by John Fowles
I went and opened one of the shutters to let more light in. Hermes stood in the doorway, staring doubtfully at me. Once again he asked me what I was doing. I noticed he didn’t bother to ask me where Julie was, and this time I ignored him. In a way I hoped he would try to stop me, since I felt a growing need for physical violence of some kind. But he made no move, and I had to vent my frustration on the chest-of-drawers. Apart from one half-drawer with toilet and cosmetic things, it contained nothing but clothes. I gave up, looked round the room. In one corner a rail had been fixed, and a curtain hung there. Ripped aside, it revealed a short row of dresses, skirts, a summer coat. I recognized the pink dress she had worn on the Sunday when I had been told the ‘truth’; or what had then seemed the truth. On the floor were shoes, and behind them, against one of the angles of the wall, a suitcase. I picked it up and threw it on the bed and, without much hope, tried the catches. But they opened.
There were more clothes, two or three woollen jumpers, a heavy tweed skirt, seemingly things not needed in summer Greece; two Greek shoulder-bags, brand-new, there were price-tags still on, as if bought for presents. Underneath lay some books. A pre-war guide to Greece, with some postcards of classical sites and sculpture. None had been written on. A Greene novel. An American paperback on witchcraft, in which a place was marked by a letter. I slipped a printed card out of the envelope. It was an invitation to speech day, a week before, at the London school where Julie had told me she had worked. The envelope had been forwarded to Bourani from Cerne Abbas, her home in Dorset, nearly a month previously. There was also a text of the Palatine Anthology. I flicked it open. Julia Holmes, Girton. Some of the poems had little margin notes, English equivalents, in her neat handwriting.
Hermes spoke. ‘What are you looking for?’
I muttered, ‘Nothing.’ I had a growing suspicion that Conchis operated on some principle like that of the espionage cell; one never told the lower echelons more than they needed to know … and Hermes did not know very much: perhaps only that I might appear like this and seem angry, and was to be humoured. I gave up with the suitcase and looked at him.
‘The other young lady’s room?’
‘Nothing. She took all her things.’
I made him show me ‘the room, which was next-door, and similarly furnished. But that held no signs of occupation at all. Even a wastepaper-basket beside a table was empty. Once more I fixed Hermes.
‘Why didn’t she take her sister’s things with her?’
He shrugged, as if I were being unreasonable. ‘The master told me she would return. With you.’
Downstairs I made Hermes fetch his wife. She was an island woman of fifty or so, sallow-faced, in the ubiquitous black, but she seemed both less morose and more loquacious than her husband. Yes, the sailors had brought the boxes, the master had come. About two o’clock. The young lady had left with him. Had she looked unhappy? Not at all. She was laughing. Such a pretty young lady, the woman added. Had she ever seen her before this summer? Never. She added, as if I might not know, she is foreign. Did she say where she was going? To Athens. Did she say if she was coming back? The woman opened her hands, she did not know. Then she said, Isos. Perhaps. I asked more questions, but received no better answers. It was flagrantly odd that they asked me no questions in return, but I felt certain they were mere pawns; and even if they had known what was happening, they were very clearly not going to tell me.
Eyele. She was laughing. I think it was that one Greek word that stopped me going to the police. I could imagine June being tricked into going with Conchis, but she must have suspected something, she couldn’t just have been laughing. It was somehow a false note, it confirmed all my worst doubts. Then all those things of Julie’s still waiting in the room upstairs; that was another anomaly, though a more favourable one. All this leading me on, shutting me out, leading me on … it was not over yet. I began to be sure that I had only to wait, however disappointed and thwarted I felt in the now.
I had a letter at lunch on the Monday. It was from Mrs Holmes, and had been posted in Cerne Abbas the previous Tuesday.
Dear Mr Urfe,
Of course I don’t mind you writing. I’ve passed your letter on to Mr Vulliamy, who is headmaster of our primary, such a nice man, and he was very tickled by the idea, I think having pen-pals in France and America is getting rather old hat anyway, don’t you. I’m sure he will be getting in touch with you.
I’m so glad you’ve met Julie and June and that there’s someone else English on the island. It does sound so lovely. Do remind them to write. They are awful about it.
Yours most sincerely,
CONSTANCE HOLMES
That evening I was on duty, but I slipped out when the boys had gone to bed and went to Hermes’s house. There were no lights on in the upper floor.
Tuesday came. I felt restless, futile, unable to decide anything. In the late afternoon I strolled up from the quay to the square of the execution. There was a plaque there against the wall of the village school. The walnut tree still stood on the right; but on the left the iron grilles had been replaced by wooden gates. Two or three small boys played football against the high wall beside it; and it was like the room, that torture room, which I had gone to see when I came back from the village on the Sunday evening – locked, but I went round outside and peered in. It was now used as a store-room, and had easels and blackboards, spare desks and other furniture; completely exorcized by circumstance. It should have been left as it had been, with the blood and the electric fire and the one terrible table in the centre.
