by John Fowles
‘Did he really say I was his kept woman?’
I told her verbatim. She stared after the yacht.
‘What a cheek.’
‘I knew it was a put-on. It’s just that dear old poker-face of his.’
‘I shall jolly well slap it next time I see him. June’ll go mad.’ But then she smiled at me. ‘Still … ‘ she pulled my hand. ‘That walk. I’m famished.’
‘I want to see where you lived.’
‘Afterwards. Please let’s eat.’
We climbed back to where I had left the basket, and installed ourselves under a pine-tree. She undid the sandwiches, I opened the champagne, and lost some of it, it had got too warm. But we toasted each other, then kissed again, and started eating. She wanted to know everything that had happened the day before, and I told her; then everything else, the night manoeuvres, the supposed letter to her from me the week before, my not having been ill.,.
‘You did get my real letter from Siphnos?’
‘Yes.’
‘Actually we wondered if it was some last trick. But he’s been so sweet to us. Ever since our little show-down.’
I asked her what they’d been doing … in Crete and cruising around. She grimaced. ‘Lying in the sun and getting bored.’
‘I can’t think why there had to be the delay.’
Julie hesitated. ‘He did make one attempt last weekend to sell us the idea of … you know, pushing you off on to June. I suppose he couldn’t quite give up hope on that.’
‘Look at this.’ I reached for my duffel-bag and showed her the envelope of money; told her how much it was, what I still felt inclined to do with it. But she was swift to disagree.
‘No honestly, you must take it. You’ve earned it, and he’s got so much.’ She smiled. ‘And you may have to start buying me meals soon. Now I’m out of work.’
‘He didn’t try and tempt you with more money?’
‘He did actually. It was the house in the village and you against the completion of contract money.’
‘A bit rough on June?’
Julie sniffed. ‘She wasn’t allowed a vote.’
‘I adore that sun-hat.’
It was soft, childlike, short-brimmed. She took it off and contemplated it, again like a child, almost gauchely, as if no one had ever paid her physical compliments before. I leant across and kissed her cheek, then put an arm round her shoulders and drew her to me. The yacht was two or three miles away now, disappearing round the end of Phraxos to the east.
‘And the grand enigma – not a clue?’
‘You’ve no idea. We were almost on our knees to him the other day. But that’s the other price. It was going on in that absurd way, or this. Being left in the dark.’
‘I wish to God I knew what happened here last year – and the one before.’
‘You haven’t heard from them?’
‘Not a word.’ I added, ‘I’d better confess.’ I told her about the letters I had written checking on her, and showed her the one from her bank in London.
‘I think that’s absolutely foul of you, Nicholas. Fancy not trusting us.’ She bit her lips. ‘Nearly as foul as June’s ringing up the British Council in Athens and checking on you.’ I grinned. ‘I made ten bob out of that.’
‘Is that all I was worth?’
‘All she was worth.’
I looked to the east. The yacht had disappeared, the sea was empty now, the wind blew gently through the pines above us, shifted wisps of her hair. She had slumped a little against me where I sat with my back to the pine-stem. I felt like one of those rockets, like the champagne we had drunk. I turned her face and we kissed, then lay, still kissing, side by side in the sun-flecked shade. I wanted her, but not so urgently, now that all summer lay ahead. So I contented myself with a hand beneath her shirt on her bare back, and her mouth. In the end she lay half across me, with her lips against my cheek, in silence.
I whispered, ‘Have you missed me?’
‘More than it’s good for you to know.’
‘I’d like to lie like this every night of my life.’
‘I wouldn’t. Not comfortable enough.’
‘Don’t be so literal-minded.’ I held her a little tighter. ‘Say I may. Tonight.’
She ran fingers through my shirt.
‘Was she nice in bed? Your Australian friend?’
I lay there, chilled a moment, staring up through the pine-branches at the sky beyond, half inclined to tell her … then no, it was better to wait.
‘I’ll tell you all about her one day.’
She pinched my skin gently. ‘I thought you had.’
‘Why do you ask, anyway?’
‘Because.’
‘Because what?’
‘I’m probably not as… you know.’
I turned and kissed her hair. ‘You’ve already proved you’re much cleverer.’
She was silent a moment, as if she wasn’t fully reassured.
‘I’ve never really been physically in love with anyone before.’
‘It’s not an illness.’
‘An unknown place.’
‘I promise you’ll like it.’
Another little silence. ‘I wish there was another you. For June.’
‘She wants to stay?’
‘A little while.’ Then she murmured, ‘That’s the trouble with being twins. You always have the same tastes in everything.’
‘I thought you didn’t see eye to eye on men.’
She kissed my neck. ‘We do on this one.’
‘She’s teasing you.’
‘I bet you wish we had gone through with Three Hearts.’
‘I’m gnashing my teeth in disappointment.’
There was another pinch, less gentle this time.
‘Seriously.’
‘You’re like a little girl sometimes.’
‘It’s how I feel. My toy.’
‘Who you’re going to take to bed with you tonight?’
