by John Fowles
She crossed her legs. She sat in an old wing chair covered in pale-gold brocade; very erectly. All her ‘county’ horsiness had disappeared.
‘I wish you’d sit down.’
‘No.’
She accepted my bleakness with a little shrug, and looked me in the eyes; a shrewd, unabashed and even haughty stare. Then she began to speak.
‘My father died when I was eighteen. Mainly to escape from home I made a disastrous – a very stupid – marriage. Then in 1928 I met my second husband. My first husband divorced me a year later. We married. We wanted to be out of England for a time and we hadn’t much money. He applied for a teaching post in Greece. He was a classical scholar … loved Greece. We met Maurice. Lily and Rose were conceived on Phraxos. In a house that Maurice lent us to live in.’
‘I don’t believe a word. But go on.’
‘I funked having twins in Greece and we had to come back to England.’ She took a cigarette from a silver box on the tripod table beside her. I refused her offer of one; and let her light her cigarette herself. She was very calm; in her own house; ‘My mother’s maiden name was de Seitas. You can confirm that at Somerset House. She had a bachelor brother, my uncle, who was very well off and who treated me – especially after my father’s death – as much as a daughter as my mother would allow him to. She was a very domineering woman.’
I remembered that date Conchis had given me for the finding of Bourani: April, 1928.
‘You’re saying now that you never met … Maurice before 1929?’
She smiled. ‘Of course not. But I supplied him with all the details of that part of his story to you.’
‘And a sister called Rose?’
‘Go to Somerset House.’
‘I shall’
She contemplated the tip of her cigarette; made me wait a moment.
‘The twins arrived. A year later my uncle died. We found he had left me nearly all his money on condition that Bill changed his name by deed poll to de Seitas. Not even de Seitas-Hughes. My mother was mainly responsible for that meanness.’ She looked at the group of miniatures that hung beside her, beside the mantelpiece. ‘My uncle was the last male of the de Seitas family. My husband changed his name to mine. In the Japanese style. You can confirm that as well.’ She added, ‘That is all.’
‘It’s very far from all. My God.’
‘May I, as I know so much about you, call you Nicholas?’
‘No.’
She looked down, once again with that infuriating small smile that haunted all their faces – her daughters’, Conchis’s, even Anton’s and Maria’s in their different ways, as if they had all been trained to give the same superior, enigmatic smiles; as perhaps they had. And I suspected that if anyone had done the training, it would be this woman.
‘You mustn’t think that you are the first young man who has stood before me bitter and angry with Maurice. With all of us who help him. Though you are the first to reject the offer of friendship I made just now.’
‘I have some ugly questions to ask.’
‘Ask.’
‘Some others first. Why are you known in the village as an opera-singer?’
‘I’ve sung once or twice in local concerts. I was trained.’
‘ “The harpsichord is the plonkety-plonk one”?’
‘It is rather, isn’t it?’
I turned my back on her; on her gentleness; her weaponed ladyhood.
‘My dear Mrs de Seitas, no amount of charm, no amount of intelligence, no amount of playing with words can get you out of this one.’
She left a long pause.
‘It is you who make our situation. You must have been told that. You come here telling me lies. You come here for all the wrong reasons. I tell you lies back. I give you wrong reasons back.’
‘Are your daughters here?’
‘No.’
I turned to face her.
‘Alison?’
‘Alison and I are good friends.’
‘Where is she?’
She shook her head; no answer.
‘I demand to know where she is.’
‘In my house no one ever demands.’ Her face was bland, but as intent on mine as a chess player on the game.
‘Very well. We’ll see what the police think about that.’
‘I can tell you now. They will think you very foolish.’
I turned away again, to try to get her to say more. But she sat in the chair and I felt her eyes on my back. I knew she was sitting there, in her corn-gold chair, and that she was like Demeter, Ceres, a goddess on her throne; not simply a clever woman of nearly fifty, in 1953, in a room with a tractor droning somewhere near by in the fields; but playing a role so deep-rooted in fidelity to concepts I did not understand, to people I could not forgive, that it had almost ceased to be a role.
She stood up and went to a bureau in the corner and came back with some photos, which she laid out on a table behind the sofa. Then she went back to her chair; invited me to look at them. There was one of her sitting on the swing seat in front of the loggia. At the other end sat Conchis; between them was Benjie. Another photo showed Lily and Rose. Lily was smiling into the camera, and Rose in profile, as if passing behind her, was laughing. Once again I could see the loggia in the background. The next photo was an old one. I recognized Bourani. There were five people standing on the steps in front of the house. Conchis was in the middle, a pretty woman beside him was obviously Lily de Seitas. Beside her, his arm round her, was a tall man. I looked on the back; Bourani, 1935.
‘Who are the other two?’
‘One was a friend. And the other was a predecessor of yours.’
