by John Fowles
I noticed the twoness of the tea table, and stood by the corner, embarrassed, aware of a trite English desire to sneak away. Then, without warning, a figure appeared in the doorway.
It was Conchis.
13
Before anything else, I knew I was expected. He saw me without surprise, with a small smile, almost a grimace, on his face.
He was nearly completely bald, brown as old leather, short and spare, a man whose age was impossible to tell; perhaps sixty, perhaps seventy; dressed in a navy-blue shirt, knee-length shorts, and a pair of salt-stained gymshoes. The most striking thing about him was the intensity of his eyes; very dark brown, staring, with a simian penetration emphasized by the remarkably clear whites; eyes that seemed not quite human.
He raised his left hand briefly in a kind of silent salutation, then strode to the corner of the colonnade, leaving me with my formed words unspoken, and called back to the cottage.
"Maria!"
I heard a faint wail of answer.
"You . . ." I began, as he turned.
But he raised his left hand again, this time to silence me; took my arm and led me to the edge of the colonnade. He had an authority, an abrupt decisiveness, that caught me off-balance. He surveyed the landscape, then me. The sweet saffronlike smell of some flowers that grew below, at the edge of the gravel, wafted up into the shade.
"I chose well?"
His English sounded perfect.
"Wonderfully. But you must let me—"
Once again his arm, brown and corded, swept silencingly towards the sea and the mountains and the south, as if I might not have properly appreciated it. I looked sideways at him. He was obviously a man who rarely smiled. There was something masklike, emotionpurged, about his face. Deep furrows ran from beside his nose to the corners of his mouth; they suggested experience, command, impatience with fools. He was slightly mad, no doubt harmlessly so, but mad. I had an idea that he thought I was someone else. He kept his apelike eyes on me. The silence and the stare were alarming, and faintly comic, as if he was trying to hypnotize a bird.
Suddenly he gave a curious little rapid shake of the head; quizzical, rhetorical, not expecting an answer. Then he changed, as if what had happened between us till then was a joke, a charade, that had been rehearsed and gone according to plan, but could now be ended. And I was completely off-balance again. He wasn't mad after all. He even smiled, and the ape eyes became
almost squirrel eyes.
He turned back to the table. "Let us have tea."
"I only came for a glass of water. This is..
"You came here to meet me. Please. Life is short."
I sat down. The second place was mine. An old woman appeared, in black, a black gray with age, her face as lined as an Indian squaw's. She was incongruously carrying a tray with an elegant silver teapot, a kettle, a bowl of sugar, a saucer with sliced lemon.
"This is my housekeeper. Maria."
He spoke to her in very precise Greek, and I heard my own name and the name of the school. The old woman bobbed at me, her eyes on the ground, unsmiling, and then unloaded her tray. Conchis plucked the muslin away from one of the plates with the quick aplomb of a conjurer. I saw cucumber sandwiches. He poured the tea, and indicated the lemon.
"How do you know who I am, Mr. Conchis?"
"Anglicize my name. I prefer the ch soft." He sipped his tea. "If you interrogate Hermes, Zeus will know."
"I'm afraid my colleague was tactless."
"You no doubt found out all about me."
"I found out very little. But that makes this even kinder of you."
He looked out to sea. "There is a poem of the Tang dynasty." He sounded the precious little glottal stop. "Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves. Although my neighbors are all barbarians, and you, you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups on my table."
I smiled. "Always?"
"I saw you last Sunday."
"They were your things down there?"
He bowed his head. "And I also saw you this afternoon."
"I hope I haven't kept you from your beach."
"Not at all. My private beach is down there." He pointed over the gravel. "But I always like a beach to myself. And I presume the same of you. Now. Eat the sandwiches."
He poured me more tea. It had huge torn leaves and a tarry China fragrance. On the other plate were kourabiàdes, conical buttercakes rolled in icing sugar. I'd forgotten what a delicious meal tea could be; and sitting there I felt invaded by the envy of the man who lives in an institution, and has to put up with the institution meals and institution everything else, for the rich private life of the established. I remembered having tea with one of my tutors, an old bachelor don at Magdalen; and the same envy for his rooms, his books, his calm, precise, ticking peace.
I bit into my first kourabià, and gave an appreciative nod.
"You are not the first English person to have admired Maria's cooking."
"Mitford?" His eyes fixed me sharply again. "I met him in London."
He poured more tea. "How did you like Captain Mitford?"
"Not my type."
"He told you about me?"
"Not at all. That is . . ." his eyes flicked at me. "He just said you'd had a row."
"Captain Mitford made me ashamed to have English blood."
Till then I had felt I was beginning to get his measure; first of all, his English, though excellent, was somehow not contemporary, more that of someone who hadn't been in England for many years; and then his whole appearance was foreign. He had a bizarre family resemblance to Picasso; saurian as well as simian, decades of living in the sun, the quintessential Mediterranean man, who had discarded everything that lay between him and his vitality. A monkey-glander, essence of queen bees; and intense by choice and exercise as much as by nature. He was plainly not a dandy about clothes; but there are other sorts of narcissism.
"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?"
"Never." He jumped swiftly on. "Do you like my house? I designed and built it myself."
I looked around. "I envy you."
"And I envy you."
"Not much to envy."
"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 think it trite; that it did not carry its usual meaning. He stood up. "Well. Now I will leave you for a few minutes. Then we shall have a look round." I stood up with him, but he gestured me down again. "Finish the cakes. Maria will be honored. 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 kourabià. 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 stood up, 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, and sat down again. 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 around 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." His jerkiness was pathological; as if he wanted to get rid not only 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. "I hope you will."
"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 look on me. "And not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe."
"You live alone here?"
"What some would call alone. What others would not."
He stared ahead as he said it; 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, alertly, incessantly pointing things out. He showed me around his little vegetable-garden terrace: his cucumbers, his almonds, his 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 Paris. They found it dull being garrisoned here." He turned and saw me smile. "Precisely. One must be grateful for the smallest grain of humor from the Germans. I should not like the responsibility of destroying such a rare plant."
"Do 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."
It seemed odd that a man so penetrated by dryness should hold such views. But we had come to an arbor of bougainvillea 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 pear wood."
"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 around 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 cuffed 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's 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 balk 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 his manner was so strange. 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 to this place, 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, sitting 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 around. There was nothing. I glanced back at him.
"Something there?"
"Nothing."
Silence.
I watched his profiled face. Was he mad? Was he making fun of me? But he stared expressionlessly out to sea. I tried to make conversation again.
"I gather you've met both my predecessors."
His head turned on me with a snakelike 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.
Unexpectedly, 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."
We set off back up the cliff hill. Halfw
ay up, 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 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 meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself."
"I'm afraid you have me out of my depth."
He put his hand momentarily on my shoulder, as if to reassure me; to say it did not matter. Then he stood and 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 masklike face was drained of humor.
"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 many 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."