‘It’s only a single bed.’
‘Then there won’t be room for pyjamas.’
‘Actually I’ve given up wearing them here.’
‘You’re driving me wild.’
‘I drive myself wild. Lying naked there thinking about you.’
‘What am I doing?’
‘All sorts of wicked things.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t imagine them in words.’
‘Gentle things or rough things?’
‘Things.’
‘Tell me just one.’
She hesitated, then whispered, ‘I run away and you catch me.’
‘What do I do then?’ She said nothing. I reached my hand down her back. ‘Put you over my knees and smack you?’
‘Sometimes I have to be very, very slowly seduced.’
‘Because you’ve never been made love to before?’
‘Mm.’
‘I want to undress you now.’
‘Then you’d have to carry me back.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
She leant up on an elbow, then leant across and kissed me, a little smile.
‘Tonight. I promise. And June’s waiting for us.’
‘Let me see your place first.’
‘It’s horrid. Like a tomb.’
‘Just one quick dekko.’
She stared down into my eyes, as if for some reason she was inclined to argue me out of it; then smiled and stood and reached a hand for me. We went back down the steep slope over the sea. Julie stooped and pulled on a stone: the encrusted lid rose, the dark hole gaped. She turned and knelt, felt down with a foot for the top rung of the ladder, then began to clamber down. She reached the bottom some fifteen feet below and her face craned up.
‘Be careful. Some of the rungs are worn.’
I turned and climbed down after her. It was unpleasantly claustrophobic inside the tube. But at the bottom, opposite the ladder, a small square room opened out, about fifteen feet by fifteen. In the poor light I could make out a
door in each sidewall and on the side towards the sea, the blocked apertures of what must have once been machine-gun, or observation, slits. A table, three wooden chairs, a small cupboard. There was a fusty staleness in the air, as if silence had a smell.
‘Have you got a match?’
She held out a hurricane lamp, and I lit it. The left wall of the room was painted with a clumsy mural – a beer-cellar scene, foaming steins, bosomy girls with winking eyes. Dim traces showed that there had once been colours, but now it was only the black outlines that remained. It was as remote as an Etruscan wall-painting; of a culture long sunken under time. On the right-hand wall was something more skilful – a perspective street vista that I guessed to be of some Austrian city … Vienna, perhaps. I guessed, too, that Anton had helped to execute it. The two side-doors looked like bulkhead doors aboard a ship. There were massive padlocks on each.
Julie nodded. ‘That was our room, in there. Joe used the other.’
‘What a godawful place. It smells.’
‘We used to call it the Earth. Have you ever smelt a fox-earth?’
‘Why are the doors locked?’
‘I don’t know. They never have been. I suppose there must be people on the island who know the place exists.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘You’re not missing anything. Just costumes. Beds. More ghastly murals.’
I looked at her in the lamplight. ‘You’re a brave girl. To face this sort of thing.’
‘We hated it. So many sour, unhappy men. Locked away here with all that sunlight outside.’
I touched her hand.
‘Okay. I’ve seen enough.’
‘Would you put out the lamp?’
I extinguished it, and Julie turned to climb the ladder to the outside. Slim blue legs, the brilliant daylight dazzling down. I waited a moment at the bottom, to keep clear of her feet, then started after her. The top of her body disappeared.
And then she screamed my name.
Someone, perhaps two someones, had sprung from behind the lid and grabbed her arms. She seemed to be lifted, almost jerked bodily out and away – a leg kicked wildly sideways, as if she were trying to hook a foot behind the counterweight wires. My name again, but cut short; a scuffle of stones outside, out of my sight. I clawed violently up the remaining rungs. For one fraction of a second a face appeared in the opening above. A young man with crew-cut blond hair, the sailor I had seen that morning at the house. He saw I was still two rungs from the top, and immediately slammed the lid down. The shocked counterweights rattled against the metal wall by my feet. I bellowed in the sudden pitch darkness.
‘For God’s sake! Hey! Wait a minute!’
I pushed with all my force on the underside of the lid. It gave infinitesimally, as if someone were sitting or standing on it. But it refused to budge at a second attempt. The tube was too narrow for me to apply much upward pressure.
Once more I strained to heave it up; then listened. Silence. I tried the lid one last time, then gave up and climbed down to the bottom. I struck a match, relit the hurricane-lamp; tried the two massive doors. They were impenetrable. I tore open the cupboard. It was as empty of objects as what had just happened was of reason. Snarling with rage, I remembered Conchis’s fairy-godfather exit: the gay farewell, the fireworks, the bottle of Krug. Our revels now are ended. But this was Prospero turned insane, maniacally determined never to release his Miranda.