‘Geoffrey Sugden?’ She nodded, but with a touch of surprise. I put the photo down; decided to have a small revenge. ‘I traced one pre-war master at the school. He told me quite a lot.’
‘Oh?’ A shadow of doubt in her calm voice.
‘So do let’s stick to the truth.’
There was an awkward moment’s silence. Her eyes probed mine. ‘What did he say?’
‘Enough.’
We stared at each other. Then she stood up again and went to the desk. She took a letter out and detached a bottom sheet; checked it, then came and handed it to me. It was a carbon copy of Nevinson’s letter to me. On the top he had scrawled: ‘Hope this dust does not cause any permanent harm to the recipient’s eyes!’ She had turned away and was looking along some bookshelves beside the desk, but now she came back and silently handed me three books in exchange for the letter. I swallowed a sarcasm and looked at the one on top—a school textbook, clothbound in blue. An Intermediate Greek Anthology for Schools, compiled and annotated by William Hughes, M.A. [Cantab), 1932.
‘He did that as hackwork. The other two he did for love.’
The second one was a limited edition of a translation of Longus, dated 1936.
‘1936. Still Hughes?’
‘An author can use whatever name he likes.’
Holmes, Hughes: I remembered a detail from her daughter’s story.
‘Did he teach at Winchester?’
She smiled. ‘Briefly. Before we married.’
The other book was an edition of translations from the poems of Palamas, Solomos, and other modern Greek poets; even some by Seferis.
‘Maurice Conchis, the famous poet.’ I looked sourly up. ‘Brilliant choice on my part.’
She took the books and put them on the table. ‘I thought you did it very intelligently.’
‘Even though I’m a very foolish young man.’
‘Silliness and intelligence are not incompatible. Especially in your sex and at your age.’
She went and sat in her wing chair again, and smiled again at my unsmiling face; an insidiously warm, friendly smile from an intelligent, balanced woman. But how could she be balanced? I went to the window. Sunlight touched my hands. I could see Benjie and the Norwegian girl playing catch down by the loggia. Every so often their cries reached back to us.
‘Supp
osing I’d believed your story about Mr Rat?’
‘I should have remembered something very interesting about him.’
‘And?’
‘You would have come out again to hear it?’
‘Supposing I’d never traced you in the first place?’
‘A Mrs Hughes would in due course have asked you to lunch.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Of course not. She would have written a letter.’ She sat back, closed her eyes. ‘“My dear Mr Urfe, I must explain that I have obtained your name from the British Council. My husband, who was the first English master at the Lord Byron School, died recently and among his private papers we have come across an account, hitherto unknown to me, of a remarkable experience that … “‘ She opened her eyes and raised her eyebrows interrogatively.
‘And when would this call have come? How much longer?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.’
‘Won’t tell me.’
‘No. It is not for me to decide.’
‘Look, there’s just one person who has to do the deciding. If she—’
‘Precisely.’
She reached up to the mantelpiece beside her and took a photo out from behind an ornament there.
‘It’s not very good. Benjie took it with his Brownie.’
It was of three women on horseback. One was Lily de Seitas. The second was Gunhild. The third, in the middle, was Alison. She looked insecure, and was laughing down into the camera.
‘Has she met … your daughters?’
Her blue-grey eyes stared up at me. ‘Please keep it if you wish.’
I flung my will against hers.
‘Where is she?’
‘You may search the house.’
She watched me, chin on hand, in the yellow chair; unnettled; in possession. Of what, I didn’t know; but in possession. I felt like a green young dog in pursuit of a cunning old hare; every time I leapt, I bit brown air. I looked at the photo of Alison, then tore it in four and threw it into an ashtray on a console table by the window. Silence, which eventually she broke.
‘My poor resentful young man, let me tell you something. Love may really be more a capacity for love in oneself than anything very lovable in the other person. I believe Alison has a very rare capacity for attachment and devotion. Far more than I have ever had. I think it is very precious. And all I have done is to persuade her that she must not underestimate, as I believe she has all her life till now, what she has to give.’
‘How kind.’
She sighed. ‘Sarcasm again.’
‘Well, what do you expect? Tears of remorse?’
‘Sarcasm is so ugly. And so revealing.’
There was silence. After a time, she went on.
‘You are really the luckiest and the blindest young man. Lucky because you are born with some charm for women, even though you seem determined not to show it to me. Blind because you have had a little piece of pure womankind in your hands. Do you not realize that Alison possessed the one great quality our sex has to contribute to life? Beside which things like education, class, background, are nothing? And you’ve let it slip.’
‘Helped by your charming daughters.’
‘My daughters were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness.’
A dull, deep rage was brewing in me.
‘I happened—stupidly, I grant you—to fall in love with one of them.’
‘As an unscrupulous collector falls in love with a painting he wants. And will do anything to get.’
