by John Fowles
"Nicholas."
Always those tenderly impenetrable eyes.
"I want to marry you."
She withdrew her hands gently. I moved closer and put my arms round her shoulders. "What's wrong?"
"I want you to take me to bed with you first."
"But I'm dying to. You know I am."
She misinterpreted my movement. "Not here."
"Of course not here."
"I'm so frightened that you'll be disappointed."
I shook her. "You're just a neurotic spinster."
"I know."
"I'll be as patient and gentle as . . ."
She gave me a quick smile, then stood up and went to the door. We remained staring at each other. She murmured, "Not too gentle."
I followed her fair head down the stairs. She went ahead of me into the music room, then whisked round, playful, a sudden idea. She said just one word.
"Encore?"
I knew what she meant. I stood back against the wall. She disappeared, a pause, the sound of a drawer opening, then she was standing in the doorway, with the recorder flue brush in her hand; with miraculously the same look at me, the same secret look back at the Conchis who now was not there, the same leaning forward to push me away.
But this time I caught her wrist and pulled her out of the music room into the little corridor; drew the door to, so that we stood in the cool darkness, watching, not playing, very close; and she came into my arms. I kissed her until she twisted her head away with a little gasp; then made her turn. I held her back against me, slipped my right hand inside her trousers, spread my fingers over her naked stomach. She held my wrist. I tenderly bit her neck, murmured her name over and over again, slipped my other hand under her shirt and up her bare back and unhooked the bra; then, unresisted, caressed my way under her warm arm to her breasts, small breasts that I could just span with one hand; and so held her against me; our hot nakednesses through the thin clothes. She made little movements; then surrendered. Minutes passed. I whispered.
"Promise I can hold you tonight like this." She nodded. "Undress you and hold you like this." She raised my right hand and kissed it.
We heard Hermes's footsteps coming over the gravel outside. I refastened her bra, and she shook her hair straight. A moment in the shadows, shadowy eyes.
"You make me feel I've never touched a girl before."
"You make me feel I've never been touched."
Under the colonnade, Hermes stood waiting. He went and locked the music-room doors from the inside; let himself out by the front door. I said we would be at the house in the village about six, and then we watched him go down the path with Julie's suitcase. We were alone. Silence, the cicadas. Her mouth looked bruised, her eyes almost violet; a heavy, emotion-laden look at me, as if she blamed me and forgave me, forgave me and blamed me . . . I reached out my hand.
"I've been good."
She recovered herself then, laughed and remembered, and led me to the steps over the gulley; I heard the sound of the boat drawing out of the private cove. To my surprise Julie turned down past the carob. We came to the edge of the trees, between the small hummock where I had met the sisters and the place where we had lain on Julie's rug and the whole story had been told. Twenty yards away the cliff dropped straight into the sea. The ground was rough. There were small boulders, some matted whinlike scrub, thyme and other aromatic plants; the hug dry brown bulbs of asphodels.
"Here. See if you can find it."
She stood under a pine and watched me quarter the innocent ground. I searched for a raised neck, a cap of some sort; threw a sharp look back at her. She had her hand to her mouth, in suspense. I was near.
Just in front of me there was the stump of a pine that had been cut down many years before. Around it an area of about five feet by three was bare, apparently because of the stones, or because the dead stem had poisoned the ground in some way. It seemed perfectly natural, but Julie was smiling. The stones were, on a second examination, suspiciously thick around the stump. And as soon as I actually stood on the bare patch I realized something else. The stones did not budge under my feet; they were cemented in. Julie came down through the low undergrowth to beside me. Pointed.
Beyond the stump was a stone a foot or so long, seemingly embedded in the ground — or concreted, like the rest. But it was loose, though difficult to lift till I moved it sideways. Underneath was a hinged iron ring, lying flat in a recess. Gradually I could make out the outline of a trapdoor. It was very irregular; and the tree stump had been cemented into the middle of it.
"I'll show you."
She stooped to grip the ring.
"Wait a minute. It must be as heavy as hell."
"It's counterbalanced."
She strained for a moment and then swiftly a whole jagged section of the ground rose in the air. I looked down. An oval hole about a yard in widest diameter, descending vertically, like a huge pipe; an iron ladder against the wall. From the inside of the door hung two wire cables ending in what looked like lead weights four or five feet down the pipe — the counterbalance. I looked at the door again. It was flanged with rocks so cemented that from above they broke the line of the edge.
"What on earth . . ."
She smiled. "The Germans. In the war."
I hit my head. Of course. A gun emplacement. Conchis would simply have concealed the entrance; blocked off the front slits.
"What about the stone over the ring?"
She showed me. It too had a hook that kept it in place. Then she turned at the brink, put her hands onto the ground and felt her feet onto the rungs of the iron ladder. In ten seconds she was out of sight; could have pulled the "lid" down, and anyone coming over the rise of ground from inland would have been completely at a loss.
She reached the bottom some fifteen feet below and called; a hollow subterranean timbre to her voice; pale face upturned.
I began to clamber down after her. It was unpleasantly claustrophobic. But at the bottom, opposite the ladder, was a triangular room running towards the cliff. Not very large; equilateral twelvefoot sides. On the side farthest from the ladder I could just make out two doors. Julie was standing by one of them. She came back towards me, to the foot of the ladder.
