by John Fowles
"It's Urfe, actually."
She put her hand to her face, in shame. "Oh dear. There I go again." The boy jerked her other hand; he too was ashamed of her silliness.
We all walked up to the house, through a drawing room into a wide hall and then into a room at the side. I saw a long dining table, silver candlesticks. On the paneling between two windows was a painting. Benjie ran and switched on a picture light above it. It showed a little Alice-like girl with long hair, in a sailor dress, looking round a door, as if she was hiding and could see whoever was looking for her searching in vain. Her face was very alive, tense, excited, yet still innocent. In gilt on a small black plaque beneath I read: Mischief, by Sir William Blunt, R.A.
"Charming."
Benjie made his mother bend down and whispered something.
"He wants to tell you what the family calls it."
She nodded at him and he shouted, "How Soppy Can You Get." She pulled his hair as he grinned.
Another charming picture.
She apologized for not being able to invite me to lunch, but she had a "Women's Institute do" in Hertford; and I promised that as soon as a translation of the Conchis poems was ready I would send her a copy.
Driving back down the lane to Much Hadham, I laughed. I might have guessed that Conchis was compensating for some deep feeling of inferiority towards her and her sisters, towards his own youth, towards England and the English; just as I ought to have had more confidence in my inevitably arriving, one day, at the real truth about him. In a sense I, and all the others who had been through the "system" at Bourani, must represent his revenge for all the humiliations and unhappiness he had suffered in the Montgomery household, and probably others like them, during those distant years.
I came out into the main street. It was half-past twelve and I decided to get a bite to eat before I did the drive back into London. So I stopped at a small half-timbered pub. I had the lounge bar all to myself.
"Passing through?" asked the landlord, as he drew me a pint.
"No. Been to see someone. Dinsford House."
"Nice place she's got there."
"You know them?"
He wore a bow tie; had a queasy in-between accent.
"Know of them. I'll take the sandwiches separate." He rang up the till. "Used to see the children round the village."
"I've just been out there on business."
"Oh yes."
A peroxided woman's head appeared round the door. She held out a plate of sandwiches. As he handed me back my change, he said, "Singer in opera, wasn't she?"
"I don't think so."
"That's what they say round here."
I waited for him to go on, but he evidently wasn't very interested. I finished half a sandwich. Thought.
"What's her husband do?"
"Isn't a husband." He caught up my quick look. "Well we been here two years now and I never heard of one. There're . . . gentlemen friends, I'm told." He gave me a minute wink.
"Ah. I see."
"Course they're like me. London people." There was a silence. He picked up a glass. "Good-looking woman. Never seen her daughters?" I shook my head. He polished the glass. "Real corkers." Silence.
"How old are they?"
"Don't ask me. I can't tell twenty from thirty these days. The eldest are twins, you know." If he hadn't been so busy polishing the glass in the old buy-me-a-drink ploy he would have seen my face freeze into stone. "What they call identicals. Some are normals. And others are identicals." He held the glass up high to the light. "They say the only way their own mother can tell them apart one's got a scar or something on her wrist."
I was out of the bar so fast that he didn't even have time to shout.
72
I didn't feel angry at first; I drove very fast, and nearly killed a man on a bicycle, but I was grinning most of the way. This time I didn't park my car discreetly by the gate. I skidded it on the gravel in front of the black door; and I made the lion-headed knocker give the hardest banging it had sounded in years.
Mrs. de Seitas herself answered the door; she had changed, but only from her jodhpurs into a pair of pale fawn trousers. She looked past me at my car, as if that might explain why I had returned. I smiled.
"I see you're not going out for lunch after all."
"Yes, I made a stupid mistake over the day." She gathered her shirt collar together. "Did you forget something?"
"Yes."
"Oh." I said nothing and she went on brightly but a fraction too late, "What?"
"Your twin daughters."
Her expression changed; she didn't appear in the least guilty, but she gave me a look of concession and then the faintest smile. I wondered how I had not seen the similarity; the eyes, the long mouth. I had let that spurious snapshot Lily had shown me linger in my mind. A silly woman with fluffed-up hair. She stepped back for me to enter.
"Yes. You did."
Benjie appeared at a door at the end of the hall. She spoke calmly to him as she closed the door behind me.
"Benjie, go and have your lunch."
"Benjie." I went quickly and bent a little in front of him. "Benjie, could you tell me something? The names of your twin sisters?"
He frowned and looked at his mother. She must have nodded.
"Lil' and Rose."
"Thank you."
He gave me one last doubtful look, and disappeared. I turned to Lily de Seitas. She said, as she moved self-possessedly towards the drawing room, "We called them that to placate my mother. She was a hungry goddess." Her manner had changed with her clothes; and a vague former disparity between her vocabulary and her looks was accounted for. It was suddenly credible that she was fifty; and incredible that I had thought her rather unintelligent. I followed her into the room.
"I'm interrupting your lunch."
She gave me a dry backwards look. "I've been expecting an interruption for several weeks now."
