“Anything.” I shoved him out.
As soon as the sounds of footsteps and voices had died down and I knew school had begun I pulled on my clothes and went out. I wanted to get away from the school, the village, from Bourani, from everything. I went along the north coast to a deserted cove and sat there on a stone and pulled out the cuttings again and reread them. June 29th. One of the last things she must have done was to post my letter back unopened. Perhaps the last thing. For a moment I felt angry with the other girl; but I remembered her, her flat, prim face, and her kind eyes. She wrote stilted English, but she would never deliberately leave anyone in the lurch; that sort never did. And I knew those two sides of Alison—the hard practical side that misled one into believing she could get over anything; and the other apparently rather histrionic Alison that one could never quite take seriously. In a tragic way these two sides had finally combined: there would have been no fake suicides with her, no swallowing a few tablets when she knew someone would come in an hour’s time. But a weekend to die.
It was not only that I felt guilty of jettisoning Alison. I knew, with one of those secret knowledges that can exist between two people, that her suicide was a direct result of my having told her of my own attempt—I had told it with a curt meiosis that was meant to conceal depths; and she had called my bluff one final time. I don’t think you know what sadness means.
I remembered those hysterical scenes in the Piraeus hotel; that much earlier “suicide note” she had composed, to blackmail me, as I then thought, just before I left London. I thought of her on Parnassus; I thought of her in Russell Square; things she said, she did, she was. And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the beginning… and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. One day she had said: When you love me (and she had not meant “make love to me”) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am; and I took it as a chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and so give me a sense of responsibility towards her. In a way her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should feel innocent, and I felt guilty. It was as if at this moment, when I most wanted to be clean, I had fallen into the deepest filth; most free for the future, yet most chained to the past.
And Julie; she now became a total necessity.
Not only marriage with her, but confession to her. If she had been beside me then, I could have poured out everything, made a clean start. I needed desperately to throw myself on her mercy, to be forgiven by her. Her forgiveness was the only possible justification now. I was tired, tired, tired of deception; tired of being deceived; tired of deceiving others; and most tired of all of being self-tricked, of being endlessly at the mercy of my own loins; the craving for the best, that made the very worst of me.
Those flowers, those intolerable flowers.
My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all male selfishnesses: to have imposed the role I needed from Alison on her real self. Something far worse than lèse-majesté. Lèse-humanité. What had she said about that muleteer? I felt two packets fond of him.
And one death fond of me.
* * *
When I got back that evening I wrote two letters, one to Ann Taylor, the other to Alison’s mother. I thanked Ann and true to my new resolve took as much blame as I could; to the mother (Goulburn, N.S.W.—I remembered Alison screwing up her face: Goulburn, the first half’s all it’s fit for, the second’s what they ought to do with it), to the mother, a difficult, because I didn’t know how much Alison had said about me, letter of condolence.
Before I went to bed I took out England’s Helicon; turned to Marlowe.
Come live with mee, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,
Woods or steepie mountaine yeeldes.
And wee will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the sheepheards feede the yr flocks,
By shallow Rivers, to whose falls
Melodious byrds sing Madri galls.
And I will make thee beds of Roses,
And a thousand fragrant poesies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,
Imbroydred all with leaves of Mirtle…
52
I had another letter from England on Saturday. There was a small black eagle on the flap: Barclay’s Bank.
DEAR MR. URFE,
Thank you for writing to me upon the recommendation of the Misses Holmes. I have pleasure in enclosing a form which I hope you will kindly fill in and return to me and also a small booklet with details of the special services we can offer overseas customers.
Yours truly,
P. J. FEARN, Manager
* * *
I looked up from reading it into the eyes of the boy who sat opposite me at table, and gave him a small smile; the unsuppressed smile of the bad poker player.
Half an hour later I was climbing through the windless forest to the central ridge. The mountains were reduced to a pale insubstantiality by the heat, and the islands to the east rose and trembled shimmeringly over the sea, a strange optical illusion, like spinning tops. On the central ridge I moved along to a place where there was shade and a view down over Bourani; and sat there for an hour, in limbo, with the death of Alison still dark inside me and the hope of Julie, Julie now confirmed as Julie, there below me in the south. Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison’s death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with.
By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockeyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high.
Before I moved off I took out the headed Barclay’s letter and read it again. It had the effect of making me feel more indulgent towards Conchis than I had intended to be. I saw no objection now to a few small last dissimulations—on both sides.