Perhaps I was over-bitter about the school during those days. The examinations had taken place; and it promised in the prospectus that ‘each student is examined personally in written English by the native English professor’. This meant that I had two hundred papers or so to correct. In one way I didn’t mind. It kept other anxieties and suspenses at bay.
I realized a subtle but profound shift was taking place in me. I knew I could no longer trust the girls – the screw had been turned once too often for that. Julie’s harking-back, just before she was ‘kidnapped’, to my supposed attraction for June was in retrospect the worst false note of all. If I hadn’t been so besotted by her, I should have picked it up at the time. It seemed clear that they were still doing what Conchis wanted; which must mean that they knew, had known from the beginning, what lay behind it all. But if that was one reasonable assumption, I had to add another: that Julie did feel a very real attraction for me. Put the two together, and I had to conclude that she was in some way playing on both sides … deceiving me for the old man’s sake, but also deceiving him for mine. That in turn meant she must know I was not to be denied her in the end, that the teasing would one day stop. I regretted not having told her about Alison when I had had the chance, since that must, if her feeling for me had any decency at all, have brought the absurd hide-and-seek to an abrupt close. But at least my silence there killed one past fear. She could not have known the truth and continued with the charade.
Wednesday had been a sultry day with a veiled sun, an end-of-the-world day, very un-Aegean. That night I sat down for a really long session of correcting. Thursday was the deadline for handing in papers to the assistant headmaster. The air was very heavy, and about half past ten I heard distant rumbles. Rain was mercifully coming. An hour later, when I had worked about one-third of the way through the pile of foolscap, there was a knock on the door. I shouted. I thought it was one of the other masters or perhaps one of the sixth-form leavers who had come cadging advance results.
But it was Barba Vassili, from the gate. He was smiling under his white walrus moustache; and his first words made me jump from my desk.
‘Sygnonri, kyrie, ma mia thespoinis …’
58
‘Excuse me, sir, but a young lady
‘Where?’
He gestured back towards the gate. I was tearing on a coat. ‘A very beautiful young lady. A foreigner, she –’
But I was already pas
t him and running down the corridor. I called back to his grinning face – ‘ To phos!’ – to make him turn out the light, then I leapt down the stairs, raced out of the building and along the path towards the gate. There was a bare bulb above Barba Vassili’s window; a pool of white light. I expected to see her standing in it, but there was no one. The gate was locked at that time of night, since we masters all had pass-keys. I felt in my pockets and remembered that I had left mine in the old jacket I wore in class. I looked through the bars. There was no one in the road, no one on the thistly wasteland that ran down to the sea fifty yards away, no one by the water. I called in a low voice.
But no quick shape appeared from behind the walls. I turned exasperatedly. Barba Vassili was hobbling slowly down through the trees from the masters’ block.
‘Isn’t she there?’
He seemed to take ages to unlock the side-gate used in the evening. We went out into the road. The old man pointed away from the village.
‘That way?’
‘I think.’
I began to smell more games. There was something in the old man’s smile; the thundery air, the deserted road – and yet I didn’t care what happened, as long as something happened.
‘May I have your key, Barba?’
But he wouldn’t let me have the one in his hand; had to return inside Iris lodge and rummage to find another. He seemed to be delaying me, and when he at last turned round with a spare key, I snatched it out of his hand.
I walked quickly down the road away from the village. To the east lightning shuddered. After seventy or eighty yards the school wall turned inland at right angles. I thought Julie might be waiting round the corner of it. She wasn’t. The road did not go much more than a quarter of a mile farther; beyond the wall it looped a little away from the sea to cross a dried-out torrent. There was a small bridge and a hundred yards to the left and inland of that, another of the countless island chapels, linked to the road by an avenue of tall cypresses. The moon was completely obscured by a dense veil of high cloud, but there was a grey Palmeresque light over the landscape. I came to the bridge and hesitated, torn between following the road and turning back towards the village, the much more plausible way for her to have gone. Then I heard her call my name.
The voice came from the avenue of cypresses. I walked quickly up between them. Halfway to the chapel there was a movement to my left. She was standing ten feet away, hidden from the road, between two of the largest trees. A dark summer mackintosh, a headscarf, trousers, a seemingly black shirt; the paler oval of her face. In spite of what I first said, I knew at once: there was something about the way she waited, with her hands in her mackintosh pockets.
‘Julie?’
‘It’s me. June. Thank God you’ve come.’
I went close to her. ‘Where’sJulie?’
She looked at me a long moment, then let her head sink.
‘I thought you’d realized.’
‘Realized what?’
‘What’s going on.’ She met my eyes. ‘Between her and Maurice.’
I left a silence, and she looked down again.
‘What the hell do you all take me for?’ She said nothing. ‘You seem to have forgotten I’ve been through the rich man’s mistress farce already.’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean that. Just that she’ll … do whatever he asks. In other ways.’
Her head remained down, and I had my choice then. I should have turned straight on my heel and walked back to the school, my room, my desk, my examination-marking; because I knew I had returned to the beginning as regards the masque. In terms of hard fact I knew no more of this girl than when I had first set eyes on her naked figure running in the night below the terrace at Bourani. Yet I also knew that I could no more turn on my heel than a dropped stone can fly back into the hand.