She sat in an armchair and gestured for me to sit on the huge sofa in the center of the room, but I shook my head. She glanced at a silver tray of drinks by the wall; I shook my head again. She was not nervous; even smiled.
"Well?"
"We start from the fact that you have two enterprising daughters. Let me hear you re-invent from there."
"I'm afraid my invention's at an end. I can only fall back on the truth now." But she was still smiling as she said it; smiling at my not smiling. "Maurice is the twins' godfather."
"You do know who I am?" It was her calmness; I could not believe she knew what they had done at Bourani.
"Yes, Mr. Urfe. I know exactly who you are." Her cool eyes warned me; and annoyed me. "And what happened?"
"And what happened." She looked down at her hands, then back at me. "My husband was killed in 1945. In the Far East. He never saw Benjie." She saw the impatience on my face and checked it. "He was also the first English master at the Lord Byron School."
"Oh no he wasn't. I've looked up all the old prospectuses."
"Then you remember the name Hughes."
"Yes."
She crossed her legs. She sat in an old wingchair covered in pale gold brocade; very erectly.
All her "county" horsiness had disappeared.
"I wish you'd sit down."
"No thank you."
She accepted my bleakness with a little shrug, and looked me in the eyes; a shrewd, unabashed and even haughty stare. Then she began to speak.
"My father died when I was eighteen. Mainly to escape from home I made a disastrous — a very stupid — marriage. Then in 1929 I met my second husband. My first husband divorced me. We married. We wanted to be out of England for a time and we hadn't much money. He applied for a teaching post in Greece. He was a classical scholar . . . loved Greece, We met Maurice. Lily and Rose were conceived on Phraxos. In a house that Maurice lent us to live in.
"I don't believe a word. But go on."
"I funked having twins in Greece and we had to come back to England." She took a cigarette from
a silver box on the tripod table beside her. I refused her offer of one; and let her light her cigarette herself. She was very calm; in her own house; mistress. "My mother's maiden name was de Seitas." She appraised me; her daughter's look. "You can confirm that at Somerset House. She had a bachelor brother, my uncle, who was very well off and who treated me — especially after my father's death — as much as a daughter as my mother would allow him to. She was a very domineering woman."
"You're saying now that you never met . . . Maurice before 1930?"
She smiled. "Of course not. But I supplied him with all the details of that part of his story to you."
"And a sister called Rose?"
"Go to Somerset House."
"I shall."
She contemplated the tip of her cigarette; made me wait a moment.
"The twins arrived. A year later my uncle died. We found he had left me nearly all his money on condition that Bill changed his name by deed-poll to de Seitas. Not even de Seitas-Hughes. My mother was mainly responsible for that meanness." She looked at the group of miniatures that hung beside her, beside the mantelpiece. "My uncle was the last male of the de Seitas family. My husband changed his name to mine. In the Japanese style. You can confirm that as well." She added, "That is all."
"It's very far from all. My God."
"May I, as I know so much about you, call you Nicholas?"
"No."
She looked down, once again with that infuriating small smile that haunted all their faces — her daughters', Conchis's, even Anton's and Maria's in their different ways, as if they had all been trained to give the same superior, enigmatic smiles; as perhaps they had. And I suspected that if anyone had done the training, it would be this woman.
"You mustn't think that you are the first young man who has stood before me bitter and angry with Maurice. With all of us who help him. Though you are the first to reject the offer of friendship I made just now."
"I have some ugly questions to ask."
"Ask."
"Some others first. Why are you known in the village as an opera singer?"
She paused before answering, as if warning me not to interrogate too roughly. I sensed formidable powers of snubbing.
"I've sung once or twice in local concerts. I was trained."
"'The harpsichord is the plonkety-plonic one'?"
"It is rather, isn't it?"
I turned my back on her; on her gentleness; her weaponed ladyhood.
"My dear Mrs. de Seitas, no amount of charm, no amount of intelligence, no amount of playing with words can get you out of this one."
She left a long pause. "It is you who make our situation. You must have been told that. You come here telling me lies. You come here for all the wrong reasons. I tell you lies back. I give you wrong reasons back."
"Are your daughters here?"
"No."
I turned to face her. "Alison?"
"Alison and I are very good friends."
"Where is she?"
She shook her head; no answer.
"I demand to know where she is."
"In my house no one ever demands." Her face was bland, but as intent on mine as a chessplayer's on the game.
"Very well. We'll see what the police think about that."
"I can tell you now. They will think you very foolish."
I turned away again, to try to get her to say more. But she sat in the chair and I felt her eyes on my back. I knew she was sitting there, in her corn-gold chair, and that she was like Demeter, Ceres, a goddess on her throne; not simply a clever woman of nearly fifty, in 1953, in a room with a tractor droning somewhere nearby in the fields; but playing a role so deep-rooted in fidelity to concepts I did not understand, to people I did not like, that it had almost ceased to be a role.