I stood at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to comprehend the sadistic old man’s duplicities: to read his palimpsest. His ‘theatre without an audience’ made no sense, it couldn’t be the explanation. The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he was doing did spring in part from some theory of the theatre, but he had said it himself: The masque is only a metaphor. So? Some incomprehensible new philosophy: metaphorism? Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. I thought and thought, and thought again, and arrived at last at nothing but more doubt. It began to extend to Julie and June as well. I returned to the schizophrenia stage. That must be it, it was all planned from the beginning, I was never to have her, always to be tormented, mocked like Tantalus. Yet how could any girl do what she had done – I could still feel her kisses, remember every word of that deliberately erotic little whispered conversation she had initiated – and not mean an iota of it? Except someone who was indeed mentally deranged and in some way aware that her promises need never be met?
But how could a man who claimed to be a doctor allow such things to go on? It was inconceivable.
Half an hour and several attempts later the lid smoothly gave before my upthrust. Three seconds later I was in the sunlight again. The sea “was empty, and the trees around me. I climbed the slope to where I could look further inland, but of course there was nothing. The wind blew through the Aleppo pines, indifferent, inhuman, on another planet. A scrap of white paper, a relic from our lunch, flapped idly where it had caught in a tangle of smilax some fifty yards away. The basket and the bag stood where we had left them; the pink hat where she had laid it when she took it off.
Two minutes later I was at the house. It was shuttered blind, exactly as I had last seen it. I started walking fast down the track towards the gate. And there, just as on my first visit to Bourani, I found that I had been left a clue.
57
Or rather, two clues.
They were hanging, from the branch of a pine tree near the gate, in the centre of the path, some six feet from the ground, swinging a little in the wind, innocent and idle, touched by sunlight. One was a doll. The other was a human skull.
The skull hung from a black cord, which passed through a neat hole drilled in the top, and the doll from a white one. Its neck was in a noose. It was hanging in both senses. About eighteen inches high, clumsily carved in wood and painted black, with a smiling mouth and eyes naively whitened in. Round its ankles were its only ‘clothes’ – two wisps of white rag. The doll was Julie, and said that she was evil, she was black, under the white innocence she wore.
I twisted the skull and made it spin. Shadows haunted the sockets, the mouth grinned grimly.
Alas, poor Yorick.
Disembowelled corpses?
Or Frazer … The Golden Bough? I tried to remember. What was it? Hanging dolls in sacred woods.
I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved. The dry trees in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The pro-foundest distances are never geographical.
In the light, in the alley between the trees. And everywhere, a darkness beneath.
What it is, has no name.
The skull and his wife swayed in a rift of the breeze. Leaving them there, in their mysterious communion, I walked fast away.
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians. All I knew was that I ached for Julie, I was mad for her, the world that day had no other meaning; so I strode down to the school like some vengeance-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga, though with always the small last chance in mind that I should find Julie waiting for me. But when I flung my door open, I flung it open on to an empty room. Then I felt like going to Demetriades and trying to wring the truth out of him; forcing him to come with me to the science master. I half decided to go to Athens, and even got a suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe; then changed my mind. Probably the fact that there were another two weeks of term to run was the only significant one; two weeks more in which to torment us … or me.
Finally I went down to the village, straight to the house behind the church. The gate was open; a garden green with lemon and orange trees, through which a cobbled path led to the door of the house. Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed facade was in shadow, a palest blue against the evening sky’s pale blue
. As I walked between the cool, dark walls of the trees Hermes came out at the front door. He looked behind me, as if surprised to see me alone.
I said in Greek, ‘Is the young lady here?’ He stared at me, then began to open his hands in incomprehension. I cut in impatiently. ‘The other young lady – the sister?’
He raised his head. No.
‘Where is she?’
With the yacht. After lunch.
‘How do you know? You weren’t here.’
His wife had told him.
‘With Mr Conchis? To Athens?’
‘Nai.’ Yes.
The yacht could easily have called in at one of the village harbours after it had disappeared from our sight; and I supposed June might have gone aboard without fuss, if she had been told we were there. Or it might always have been planned so. I stared at Hermes a moment, then pushed past him and went into the house.
An airy hall, cool and bare, a fine Turkish carpet hanging on one wall; and on another an obscure coat-of-arms, rather like an English funeral hatchment. Through an open door to the left I saw the crates of pictures from Bourani. A small boy stood in the door, he must have been one of Hermes’s children. The man said something to him and after a solemn brown stare the child turned away.
Hermes spoke behind my back. ‘What do you want?’
‘Which rooms were the girls in?’
He hesitated, then pointed up the stairs. I had a reluctant impression that he was genuinely out of his depth. I strode up the stairs. Passages led both left and right, the length of the building. I looked round at Hermes, who had followed me. Again he hesitated; then again he pointed. A door to the right. I found myself in a typical island room. A bed with a folkweave bedspread, a floor of polished planks, a chest of drawers, a fine cassone, some pleasant water-colours of island houses. They had the clean, stylish, shallow look of architectural perspectives and though they were unsigned I guessed that once more I was looking at Anton’s work. The west-facing shutters were latched three-quarters closed. On the sill of the open windows stood a wet kanati, the porous jug the Greeks put there to cool both air and water. A small bowl of jasmine and plumbago flowers, creamy white and pale blue, sat on top of the cassone. A nice, simple, welcoming little scene.