* * *
At last it began to seem plain. All that happened at Bourani was in the nature of a private masque; and no doubt the passage was a hint to me that I should, both out of politeness and for my own pleasure, not poke my nose behind the scenes. I felt ashamed of the questions I had asked at Agia Varvara.
I washed and, in deference to the slight formality Conchis apparently liked in the evenings, changed into a white shirt and a summer suit. When I came out of my room to go downstairs the door of his bedroom was open. He called me in.
“We will have our ouzo up here this evening.”
He was sitting at his desk, reading a letter he had just written. I waited behind him a moment, looking at the Bonnards again while he addressed the envelope. The door of the little room at the end was ajar. I had a glimpse of clothes, of a press. It was simply a dressing room. By the open doors, Lily’s photograph stared at me from its table.
We went out onto the terrace. There were two tables there, one with the ouzo and glasses on, the other with the dinner things. I saw at once that there were three chairs at the dinner table; and Conchis saw me see.
“We shall have a visitor after dinner.”
“From the village?” But I was smiling, and he was too when he shook his head. It was a magnificent evening, one of those gigantic Greek spans of sky and world fluxed in declining light. The mountains were the gray of a Persian cat’s fur, and the sky like a vast, unfaceted primrose diamond. I remembered noticing, one similar sunset in the village, how every man outside every taverna had turned to face the west, as if they were in a cinema, with the eloquent all-saying sky their screen.
“I read the passage you marked in Le Masque Français.”
“It is only a metaphor. But it may help.”
He handed me an ouzo. We raised glasses.
* * *
Coffee was brought and poured, and the lamp moved to the table behind me, so that it shone on Conchis’s face. We were both waiting.
“I hope I shan’t have to forego the rest of your adventures.”
He raised his head, in the Greek way, meaning no. He seemed a little tense, and looked past me at the bedroom door; and I was reminded of that first day. I turned, but there was no one there.
He spoke. “You know who it will be?”
“I didn’t know if I was meant to come in last week or not.”
“You are meant to do as you choose.”
“Except ask questions.”
“Except ask questions.” A thin smile. “Did you read my little pamphlet?”
“Not yet.”
“Read it carefully.”
“Of course. I look forward to it.”
“Then tomorrow night perhaps we can perform an experiment.”
“On communicating with other worlds?” I didn’t bother to keep a certain scepticism out of my voice.
“Yes. Up there.” The star-heavy sky. “Or across there.” I saw him look down, making the visual analogy, to the black line of mountains to the west.
I risked facetiousness. “Up there—do they speak Greek or English?”
He didn’t answer for nearly fifteen seconds; didn’t smile.
“They speak emotions.”
“Not a very precise language.”
“On the contrary. The most precise. If one can learn it.” He turned to look at me. “Precision of the kind you mean is important in science. It is unimportant in—”
But I never found out what it was unimportant in.
We both heard the footsteps, those same light footsteps I had heard before, on the gravel below, coming as if up from the sea. Conchis looked at me quickly.
“You must not ask questions. That is most important.”
I smiled. “As you wish.”
“Treat her as you would treat an amnesiac.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never met an amnesiac.”
“She lives in the present. She does not remember her personal past—she has no past. If you question her about the past, you will only disturb her. She is very sensitive. She would not want to see you again.”
I wanted to say, I like your masque, I shan’t spoil it. I said, “If I don’t understand why, I begin to understand how.”
He shook his head. “You are beginning to understand why. Not how.”
His eyes lingered on me, burning the sentence in; looked aside, at the doors. I turned.
I realized then that the lamp had been put behind me so that it would light her entrance; and it was an entrance to take the breath away.
She was dressed in what must have been the formal evening style of 1915: an indigo silk evening wrap over a slim ivory-colored dress of some shot material that narrowed and ended just above her ankles. Her hair was up, in a sort of Empire fashion. She was smiling and looking at Conchis, though she glanced with a cool interest at me as I stood. Conchis was already on his feet. She looked as stunningly elegant, as poised and assured—because even her slight nervousness seemed professional—as if she had just stepped out of a cabine at Dior. That was indeed my immediate thought: She’s a professional model. And then, the old devil.
The old devil spoke, after first kissing her hand.
“Lily. May I present Mr. Nicholas Urfe. Miss Montgomery.”
She held out her hand, which I took. A cool hand, no pressure. I had touched a ghost. Our eyes met, but hers gave nothing away. I said, “Hello.” But she replied only with a slight inclination, and then turned for Conchis to take off her wrap, which he placed over the back of his own chair.
She had bare shoulders and arms; a heavy gold and ebony bracelet; an enormously long necklace of what looked like sapphires, though I presumed they must be paste, or ultramarines. I guessed her to be about twenty-two or three. But there clung about her something that seemed much older, ten years older, a sort of coolness—not a coldness or indifference, but a limpid aloofness; coolness in the way that one thinks of coolness on a hot summer’s day.
