by John Fowles
So Conchis would know I was invited to Athens — and would guess that this was the girl I had spoken about, the girl I must "swim towards." Perhaps that was why he had had to go away. There might be arrangements to cancel for the next weekend. I had assumed that he would invite me again, give me the whole four days of half-term; that Alison would not take my lukewarm offer.
I came to a decision. A physical confrontation, even the proximity that Alison's coming to the island might represent, was unthinkable. Whatever happened, if I met her, it must be in Athens. If he invited me, I could easily make some excuse and not go. But if he didn't, then after all I would have Alison to fall back on. I won either way.
The bell rang again for me. It was lunchtime. I collected my things and drunk with the sun, walked heavily up the path. But I was covertly trying to watch in every direction, preternaturally on the alert for events in the masque. As I walked through the windswept trees to the house, I expected some strange new sight to emerge, to see both twins together — I didn't know. I was wrong. There was nothing. My lunch was laid; one place. Maria did not appear. Under the muslin there was taramasalata, boiled eggs, and a plate of loquats.
By the end of the meal under the windy colonnade I had banned Alison from my mind and was ready for anything that Conchis might now offer. To make things easier, I went through the pine trees to where I had lain and read of Robert Foulkes the Sunday before. I took no book. But lay on my back and shut my eyes.
33
I was given no time to sleep. I had not been lying there five minutes before I heard a rustle and, simultaneously, smelt the sandalwood perfume. I pretended to be asleep. The rustle came closer. I heard the tiny crepitation of pine needles. Her feet were just behind my head. There was a louder rustle; she had sat down, and very close behind me. I thought she would drop a cone, tickle my nose. But in a very low voice she began to recite, half singing.
A frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no.
So off he marched with his nice new hat
And on the way he met with a rat.
And they came to the door of the mouse's hall,
They gave a loud knock and they gave a loud call.
Pray, Mrs. Mouse, are you within?
Oh yes, Mr. Rat, I'm learning to spin.
Pray, Mrs. Mouse, will you give us some beer?
Young froggy and I are fond of good cheer.
But as they were all a merry-making
The cat and her kittens came tumbling in.
The cat she seized the rat by the crown;
The kittens they pulled the little mouse down.
This put poor frog in a terrible fright,
So he took his new hat and wished them good night.
As froggy was crossing him over a brook,
A lily-white duck gob-gobbled him up.
So that was an end of one, two and three,
Riddle-me-ro, riddle-me-ree.
All the time I was silent, and kept my eyes closed. She teased the words; I was the frog. A willing frog; the wind blew in the pines above, she said each couplet in her dry-sweet voice. Alter each couplet, she paused. A little silence, the wind. Then the next couplet.
She finished. Without moving, I opened my eyes and looked back. A fiendish green and black face, with protuberant fire-red eyes, glared down at me. I twisted over. She was holding a Chinese carnival mask on a stick, in her left hand. I saw the scar. I grinned, and she lowered the mask to her nose and stared over it at me with taunting eyes.
She had changed into a long-sleeved white blouse and a long gray skirt and her hair was tied back by a black velvet bow. I pushed the mask aside. She was smiling.
"I have come to gobble you up."
"I haven't even been a-wooing yet." She half raised the mask again and looked at me over the top of it with silent incredulity. "Well, I haven't been a-wooing you yet."
"You cannot woo me."
"Why not?"
"Forbidden."
"By you?"
"By everything."
She put her hands round her enskirted knees and leant back and stared up through the branches at the sky. A fine throat. She was wearing absurd black lace-up boots.
"I saw your twin sister this morning."
"That was very clever. I have no sister."
"Yes you have. She was standing with a charming young man dressed in black. It was quite a shock. To see him dressed at all." She looked down, and made no answer. "Where did you hide?"
"I went home."
"Over there?" I pointed towards the sea.
"Yes. Over there."
I knew it was no good; she wouldn't lay down the other mask. I shrugged, smiled at her now rather serious, perceptibly watchful face and reached for my cigarettes. I offered her one, but she shook her head. She watched me strike the match and inhale a couple of times, and then suddenly reached out her hand.
"Have one." I held out the packet, but she wanted the cigarette in my mouth.
"One puff."
She took the cigarette and pecked out her lips at it in the characteristic way of first smokers; took a little puff, then a bigger one. She coughed and buried her head in her knees, holding out the cigarette for me to take back.
"Horrible."
"Beautifully acted."
She bowed her head again to cough. I looked at the nape of her neck, her slim shoulders, her total reality.
"Where did you train?"
"Train?" She spoke into her knees.
"Which drama school? RADA?"
She shook her head, then looked up and said, "I have never had a dramatic training." I had the impression that this was the truth, a remark out of role; and that she sensed that I sensed it, and had to improvise defense. She went on quickly, "As far as I know."
