by John Fowles
At the same time a parabola, a fall, an ejaculation; but the transience, the passage, had become an integral part of the knowledge of the experience. The becoming and the being were one.
I think I saw the star again for a while, the star as it simply was, hanging in the sky above, but now in all its being-and-becoming. It was like walking through a door, going all round the world, and then walking through the same door but a different door.
Then darkness. I remember nothing.
Then light.
37
Someone had knocked on the door. I was staring at a wall. I was in bed, I was wearing pajamas, my clothes were folded on the chair. It was daylight, very early, the first thin sunlight on the tops of the pines outside. I looked at my watch. Just before six o'clock.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I had a black plunge of shame, of humiliation; of having been naked in front of Conchis, of having been in his power; even worse, others could have seen. Lily. I saw myself lying there and all of them sitting and grinning while Conchis asked me questions and I gave naked answers. But Lily — he must also hypnotize her; this was why she could not lie. Svengali and Trilby.
Then the mystical experience itself, still so vivid, as clear as a learnt lesson, as the details of a drive in new country, hit me. I saw how it had been done. There would have been some drug, some hallucinogen in the raki. He had suggested these things, these stages of knowledge, he had induced them as I lay there.
The richness of what I remembered; the potential embarrassment of what I could not; the good of it and the evil of it; these two things made me sit for minutes with my head in my hands, torn between resentment and gratitude.
I went and washed, stared at myself in the mirror, went down to the coffee the silent Maria had waiting for me. I knew Conchis would not appear, Maria would say nothing. Nothing was to be explained, everything was planned to keep me in suspense until I came again.
* * *
As I walked back through the trees, I tried to assess the experience; why, though it was so beautiful, so intensely real, it seemed also so sinister. It was difficult in that early morning light and landscape to believe that anything on earth was sinister, yet the feeling persisted with me and it was not only one of humiliation. It was one of new danger, of meddling in darker, stranger things than needed to be meddled with. It also made Lily's emotional fear of Conchis much more convincing than his pseudo-medical pity for her; she might just be schizophrenic, but he was proven a hypnotist. But this was to assume that they were not working together to trick me; and then I began clawing, in a panic of memory, through all my meetings with Conchis, trying to see if he could ever have hypnotized me before, without my being aware of it .
I remembered bitterly that only reality was like gravity. For a while I remembered Conchis's trancelike state imagining it all? Had he willed me to the afternoon before I had said to Lily that my sense of was like a man in space, whirling through madness. I during the Apollo scene. Had he hypnotized me into go to sleep when I did that afternoon, so conveniently placed for the Foulkes apparition? Had there ever been a man and a girl standing there? Lily even . . . but I recalled the feel of her skin, of those ungiving lips. I got back to earth. But I was badly shaken.
It was not only the being hypnotized by Conchis that unanchored me; in a subtler but similar way I knew I had been equally hypnotized by Lily. I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive. It wasn't only that I foresaw a very steep bill with Lily; she shook my whole theory. She had a certain exhalation of surrender about her, as if she was a door waiting to be pushed open; but it was the darkness beyond that held me. Perhaps it was partly a nostalgia for that extinct Lawrentian woman of the past, the woman inferior to man in everything but that one great power of female dark mystery and beauty: the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female. The essences of the two sexes had become so confused in my androgynous twentieth-century mind that this reversion to a situation where a woman was a woman and I was obliged to be fully a man had all the fascination of an old house after a cramped, anonymous modern flat. I had been enchanted into wanting sex often enough before; but never into wanting love.
All that morning I sat in classes, teaching as if I was still hypnotized, in a dream of hypotheses. Now I saw Conchis as a sort of novelist sans novel, creating with people, not words; now I saw him as a complicated but still very dirty old man; now as a Svengali; now as a genius among practical jokers. But whichever way I saw him I was fascinated, and Lily, Lily with her hair blown sideways, Lily with her tearstained face, Lily at that first moment, in the lamplight, cool ivory . . . I didn't try to pretend that I was anything else than almost literally bewitched by Bourani. It was almost a force, like a magnet, drawing me out of the classroom windows, through the blue air to the central ridge, and down there where I so wanted to be. The rows of olive-skinned faces, bent black heads, the smell of chalk dust, an old inkstain that rorschached my desk — they were like things in a mist, real yet unreal; obstacles in limbo.
I was glad, with a simplicity that recalled earliest adolescence, first pash on a girl, that I had the white thread. I put it in an envelope, and I must have looked at it a dozen times that day, between classes, even during classes, as if it was a mascot, a proof, a good omen. After lunch Demetriades came into my room and wanted to know who Alison was; and began being obscene, dreadful stock Greek facetiae about tomatoes and cucumbers, when I refused to tell him anything. I shouted at him to fuck off; had to push him out by force. He was offended and spent the rest of that week avoiding me. I didn't mind. It kept him out of my way.
