by John Fowles
"Thank you. Thank you very much. I'd love to."
"I think we have many things to discover."
"'We shall not cease from exploration'?"
"You read that in the book on the beach?"
"Didn't you leave it for me to read?"
He looked down. "Well. Yes. It was left. And you read it."
"I had a feeling someone was watching me. It was you?"
His dark brown eyes burnt up into mine; he took a long moment to reply. The faintest ghost of a smile.
"Do you feel that you are being watched now?"
And once again his eyes flicked past my shoulders, as if he could see something some way inside the trees. I looked round. The pines were empty. I looked back at him; a joke? He was still smiling, a small dry smile.
"Am I?"
"I merely wondered, Mr. Urfe." He held out his hand. "If for some reason you cannot come, leave a message at Sarantopoulos's for Hermes. It will get here the next day."
"I've enjoyed meeting you very much."
"Good. I am delighted. Till Saturday."
After fifty yards I turned and looked back. He was still standing there, master of his domaine. I waved and he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture, one foot slightly advanced, as if in some kind of primitive blessing. When I looked back again, just before the trees hid the house, he had disappeared.
Whatever else he was he was not like anyone else I had ever met. Something more than mere loneliness, mere senile fantasies and quirks, burnt in his striking eyes, in that abrupt, probing then dropping conversation, in those sudden oblique looks at nothing. But I certainly didn't think, as I went into the trees, that I should have the apparent answer within another hundred yards.
14
Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-colored glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman's glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label, with the words Mireille, gantiére embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before — musky, old-fashioned like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he'd been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me.
Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn't imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn't imagine; and who she was, I couldn't imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister — perhaps someone weakminded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me — that explained the old man's quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nervous strangeness. He knew she was "out"; it explained the second place at the tea table, and the mysterious bell.
I turned around, half expecting to hear a giggle, a rather inane giggle; and then as I looked at the thick shadowy scrub near the gate, and remembered the grim reference to Prospero, a more sinister explanation came to me. Not weakmindedness, but some terrible disfigurement. Not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe. I felt, for the first time on the island, a small cold shiver of solitary-place fear.
The sun was getting low and night comes with near tropical speed in Greece. I didn't want to have to negotiate the steep northside paths in darkness. So I hung the glove neatly over the center of the top bar of the gate and went on quickly. Half an hour later the charming hypothesis occurred to me that Conchis was a transvestite. After a while I began, for the first time in months, to sing.
I told no one, not even Méli, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about the mysterious third person in the house. I decided that a weakminded wife was the most likely answer; it would explain the seclusion, the taciturn servants.
I tried to make up my mind about Conchis too. I was far from sure that he was not just a homosexual; that would explain Mitford's inadequate warning, though not very flatteringly to me. The old man's nervous intensity, that jerking from one place to another, one subject to another, his jaunty walk, the gnomic answers and mystifications, the weird ffinging-up of his arms when I left — all his mannerisms suggested, were calculated to suggest, that he wanted to seem younger and more vital than he was.
There remained the peculiar business of the poetry book, which he must have had ready to puzzle me. I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday, far out in the bay, and he could easily have slipped the things onto the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water. But it seemed an oddly devious means of introduction. Then what did my "being elect" mean — our "having much to discover"? In itself it could mean nothing; in regard to him it could mean only that he was mad. And Some would say I lived alone: I remembered the scarcely concealed contempt with which he had said that.
I found a large-scale map of the island in the school library. The boundaries of the Bourani estate were marked. I saw it was bigger, especially to the east, than I had realized: six or seven hectares, some fifteen acres. Again and again I thought of it, perched on its lonely promontory, during the weary hours of plodding through Eckersley's purgatorial English Course. I enjoyed conversation classes, I enjoyed doing more advanced work with what was known as the Philologic Sixth, a small group of eighteen-year-old duds who were doing languages only because they were hopeless at science, but the endless business of "drilling" the beginners bored me into stone. What am I doing? I am raising my arm. What is he doing? He is raising his arm. What are they doing? They are raising their arms. Have they raised their arms? They have raised their arms.
It was like being a champion at tennis, and condemned to play with rabbits, as well as having always to get their wretched balls out of the net for them. I would look out of the window at the blue sky and the cypresses and the sea, and pray for the day's end, when I could retire to the masters' wing, lie back on my bed and sip an ouzo. Bourani seemed greenly remote from all that; so far, and yet so near; its small mysteries, which grew smaller as the week passed, no more than an added tang in its other promise of civilized pleasure.
