“You have not read it yet?” He seemed surprised.
“I intend to now.”
“Good. It is rare.”
He raised his hand and went in. I crossed the gravel and started idly off through the trees to the east. The ground rose slightly then dipped; after a hundred yards or so a shallow outcrop of rocks hid the house. Before me lay a deep gulley choked with oleanders and thorny scrub, which descended precipitously down to the private beach. I sat back against a pine trunk and became lost in the pamphlet. It contained the posthumous confessions and letters and prayers of a Robert Foulkes, vicar of Stanton Lacy in Shropshire. Although a scholar, and married with two sons, in 1677 he had got a young girl with child, and then murdered the child; for which he was condemned to death.
He wrote the fine muscular pre-Dryden English of the mid-seventeenth century. He had mounted to the top of impiety, even though he had known that the minister is the people’s Looking-glass. Crush the cockatrice he groaned from his death cell. I am dead in law—but of the girl he denied that he had attempted to vitiate her at Nine years old; for upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done.
The pamphlet was some forty pages long, and it took me half an hour to read. I skipped the prayers, but it was as Conchis had said, far more real than any historical novel—more moving, more evocative, more human. I lay back and stared up through the intricate branches into the sky. It seemed strange, to have that old pamphlet by me, that tiny piece of a long-past England that had found its way to this Greek island, these pine trees, this pagan earth. I closed my eyes and watched the sheets of warm color that came as I relaxed or increased the tension of the lids. Then I slept.
When I woke, I looked at my watch without raising my head. Forty minutes had passed. After a few minutes more of dozing I sat up.
He was there, standing in the dark ink-green shadow under a dense carob tree seventy or eighty yards away on the other side of the gulley, at the same level as myself. I leapt to my feet, not knowing whether to call out, to applaud, to be frightened, to laugh, too astounded to do anything but stand and stare. The man was costumed completely in black, in a high-crowned hat, a cloak, a kind of skirted dress, black stockings. He had long hair, a square collar of white lace at the neck, and two white hands. Black shoes with pewter buckles. He stood there in the shadows, posed, a Rembrandt, disturbingly authentic and yet enormously out of place—a heavy, solemn man with a reddish face. Robert Foulkes.
I looked round, half expecting to see Conchis somewhere behind me. But there was no one. I looked back at the figure, which had not moved, which continued to stare at me from the shade through the sunlight over the gulley. And then another figure appeared from behind the carob. It was a white-faced girl of about fourteen or fifteen, in a long dark-brown dress. I could make out a sort of closefitting purple cap on the back of her head. Her hair was long. She came beside him, and she also stared at me. She was much shorter than he was, barely to his ribs. We must have stood, the three of us, staring at each other for nearly half a minute. Then I raised my arm, with a smile on my face. There was no response. I moved ten yards or so forward, out into the sunlight, as far as I could, to the edge of the gulley.
“Good day,” I called in Greek. “What are you doing?” And then again: “Ti kanete?”
But they made not the least reply. They stood and stared at me—the man with a vague anger, it seemed, the girl expressionlessly. A flaw of the sun-wind blew a brown banner, some part of the back of her dress, out sideways. I thought, it’s Henry James. The old man’s discovered that the screw could take another turn. And then, his breathtaking impudence. I remembered the conversation about the novel. Words are for facts. Not fiction.
I looked around again, towards the house; Conchis must declare himself now. But he did not. There was myself, with an increasingly foolish smile on my face—and there were the two of them in their green shadow. The girl moved a little closer to the man, who put his hand ponderously, patriarchally, on her shoulder. They seemed to be waiting for me to do something. Words were no use. I had to get close to them. I looked up the gulley. It was uncrossable for at least a hundred yards, but then my side appeared to slope more easily to the gulley floor. Making a gesture of explanation, I started up the hill. I looked back again and again at the silent pair under the tree. They turned and watched me until a shoulder on their side of the small ravine hid them from view. I broke into a run.