After my last lesson I couldn't resist it. I had to go back to Bourani. I didn't know what I was going to say, but I had to reenter the domaine. As soon as I saw it, the hive of secrets lying in the last sunshine over the seething pinetops, far below, I was profoundly relieved, as if it might not have been still there; and I was a little more cautious and practical, less inclined to walk in without being invited. The closer I got, the more nefarious I felt, and the more nefarious I became. I began to realize that I didn't want to be seen; I simply wanted to see them; to know they were there, waiting for me.
I approached at dusk from the east, slipped under the wire, and walked down cautiously past the statue of Poseidon, over the gulley, and through the trees to where I could see the house. Every window at the side was shuttered up. There was no smoke from Maria's cottage. I worked round to where I could see the front of the house. The French windows under the colonnade were shuttered. So were the ones that led from Conchis's bedroom onto the terrace. It was clear that no one was there. I walked back through the darkness, feeling depressed, and increasingly resentful that Conchis could spirit his world away like that, deprive me of it, like a callous drugward doctor with some hooked addict.
* * *
The next day I wrote a letter to Mitford, telling him that I'd been to Bourani, met Conchis, and begging him to come clean on his own experience there. I sent it to the address in Northumberland.
I also saw Karazoglou again, and tried to coax more information out of him about Leverrier. He was obviously quite sure that Levertier had never met Conchis. He remembered one new thing: that Leverrier had been a Catholic; he had used to go to mass in Athens. And he said more or less the same as Conchis. Il avait toujours rair un peu triste, il ne s'est jamais habitué a la vie ici. Yet Conchis had also said that he had made an excellent "seeker."
I got Leverrier's address in England out of the school bursar, but then decided not to write; I had it at hand if I needed it.
I also did a little research on Artemis. She was Apollo's sister in mythology; protectress of virgins and patroness of hunters. The saffron dress, the bus
kins and the silver bow (the crescent new moon) constituted her standard uniform in classical poetry. Though she seemed permanently trigger-happy where amorous young men were concerned I could find no mention of her being helped by her brother. She was "an element in the ancient matriarchal cult of the Triple Moon-goddess, linked with Astarte in Syria and Isis in Egypt." Isis, I noted, was often accompanied by the dogheaded Anubis, guardian of the underworld, who later became Cerberus. Fascinating. But it explained nothing.
* * *
On Tuesday and Wednesday prep duties kept me at the school. On Thursday I went over to Bourani again; nothing had changed. It was as deserted as it had been on Monday. I went up to the house, tried the shutters, roamed the grounds, went down to the private beach, from which the boat was gone. I sat for half an hour in the darkness under the colonnade; and thought, among other things, of Conchis's foolishness in leaving the Modigliani and Bonnards like that, in such a deserted house. My mind traveled up to the Bonnards, and grasshoppered from them to Alison. That night there was a special midnight boat to take the boys and masters back to Athens for the half-term holiday. It meant sitting up all night dozing in an armchair in the scruffy first-class saloon, but it gave one all Friday in Athens.
A minute later I was walking fast down the path towards the gate. But even then, as I came to the trees, I looked back and hoped, with one thousandth of a hope, that someone might be beckoning me back.
But no one was; so I set out for my faute de mieux.
38
Athens was dust and drought, ochre and drab. Even the palm trees looked exhausted; all the humanity in human beings had retreated behind dark skins and even darker glasses. At two in the afternoon city and citizens gave up; the streets were empty, abandoned to indolence and heat. I lay slumped behind shutters on a bed in the Piraeus hotel, and dozed fitfully. The city was doubly too much for me. After Bourani, the descent back into the age, the machinery, the stress, was completely disorientating.
The afternoon dragged out its listless hours. The closer I came to meeting Alison, the more muddle-motived I grew. I knew that if I was in Athens at all, it was mainly out of spite. Six days before it had not been too difficult to think of her as something that could be used if nothing better turned up; but two hours before changed my meanness into guilt. In any case, I no longer wanted sex with her. It was unthinkable — not because of her, but because of Lily. I wanted neither to deceive Alison nor to get involved with her; and it seemed to me that there was only one pretext that would do what I required: make her sorry for me and make her keep at arm's length. At five I got up, had a shower, and caught a taxi out to the airport. I sat on a bench opposite the long reception counter, then moved away; finding, to my irritation, that I was increasingly nervous. Several other air hostesses passed quickly — hard, trim, professionally pretty, mechanically sexy; more in love with looking attractive than being it. Six came, six fifteen. I goaded myself to walk up to the counter. There was a girl there in the tight uniform, with flashing white teeth and dark brown eyes whose innuendoes seemed put on with the rest of her lavish makeup.
"I'm supposed to be meeting one of your girls. Alison Kelly."
"Allie? Her flight's in. She'll be changing." She picked up a telephone, dialed a number, gleamed her teeth at me. Her accent was impeccable; and American. "Allie? Your date's here. If you don't come right away he's taking me instead." She held out the receiver. "She wants to speak to you."