15
This time he was waiting for me at the table. I dumped my dufflebag by the wall and he called for Maria to bring the tea. He was much less eccentric, perhaps because he had transparently determined to pump me. We talked about the school, about Oxford, my family, about teaching English to foreigners, about why I had come to Greece. Though he kept asking questions, I still felt that he had no real interest in what I was saying. What interested him was something else, some specificness I exhibited, some category I filled. I was not interesting in myself, but only as an example. I tried once or twice to reverse our roles, but he again made it clear that he did not want to talk about himself. I said nothing about the glove.
Only once did he seem really surprised. He had asked me about my unusual name.
"French. My ancestors were Huguenots."
"Ah."
"There's a writer called Honoré d'Urfé —"
He gave me a swift look. "He is an ancestor of yours?"
"It's just a family tradition. No one's ever traced it. As far as I know." Poor old d'Urfé; I had used him before to suggest centuries of high culture lay in my blood. Conchis's smile was genuinely warm, almost radiant, and I smiled back. "That makes a difference?"
"It is amusing."
"It's probably all rubbish."
"No, no, I believe it. And have you read L'Astree?"
"For my pains. Terrible bore."
"Oui, un peu fade. Mais pa.s tout a fait sans charmes." Impeccable accent; he could not stop smi
ling. "So you speak French."
"Not very well."
"I have a direct link with le grand siècle at my table."
"Hardly direct."
But I didn't mind his thinking it; his sudden flattering benignity. He stood up.
"Now. In your honor. Today I will play Rameau."
He led the way into the room, which ran the whole width of the house. Books lined three walls. At one end there was a green-glazed tile stove under a mantelpiece on which stood two bronzes, one a modern one. Above them was a life-size reproduction of a Modigliani, a fine portrait of a somber woman in black against a glaucous green background.
He sat me in an armchair, sorted through some scores, found the one he wanted; began to play, short, chirrupy little pieces, then some elaborately ornamented courantes and passacaglias. I didn't much like them, but I realized he played with some mastery. He might be pretentious in other ways, but he was not posing at the keyboard. He stopped abruptly, in midpiece, as if a light had fused; pretention began again.
"Voilà ."
"Very nice." I determined to stamp out the French flu before it spread. "I've been admiring that." I nodded at the reproduction.
"Yes?" We went and stood in front of it. "My mother."
For a moment I thought he was joking.
"Your mother?"
"In name. In reality, it is his mother. It was always his mother." I looked at the woman's eyes; they hadn't the usual fishlike pallor of Modigliani eyes. They stared, they watched, they were simian. I also looked at the painted surface. With a delayed shock I realized I was not looking at a reproduction.
"Good Lord. It must be worth a fortune."
"No doubt." He spoke without looking at me. "You must not think that because I live simply here I am poor. I am very rich." He said it as if "very rich" was a nationality; as perhaps it is. I stared at the picture again. I think it was the first time I had seen a really valuable modern picture hanging in a private house. "It cost me . . . nothing. And that was charity. I should like to
say that I recognized his genius. But I did not. No one did. Not even the clever Mr. Zborowski."
"You knew him?"
"Modigliani? I met him. Many times. I knew Max Jacob, who was a friend of his. That was in the last year of his life. He was quite famous by then. One of the sights of Montparnasse." I stole a look at Conchis as he gazed up at the picture; he had, by no other logic than that of cultural snobbery, gained a whole new dimension of social respectability for me, and I began to feel much less sure of his eccentricity and his phoniness, of my own superiority in the matter of what life was really about.
"You must wish you bought more from him."
"I did."
"You still own them?"
"Of course. Only a bankrupt would sell beautiful paintings. They are in my other houses." I stored away that plural; one day I would mimic it to someone.
"Where are your . . . other houses?"
"Do you like this?" He touched the bronze of a young man beneath the Modigliani. "This is a maquette by Rodin. My other houses. Well. In France. In the Lebanon. In America. I have business interests all over the world." He turned to the other characteristically skeletal bronze. "And this is by the Italian sculptor Giacometti."
I looked at it, then at him. "I'm staggered. Here on Phraxos."
"Why not?"
"Thieves?"
"If you have many valuable paintings, as I have — I will show you two more upstairs later — you make a decision. You treat them as what they are — squares of painted canvas. Or you treat them as you would treat gold ingots. You put bars on your windows, you lie awake at night worrying. There." He indicated the bronzes. "If you want, steal them. I shall tell the police, but you may get away with them. The only thing you will not do is make me worry."
"They're safe from me."
