by John Fowles
But its tone was really set by its two paintings: both nudes, girls in sunlit interiors, pinks, reds, greens, honeys, ambers; all light, warmth, glowing like yellow fires with life, humanity, domesticity, sexuality, Mediterraneity.
"You know him?" I shook my head. "Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died." I stood in front of them. He said, behind me, "These, I paid for."
"They were worth it."
"Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason."
I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again. Conchis moved out on the terrace, and I followed him. By the westward of the two French doors stood a small Moorish ivory-inlaid table. It carried a bowl of flowers set, as if votively, before a photograph.
It was a large picture in an old-fashioned silver frame, with the photographer's name stamped floridly in gold across the bottom corner — a London address. A girl in an Edwardian dress stood by a vase of roses on an improbable Corinthian pedestal, while painted foliage drooped sentimentally across the background. It was one of those old photographs whose dark chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces; of a period when women had bosoms, not breasts. The young girl in the picture had a massed pile of light hair, and a sharp waist, and that plump softness of skin and slightly heavy Gibson-girl handsomeness of feature that the age so much admired.
Conchis had stopped and saw me give it a lingering glance. "She was once my fiancée."
I looked again. "You never married her?"
"She died."
The girl looked absurdly historical, standing by her pompous vase in front of the faded, painted grove.
"She looks English."
"Yes." He paused, surveying her. "Yes, she was English."
I looked at him. "What was your English name, Mr. Conchis?"
He smiled one of his rare smiles; like a monkey's paw flashing out of a cage. "I have forgotten."
"You never married at all?"
He remained looking down at the photograph, then slowly shook his head.
"Come."
A table stood in the southeast corner of the parapeted L-shaped terrace. It was already laid with a cloth, presumably for dinner. We looked over the trees at the breathtaking view, the vast dome of light over land and sea. The mountains of the Peloponnesus had turned a violet-blue, and Venus hung in the pale green sky like a white lamp, with the steady soft brilliance of gaslight. The photo stood in the doorway, placed rather in the way children put dolls in a window to let them look out.
He sat against the parapet with his back to the view.
"You have a girl. You are engaged?" In my turn I shook my head. "You must find life here very frustrating."
"I was warned." Some embarrassing proposition haunted the air.
"You have no girl. You have no family. You have no friends here. You are very alone."
"Loneliness has its advantages." I looked at him. "Hasn't it?"
"I am lonely here. Not elsewhere." He added, "And not even here."
I looked out to sea. "Well there is a girl, but . . ."
"But?"
"I can't explain."
"Is she English?"
I thought of the Bonnard; that was the reality; such moments; not what one could tell. I smiled at him.
"May I ask you what you asked me last week? No questions?"
"Of course."
We sat in silence then, that same peculiar silence he had imposed on the beach the Saturday before. At last he turned to the sea and spoke again.
"Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn."
"To live alone?"
"To live. With things as they are. A Swiss came to live here — many years ago now — in an isolated ruined cottage at the far end of the island. Over there, under Aquila. A man of my age now. He had spent all his life assembling watches and reading about Greece. He had even taught himself classical Greek. He repaired the cottage himself, cleared the cisterns, and made some terraces. His passion became — you cannot guess — goats. He kept one, then two. Then a small flock of them. They slept in the same room as he did. Always exquisite. Always combed and brushed, since he was Swiss. He used to call here sometimes in spring and we would have the utmost difficulty in keeping his seraglio out of the house. He learnt to make excellent cheeses — they fetched good prices in Athens. But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met."
"What happened to him?"
"He died in 1937. A stroke. They did not discover him till a fortnight later. By then all his goats were dead too. It was winter, so you see the door was fastened."
His eyes on mine, Conchis grimaced, as if he found death a joker. His skin clung very close to his skull. Only the eyes lived. I had the strange impression that he wanted me to believe he was death; that at any moment the leathery old skin and the eyes would fall, and I should find myself the guest of a skeleton.
* * *
Later we went back indoors. There were three other rooms on the north side of the first floor. One room he showed me only a glimpse of, a lumber room. I saw crates piled high, and some furniture with dustcovers on. Then there was a bathroom, and beside the bathroom, a small bedroom. The bed was made, and I saw my dufflebag lying on it. I had fully expected one locked room, the woman-of-the-glove's room. Then I thought that she lived in the cottage — Maria looked after her, perhaps; or perhaps this room that was to be mine for the weekend was normally hers. He handed me the seventeenth-century pamphlet, which I had left on a table on the landing.
"I usually have an aperitif downstairs in about half an hour. I will see you then?"
"Of course."
"I must tell you something."
"Yes?"
"You have heard some disagreeable things about me?"
