by John Fowles
It was about half past twelve when I got back to my room. There was the usual hot airlessness of nocturnal Athens in summer. I had just stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower when the telephone rang by the bed. I went naked to it. I had a grim idea that it would be the critic, unsuccessful at Zappeion and now looking for a target for his endless Christian names.
‘Hallo.’
‘Meester Ouf It was the night porter. ‘There is telephone for you.’
There was a clicketing.
‘Hallo?’
‘Oh. Is that Mr Urfe?’ It was a man’s voice I didn’t recognize. Greek, but with a good accent.
‘Speaking. Who are you?’
‘Would you look out of your window, please?’
Click. Silence. I rattled the hook down, with no result. The man had hung up. I snatched my dressing-gown off the bed, switched out the light, and raced to the window.
My third-floor room looked out on a side street.
There was a yellow taxi parked on the opposite side with its back to me, a little down the hill. That was normal. Taxis for the hotel waited there. A man in a white shirt appeared and walked quickly up the far side of the street, past the taxi. He crossed the road just below me. There was nothing strange about him. Deserted pavements, street lights, closed shops, and darkened offices, the one taxi. The man disappeared. Only then was there a movement.
Directly opposite and beneath my window was a street-light fixed on the wall over the entrance to an arcade of shops. Because of the angle I could not see to the back of the arcade.
A girl came out.
The taxi-engine broke into life.
She knew where I was. She came out to the edge of the pavement, small, unchanged yet changed, and stared straight up at my window. The light shone down on her brown arms, but her face was in shadow. A black dress, black shoes, a small black evening handbag in her left hand. She came forward from the shadows as a prostitute might have done; as Robert Foulkes had done. No expression, simply the stare up and across at me. No duration. It was all over in fifteen seconds. The taxi suddenly reversed up the road to in front of her. Someone opened a door, and she got quickly in. The taxi jerked off very fast. Its wheels squealed scaldingly at the end of the street.
A crystal lay shattered.
And all betrayed.
67
At the last moment I had angrily cried her name. I thought at first that they had found some fantastic double; but no one could have imitated that walk. The way of standing.
I leapt back to the phone and got the night porter.
‘That call – can you trace it?’ He didn’t understand ‘trace’. ‘Do you know where it came from?’
No, he didn’t know.
Had anyone strange been in the hotel lobby during the last hour? Anyone waiting for some time?
No, Meester Ouf, nobody.
I turned off the shower, tore back into my clothes and went out into Constitution Square. I went round all the cafes, peered into all the taxis, went back to Zonar’s, to Tom’s, to Zaporiti’s, to all the fashionable places in the area; unable to think, unable to do anything but say her name and crush it savagely between my teeth.
Alison. Alison. Alison.
I understood, how I understood. Once I had accepted, and I had to accept, the first incredible fact: that she must have agreed to join them. But how could she? And why? Again and again: why.
I went back to the hotel.
Conchis would have discovered about the quarrel, perhaps even overheard it; if he used cameras, he could use microphones and tape—recorders. Approached her during the night, or early the next morning … those messages in the Earth: Hirondelle. The people in the Piraeus hotel, who had watched me try to persuade her to let me back into the room. As soon I mentioned her name, Conchis must have pricked up his ears; as soon as he knew she was coming to Athens, envisaged new complications in his plans. He would have had us followed from the moment we met; then persuaded her, all his charm, perhaps half deceiving her to begin with … I had a strange moment of non-sexual jealousy, a vision of his telling her the truth: I wish to give this selfish young man of yours a lesson he will never forget. I remembered old spats with Alison over something not entirely unconnected: various contemporary “writers and painters. Pointing out their faults had always pleased me more than hearing her fall for their virtues; even there I had used to feel slighted personally … as she had been shrewd enough to tell me, often enough.
Or had she always been working for him? Hadn’t he almost forced me to meet her by cancelling that half-term weekend? Even offered me the village house, if I wanted to bring her to the island? But I remembered something ‘June’ had said on that last night – how they improvized, how the ‘rat’ was granted parity with the experimenter in constructing the maze. I could believe that: so they must somehow, after her screaming at the Piraeus hotel, have found a way to buy Alison with their sick logic, their madness, their lies, their money … perhaps told her the great secret I was not allowed to know: why they had chosen me in the first place. I also remembered all the lies I had told them about Alison, over matters on which they must have had full knowledge. I growled out loud at the recall.
Then too, on reflection, it had always been odd how little use had been made of ‘June’. There were all her costumes in the Earth. A much fuller role must have been planned for her before Alison’s unexpected ‘entry’. That very first face-to-face – mouth-to-mouth -meeting with her, with its implicit sneer at my inconstancy, that repeated nonsense about the Three Hearts story – they showed how things might have gone. Then the Sunday, on the beach, that flaunting of her bare body … perhaps Conchis had not been sure of Alison so soon after the first approach, other contingencies had to be allowed for. Then Alison must have been won, and ‘June’ withdrew from the action. That “was also why Lily’s character and part had changed and why she had to take on – and so rapidly – the Circe role.