"Oh of course. You suffer from amnesia." She was silent, looking straight ahead, as if in two minds about whether to play at being offended or not. She threw me a veiled look, then stared ahead again. I lay on my elbow. "I don't mind in the least being made a fool of, but I can't stand every attempt at natural curiosity being treated as bad taste." I watched the side of her face. We were at right angles to each other. She remained chin on knees, eyes lost in the distance. I said after a few moments, "You're trying — very successfully — to captivate me. Why?"
She made no attempt this time to be offended. One realized progress more by omissions than anything else; by pretenses dropped.
"Am I?"
"Yes."
She picked up the mask and held it like a yashmak again.
"I am Astarte, mother of mystery." The piquant gray-violet eyes dilated, and I had to laugh.
I said, very gently, "Buffoon."
The eyes blazed. "Blasphemy, oh foolish mortal!"
"Sorry, I'm an atheist."
She put down the mask.
"And a traitor."
"Why?" I remembered the reference to treachery during the palmreading.
"Astarte knows all." She looked sideways at me, coolly, changing the mood. The cable from Alison.
There was silence. She kept hugging her knees, looking at the ground in front of her.
"He told you about this girl."
"You told me."
"I told you!"
"I was there when you told Maurice."
"But we were in the garden. You can't have been."
She wouldn't look at me. "She is Australian. You . . . lived with her as man and wife."
"He told you, didn't he?" Silence. "You know what her job is?" She nodded. "Let me hear you say it."
"She is an air-hostess."
"What is an air-hostess?"
"She looks after passengers on airplanes."
"How do you know that? You died in 1916."
"I asked Maurice."
"I bet you're good at chess."
"I cannot play chess."
"Why don't you ask him about your own past?"
"I know I was born in London. We lived in a pa
rt of London called St. John's Wood. Maurice lived in St. John's Wood too. I studied music, I was in love with Maurice, we became engaged, but then the dreadful war came and he had to go away and I went to nurse and . . . I caught typhoid." She was barely pretending this was true; simply reciting her "past," with a small smile, in order to tease me.
I reached out and caught her hand. At the same time I heard the sound of a boat engine; she heard it as well, but her eyes gave nothing away.
She said in a small, cold voice. "Please let me go."
"No."
"Please."
"No."
"You're hurting my wrist."
"Promise not to go."
There was a pause. She said, "I promise not to go." I quickly raised her wrist and kissed it before she could react. She gave me an uncertain glance, then pulled her hand away, but not too roughly. She swiveled round and turned her back to me. I picked up a cone.
"I suppose he told you this Australian girl sent me a cable yesterday." She did not answer. "If you said I could meet you, how shall I put it . . . officially? . . . here next weekend, or unofficially somewhere else . . . in the village? Anywhere. I shouldn't go." There was a pause. "I'm trying to be frank. Not treacherous." Her back was silent. "I haven't been very happy on Phraxos. Not until I came here, as a matter of fact. I've been, well, pretty lonely. I know I don't love . . . this other girl.. It's just that she's been the only person. That's all."
"Perhaps to her you seem the only person."
"There are dozens of other men in her life. Honestly. There've been at least three more since I left England." A runner ant zigzagged neurotically up the white back of her blouse and I reached and flicked it off. She must have felt me do it, but she did not turn. "It was nothing. Just an affaire."
She didn't speak for some time. I craned round to see her face. It was pensive. She said, "I know you did not believe what Maurice said last night. But it was true." She glanced round solemnly at me. "I am not the real Lily. But I am not anyone impersonating the real Lily."
"Because you're dead?"
"Yes. I am dead."
I crouched beside her, tapped her shoulder.
"Now listen. All this is very amusing. But it just doesn't hold water. First there are several of you. You've got a twin sister, and you know it. You do this disappearing trick, and you have this charming line of mystery talk. Period dialogue and mythology and all the rest. But the fact is, there are two things you can't conceal. You're intelligent. And you're as physically real as I am." I pinched her arm, and she winced. "I don't know whether you're doing all this because you love the old man. Because he pays you. Because it amuses you. Because you're his mistress. I don't know where you and your sister and your other friends live. I don't really care, because I think the whole idea's original, it's charming to be with you, I like Maurice, I think this is all fun . . . but don't let's take it all so bloody seriously. Play your charade. But for Christ's sake don't try to explain it."
I knew I had called her bluff then; regained the initiative. I stood up behind her and lit a cigarette. She sat, looking down in front of her. After a moment her face went down on her knees. The boat came into the cove; Conchis had returned. I waited, thinking that I ought to have realized that a little force would do the trick. She was silent a long time. Then her shoulders gave a little shake. She was pretending to cry.
"Sorry. No go."
She stared round. Her eyes were full of very real tears.
I knelt beside her.
She gave a rueful smile and brushed her eyes with the back of her wrist. I put my hand on her shoulder. I could feel the warmth of her skin through the linen; reached in my pocket and found a handkerchief. "Here." She dabbed at her eyes, and looked at me, with a pleading simplicity.