"I only know one story about you and that seems very much to your credit."
"The execution?"
"I told you last week."
"I have a feeling that you have heard something else. From Captain Mitford?"
"Absolutely nothing. I assure you."
He was standing in the doorway, giving me his intensest look. He seemed to gather strength; to decide that the mystery must be cleared up; then spoke.
"I am psychic."
The house seemed full of silence; and suddenly everything that had happened earlier led to this.
"I'm afraid I'm not psychic. At all."
We seemed drowned in dusk; two men staring at each other. I could hear a clock ticking in his room.
"That is unimportant." He moved away. "In half an hour?"
"Of course. But why did you tell me that?"
He turned to a small table by the door, and struck a match to light the oil lamp, and then carefully adjusted it. In the doorway he stopped a moment.
"In half an hour?" he said again.
Then he went down the passage and across the landing into his room. I heard his door shut. The house was very still. I had a sensation that I couldn't define; except that it was new.
16
The bed was a cheap iron one. Besides a second table, a carpet, and an armchair, there was only an old, locked cassone, of a kind to be found in every cottage on the island. It was the least likely millionaire's spare room imaginable. The walls were bare except for a photograph of a number of village men standing in front of a house — the house. I could make out a younger Conchis in the center, wearing a straw hat and shorts, and there was one woman, a peasant woman, though not Maria, beca
use she was Maria's age in the photo and it was plainly twenty or thirty years old. I held up the lamp and turned the picture round to see if there was anything written on the back. But the only thing there was a fragile gecko, which clung splayfooted to the wall and watched me with cloudy eyes. Geckos like seldom-used rooms.
On the table by the head of the bed there was a flat shell to serve as an ashtray, and three books; a collection of ghost stories, an old Bible and a large thin volume entitled The Beauties of Nature. The ghost stories purported to be true, "authenticated by at least two reliable witnesses." The list of contents — Borley Rectory, The Isle of Man Polecat, No. 18 Dennington Road, The Man with the Limp — reminded me of being ill at boarding school. I opened The Beauties of Nature. The nature was all female, and the beauty all pectoral. There were long shots of breasts, shots of breasts of every material from every angle, and against all sorts of background, closer and closer, until the final picture was of nothing but breast, with one dark and much larger than natural nipple staring from the center of the glossy page. It was much too obsessive to be
erotic.
I picked up the lamp and went into the bathroom. It was well fitted out, with a formidable medicine chest. I looked for some sign of a woman's occupation, and found none. There was running water, but it was cold and salt; for men only.
I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The sky in the open window was a pale night blue and one or two first faint northerly stars blinked over the trees. Outside, the crickets chirped monotonously, with a Webern-like inconsistency yet precision of rhythm. I heard small noises from the cottage below my window, and I could smell cooking. In the house was a great stillness. I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so Germanically dogmatic that I wanted to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me, and not only as a rich man with some enviable works of art in his house. And now he quite definitely frightened me. It was the kind of illogical fear of the supernatural that in others made me sneer; but all along I had felt that I was invited not out of hospitality, but for some other reason. He wanted to use me in some way. I now discounted homosexuality; he had had his chances and ignored them. Beside, the Bonnards, the fiancée, the book of breasts, all discounted it.
Something much more bizarre was afoot. Are you elect . . . Even here I am not alone . . . I am psychic . . . it all pointed to spiritualism, to table tapping. Perhaps the lady of the glove was a medium of some kind. Certainly Conchis hadn't got the petty-bourgeois gentility and the woolly vocabulary I associated with séance holders; but he was equally certainly not a normal man.
I lit a cigarette, and after a while I smiled. In that small bare room, it seemed not to matter, even if I was a shade scared. The truth was that I was full of a sort of green stir. Conchis was no more than the chance agent, the event that had come at the right time; just as in the old days, I might, after a celibate term at Oxford, have met a girl and begun an affaire with her; I had begun something exciting with him. It seemed linked in a way with my wanting to see Alison again. I wanted to live again.
The house was as quiet as death, as the inside of a skull; but the year was 1953, I was an atheist and an absolute nonbeliever in spiritualism, ghosts and all that mumbo-jumbo. I lay there waiting for the half-hour to pass; and the silence of the house was still, that day, much more a silence of peace than one of fear.