‘Except that this wasn’t a painting. It was a girl with as much morality as a worn-out whore from the Place Pigalle.’
She let a little silence pass, the elegant drawing-room reprove, then said quietly, ‘Strong words.’
I turned on her. ‘I begin to wonder how much you know. First of all, your not so virgin daugher—’
‘ I know precisely what she did.’ She sat calmly facing me; but a little more erect. ‘And I know precisely the reasons behind what she did. But if I told you them, I would tell you everything.’
‘Shall I call those two down there? Tell your son how his sister performs—I think that’s the euphemism—one week with me, the next with a Negro?’
She let silence pass again, as if to isolate what I said; as people leave a question unanswered in order to snub the questioner.
‘Does a Negro make it so much worse?’
‘It doesn’t make it any better.’
‘He is a very intelligent and charming man. They have been sleeping together for some time.’
‘And you approve?’
‘My approval is unasked for and unnecessary. Lily is of age.’
I grinned sourly at her, then looked out at the garden. ‘Now I understand why you grow so many flowers.’ She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, ‘To cover the stink of sulphur.’
She got up and stood with one hand on the mantelpiece, watching me as I walked about the room; still calm, alert, playing me like a kite. I might plunge and flare; but she held the string.
‘Are you prepared to listen without interrupting?’
I looked at her; then shrugged assent.
‘Very well. Now let us get this business of what is and what is not sexually proper out of the way.’ Her voice was even, as matter-of-fact as one of those woman doctors determined to ban gender from the surgery. ‘Because I live in a Queen Anne house do not think I live, like most of the rest of our country, by a Queen Anne morality.’
‘Nothing was further from my mind.’
‘Will you listen?’ I went and stood by the window, my back to her. I felt that at last I ought to have her in a corner; I must have her in a corner. ‘How shall I explain to you? If Maurice were here he would tell you that sex is perhaps a greater, but in no way a different, pleasure from any other. He would tell you that it is only one part—and not the essential part—in the relationship we call love. He would tell you that the essential part is truth, the trust two people build between their minds. Their souls. What you will. That the real
infidelity is the one that hides the sexual infidelity. Because the one thing that must never come between two people who have offered each other love is a lie.’
I stared out over the lawn. I knew it was prepared, all she was saying; perhaps learnt by heart, a key speech.
‘Are you daring to preach to me, Mrs de Seitas?’
‘Are you daring to pretend that you do not need the sermon?’
‘Look—’
‘Please listen to me.’ If her voice had held the least sharpness or arrogance, I should not have done so. But it was unexpectedly gentle; almost beseeching. ‘I am trying to explain what we are. Maurice convinced us—over twenty years ago—that we should banish the normal taboos of sexual behaviour from our lives. Not because we were more immoral than other people. But because we were more moral. “We attempted to do that in our own lives. I have attempted to do it in the way I have brought up our children. And I must make you understand that sex is for us, for all of us who help Maurice, not an important thing. Or not the thing it is in most people’s lives. We have more important things to do.’
I would not turn and look at her.
‘Before the war I twice played roles somewhat similar to Lily’s with you. She is prepared to do things that I was not. I had far more inhibitions to shed. I also had a husband whom I loved sexually as well as in the other more important ways. But since we have penetrated so deep into your life, I owe it to you to say that even when my husband was living I sometimes gave myself, with his full knowledge and consent, to Maurice. And in the war he in his turn had an Indian mistress, with my full knowledge and consent. Yet I believe ours was a very complete marriage, a very happy one, because we kept to two essential rules. We never told each other lies. And the other one … I will not tell you until I know you better.’
I looked round then, contemptuously. I found her calmness uncomfortable; the madness seething underneath. She
sat down again.
‘Of course, if you wish to live in the world of received ideas and received manners, what we did, what my daughter did, is disgusting. Very well. But remember that there is another possible explanation. She may have been being very brave. Neither I nor my children pretend to be ordinary people. They were not brought up to be
ordinary. We are rich and we are intelligent and we mean to live rich, intelligent lives.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘Of course. Lucky us. And we accept the responsibility that our good luck in the lottery of existence puts upon us.’
‘Responsibility!’ I wheeled round on her again.
‘Do you really think we do this just for you? Do you really believe we are not … charting the voyage?’ She went on in a milder voice. ‘All that we did was to us a necessity.’ She meant, not self-indulgence.
‘With all the necessity of gratuitous obscenity.’
‘With all the necessity of a very complex experiment.’
‘I like my experiments simple.’
‘The days of simple experiments are over.’
A silence fell between us. I was still full of spleen; and in some obscure way frightened to think of Alison in this woman’s hands, as one hears of a countryside one has loved being sold to building developers. And I also felt left behind, abandoned again. I did not belong to this other-planet world.