"The doors are locked." She seemed surprised.
"Shouldn't they be? I expect Hermes has been down."
"Have you got a match?"
I struck one. The left wall of the triangular room was painted with a lurid mural — a beer cellar scene, foaming stems of beer, bosomy girls with winking eyes. Dim traces showed that there had once been colors, but now it was only black outlines that remained. As remote as an Etruscan wall painting; of a culture long-sunken under time. On the right-hand wall was something much more skillful — a perspective street scene that I didn't recognize, but guessed to be of some Austrian city. Vienna perhaps. I guessed, too, that Anton had helped to execute it. I lit a fourth match. There were two heavy doors like bulkhead doors aboard a ship. Both had massive padlocks.
She nodded. "That was our room, to the right. Joe used this one."
"What a god-awful place. It smells."
"I know. We used to call it the earth. Have you ever smelt a fox earth?"
"What's behind the doors?"
"Just costumes. Beds. More murals."
I saw the wire running in over the top left-hand door.
"And a field telephone. Where did it go?"
"To his bedroom."
"Are there more places like this?"
"Two more. Just to hide in."
"That day on the beach." She nodded, smiled in the feeble light from the pipe to the surface. "You're a brave girl. To face this sort of thing."
"I hated it." She looked round. "So many sour, unhappy men."
I followed her back to the foot of ladder. I was thinking of a place under the bluff on the central ridge, a little corner shaded by pine trees, absolutely private, thickly carpeted with pine needles; to take her there, and take her, with a gentle ro
ughness, a romantic brutality; as, and I did not shirk the parallel, I had taken Alison on Parnassus; and because I had taken her; the sad sweet poetry of echoes.
Julie began to climb the ladder; slim blue legs. The white daylight dazzled down. I waited a moment at the bottom, to keep clear of her feet, than started after her. The top of her body disappeared.
And then she screamed my name.
Someone had caught her arms and was dragging her away. Her legs kicked wildly sideways, then vanished. My name again, but cut off short. A scuffle of stones. I clawed violently up the remaining rungs. For one fraction of a second a face appeared in the opening above. Young, with crewcut blond hair. I had an idea he was German, one of the "soldiers," though he was wearing a black shirt. He saw I was still two rungs from the top, and immediately slammed the lid down.
I shouted in the pitch darkness. "For God's sake! Hey. Wait a minute!"
I pressed up furiously on the underside of the lid. It gave a fraction, as if someone was standing or sitting on it. But it wouldn't move further.
I strained to heave it up. Then listened. Silence. I tried the lid again, as unrewardingly as before. After a while I climbed down to the bottom. I struck a match and examined the two massive doors. They were impenetrable.
Snarling with rage, I remembered Conchis's fairy-godfather smiles. The great farewell. Our revels now are ended. He must have hugged himself with joy when I called his bluff and produced my letter. I saw why he had taunted me. He wanted me to tell him I loved Julie. His plan was always to be ruined. Her false departure was always to be canceled.
And Julie? I was flooded with old doubts about her. But had she tried to delay me at the bottom of the ladder? No. And she could easily have dropped something. Had she enticed me into the place? No, I had brought the subject up myself, both times.
He had tricked her as well.
Perhaps he was jealous of us — not only sexually jealous, but jealous of us as rebellious puppets. I thought of how near I had been to having her. To teaching her that there were things in which I was skilled, wise, both passionate and patient.
I swore aloud with frustrated rage and went up the ladder again to bang on the lid with one of the counterweights. But it was a waste of time. So I sat at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to plumb Conchis's duplicities; to read his palimpsest. His "theatre without an audience" made no sense, it couldn't be the explanation. The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he was doing sprang from some theory about the theatre — he had said it himself: The masque is only a metaphor. A strange and incomprehensible new philosophy? Metaphorism? Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. I thought and thought, and thought again, and arrived at nothing. Half an hour and five attempts later the lid smoothly gave. I ran up into the trees to where I could see inland, but the landscape was empty. Behind the lid stood my dufflebag, where I had left it, untouched.
The house too was as we had left it, shuttered blind. And then, standing under the colonnade, I recalled that first plan: how Julie would have been waiting in my room while I raged as I was raging then over at Bourani. I began to suspect her again, but only of having played this last trick, this doubly false coda, for Conchis.
I started walking fast down the track to the gate. And there, just as on that very first visit, I found that I had been left a clue.
57
Or rather, two clues.
They were hanging from the branch of a pine tree near the gate down into the center of the path, some six feet from the ground, swinging a little in the wind, innocent and idle, touched by sunlight. One was a doll. The other was a human skull.
The skull hung from a black cord, which passed through a neat hole drilled in the top, and the doll from a white one. Its neck was in a noose. It was hanging in both senses. About eighteen inches high, clumsily carved in wood and painted black, with a smiling mouth and eyes naϊvely whitened in. Around its ankles were its only "clothes" — two wisps of rag, one ivory, the other indigo. I recognized them as the fabrics "Lily" had worn the second weekend. The doll was her, and said that she was evil, she was black, under the white she so often wore.