The gulley was finally crossable, though it was a tough scramble up the far side through some disagreeably sharp-thorned bushes. Once through them I was able to run again. The carob came into sight below. There was nothing there. In a few seconds—it had been perhaps a minute in all since I had lost sight of them—I was standing under the tree, on an unrevealing carpet of shriveled seedpods. I looked across to where I had slept. The small gray and red-edged squares of the pamphlet and Time lay on the pale carpet of needles. I went well beyond the carob until I came to strands of wire running through the trees, at the edge of the inland bluff, the eastern limit of Bourani. The three cottages lay innocently below among their little orchard of olives. In a kind of panic I walked back to the carob and along the east side of the gulley to the top of the cliff that overlooked the private beach. There was more scrub there, but not enough for anyone to hide, unless they lay flat. And I could not imagine that choleric-looking man lying down flat, in hiding.
Then from the house I heard the bell. It rang three times. I looked at my watch—teatime. The bell rang again; quick, quick, slow, and I realized it was sounding the syllables of my name. I shouted—”Coming!” My voice echoed, lonely, ridiculous. I began to walk back.
I ought, I suppose, to have felt frightened. But I wasn’t. Apart from anything else I was too intrigued and too bewildered. Both the man and the whey-faced girl had looked remarkably English; and whatever nationality they really were, I knew they didn’t live on the island. So I had to presume that they had been specially brought; had been standing by, hiding somewhere, waiting for me to read the Foulkes pamphlet. I had made it easy by falling asleep, and at the edge of the gulley. But that had been pure chance. And how could Conchis have such people standing by? And where had they disappeared to?
For a few moments I had let my mind plunge into darkness, into a world where the experience of all my life was disproved and ghosts existed. But there was something far too unalloyedly physical about all these supposedly “psychic” experiences. Besides, “apparitions” obviously carry least conviction in bright daylight. It was almost as if I was intended to see that they were not really supernatural; and there was Conchis’s cryptic, doubt-sowing advice that it would be easier if I pretended to believe. Why easier? More amusing, more polite, perhaps; but “easier” suggested that I had to pass through some ordeal.
I stood there in the trees, absolutely at a loss; and then smiled. I had somehow landed myself in the center of an extraordinary old man’s fantasies. That was clear. Why he should hold them, why he should so strangely realize them, and above all, why he should have chosen me to be his solitary audience of one, remained a total mystery. But I knew I had become involved in something too uniquely bizarre to miss, or to spoil, through lack of patience or humor.
I picked up Time and the pamphlet. Then, as I looked back at the dark, inscrutable carob tree, I did feel a faint touch of fear. But it was a fear of the inexplicable, the unknown; not of the supernatural.
As I walked across the gravel to the colonnade, where I could see Conchis was already sitting, his back to me, I decided on a course of action—or rather, of reaction.
He turned. “A good siesta?”
“Yes thank you.”
“You have read the pamphlet?”
“You’re right, it is more fascinating than any historical novel.” He kept a face impeccably proof to my ironic undertone. “Thank you very much.” I put the pamphlet on the table.
Calmly, in my silence, he began to pour me tea.
* * *
He had already had his own and he went away to play the harpsichord for twenty minutes. As I listened to him I thought. The incidents seemed designed to deceive all the senses. Last night’s had covered smell and hearing; this afternoon’s, and that glimpsed figure of yesterday, sight. Taste seemed irrelevant—but touch… how on earth could he expect me even to pretend to believe that what I might touch was “psychic”? And then what on earth—appropriately, on earth—had these tricks to do with “traveling to other worlds”? Only one thing was clear; his anxiety about how much I might have heard from Mitford and Leverrier was now explained. He had practiced his strange illusionisms on them; and sworn them to secrecy.