She stood up and went to a bureau in the corner and came back with some photos, which she laid out on a table behind the sofa. Then she went back to her chair; invited me to look at them. There was one of her sitting on the swing-seat in front of the loggia. At the other end sat Conchis; between them was Benjie. Another photo showed Lily and Rose. Lily was smiling into the camera, and Rose, in profile, as if passing behind her, was laughing. Once again I could see the loggia in the background. The next photo was an old one. I recognized Bourani. There were five people standing on the steps in front of the house. Conchis was in the middle, a pretty woman beside him was obviously Lily de Seitas. Beside her, his arm round her, was a tall man. I looked on the back; Bourani, 1935.
"Who are the other two?"
"One was a friend. And the other was a predecessor of yours."
"Geoffrey Sugden?" She nodded, but with a touch of surprise. I put the photo down; decided to have a small revenge. "I traced one prewar master at the school. He told me quite a lot."
"Oh?" A shadow of doubt in her calm voice.
"So do let's stick to the truth."
There was an awkward moment's silence; her eyes on me. "Was he . . . still bitter?"
"Yes. Very."
We stared at each other. Then she stood up again and went to the desk. She took a letter out and detached a bottom sheet; checked it, then came and handed it to me. It was a carbon copy of Nevinson's letter to me. On the top he had scrawled: "Hope this dust does not cause any permanent harm to the recipient's eyes!" She had turned away and was looking along some bookshelves beside the desk, but now she came back, with a wide-eyed look, half of warning, half of reproach, and silently handed me the books in exchange for the letter. I swallowed a sarcasm and looked at the top book — a school textbook, clothbound in blue. An Intermediate Greek Anthology for Schools, compiled and annotated by William Hughes, M.A. (Cantab.), 1932.
"He did that as hackwork — for bread. The other two he did for love."
One was a limited edition of a translation of Longus, dated 1936.
"1936. Still Hughes?"
"An author can use whatever name he likes."
The other book was an edition of translations from the poems of Palamas, Solomos, and other modern Greek poets; even some by Seferis.
"Maurice Conchis, the famous poet." I looked sourly up. "Brilliant choice on my part."
She took the books and put them on the table. "I thought you did it very intelligently."
"Even though I'm a very foolish young man."
"Silliness and intelligence are not incompatible. Especially in your sex and at your age."
She went and sat in her wingchair again, and smiled again at my unsmiling face; an insidiously warm, friendly smile from an intelligent, balanced woman. But how could she be balanced? I went to the window. Sunlight touched my hands. I could see Benjie and the Norwegian girl playing catch down by the loggia. Every so often their cries reached back to us.
"Supposing I'd believed your story about Mr. Rat?"
"I should have remembered something very interesting about him."
"And?"
"You would have come out again to hear it."
"Supposing I'd never traced you in the first place?"
"A Mrs. Hughes would in due course have asked you to lunch."
"Just like that?"
"Of course not. She would have written a letter." She sat back, closed her eyes. "My dear Mr. Urfe, I must explain that I have obtained your name from the British Council. My husband, who was the first English master at the Lord Byron School, died recently and among his private papers we have come across an account, hitherto unknown to me, of a remarkable experience that . . ." she opened her eyes and raised her eyebrows interrogatively.
"And when would this call have come? How much longer?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you that."
"Won't tell me."
"No. It is not for me to decide."
"Look, there's just one person who has to do the deciding. If she —"
"Precisely."
She reached up to the mantelpiece beside her and took a photo out from behind an ornament there; handed it to me.
"It's not very good. Benjie to
ok it with his Brownie."
It was of three women on horseback. One was Lily de Seitas. The second was Gunnel. The third, in the middle, was Alison. She looked insecure, and was laughing down into the camera.
"Has she met . . . your daughters?"
Her blue-gray eyes stared up at me. "Please keep that. I had it made for you."
I flung my will against hers.
"Where is she?"
"You may search the house."
She watched me, chin on hand, in the yellow chair; unnettled; in possession. Of what, I didn't know; but in possession. I felt like a green young dog in pursuit of a cunning old hare; every time I leapt, I bit brown air. I looked at the photo of Alison, then tore it in four and threw it into an ashtray on a console table by the window. Silence, which eventually she broke. "My poor resentful young man, let me tell you something. Love may really be more a capacity for love in oneself than anything very lovable in the other person. I believe Alison has a very rare capacity for attachment and devotion. Far more than I have ever had. I think it is very precious. And all I have done is to persuade her that she must not underestimate, as I believe she has all her life till now, what she has to give."
"How kind."
She sighed. "Sarcasm again."
"Well what do you expect? Tears of remorse?"
"Sarcasm is so ugly. And so revealing."
There was silence. After a time, she went on.
"You are really the luckiest and the blindest young man. Lucky because you are born with some charm for women, even though you seem determined not to show it to me. Blind because you have had a little piece of pure womankind in your hands. Do you not realize that Alison possesses the one great quality our sex has to contribute to life? Beside which things like education, class, background, are nothing? And you've let it slip."
"Helped by your charming daughters."
"My daughters were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness."
A dull, deep rage brewing in me.
"I happened — stupidly, I grant you — to fall in love with one of them."
"As an unscrupulous collector falls in love with a painting he wants. And will do anything to get."