I twisted the skull and made it spin. Shadows haunted the sockets, the mouth grinned grimly.
Alas, poor Yorick.
Disemboweled corpses?
Or Frazer . . . The Golden Bough? I tried to remember. What was it? Hanging dolls in sacred woods.
I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved, the dry trees lay in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical.
In the light, in the alley between the trees. And everywhere, a darkness beneath. What it is, has no name.
The skull and his wife swayed in a rift of the wind from the sea. Leaving them there, in their mysterious communion, I walked fast away.
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians. All I knew was that I ached for Julie, I was mad for her, the world that day had no other meaning; so I strode down to the school like some vengeance-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga, though with always the small chance in mind that I should find Julie waiting for me. But when I flung my door open, I flung it open onto an empty room. Then I felt like going to Demetriades and trying to wring the truth out of him; forcing him to come with me to the science master. I half decided to go to Athens, and even got a suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe; then changed my mind. Probably the fact that there were another two weeks of term to run was the only significant one; two weeks more in which to torment us.
Finally I went down to the village, straight to the house behind the church. The gate was open; a garden green with lemon and orange trees, through which a cobbled path led to the door of the house. Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed facade was in shadow, a palest blue against the evenings sky's pale blue. As I walked between the cool, dark walls of the trees Hermes came out of the door. He did not seem in the least surprised.
I said in Greek, "Is the young lady here?"
Then he did look surprised, glanced past me, as if expecting her to appear. After a moment he said, "Why?"
"Is she here?"
He raised his head. No. I gave him a close scrutiny. He said, "Where is she?"
"You have her suitcase?"
"Inside."
"I want to see it."
He hesitated, then led the way in. An airy, bare hall, a fine Turkish carpet on one wall; an obscure coat of arms, rather like an English funeral hatchment, on another. I saw through an open door the crates Hermes had brought from Bourani. It was apparently his own room. A small boy came to the door. Hermes said something to him, and the boy gave me a solemn brown stare, then retreated. Hermes walked up the stairs, where doors led to left and right from a transverse landing. He opened the left-hand one. I found myself in an island room. A bed with a folkweave bedspread, a floor of polished planks, a chest of drawers, a fine cassone, some pleasant watercolors of island houses. They had the clean, stylish, shallow look of architectural perspectives, and though they were unsigned I guessed that they were Anton's. Hermes threw open the shutters of the west-facing window.
Julie's suitcase stood at the foot of the bed. On top of the chest of drawers was a small bowl of flowers; on the windowsill a wet kanati, the porous water jug Greeks put in their windows to cool both air and water. A nice, simple, welcoming little room. Without looking at Hermes I picked up the case and put it on the bed, then without much hope tried the catches. But they opened. Clothes, underclothes, a blue sundress, two pairs of shoes, a bikini, toilet things.
"What are you looking for?"
I said, "Nothing." I ruffled through the contents of the case, and beca
me embarrassed. I couldn't turn it out and examine each thing separately, as I felt tempted. There were two or three books at one corner. A text of the Palatine Anthology. I flicked it open. Julie Holmes, Girton. Some of the poems had little marginal notes, English equivalents, written in her neat handwriting. A Greene novel. Underneath that, an American paperback on witchcraft. A place had been marked by a letter. I slipped it halfway out of the envelope. It was the one from her mother I had read before.
I looked at Hermes. Almost certainly he was genuinely ignorant. There was no reason why he should have been told she wasn't coming. He also had been deceived.
Ten minutes later I was in the radio office on the ground floor of the customs house, and handing in my form.
MISS JUNE HOLMES, HOTEL GRAND BRETAGNE,
ATHENS. CHARLOTTE. URGENT. CHARLOTTE. JULIE.
I went the next day, Monday, to meet the noon boat. There was no sign of June. But an hour later, at lunch, I found there had been something for me on it; a letter from Mrs. Holmes. It was on the same headed paper I had seen only the day before; posted in Cerne Abbas on the previous Tuesday.
DEAR MR. URFE,
Of course I don't mind you writing, I've passed your letter on to Mr. Vulliamy, who is headmaster of our primary, such a nice man, and he was very excited by the idea, I think having pen pals in France and America is getting rather old hat anyway, don't you. I'm sure he will be getting in touch with you.
I'm so glad you've met Julie and June and that there's someone else English on the island. It does sound so lovely. Do remind to write. They are awful about it.
Yours most sincerely,
CONSTANCE HOLMES
Tuesday came; again I went down to meet the boat; and again June was not on it. I felt restless, futile, unable to decide what to do. In the evening I strolled up from the quay to the square of the execution. There was a plaque there against the wall of the village school. The walnut tree still stood on the right; but on the left the iron grilles had been replaced by wooden gates. Two or three small boys played football against the high wall beside it; and it was like the room, that torture room, which I had gone to see when I came back from the village on the Sunday evening — locked, but I went round outside and peered in. It was now used as a storeroom, and had easels and blackboards, spare desks and other furniture; completely exorcized by circumstance. It should have been left as it had been, with the blood and the electric fire and the one terrible table in the center.