The sedan-coffin. It had not been empty; they would have wanted her to witness the success of their method. I writhed mentally under the mercilessness of it, the endless exposure. The trial: my ‘preying on young women’ – she must also have put them up to that. And the suicidal mood she had been in before I left London. All their knowledge of my past.
I was mad with anger. I thought of that genuine and atrocious wave of sadness I had felt when the news about Alison came. All the time she would have been in Athens; perhaps in the house in the village; or over at Bourani. Watching me, even. Playing an invisible Maria to Lily’s Olivia and my Malvolio – always these echoes of Shakespearean situations.
I walked up and down my room, imagining scenes where I had Alison at my mercy. Beating her black and blue, making her weep with remorse.
And then again, it all went back to Conchis, to the mystery of his power, his ability to mould and wield girls as intelligent as Lily; as independent as Alison. As if he had some secret that he revealed to them, that put them under his orders; and once again I was the man in the dark, the excluded, the eternal butt.
Not a Hamlet mourning Ophelia. But Malvolio.
I couldn’t sleep, and I felt rather like going down to Ellenikon and wringing the neck of the girl at the airline counter. Both the man who had first answered and the girl herself had, I saw now, been a little too anxious to establish who I was; they must have been persuaded, perhaps by Alison herself, to co-operate. But I knew I would get nowhere there. Very probably they would produce the same forged cuttings.
Meanwhile, I had to do something. I went down to the hotel foyer and found the night porter.
‘I want a line to London. This number.’ I wrote it down. A few minutes later he pointed to a box.
I stood listening to the phone burr-burr in my old flat in Russell Square. It went on a long time. At last it was picked up.
‘For goodness’ sake … who’s that?’
The operator said. ‘I have a long-distance call for you from Athens.’
&nbs
p; ‘From where!’
I said, ‘Okay, operator. Hallo?’
‘Who is that?’
She sounded a nice girl, but she was half asleep. Though the call cost me four pounds, it was worth it. I discovered that Ann Taylor had gone back to Australia, but six weeks before. No one had killed herself. A girl the girl on the other end didn’t know, but ‘I think she’s a friend of Ann’s’, had taken over the flat; she hadn’t seen her ‘for weeks’. Yes, she had blonde hair; actually she had only seen her twice; yes, she thought she was Australian. But who on earth …
Back in my room I remembered the flower in the buttonhole of the coat I had worn that afternoon. It was very wilted, but I took it out and stuck it in a glass of water.
I woke up late, having finally slept sounder than I expected. I lay in bed for a while, listening to the street-noises down below, thinking about Alison. I tried to recall exactly what her expression had been, whether there was any humour, any sympathy, an indication of anything, good or bad, in her small standing there. I could understand the timing of her resurrection. As soon as I got back to London I should have found out; so it had to be in Athens.
And now I was to hunt for her.
I wanted to see her, I knew I wanted to see her desperately, to dig or beat the truth out of her, to let her know how vile her betrayal was. To let her know that even if she crawled round the equator on her knees I could never forgive her. That I was finished with her. Disgusted by her. As disintoxicated of her as I was of Lily. I thought, Christ, if I could only lay my hands on her. But the one thing I would not do was hunt for her.
I only had to wait. They would bring her to me now. And this time I would use the cat.
I went down to a noon breakfast; and the first thing I discovered was that I did not have to wait. For there was another letter by hand for me. This time it contained just one word: London. I remembered that order in the Earth: Termination by July for all except nucleus. Nucleus, Ashtaroth the Unseen, was Alison.
I went to the travel agency and got a seat on the evening plane; and seeing a map of Italy on the wall, as I stood waiting for the ticket to be made out, I discovered where Subiaco was; and decided to take a gamble. The marionette would make the manipulators of strings wait a day, for a change.
“When I came out I went into the biggest bookshop in Athens, on the corner of Stadiou, and asked for a book on the identification of flowers. My belated attempt at resuscitation had not been successful, and I had had to throw the buttonhole away. The assistant had nothing in English, but there was a good French flora, she said, which gave the names in several languages. I pretended to be impressed by the pictures, then turned to the index; to Alyssum, p.69.
And there it was, facing page 69: thin green leaves, small white flowers, Alysson maritime … parfum de miel… from the Greek a (without), lyssa (madness). Called this in Italian, this in German. In English: Sweet Alison.
3
Le triomphe de la philosophie serait de Jeter du
jour sur l’obscurité des voies dont la providence se
sert pour parvenir auxfins qu’elle se propose sur
l’homme, et de tracer d’après cela quelque plan de
conduite qui pût faire connaitre à ce malheureux
individu bipède, perpétuellement ballotté par les
caprices de cet être qui dit—on le dirige aussi
despotiquement, la manière dont ilfaut qu’il
interprète les décrets de cette providence sur lui.
