by John Fowles
66
The first thing I did when I arrived at the Grande Bretagne in Athens was to telephone the airport. I was put through to the right desk. A man answered.
He didn't seem to know the name. I spelt it.
He said, "Please wait a minute."
Then a girl's voice; the same Greek-American who had been on duty that evening.
"Who is that speaking please?"
"A friend of a friend."
A moment's silence. I knew then. For hours I had nursed the feverish tiny hope. I stared down at the tired green carpet.
"Didn't you know?"
"Know what?"
"She's dead."
"Dead?"
My voice must have sounded strangely unsurprised.
"A month ago. In London. I thought everyone knew. She took an overd —"
I put the receiver down. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It was a long time before I found the will to go down and start drinking.
* * *
The next morning I went to the British Council. I told the man who looked after me that I had resigned for "personal reasons," but I managed to suggest, without breaking my half-promise to Mavromichalis, that the Council had no business sending people to such isolated posts. He jumped quickly towards the wrong conclusions.
I said, "I didn't chase the boys. That's not it."
"My dear fellow, heaven forbid, I didn't meant that." He offered me a cigarette in dismay.
We talked vaguely about isolation, and the Aegean, and the absolute hell of having to teach the Embassy that the Council was not just another chancellery annex. I asked him casually at the end if he had heard of someone called Conchis. He hadn't.
"Who is he?"
"Oh just a man I met on the island. Seemed to have it in for the English."
"It's becoming the new national hobby. Playing us off against the Yanks." He closed the file smartly. "Well thanks awfully, Urfe. Most useful chat. Only sorry it's turned out like this. But don't worry. We'll bear everything you've said very much in mind."
On the way to the door he must have felt even sorrier for me, because he invited me to dinner that evening.
But I was no sooner crossing the Kolonaki square outside the Council than I wondered why I had bothered. The stiflingly English atmosphere of the place had never seemed more alien; and yet to my horror I had detected myself trying to fit in acceptably, to conform, to get their approval. What had they said in the trial? He seeks situations in which he knows he will be forced to rebel. I refused to be the victim of a repetition compulsion; but if I refused that, I had to find courage to refuse all my social past, all my background. I had not only to be ready to empty dustbins rather than teach, but to empty them rather than ever have to live and work with the middle-class English again.
The people in the Council were the total foreigners; and the anonymous Greeks around me in the streets the familiar compatriots.
* * *
I had, when I checked in at the Grande Bretagne, asked whether there had been two English twins, fair-haired, early twenties . . . recently staying at the hotel. But the reception clerk was sure there had not; I hadn't expected there to be, and I didn't insist.
When I left the British Council, I went to the Ministry of the Interior. On the pretext that I was writing a travel book, I got to the department where the war crimes records were filed; and within fifteen minutes I had in my hands a copy of the report the real Anton had written. I sat down and read it; it was all, in every detail, as Conchis had said.
I asked the official who had helped me if Conchis was still alive. He flicked through the file from which he had taken the report. There was nothing there except the address on Phraxos. He did not know. He had never heard of Conchis, he was new in this department.
I went back in the sweltering midday heat to the hotel. The reception clerk turned to give me my key; and with it came a letter. It had my name only, and was marked Urgent. I tore open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with a number and a name. 184 Syngrou.
"Who brought this?"
"A boy. A messenger."
"Where from?"
He opened his hands. He did not know.
I knew where Syngrou was: a wide boulevard that ran from Athens down to the Piraeus. I went straight out and jumped into a taxi. We swung past the three columns of the temple of Olympic Zeus and down towards the Piraeus, and in a minute the taxi drew up outside a house standing back in a fair-sized garden. A chipped enamel number announced that it was No. 184. The garden was thoroughly disreputable, the windows boarded up. A lottery-ticket seller sitting on a chair under a pepper tree nearby asked what I wanted, but I took no notice of him. I walked to the front door, then round the back. The house was a shell. There had been a fire, evidently some years before, and the flat roof had fallen in. I looked into a garden at the rear. It was as dry and unkempt and deserted as the front. The back door gaped open. There were signs, among the fallen rafters and charred walls, that tramps or Vlach gypsies had lived there; the trace of a more recent fire on an old hearth. I waited for a minute, but I somehow sensed that there was nothing to find. It was a false trail.
I returned to the waiting yellow taxi. The dust from the dry earth rose in little swirls in the day breeze and powdered the already drab leaves of the thin oleanders. Traffic ran up and down Syngrou, the leaves of a palm tree by the gate rustled. The ticket seller was talking to my taxi driver. He turned as I came out.
"Zitas kanenan?" Looking for someone?
"Whose house is that?"
He was an unshaven man in a worn gray suit, a dirty white shirt without a tie; his rosary of amber patience beads in his hand. He raised them, disclaiming knowledge.
"Now. I do not know. Nobody's."
I looked at him from behind my dark glasses. Then said one word.
"Conchis?"
Immediately his face cleared, as if he understood all. "Ah. I understand. You are looking for o kyrios Conchis?"