‘And what exactly are you doing here?’
‘I don’t think it’s fair any more.’
‘What isn’t fair?’
She glanced up at me. ‘It was all planned. Her being snatched away from you like that. She knew all along it would happen.’
‘And this isn’t planned?’
She stared resignedly beyond me, into the night.
‘I don’t blame you for supposing it is.’
‘You haven’t told me where Julie is.’
‘In Athens. With Maurice.’
‘From where you’ve just come?’ She nodded. ‘Why this extraordinary hour?’
‘I didn’t get here till dusk.’
I searched her expression. It contrived, with her stance, an air of hurt innocence, of reproach at my suspicion. She was transparently playing a part.
‘Why didn’t you wait at the gate?’
‘I panicked. He was gone such a long time.’
Lightning flickered again. There was a waft of air, the smell of coming rain, and an almost continuous and increasingly ominous rumble from the east.
‘What’s there to panic about?’
‘I’ve run away, Nicholas. They must have guessed where.’
‘Why didn’t you go to the police – the embassy?’
‘It’s not a criminal offence. Making someone fall in love with you under false pretences. And she is my sister.’ She added, ‘It’s not what Maurice is doing. But what Julie is.’
There were telltale little pauses between the sentences, as if she had to have each one swallowed by me before she could go on. I did not leave her with my eyes. In the darkness she looked hallucinatorily like her sister.
She said, ‘I’ve only come to warn you. That’s all.’
‘And console me?’
She was saved from answering by the sound of a low voice from the road. We both looked round the cypress. Three dim shapes, men, were pacing slowly down it towards the bridge, talking in Greek.
People, villagers, masters, often strolled to the end of the road and back in the evening, for the coolness. June gave me what was meant to be a frightened look. That also did not convince me.
‘You came on the noon boat?’
But she avoided that trap. ‘I found a way by land. By Kranidi.’
Occasionally thalassophobic parents used that route – it meant changing at Corinth, and taking a taxi from Kranidi and then hiring a boat to bring one across from the mainland; a full day’s journey; and difficult if you didn’t speak reasonable Greek.
‘Why?’
‘Because Maurice has spies everywhere here. In the village.’
‘I’ll believe that part of it.’
I looked down again towards the road. The three men were strolling calmly on past the avenue of trees, their backs to us; the the greyish strip of road, the black scrub beyond, the dark sea. They were plainly exactly what they seemed.
I said, ‘Look, I’m getting bloody tired of this. Games, okay. But not with people’s emotions.’
‘Perhaps I feel exactly the same.’
‘Once too often. Sorry. It won’t wash.’
She said in a low voice, ‘She really has fooled you, hasn’t she?’
‘A good deal more convincingly than you have – and we’ve also been through this conversation before. So come on. Where is she?’
‘At this moment? Probably in bed with her real lover.’
I drew a breath. ‘Maurice?’
‘The man you know as Joe.’
I laughed, it was too much. She said, ‘All right. You don’t have to believe me.’
‘And you’ll have to do a damn sight better than this. Or I’m going back to my room.’ She was silent. ‘I suppose that’s why he stands and watches us making love together.’
‘You can do that if you’re really making love to someone every night. If you know the other man is only being made a fool of.’
She was far too persistent, it was like trying to sell a pig in a poke twice over to the same customer.
‘This is getting sick. I’ve had enough.’
I turned to go, but she caught my arm.
‘Nichola
s, please … apart from anything else I don’t know where to spend tonight. I can’t go to the house in the village.’
‘Try the hotel.’
She swallowed that rebuff, then tried again. ‘They’ll probably be here tomorrow, and if I’m going to be accused of anything, I’d like you beside me. To back me up. That’s all. Honestly.’
Just for a moment there was a more authentic tone in her voice; and she had finally a little smile, a nice mixture of ruefulness and appeal for protection. I made my voice a shade gentler.
‘You shouldn’t have told me the story of Three Hearts.’
‘Is it so improbable?’
‘You know damn well the improbability is in your bending reality to fit it.’
‘I don’t see what’s so unreal in our finding each other … she shook her head, and avoided my eyes.
‘We spend the night together. Is that the idea?’
‘I’m just saying that when you discover the truth about Julie, if…’ but again she shook her head.
‘Why do we have to wait that long?’
‘Because … I know you don’t believe me yet.’
‘I thought there’d be some snag.’
My tone had been growing more and more sarcastic, but now she looked me in the eyes. Hers had the exaggerated dilation of a dared child.
‘If that’s a challenge, I accept it. If it would make you believe me.’
‘The more I know you two, the more incredible you get.’
‘Because we both find you rather attractive? And I happen to feel sorry for you? As well as for myself. If that matters.’
I stared at her, half tempted to put her to the test. But it was so obvious that the real test was for me.
‘Did Julie tell you I’d written to your mother?’