De Sade, Les Infortunes de la Vertu
68
Rome.
In my mind Greece lay weeks, not the real hours, behind. The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of luxury, a cosmetic of the overindulged senses, between the light, the truth, and their real selves. I couldn’t stand the loss of the beautiful nakedness, the humanity of Greece, and so I couldn’t stand the sight of the opulent, animal Romans; as one sometimes cannot stand one’s own face in a mirror.
Early the morning after my arrival I caught a local train out towards Tivoli and the Alban hills. After a long bus-ride I had lunch at Subiaco and then walked up a road above a green chasm. A lane branched off into a deserted glen. I could hear the sound of running water far below, the singing of birds. The road came to an end, and a path led up through a cool grove of ilex, and then tapered out into a narrow flight of steps that twisted up round a wall of rock. The monastery came into sight, clinging like an Orthodox Greek monastery, like a martin’s nest, to the cliff. A Gothic loggia looked out prettily over the green ravine, over a little apron of cultivated terraces falling below. Fine frescoes on the inner wall: coolness, silence.
There was an old monk in a black habit sitting behind the door through to an inner gallery. I asked if I could see John Leverrier. I said, an Englishman, on a retreat. Luckily I had his letter ready to show. The old man carefully deciphered the signature, then – to my surprise, I had decided I was on a wild-goose chase – nodded and silently disappeared down into some lower level of the monastery. I went on into a hall. A series of macabre murals; death pricking a young falconer with his longsword; a medieval strip-cartoon of a girl, first titivating herself in front of a glass, then fresh in her coffin, then with the bones beginning to erupt through the skin; then as a skeleton. There was the sound of someone laughing, an old monk with an amused face scolding a younger one in French as they passed through the hall behind me. ‘Oh, si tu penses que le football est un digne sujet de méditation …’
Then another monk appeared; and I knew, with shock, that this was Leverrier.
He was tall, very close-cut hair, with a thin-cheeked brown face, and glasses with ‘standard’ National Health frames; unmistakably English. He made a little gesture, asking if it was me who had asked for him.
‘I’m Nicholas Urfe. FromPhraxos.’
He managed to look amazed, shy, and annoyed, all at the same time. After a long moment’s hesitation, he held out his hand. It seemed dry and cold; mine was stickily hot from the walk. He was a good four inches taller than I am, and as many years older, and spoke with a trace of the incisiveness that young dons sometimes affect.
‘You’ve come all this way?’
‘It was easy to stop off at Rome.’
‘I thought I’d made it clear that – ‘
‘Yes, you did, but
We both smiled bleakly at the broken-ended sentences. He looked me in the eyes, affirming decision.
‘I’m afraid your visit must still be considered in vain.’
‘I honestly had no idea that you were…’ I waved vaguely at his habit. ‘I thought you signed your letters…’
‘Yours in Christ?’ He smiled thinly. ‘I am afraid that even here we are susceptible to the forces of anti-pretension.’
He looked down, and we stood awkwardly. He came, as if impatient with our awkwardness, to a kinder decision; some mollification.
‘Well. Now you are here – let me show you round.’
I wanted to say that I hadn’t come as a tourist, but he was already leading the way through to an inner courtyard. I was shown the traditional ravens and crows, the Holy Bramble, which put forth roses when Saint Benedict rolled on it – as always on such occasions the holiness of self-mortification paled in my too literal mind beside the vision of a naked man pounding over the hard earth and taking a long jump into a blackberry bush … and I found the Peruginos easier to feel reverence for.
I discovered absolutely nothing about the summer of 1951, though I discovered a little more about Leverrier. He was at Sacro Speco for only a few weeks, having just finished his novitiate at some monastery in Switzerland. He had been to Cambridge and read history, he spoke fluent Italian, he was ‘rather unjustifiably believed to be’ an authority on the pre-Reformation monastic orders in England, which was why he was at Sacro Speco – to consult sources in the famous library; a
nd he had not been back to Greece since he left it. He remained very much an English intellectual, rather selfconscious, aware that he must look as if he were playing at being a monk, dressing up, and even a little, complicatedly, vain about it.
Finally he took me down some steps and out into the open air below the monastery. I perfunctorily admired the vegetable and vineyard terraces. He led the way to a wooden seat under a fig tree a little farther on. We sat. He did not look at me.
‘This is very unsatisfactory for you. But I warned you.’
‘It’s a relief to meet a fellow-victim. Even if he is mute.’
He stared out across a box-bordered parterre into the blue heat of the sun-baked ravine. I could hear water rushing down in the depths.
‘A fellow. Not a victim.’
‘I simply wanted to compare notes.’
He paused, then said, ‘The essence of… his… system is surely that you learn not to “compare notes”.’ He made the phrase sound cheap. His wanting me to go was all but spoken. I stole a look at him.