"Yeah."
He flung open his hands. "He is dead."
"When?"
"Four, five years." He held up four fingers; then cut his throat and said "Kaput." I looked past him to where his long stick of tickets, propped up against the chair, flapped in the wind. I smiled acidly at him, speaking in English. "Where do you come from? The National Theatre?" But he shook his head, as if he didn't understand.
"A very rich man." He looked down at the driver, as if he would understand, even if I didn't. "He is buried in St. George's. A fine cemetery." And there was something so perfect in his typical Greek idler's smile, in the way he extended such unnecessary information, that I began almost to believe that he was what he seemed.
"Is that all?" I asked.
"Ne, ne. Go and see his grave. A beautiful grave."
I got into the taxi. He rushed for his stick of tickets, and brandished them through the window.
"You will be lucky. The English are always lucky." He picked one off, held it to me. "Eh. Just one little ticket."
I spoke sharply to the driver. He did a U-turn, but after fifty yards I stopped him outside a café. I beckoned to a waiter.
The house back there, did he know who it belonged to?
Yes. To a widow called Ralli, who lived in Corfu.
I looked through the rear window. The ticket seller was walking quickly, much too quickly, in the opposite direction; and as I watched, he turned down a side alley out of sight. At four o'clock that afternoon, when it was cooler, I caught a bus out to the cemetery. It lay some miles outside Athens, on a wooded slope of Mount Aigaleos. When I asked the old man at the gate I half expected a blank look. But he went painfully inside his lodge, fingered through a large register, and told me I must go up the main alley; then fifth right. I walked past lines of toy Ionic temples and columned busts and fancy steles, a forest of Hellenic bad taste; but pleasantly green and shady.
Fifth left. And there, between two cypresses, shaded by a mournful aspidistra-like pla
nt, lay a simple Pentelic marble slab with, underneath a cross, the words:
MORIS KOLCHIS
1896—1949
Four years dead.
At the foot of the slab was a small green pot in which sat, rising from a cushion of inconspicuous white flowers, a white arum lily and a red rose. I knelt and took them out. The stems were recently cut, probably from only that morning; the water was clear and fresh. I understood; it was his way of telling me what I had already guessed, that detective work would lead me nowhere — to a false grave, to yet another joke, a smile fading into thin air.
I replaced the flowers. One of the humbler background sprigs fell and I picked it up and smelt it; a sweet, honey fragrance. Since there was a rose and a lily, perhaps it had some significance. I put it in my buttonhole, and forgot about it.
At the gate I asked the old man if he knew of any relatives of the deceased Maurice Conchis. He looked in his book again for me, but there was nothing. Did he know who had brought the flowers? No, many people brought flowers. The breeze raised the wispy hairs over his wrinkled forehead. He was an old, tired man.
The sky was very blue. A plane droned down to the airport on the other side of the Attic plain. Other visitors came, and the old man limped away.
* * *
The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity. Before I went, I had some idea that I might tell them a little about Bourani; I saw a spellbound dinner table. But the idea did not survive the first five minutes of conversation. There were eight of us, five from the Council, an Embassy secretary, and a little middle-aged queer, a critic, who had come to do some lectures. There was a good deal of literary chitchat. The queer waited like a small vulture for names to be produced.
"Has anyone read Murdoch's latest?" asked the Embassy man.
"Couldn't stand it."
"Oh I rather enjoyed it."
The queer touched his bowtie. "Of course you know what Iris said when she . . ."
I looked round the other faces, after he had done this for the tenth time, hoping to see a flicker of fellow feeling, someone else who wanted to shout at him that writing was about books, not the trivia of private lives. But they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armor, like an archosaur's ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdrew.
Nobody said what they really wanted, what they really thought. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness; and finally it became pathetic. I could see that my host and his wife had a genuine love of Greece, but it lay choked in their throats. The critic made a perceptive little disquisition on Leavis, and then ruined it by a cheap squirt of malice. We were all the same; I said hardly anything, but that made me no more innocent — or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.
It was symptomatic that the ubiquitous person of speech was "one" — it was one's view, one's friends, one's servants, one's favorite writer, one's traveling in Greece, until the terrible faceless Avenging God of the British, One, was standing like a soot-blackened obelisk over the whole evening.
I walked back to the hotel with the critic, thinking, in a kind of agonized panic, of the light-filled solitudes of Phraxos; of the losses I had suffered.
"Dreadful bores, these Council people," he said. "But one has to live." He didn't come in. He said he would stroll up to the Acropolis. But he strolled towards Zappeion, a park where the more desperate of the starving village boys who flock to Athens sell their thin bodies for the price of a meal.
I went to Zonar's in Panepistemiou and sat at the bar and had a large brandy. I felt upset, profoundly unable to face the return to England. I was in exile, and forever, whether I lived there or not. The fact of exile I could stand; but the loneliness of exile was intolerable.