She arranged herself in her chair, folded her hands, then smiled faintly at me.
“It is very warm this evening.”
Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was very largely my own—product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand.
I said, “Isn’t it?”
Conchis said, “Mr. Urfe is the young schoolmaster I mentioned.” His voice had a new tone to it: almost deference.
“Yes. We met last week. That is, we caught a glimpse of each other.” And once again she smiled faintly, but without collusion, at me before looking down.
I saw that gentleness Conchis had prepared me for. But it was a teasing gentleness, because her face, especially her mouth, could not conceal her intelligence. She had a way of looking slightly obliquely at me, as if she knew something I did not—not anything to do with the role she was playing, but about life in general; as if she too had been taking lessons from the stone head. I had expected, perhaps because the image she had presented me with the week before had been more domestic, someone less ambiguous and far less assured.
She opened a small peacock-blue fan she had been holding and began to fan herself. Her skin was very white. She obviously never sunbathed. And then there was a curious little embarrassed pause, as if none of us knew what to say. She broke it, rather like a hostess dutifully encouraging a shy dinner guest.
“Teaching must be a very interesting profession.”
“Not for me. I find it rather dull.”
“All noble and honest things are dull. But someone has to do them.”
“Anyway, I forgive teaching. Since it’s brought me here.” She slipped a look at Conchis, who bowed imperceptibly. He was playing a kind of Talleyrand role. The gallant old fox.
“Maurice has told me that you are not completely happy in your work.” She pronounced Maurice in the French way.
“I don’t know if you know about the school
, but—” I paused to give her a chance to answer. She simply shook her head, with a small smile. “I think they make the boys work too hard, you see, and I can’t do anything about it. It’s rather frustrating.”
“Could you not complain?” She gave me an earnest look; beautifully and convincingly earnest. I thought, she must be an actress. Not a model.
“You see…”
So it went on. We must have sat talking for nearly fifteen minutes, in this absurd stilted way. She questioned, I replied. Conchis said very little, leaving the conversation to us. I found myself formalizing my speech, as if I too was pretending to be in a drawing room of forty years before. After all, it was a masque, and I wanted, or after a very short while began to want, to play my part.
I found something a shade patronizing in her attitude, and I interpreted it as an attempt to upstage me; perhaps to test me, to see if I was worth playing against. I thought once or twice that I saw a touch of sardonic amusement in Conchis’s eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. In any case, I found her far too pretty, both in repose and in action (or acting), to care. I thought of myself as a connoisseur of girls’ good looks; and I knew that this was one to judge all others by.
There was a pause, and Conchis spoke.
“Shall I tell you now what happened after I left England?”
“Not if it would bore… Miss Montgomery.”
“No. Please. I like to listen to Maurice.”
He kept watching me, ignoring her.
“Lily always does exactly what I want.”
I glanced at her. “You’re very fortunate, then.”
He did not take his eyes off me. The furrows beside his nose caught shadow, deepening them.
“She is not the real Lily.”
This sudden dropping of the pretense took me, as once again he knew it would, off-balance.
“Well… of course.” I shrugged and smiled. She was staring down at her fan.
“Neither is she anyone impersonating the real Lily.”
“Mr. Conchis… I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Not to jump to conclusions.” He gave one of his rare wide smiles. “Now. Where was I? But first I must warn you that this evening I give you not a narrative. But a character.”
I looked at Lily. She seemed to me to be perceptibly hurt, and just as another wild idea was beginning to run through my mind, that she really was an amnesiac, some beautiful amnesiac he had, somehow, literally and metaphorically laid his hands on, she gave me what was beyond any doubt a contemporary look, a look out of role—a quick, questioning glance that flicked from me to Conchis’s averted head and back again. At once I had the impression that we were two actors with the same doubts about the director.
28
“Buenos Aires. I lived there for nearly four years, until the spring of 1919. I quarreled with my uncle Anastasios, I gave English lessons, I taught the piano. And I felt perpetually in exile from Europe. My father was never to speak or write to me again, but after a while I began to hear from my mother.”
I glanced at Lily, but now, back in role, she was watching Conchis with a politely interested expression on her face. Lamplight became her, infinitely.
“Only one thing of importance happened to me in the Argentine. A friend took me one summer on a tour of the Andean provinces. I learnt about the exploited conditions under which the peons and gauchos had to live. I urgently felt the need to sacrifice myself for the underprivileged. Various things we saw decided me to become a doctor. But the reality of my new career was harsh. The medical faculty at Buenos Aires would not accept me, and I had to work day and night for a year to learn enough science to be enrolled.