"And on Greek islands, no thieves. But I do not like everyone to know they are here."
"Of course."
"This picture is interesting. It was omitted from the only catalogue raisonné of his work I
have seen. You see also it is not signed. However — it would not be difficult to authenticate. I will show you. Take the corner."
He moved the Rodin to one side and we lifted the frame down. He tilted it for me to see. On the back were the first few lines of a sketch for another painting, then scrawled across the lower half of the untreated canvas were some illegible words with numbers beside them, added up at the bottom, by the stretcher.
"Debts. That one there." Toto. "Toto was the Algerian he bought his hashish from." He pointed: Zbo. "Zborowski."
I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man, and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs; and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million. Conchis watched me. "This is the side the museums never show."
"Poor devil."
"He would say the same of us. With much more reason."
I helped him put the frame back.
Then he made me look at the windows. They were rather small and narrow, arched, each one with a center pillar and a capital of carved marble.
"These come from Monemvasia. I found them built into a cottage. So I bought the cottage."
"Like an American."
He did not smile. "They are Venetian. Of the fifteenth century." He turned to the bookshelves and pulled down an art book. "Here." I looked over his shoulder and saw Fra Angelico's famous Annunciation; and at once knew why the colonnade outside had seemed so familiar. There was even the same white-edged floor of red tiles.
"Now what else can I show you? My harpsichord is very rare. It is one of the original Pleyels. Not in fashion. But very beautiful." He stroked its shining black top, as if it were a cat. There was a music stand on the far side, by the wall. It seemed an unnecessary thing to have with a harpsichord.
"You play some other instrument, Mr. Conchis?"
He looked at it, shook his head. "No. It has sentimental value." But he sounded quite unsentimental.
He looked at his watch. "Now, I must leave you for some time. I have letters to write. You will find newspapers and magazines over there. Or books — take what you want. You will excuse me? Your room is upstairs . . . if you wish?"
"No, this is fine. Thank you."
He went; and I stared again at the Modigliani, caressed the Rodin, surveyed the room. I felt rather like a man who has knocked on a cottage door and found himself in a palace; vaguely foolish. I took a pile of the French and American magazines that lay on a table in the corner and went out under the colonnade. After a while I did something else I hadn't done for several
months. I began to rough out a poem.
From this skull-rock strange golden roots throw
Ikons and incidents; the man in the mask
Manipulates. I am the fool that falls
And never learns to wait and watch,
Icarus eternally damned, the dupe of time . . .
He suggested we look over the rest of the house.
A door led into a bare, ugly hall. There was a dining room, which he said he never used, on the north side of the house, and another room which resembled nothing so much as a secondhand-book shop; a chaos of books — shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of magazines and newspapers, and one large and evidently newly arrived parcel that lay unopened on a desk by the window.
He turned to me with a pair of calipers in his hand.
"I am interested in anthropology. May I measure your skull?" He took my permission for granted, and I bent my head. As he gently pinched my head, he said, "You like books?"
He seemed to have forgotten, but perhaps he hadn't, that I had read English at Oxford.
"Of course."
"What do you read?" He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook.
"Oh . . . novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism."
"I have not a single novel here."
"N
o?"
"The novel is no longer an art form."
I grinned.
"Why do you smile?"
"It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn't know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that."
"Like what?"
"'Do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?' No serious answer was expected."
"I see. It was not serious."
"Not at all." I looked at the notebook. "Are my measurements interesting?"
"No." He dismissed that. "Well — I am serious. The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy." He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. "I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since." I remembered my own small destroying and thought, grand gestures are splendid — if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. "Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?"
"For fun?"
"Fun!" He pounced on the word. "Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction."
"I see."
"For this." A life of Franklin Roosevelt. "This." A French paperback on astrophysics. "This. Look at this." It was an old pamphlet — An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679. "There, take that and read it over the weekend. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels you have ever read."
* * *
His bedroom extended almost the seaward width of the house, like the music room below. At one end was a bed — a double bed, I noticed — and a huge wardrobe; at the other, a closed door led through into what must have been a very small room, a dressing room perhaps. Near that door stood a strange-looking table, the top of which he lifted. It was (I had to be told) a clavichord. The center of the room was fitted out as a kind of sitting room and study. There was another tiled stove, and a desk littered with the papers he must have been working on, and two armchairs upholstered in pale brown to match a chaise longue. In one corner there was a triangular cabinet full of pale blue and green Isnik ware. Flooded with evening light, it was altogether a more homely room than the one downstairs, and by contrast pleasantly free of books.