It was about half-past twelve when I got back to my room. There was the usual hot airlessness of nocturnal Athens in summer. I had just stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower when the telephone rang by the bed. I went naked to it. I had a grim idea that it would be the critic, unsuccessful at Zappeion and now looking for a target for his endless Christian names.
"Hello."
"Meester Ouf." It was the night porter. "There is telephone for you."
There was a clicketing.
"Hello?"
"Oh. Is that Mr. Urfe?" It was a man's voice I didn't recognize. Greek, but with a good accent.
"Speaking. Who are you?"
"Would you look out of your window, please?"
Click. Silence. I rattled the hook down, with no result. The man had hung up. I snatched my dressing gown off the bed, switched out the light, and raced to the window.
My third-floor room looked out on a side street.
There was a yellow taxi parked on the opposite side with its back to me, a little down the hill. That was normal. Taxis for the hotel waited there. A man in a white shirt appeared and walked quickly up the far side of the street, past the taxi. He crossed the road just below me. There was nothing strange about him. Deserted pavements, street lights, closed shops and darkened offices, the one taxi. The man disappeared. Only then was there a movement.
Directly opposite and beneath my window was a streetlight fixed on the wall over the entrance to an arcade of shops. Because of the angle I could not see to the back of the arcade. A girl came out.
The taxi engine broke into life.
She knew where I was. She came out to the edge of the pavement, small, unchanged yet changed, and stared straight up at my window. The light shone down on her brown arms, but her face was in shadow. A black dress, black shoes, a small black evening handbag in her left hand. She came forward from the shadows as a prostitute might have done; as Robert Foulkes had done. No expression, simply the stare up and across at me. No duration. It was all over in fifteen seconds. The taxi suddenly reversed up the road to in front of her. Someone opened a door, and she got quickly in. The taxi jerked off very fast. Its wheels squealed scaldingly at the end of the street.
A crystal lay shattered.
And all betrayed.
67
At the last moment I had angrily cried her name. I thought at first that they had found some fantastic double; but no one could have imitated that walk. The way of standing. I leapt back to the phone and got the night porter.
"That call — can you trace it?" He didn't understand "trace." "Do you know where it came from?"
No, he didn't know.
Had anyone strange been in the hotel lobby during the last hour? Anyone waiting for some time?
No, Meester Ouf, nobody.
I turned off the shower, tore back into my clothes and went out into Constitution Square. I went round all the cafés, peered into all the taxis, went back to Zonar's, to Tom's, to Zaporiti's, to all the fashionable places in the area; unable to think, unable to do anything but say her name and crush it savagely between my teeth.
Alison. Alison. Alison.
I understood, how I understood. Once I had accepted, and I had to accept, the first incredible fact: that she must have agreed to join the masque.
But how could she? And why? Again and again: why.
I went back to the hotel.
Conchis would have discovered about the quarrel, perhaps even overheard it; if he used cameras, he could use microphones and tape recorders. Contacted her during the night, or early the next morning. Perhaps through Lily. Those messages in the Earth: Hirondelle. The people in the Piraeus hotel, watching me try to get her to let me back into her room.
As soon as I mentioned Alison, Conchis must have pricked up his ears. As soon as he knew she was coming to Athens he must have started to envisage new complications in his action; sized up t
he situation; stepped in and used it; had us followed from the moment we met; then persuaded her, all his charm, probably half deceiving her, as everyone on the fringes was deceived.
That Sunday he had suddenly gone to Nauplia was the same day the opened telegram from Alison had arrived. Even then? Hadn't he forced me to meet her by canceling — without warning — that next, half-term weekend? Gone to Nauplia to plan? And Lily had really begun to throw her web round me, that same strange Sunday. All must have changed course, that day. The lies I had told the next weekend. To Lily-Julie. I felt my face go red. The day she had worn light blue, dark blue; to echo Alison. I growled out loud.
I saw a meeting of all of them: I saw them overwhelming her with their sick logic, their madness, their ease, their money. And the great secret: why they had chosen me. I recalled something that had occurred to me in the Earth — how little use had been made of Rose. All her costumes had been there. Before Alison's "entry," she would have been going to play a much fuller role, and that first meeting with her had been the beginning of it (and a sneer at my inconstancy). At only one week from his first approach to Alison Conchis riad probably not been quite sure of her, so Rose's role that weekend was an insurance against Alison's failing to cooperate. Very soon after Alison must have agreed; so Rose withdrew. That was why Lily's character and role had changed and why she had to enter — and so rapidly — the present. First she had been acting "against" Rose; then "against" Alison.
The sedan-coffin. It had not been empty. The mercilessness of it; the endless exposure. The trial: my "preying on young women"; Alison must have told them that. And the suicide — "hysterical suicide"; she would have told them that as well. All their knowledge of my past.
I was mad with anger. I thought of that genuine and atrocious wave of sadness I had felt when the news about Alison came. All the time she would have been in Athens; perhaps in the house in the village, or over at Bourani. Watching me, even. Playing an invisible Maria to Lily's Olivia and my Malvolio — always these echoes of Shakespearean situations.