When he came out he took me off to water his vegetables. The water had to be drawn up out of one of a battery of long-necked cisterns behind the cottage, and when we had done that and fed the plants we sat on a seat by the Priapus arbor, with the unusual smell, in summer Greece, of verdant wet earth all around us. He did his deep-breathing exercises; evidently, like so much else in his life, ritual; then smiled at me and jumped back twenty-four hours.
“Now tell me about this girl.” It was a command, not a question, or rather a refusal to believe I could refuse again.
“There’s nothing really to tell.”
“She turned you down.”
“No. Or not at the beginning. I turned her down.”
“And now you wish… ?”
“It’s all over. It’s all too late.”
“You sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?”
There was a silence. I took the step; something that had nagged me ever since I had discovered he was a doctor; and also to shock his old man’s mocking of my young man’s fatalism.
“As a matter of fact I have.” He looked sharply at me. “By syphilis. I managed to get it early this year in Athens.” Still he observed me. “It’s all right. I think I’m cured.”
“Who diagnosed it?”
“The man in the village. Patarescu.”
“Tell me the symptoms.”
“The clinic in Athens confirmed his diagnosis.”
“No doubt.” His voice was dry, so dry that my mind leapt to what he hinted at. “Now tell me the symptoms.”
In the end he got them out of me; in every detail.
“As I thought. You had soft sore.”
“Soft sore?”
“Chancroid. Ulcus molle. A very common disease in the Mediterranean. Unpleasant, but harmless. The best cure is frequent soap and water.”
“Then why the hell…”
He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the ubiquitous Greek gesture for money, for money and corruption; I suddenly felt like Candide.
“Have you paid?”
“Yes. For this special penicillin.”
“You can do nothing.”
“I can damn well sue the clinic.”
“You have no proof that you did not have syphilis.”
“You mean Patarescu—”
“I mean nothing. He acted with perfect medical correctness. A test is always advisable.” It was almost as if he were on their side. He shrugged gently: what was, was.
“He could have warned me.”
“Perhaps he thought it more important to warn you against venery than venality.”
I hit my thigh with my clenched fist. “Christ.”
We fell silent. In me battled a flood of relief at being reprieved and anger at such vile deception. At last Conchis spoke again.
“Even if it had been syphilis—why could you not return to this girl you love?”
“Really—it’s too complicated.”
“Then it is usual. Not unusual.”
Slowly, disconnectedly, prompted by him, I told him a bit about Alison; remembering his frankness the night before, produced some of my own. Once again I felt no real sympathy coming from him; simply his obsessive and inexplicable curiosity. I told him I had recently written a letter.
“And if she does not answer?”
I shrugged. “She doesn’t.”
“You think of her, you want to see her—you must write again.” I smiled then, briefly, at his energy. “You are leaving it to hazard. We no more have to leave everything to hazard than we have to drown in the sea.” He shook my shoulder. “Swim!”
“It’s not swimming. It’s knowing in which direction to swim.”
“Towards the girl. She sees through you, you say, she understands you. That is good.”
I was silent. A primrose-and-black butterfly, a swallowtail, hovered over the bougainvillea around the Priapus arbor, found no honey, and glided away through the trees. I scuffed the gravel. “I suppose I don’t know what love is, really. If it isn’t all sex. And I don’t even really care a damn any more, anyway.”
“My dear young man, you are a disaster. So defeated. So pessimistic.”
“I was rather ambitious once. I ought to have been blind as well. Then perhaps I wouldn’t feel defeated.” I looked at him. “It’s not all me. It’s in the age. In all my generation. We all feel the same.”
“In the greatest age of enlightenment in the history of this earth? When we have destroyed more darkness in this last fifty years than in the last five million?”
“As at Neuve Chapelle? Hiroshima?”
“But you and I! We live, we are this wonderful age. We are not destroyed. We did not even destroy.”
“No man is an island.”
“Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, airplanes, telephones, television—what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear forever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.”
“It seems possible.”
“Come with me.” He stood up, as if time was vital. “Come. I will show you the innermost secret of life. Come.” He walked quickly round to the colonnade. I followed him upstairs. There he pushed me out onto the terrace.
