lane dipped abruptly down between two cottages. The roof of the one on the right was below the wall of the house. At the bottom a cross alley took me back and round to the other side. There the ground fell away even more precipitously and I found myself looking up ten feet of vertical rock even before the wall foundation started. The house and its garden walls on this side continued the rock face, and I could see that in fact it was not a very big house, though still by village standards much too grandiose for a donkey-driver.
Two ground-floor windows, three upstairs, all shuttered. They were still in the last sunlight and must have given a fine view west over the village and the straits to the Argolian mainland. Was it a view Julie knew well? I felt like Blondel beneath Richard Cœur-de-Lion’s window; but not even able to pass messages by song. Down in a small square belo
w I could see two or three women interestedly watching me. I waved, strolled on, as if my look upwards had been idle curiosity. I came to yet another cross alley, and climbed up it to my starting-point outside Agios Elias. The house was impregnable to passing eyes.
Later, down in front of the Hotel Philadelphia, I looked back. I could see over all the intervening roofs the church and the house to the right of it, the five windows staring out.
They seemed defiant, but blind.
51
Monday was a day of academic chores; catching up on the Sisyphean piles of marking that seemed always to roll down on my desk; finalizing – miserable word for a miserable prospect – the end-of-term examination papers; and trying all the time not to think about Julie.