* * *
It was like the first day. The being uninvited, unsure; the going through the gate, approaching the house in its silent sunlit mystery, going round the colonnade; and there too it was the same, the tea table covered in muslin. No one present. The sea and the heat through the arches, the tiled floor, the silence, the waiting.
And although I was nervous for different reasons, even that was the same. I put my duffle-bag on the cane settee and went into the music room. A figure stood up from behind the harpsichord. He had evidently been sitting on the music stool, reading a book, which he put down as soon as I appeared.
“Nicholas.”
“Hello, Mr. Conchis.” My voice was neutral.
He came and shook my hand, gave me a scrutiny; the characteristic rapid movement of his head.
“I am invited?”
“Of course. Did I not say?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“You are well?”
“Slightly bruised.” I raised my hand, which was scarred and still red from the daubings of Mercurochrome the school nurse had put on it.
“How did you do that?” He asked the question with a perfect effrontery.
“I tripped over something as I was running.”
He took me to the door, insisted on examining the hand.
“You must be careful. There is always the danger of tet
anus.”
“I intend to be.”
He examined my bleak smile rather as he had looked at the hand. With the minutest of shrugs, which might or might not have been apologetic, he took my arm and led me out towards the tea table; then went to the corner.
“Maria!”
He came back to the table, and whisked the muslin away. We sat down.
“How was Geneva?”
“Dull.” He offered me a sandwich. “I foolishly entered a financing consortium two years ago. Can you imagine Versailles with not one Roi Soleil, but seven of them?”
“Financing what?”
“Many things.” Marie appeared with the tray. “But tell me what you have been doing.”
“Nothing.” I returned his oblique smile. “Waiting.”
He took the compliment with a little bow; and turned to the tea things.
I said, “I met Barba Dimitraki the other day. By chance.” He poured the tea into the cups, so unsurprised that I suspected he already knew. But the keen, bright look he gave me as he handed me my cup appeared to convey a certain admiration; as if he might have underestimated me.
“And what did he tell you?”
“Very little. But I understand that I have more fellow victims than I thought.”
“Victims?”
“A victim is someone who has something inflicted on him without being given any real choice.”
He sipped his tea. “That sounds an excellent definition of man.”
“I should like an excellent definition of God.”
“Yes. Of course.” He put his cup down and folded his arms; he seemed in an excellent humor, at his most Picasso-like and dangerous. “I was going to wait until tomorrow. But no matter.” He glanced at my hand but he seemed to hint at something other. At Julie? The smile lingered in his face, lingered and threatened, and then he said, “Well. What do you think I am doing?”
“Preparing to make a fool of me again?”
He smiled almost benignly at me, as if that afternoon I was constantly surprising him, and shook his head. “Now you have met Barba Dimitraki…” He left one of his characteristic long pauses, then went on. “Before the war we used to amuse ourselves with my private theatre here. And during the war, when I had a great deal of time to think, and no friends to amuse me, no theatre, I conceived a new kind of drama. One in which the conventional relations between audience and actors were forgotten. In which the conventional scenic geography, the notions of proscenium, stage, auditorium, were completely discarded. In which continuity of performance, either in time or place, was ignored. And in which the action, the narrative was fluid, with only a point of departure and a fixed point of conclusion.” His mesmeric eyes pinned mine. “You will find that Artaud and Pirandello and Brecht were all thinking, in their different ways, along similar lines. But they had neither the money nor the will—and perhaps not the time—to think as far as I did. The element that they could never bring themselves to discard was the audience.” He spread his arms. “Here we are all actors. None of us are as we really are.” He raised his hand quickly. “Yes, I know. You think you are not acting. Just pretending a little. But you have much to learn about yourself. You are as far from your true self as that Egyptian mask our American friend wears is from his true face.”
I gave him a warning look. “He’s not my American friend.”
“If you had seen him play Othello, you would not say that. He is a very fine young actor.”
“He must be. I thought he was meant to be a mute.”
His smile was almost mischievous. “Then I have proved my praise.”
“Rather a waste of a very fine young actor.”
“His part is not ended yet.”
He sat watching me; the old humorlessly amused look.
“And you are the producer?”
“No. This year the director is a very old friend of mine. He used to come here before the war.”
“Shall I meet him?”
“That depends on him. But I think not.”
“Why on him?”
“Because I am an actor too, Nicholas, in this strange new metatheatre. That is why I say things both of us know cannot be true. Why I am permitted to lie. And why I do not want to know everything. I also wish to be surprised.”
I remembered something Julie had said: He wants us to be mysteries to him as well. But it was obviously a very limited freedom and mystery he wanted in us; however large an aviary the fancier builds, the aviary’s purpose is still to imprison.