“Go and sit at the table. With your back to the sun.”
In a minute he appeared, carrying something heavy draped in a white towel. He put it carefully on the center of the table. Then he paused, made sure I was looking, before gravely he removed the cloth. It was a stone head, whether of a man or a woman it was difficult to say. The nose had been broken short. The hair was done in a fillet, with two side-pieces. But the power of the fragment was in the face. It was set in a triumphant smile, a smile that would have been smug if it had not been so full of the purest metaphysical good humor. The eyes were faintly Oriental, long, and as I saw, for Conchis put a hand over the mouth, also smiling. The mouth was beautifully modeled, timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused.
“That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.”
“It’s Cycladic, isn’t it?”
“Never mind what it is. Look at it. Look into its eyes.”
He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen—or not so much a divinity, as a having known divinity—in it; of being ultimately certain. But as I looked, I began to feel something else.
“There’s something implacable in that smile.”
“Implacable?” He came behind my chair and looked down over my head. “It is the truth. Truth is implacable. But the nature and meaning of this truth is not.”
“Tell me where it came from.”
“From Didyma in Asia Minor.”
“How old is it?”
“The sixth or seventh century before Christ.”
He sat on the parapet, his arms folded.
“I wonder if it would have that smile if it knew of Belsen.”
“Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.” A long silence. Then he said, “When I die, I shall have this by my bedside.
It is the last face I want to see.”
The little head watched our watching; bland, certain, and almost maliciously inscrutable. It flashed on me that it was also the smile that Conchis sometimes wore; as if he sat before the head and practiced it. At the same time I realized exactly what I disliked about it. It was above all the smile of dramatic irony, of those who have privileged information. I looked back up at Conchis’s face; and knew I was right.
24
A starry darkness over the house, the forest, the sea; the dinner cleared away, the lamp extinguished. I lay back in the long chair. He let the night silently envelop and possess us; time fall away; then began to draw me back down the decades.
“April, 1915. I returned without trouble to England. I did not know what I should do. Except that I had in some way to justify myself. At nineteen one is not content simply to do things. They have to be justified as well. My mother fainted when she saw me. For the first and last time in my life I saw my father in tears. Until that moment of confrontation I had determined that I would tell the truth. That I could not deceive them. Yet before them, I could not do anything but deceive. Perhaps it was pure cowardice, it is not for me to say. But there are some truths too cruel, before the faces one has to announce them to, to be told. So I said that I had been lucky in a draw for leave, and that now Montague was dead I was to rejoin my original battalion. A madness to deceive. Not economically, but with the utmost luxury. I invented a new battle of Neuve Chapelle, as if the original had not been bad enough. I even told them I had been recommended for a commission. At first fortune was on my side. Two days after I returned, official notification came that I was missing, believed killed in action. Such mistakes occurred frequently enough for my parents to suspect nothing. The letter was joyously torn up.
“And Lily. Perhaps that waiting before the knowledge came that I was safe had made her see more clearly her real feelings for me. Whatever it was, I could no longer complain that she treated me more like a brother than a lover. You know, Nicholas, that whatever miseries the Great War brought it destroyed a great deal that was unhealthy between the sexes. For the first time for a century women discovered that man wanted something more human from them than a nun-like chastity, a bien pensant idealism. I do not mean that Lily suddenly lost all reserve. Or gave herself to me. But she gave as much to me as she could. The time I spent alone with her… those hours allowed me to gather strength to go on with my deception. At the same time as they made it more terrible. Again and again I was possessed by a desire to tell her all, and before justice caught up with me. Every time I returned home I expected to find the police waiting. My father outraged. And worst of all, Lily’s eyes on mine. But when I was with her I refused to talk about the war. She misinterpreted my nervousness. It touched her deeply and brought out all her gentleness. Her warmth. I sucked on her love like a leech. A very sensual leech. She had become a very beautiful young woman.
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