"Tell her I'll wait. Not to hurry."
"He's shy." Alison must have said something, because the girl smiled. She put the phone down.
"She'll be right across."
"What did she say then?"
"She said you're not shy, it's just your technique."
"Oh."
She gave me what was meant to be a coolly audacious look between her long black eyelashes, then turned to deal with two women who had mercifully appeared at the other end of her section of the counter. I escaped and went and stood near the entrance. When I had first lived on the island, Athens, the city life, had seemed like a normalizing influence, as desirable as it was still familiar. Now I realized that it began to frighten me, that I loathed it; the slick exchange at the desk, its blatant implications of sex, contracepted excitement, the next stereotyped thrill. I came from another planet.
A minute or two later Alison appeared through the door. Her hair was short, too short, she was wearing a white dress, and immediately we were on the wrong foot, because I knew she had worn it to remind me of our first meeting. Her skin was paler than I remembered. She took off her dark glasses when she saw me and I could see she was tired, her most bruised. Pretty enough body, pretty enough clothes, a good walk, the same old wounded face and truth-seeking eyes. Alison might launch ten ships in me; but Lily launched a thousand. She came and stood and we gave each other a little smile.
"Hi."
"Hello, Alison."
"Sorry. Late as usual."
She spoke as if we had last met the week before. But it didn't work. The nine months stood like a sieve between us, through which words came, but none of the emotions.
"Shall we go?"
I took the airline bag she was carrying and led her out to a taxi. Inside we sat in opposite corners and looked at each other again. She smiled.
"I thought you wouldn't come."
"I didn't know where to send my refusal."
"I was cunning."
She looked out of the window, waved to a man in uniform. She looked older to me, overexperienced by travel; needing to be known all over again, and I hadn't the energy.
"I've got you a room overlooking the port."
"Fine."
"They're so bloody stuffy in Greek hotels. You know."
"Toujours the done thing." She gave me a brief ironic look from her gray eyes, then covered up. "It's fun. Vive the done thing." I nearly made my prepared speech, but it annoyed me that she assumed I hadn't changed. was still slave to English convention; it even annoyed me that she felt she had to cover up.
"Your hair."
"You don't like it."
"Not used to it."
She held out her hand and I took it and we pressed fingers. Then she reached out and took off my dark glasses.
"You look devastatingly handsome now. Do you know that? You're so brown. Dried in the sun, sort of beginning to be ravaged. Jesus, when you're forty."
I remembered Lily's prophecy, I remembered — that evening I never forgot — Lily. I smiled, but I looked down and let go of her hand to get a cigarette. I knew what her flattery meant; the invitation extended.
"Alison, I'm in a sort of weird situation."
It knocked all the false lightness out of her. She looked straight ahead.
"Another girl?"
"No." She flashed a look at me. "I've changed, I don't know how one begins to explain things."
"But you wish to God I'd kept away."
"No, I'm . . . glad you've come." She glanced at me suspiciously again. "Really."
She was silent for a few moments. We moved out onto the coast road.
"I'm through with Pete."
"You said."
"I forgot." But I knew she hadn't.
"Was he fed up?"
"And I've been through with everyone else since I've been through with him." She kept staring out of the window. "Sorry. I ought to have started with the small talk."
"No. I mean . . . you know."
She slid another look at me; hurt and trying not to be hurt. She made an effort. "I'm living with Ann again. Only since last week. Back in the old flat. Maggie's gone home."
"I liked Ann."
"Yes, she's nice."
There was a long silence as we drove down past Phaleron. She stared out of the window and after a minute reached into her white handbag and took out her dark glasses. I knew why, I could see the lines of wet light round her eyes. I didn't touch her, take her hand, but I talked about the difference between the Piraeus and Athens, how the former was
more picturesque, more Greek, and I thought she'd like it better. I had really chosen the Piraeus because of the small, but horrifying, possibility of running into Conchis and Lily. The thought of her cool, amused and probably contemptuous eyes if such a thing happened sent shivers down my spine. There was something about Alison's manner and appearance; if a man was with her, he went to bed with her. And as I talked, I wondered how we were going to survive the next three days.
* * *
I tipped the boy and he left the room. She went to the window and looked down across the broad white quay, the slow crowds of evening strollers, the busy port. I stood behind her. After a moment's swift calculation I put my arm around her and at once she leant against me. "I hate cities. I hate airplanes. I want to live in a cottage in Ireland."
"Why Ireland?"
"Somewhere I've never been."
I could feel the warmth, the willingness to surrender, of her body. At any moment she would turn her face and I would have to kiss her.
"Alison, I . . . don't quite know how to break the news." I took my arm away, and stood closer to the window, so that she could not see my face. "I caught a disease two or three months ago. Well . . . syphilis." I turned and she gave me a look — concern and shock and incredulity. "I'm all right now, but . . . you know. I can't possibly . . ."