“Your bank balance must get some surprises, too.”
“My dear Nicholas, the tragedy of being very rich is that one’s bank balance is incapable of giving one surprises. Pleasant or otherwise. But I confess that this is the most ambitious of our creations. That is partly because you have played your part so well.”
I smiled; lit a cigarette. “I feel I should ask for a salary.”
“You will receive the highest salary of all.”
Julie: a present, a surprise for you. An unexpected possibility shot through me, which I smothered; but I heard an unintended note of deference in my voice.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Perhaps you will never know it.” He added drily, “I am not talking of money. And it is also the most ambitious of our creations for the very simple reason that for me there may never be another year.”
“Your heart?”
“My heart.”
But he looked immortally tanned and fit; in any case, distanced any sympathy.
A silence came between us. I said, “Lily?”
“You will see Lily later.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Before you tell me what you do mean, let me assure you that after this weekend you will never see her again. In your life. That is the fixed point of conclusion this summer.”
This was the “last trick” of Julie’s letter. I guessed it; to make me think I had lost everything, then to give it to me. I gave him a cool look.
“‘In my life’ is a long time.”
“Nevertheless, the comedy is nearly over.”
“But I intend to see the actress home afterwards.”
“She has promised that, no doubt.”
“No doubt.”
He stood up. “Her promises are worth nothing. When you see her tomorrow to say goodbye, ask her to repeat to you the poem of Catullus that begins Nulli se dicit mulier mea.”
“Which you’ve taught her?”
“No. Lily is an excellent classical scholar, and she has an excellent memory.”
He remained staring rather fiercely down at me. I stood as well; but I was enjoying it, the bluffing.
“Of course you can prevent me seeing her again here. But what happens when we leave the island is really… with respect… our business. Not yours.”
“I am trying to warn you. As you say, I cannot stop you meeting away from the island. So you must draw your own conclusions. You may think you arrived here for our first tea together by pure hazard. You did not. If you had not come here that day, partly of your own free will, we should have ensured that you were definitely here by the next weekend. Similarly we have our fixed point of conclusion. You will be foolish to fight it.”
“Can you command people’s emotions so easily?”
He smiled. “When you know the plot.”
I felt myself getting irritated then. That was probably his intention. A little bat’s wing of fear flickered through my mind. There were so many things he could do at Bourani, so many surprises he could spring besides whatever Julie believed was to come.
He reached out his hand for me to come round the table. “Nicholas. Go back to England and make it up with this girl you spoke of. Marry her and have a family and learn to be what you really are.” I had my eyes on the ground. I wanted to shout at him that Alison was dead; and largely because he had woven Julie’s life through mine. I trembled on the brink of telling him I wanted no more deceptions, no more comedy, rose ou noir. Pe
rhaps I really wanted to squeeze some sympathy out of that dry heart.
“Is that how you learn what you are? Marrying and having a family?”
“Why not?”
“A steady job and a house in the suburbs?”
“Excellent.”
“I’d rather die.”
He gave a shrug of regret, but as if he didn’t really care.
“Come. You have never heard me play my clavichord.”
I followed him indoors and upstairs. He went to the little table and lifted the lid revealing the keyboard underneath. I sat by his closed desk, watching the Bonnards. He began to play.
Those Bonnards, their eternal outpouring of a golden happiness, haunted me; they were like windows on a world I had tried to reach all my life, and failed; they had reminded me of Alison, or rather of the best of my relationship with Alison, before; and now they bred a kind of Watteau-like melancholy in me, the forevergoneness of pictures like L’Embarcation pour Cythere. As if Bonnard had captured a reality so real that it could not exist; or only as a dream, a looking back and seeing where the way was lost and if it had not been lost but it had been lost… then I thought of Julie. One day I should see her so, naked at a sunlit window; my naked wife.
I turned to glance at her photo by the window, and realized that it wasn’t there; or anywhere else in the room. It hadn’t just been moved, but removed.
The small muted notes of the clavichord barely filled the room. It was clipped, fluttering, with whimpering vibratos, remotely plangent. He played a series of little Elizabethan almans and voltas. Then a Bach-like gigue. Finally, a small set of variations; each variation ended in the same chanting silvery chorus. He came to an end and looked round at me.
“I liked that last one.”
Without a word he played the chorus again.
“Byrd. But the tune is much older. It is called Rosasolis. The English archers sang it at Agincourt.” He shut the clavichord, and turned with a smile that was of dismissal; once again manipulating my exits and entries.
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