"I tried. I tried very hard."
"You're wonderful . . . you've no idea how strange this experience has been. I mean, beautifully strange. Only, you know, it's one's sense of reality. It's like gravity. One can resist it only so long."
She handed me back my handkerchief, and we stood up, very close together. I knew I wanted very much to kiss her, to hold her. She looked at me, submissively.
"A truce?"
"A truce."
"I want you to say nothing for . . . ten minutes. A little walk, if you like."
"I like."
"Nothing — not a word?"
"I promise. If you —"
But her warning finger was towards my lips. We turned and began to walk up the slope. After a time I took her hand.
34
I kept my side of the promise as firmly as I kept hold of her hand. She led me up through the trees to a point higher than where I had forced my way over the gulley the week before, to where there was a path across, with some rough-hewn steps. I had to let go of her hand because of the narrowness of the path, but at the top of the other side she waited and held it out for me to take again. We went over a rise and there, on the upper slope of a little hollow, stood a statue. I recognized it at once. It was a copy of the famous Poseidon fished out of the sea near Euboea at the beginning of the century. I had a postcard of it in my room. The superb man stood on a short raised floor of natural rock that had been roughly leveled off, his legs astride, his majestic forearm pointing south to the sea, as inscrutably royal, as mercilessly divine as any artifact in the history of man; a thing as modern as Henry Moore and as old as the rock it stood on. Even then I was still surprised that Conchis had not shown it to me before; I knew a replica like that must have cost a small fortune; and to keep it so casually, so in a corner, unspoken of . . . again I was reminded of de Deukans; and of that great dramatic skill, the art of timing one's surprises.
We stood and looked at it. She smiled at my impressed face, then led me to a wooden seat under an almond tree on the slope behind the statue. One could see the distant sea over the treetops, but the statue was invisible to anyone close to the shore. We sat down in the shade. I tried to keep her hand, but she curled her legs up and sat twisted towards me with her arm along the back of the seat. I looked at my watch, then at her. The ten minutes was up; and she had recovered her poise, though like a landscape after rain her face seemed less aloof, forever less dry.
"May I talk?"
"If you want to."
"You'd rather I didn't."
"Sometimes being together is nicer than talking together."
"I only want to talk because it gives me an excuse to look at you."
"Why not just look?"
I took up the same position as she had, and we stared at each other along the back of the seat. Her look was so steady, and in a way so newly interested in me, so unmasked, that it made me look down.
"I'm no good at the staring game."
She shut her eyes then, with a faint smile, and it seemed to me that her face was slightly held out in the dappled shade for me to kiss. I bent forward. But she suddenly opened her eyes; they took the color of the light, were green for a moment too; we stared at each other, poised, very close, and then her hand came out and gently pushed me away.
"No."
"Please."
"No."
"For friendship's sake. Nothing else." I glanced at the seawardfacing statue. "While his back's turned."
"No." But her long smile was widening. I reached out and snicked a white thread that hung from her sleeve. "Why did you do that?"
"I'm going to put it in a bottle and see if it disappears."
"And if it does?"
"Then I'll know you're a witch." She turned and looked out to sea, as if there was a less agreeable meaning to things. "What's your real name?"
"Don't you like Lily?"
"Good Lord." She looked. "You've just contracted 'not'." She smiled, and repeated her question, still contracting 'not,' admitting surrender.
"Don't you?"
"Not much. It's so Victorian."
"Poor Victorians."
"What's your sister's name?"
She was silent. She looked
at her hands, then out to sea again; made up her mind with a little sideways look.
"I cried as much because you hadn't understood. Not because you had. But it's not your fault."
"That's the oddest sister's name I've ever heard."
She would not look at me; or smile.
'You can't understand how difficult things are."
"Difficult?"
"I owe Maurice so much. I ... it's impossible, I can't explain. But I owe him everything. So I must go on doing what he wants."
"And your sister is the same?"
"I can't lie to him. I don't mean, I mustn't. I mean literally — I can't lie to him." She sounded miserable, cornered.
"Anyone can lie to anyone. Can't they?"
"You'll understand tonight."
"How?"
"You'll understand why I can't lie to him even if I want to."
I changed the attack. "Doing what he wants — what does he want?"
"What I've been being with you."
"Mysterious?" She nodded. I sought for the word. "Flirtatious?" She nodded again. I glanced at her downcast face. "So you really don't like me at all. You just lead me on because he wants you to."
"I didn't say that."
"Do you like me?"
A huge bronze maybug boomed round the upper branches of the almond. The statue stood in the sun and eternally commanded the wind and the sea. I watched her face in shadow, hanging a little.
"Yes." It was very brief; reluctant. "I think so. I mean . . ." she sounded and looked genuinely shy. I reached out and touched her hand; then leant forward.
"When can I see you again? Not here. Somewhere else."
She would not look up.
"I'm not allowed outside Bourani."