“But then the war ended. My father died soon after. Though he never forgave me, or my mother for having helped me both into his world and out of it, he was sufficiently my father to let sleeping dogs lie. So far as I know my disappearance was never discovered by the authorities. My mother was left a sufficient income. The result of all this was that I returned to Europe and settled in Paris with her. We lived in a huge old flat facing the Pantheon, and I began to study medicine seriously. Among the medical students a group formed. We all regarded medicine as a religion, and we called ourselves the Society of Reason. We saw the doctors of the world uniting to form a scientific and ethical elite. We should be in every land and in every government, moral supermen who would eradicate all demagogy, all self-seeking politicians, reaction, chauvinism. We published a manifesto. We held a public meeting in a cinema at Neuilly. But the Communists got to hear of it. They called us Fascists and wrecked the cinema. We tried another meeting in another place. That was attended by a group who called themselves the Militia of Christian Youth—Catholic ultras. Their manners, if not their faces, were identical with those of the Communists. Which was what they termed us. So our grand scheme for utopianizing the world was settled in two scuffles. And heavy bills for damages. I was secretary of the Society of Reason. Nothing could have been less reasonable than my fellow members when it came to paying their share of the bills. No doubt we deserved what we received. Any fool can invent a plan for a more reasonable world. In ten minutes. In five. But to expect people to live reasonably is like asking them to live on paregoric.” He turned to me. “Would you like to read our manifesto, Nicholas?”
“Very much.”
“I will go and get it. And fetch the brandy.”
And so, so soon, I was alone with Lily. But before I could phrase the right remark, the question that would show her I saw no reason why in Conchis’s absence she should maintain the pretending to believe, she stood up.
“Shall we walk up and down?”
I walked beside her. She was only an inch or two shorter than myself, and she walked slowly, slimly, with elegance, looking out to sea, avoiding my eyes, as if she now was shy. I looked around. Conchis was out of hearing.
“Have you been here long?”
“I have not been anywhere long.”
“I meant on the island.”
“So did I.”
She gave me a quick look, softened by a little smile. We had gone round the other arm of the terrace, into the shadow cast by the corner of the bedroom wall.
“An excellent return of service, Miss Montgomery.”
“If you play tennis, I must play tennis back.”
“Must?”
“Maurice must have asked you not to question me.”
“Oh come on. In front of him, okay. I mean, good God, we’re both English, aren’t we?”
“That gives us the freedom to be rude to each other?”
“To get to know each other.”
“Perhaps we are not equally interested in… getting to know each other.” She looked away out over the night. I was nettled.
“You do this thing very charmingly. But what exactly is the game?”
“Please.” Her voice was faintly sharp. “I really cannot stand this.” I guessed why she had brought me around into the shadow. I couldn’t see much of her face.
“Stand what?”
She turned and looked at me and said, in a quiet but fiercely precise voice, “Mr. Urfe.”
I was put in my place.
She went and stood against the parapet at the far end of the terrace, looking towards the central ridge to the north. A breath of listless air from the sea washed behind us.
“Would you shawl me please?”
“Would I?”
“My wrap.”
I hesitated, then turned and went back for the indigo wrap. Conchis was still indoors. I returned and put it around her shoulders, then stood beside her. Without warning she reached her hand sideways and took mine and pressed it, as if to give me courage; and to make me identify her with the original, gentle Lily. She remained staring out across the clearing to the trees.
“Why did you do that?”
“I did not mean to be unkind.”
I mimicked her formal tone. “Can, may I, ask you… where you live here?”
Sh
e turned and leant against the edge of the parapet, so that we were facing opposite ways, and came to a decision.
“Over there.” She pointed with her fan.
“That’s the sea. Or are you pointing at thin air?”
“I assure you I live over there.”
An idea struck me. “On a yacht?”
“On land.”
“Curious I’ve never seen your house.”
“I expect you have the wrong kind of sight.”
I could just make out that she had a little smile at the corner of her lips. We were standing very close. The perfume around us.
“I’m being teased.”
“Perhaps you are teasing yourself.”
“I hate being teased.”
She looked at me from the corner of her eyes; a shy malice. “You prefer to tease?”
“Usually. But I don’t mind being teased by someone as pretty and gifted as you are.”
She made a little mock inclination. She had a beautiful neck; the throat of a Nefertiti. The photo in Conchis’s room made her look heavy-chinned, but she wasn’t.
“Then I shall continue to tease you.”
There was silence. Conchis was away far too long for the excuse he had given; I remembered the miserable Janet’s mother, who used to invent elephantine excuses to leave the two of us together in the sitting room, during my year of purgatory in S——.
Her question took me by surprise.
“Do you love Maurice?” She made no attempt to anglicize the French pronunciation, but sounded it with a rather precious exactitude.
“This is only the third time I’ve met him.” She appeared to wait for me to go on. “I’m very grateful for his asking me over here. Especially now.”
She cut short my compliment. “You see, we all love him very much.”
“Who is we?”
“His other visitors and myself.” I could hear the inverted commas. She had turned to face me.
“‘Visitor’ seems an odd way of putting it.”
“Maurice does not like ‘ghost.’”
I smiled. “Or ‘actress’?”
The Magus Page 18