17
When I went downstairs, the music room was lamplit but empty. There was a tray on the table in front of the stove with a bottle of ouzo, a jug of water, glasses and a bowl of fat blue-black Amphissa olives. I poured out some ouzo and added enough water to make it go milkily opaque. Then, glass in hand, I began a tour of the bookshelves. The books were methodically arranged. There were two entire sections of medical works, mostly in French, and many — they hardly seemed to go with spiritualism — on psychiatry, and another two of scientific books of all kinds; several shelves of philosophical works, and also a fair number of botanical and ornithological books, mostly in English and German; but the great majority of all the rest were autobiographies and biographies. There must have been thousands of them. They appeared to have been collected without any method: Wordsworth, Mae West, Saint-Simon, geniuses, criminals, saints, nonentities. The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library. Behind the harpsichord and under the window there was a low glass cabinet which contained two or three classical pieces. There was a rhyton in the form of a human head, a black-figure kylix on one side, a small red-figure amphora on the other. On top of the cabinet were also three objects: a photo, an eighteenth-century clock and a white-enameled snuffbox. I went behind the music stool to look at the Greek pottery. The painting on the flat inner bowl of the kylix gave me a shock. It involved two satyrs and a woman and was very obscene indeed. Nor were the paintings on the amphora of a kind any museum would dare put on display.
Then I looked closer at the clock. It was mounted in ormolu with an enameled face. In the middle was a rosy little naked cupid; the shaft of the one short hand came through his loins, and the rounded tip at its end made it very clear what it was meant to be. There were no hours marked round the dial, and the whole of the right-hand half was blacked out, with the word Sleep in white upon it. On the other half, enameled in white, were written in neat black script the following faded but still legible words: at six, Exhaustion; at eight, Enchantment; at ten, Erection; at twelve, Ecstasy. The cupid smiled; the clock was not going and his manhood hung permanently askew at eight. I opened the innocent white snuffbox. Beneath the lid was enacted, in Boucheresque eighteenth-century terms, exactly the same scene as some ancient Greek had painted in the kylix two thousand years before.
It was between these two objets that Conchis had chosen, whether with perversion, with humor, or with simple bad taste, I couldn't decide, to place another photo of the Edwardian girl, his dead fiancée.
She looked out of the oval silver frame with alert, smiling eyes. Her splendidly white skin and fine neck were shown off by a square décolletage, messy swathes of lace tied over her bosom by what seemed a white shoelace. By one armpit was a floppy black bow. She looked very young, as if she was wearing her first evening dress; and in this photo she looked less heavy featured; rather piquant, a touch of mischief, almost as if she rather enjoyed being queen of a cabinet of curiosa.
A door closed upstairs, and I turned away. The eyes of the Modigliani seemed to glare at me severely, so I sneaked out under the colonnade, where a minute later Conchis joined me. He had changed into a pair of pale trousers and a dark cotton coat. He stood silhouetted in the soft light that flowed out of the room and silently toasted me. The mountains were just visible, dusky and black, like waves of charcoal, the sky beyond still not quite drained of afterglow. But overhead — I was standing on the steps down to the gravel — the stars were out. They sparkled less fierily than they do in England; tranquilly, as if they were immersed in limpid oil. "Thank you for the bedside books."
"If you see anything more interesting on the shelves, take it up. Please."
There was a strange call from the dark trees to the east of the house. I had heard it in the evenings at the school, and at first thought it made by some moronic village boy. It was very high pitched, repeated at regular intervals. Kew. Kew. Kew. Like a melancholy transmigrated bus conductor.
"There is my friend," said Conchis. For an absurd and alarming moment I thought he must mean the woman of the glove. I saw her flitting through the island trees in her Ascot gloves, forever searching for Kew. The call came again, eery and stupid, from the night behind us. Conchis counted five slowly, and the call came as he raised his hand. Then five again, and again it
came.
"What is it?"
"Otus scops. The scops owl. It is very small. Not twenty centimeters. Like this."
"I saw you had some books on birds."
"Ornithology interests me."
"
And you have studied medicine."
"I studied medicine. Many years ago."
"And never practiced?"
"Only on myself."
Far out to sea to the west I saw the bright lights of the Athens boat. On Saturday nights it went on south down to Kythera. But instead of relating Bourani to the ordinary world, the distant ship seemed only to emphasize its hiddenness, its secrecy. I took the plunge.
"What did you mean by saying that you were psychic?"
"What did you think I meant?"
"Spiritualism?"
"Infantilism."
"That's what I think."
"Of course."
I could just make out his face in the light from the doorway. He could see more of mine, because I had swung round and sat against a column.
"You haven't really answered my question."
"Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body."
I swilled the last of the ouzo round in my glass. "Isn't it your century too?"
"I have lived a great deal in other centuries."
"In literature."
"In reality."
The owl called again, at monotonously regular intervals. I stared out into the darkness of the pines.
"Reincarnation?"
"Is rubbish."
"Then . . ." I shrugged.
"I cannot escape my human life span. So there is only one way I could have lived in other centuries."
I was silent. "I give up."