by John Fowles
‘Well. Now you are here – let me show you round.’
I wanted to say that I hadn’t come as a tourist, but he was already leading the way through to an inner courtyard. I was shown the traditional ravens and crows, the Holy Bramble, which put forth roses when Saint Benedict rolled on it – as always on such occasions the holiness of self-mortification paled in my too literal mind beside the vision of a naked man pounding over the hard earth and taking a long jump into a blackberry bush … and I found the Peruginos easier to feel reverence for.
I discovered absolutely nothing about the summer of 1951, though I discovered a little more about Leverrier. He was at Sacro Speco for only a few weeks, having just finished his novitiate at some monastery in Switzerland. He had been to Cambridge and read history, he spoke fluent Italian, he was ‘rather unjustifiably believed to be’ an authority on the pre-Reformation monastic orders in England, which was why he was at Sacro Speco – to consult sources in the famous library; and he had not been back to Greece since he left it. He remained very much an English intellectual, rather selfconscious, aware that he must look as if he were playing at being a monk, dressing up, and even a little, complicatedly, vain about it.
Finally he took me down some steps and out into the open air below the monastery. I perfunctorily admired the vegetable and vineyard terraces. He led the way to a wooden seat under a fig tree a little farther on. We sat. He did not look at me.
‘This is very unsatisfactory for you. But I warned you.’
‘It’s a relief to meet a fellow-victim. Even if he is mute.’
He stared out across a box-bordered parterre into the blue heat of the sun-baked ravine. I could hear water rushing down in the depths.
‘A fellow. Not a victim.’
‘I simply wanted to compare notes.’
He paused, then said, ‘The essence of… his… system is surely that you learn not to “compare notes”.’ He made the phrase sound cheap. His wanting me to go was all but spoken. I stole a look at him.
‘Would you be here now if… ‘
‘A lift on the road one had already long been travelling explains when. Not why.’
‘Our experiences must have varied very widely.’
‘Why should they be similar? Are you a Catholic?’ I shook my head. ‘A Christian even?’ I shook my head again. He shrugged. He had dark shadows under his eyes, as if he was tired.
‘But I do believe in … charity?’
‘My dear man, you don’t want charity from me. You want confessions I am not prepared to make. In my view I am being charitable in not making them. In my position you would understand.’ He added, ‘And at my remove I trust you will understand.’
His voice was set cold; there was a silence.
He said, ‘I’m sorry. You force me to be more brusque than I wish.’
‘I’d better go.’
He seized his chance, and stood up.
‘I intend nothing personal.’
‘Of course.’
‘Let me see you to the gate.’
We walked back; into the whitewashed door carved through the rock, up past doors that were like prison cells, and out into the hall with the death murals, the grim mirror of eternity.
He said, ‘I meant to ask you about the school. There was a boy called Aphendakis, very promising. I coached him.’
We lingered a little in the loggia, beside the Peruginos, exchanging sentences about the school. I could see that he was not really interested, was merely making an effort to be pleasant; to humiliate his pride. But even in that he was selfconscious.
We shook hands.
He said, ‘This is a great European shrine. And we are told that our visitors – whatever their beliefs – should leave it feeling … I think the words are “refreshed and consoled”.’ He paused as if I might want to object, to sneer, but I said nothing. ‘I must ask you once again to believe that I am silent for your sake as well as mine.’
‘I’ll try to believe it.’
He gave a formal sort of bow, more Italian than English; and I went down the rock staircase to the path through the ilexes.
I had to wait till evening in Subaico for a bus back to the station. It ran through long green valleys, under hilltop villages, past aspens already yellowing into autumn. The sky turned through the softest blues to a vesperal amber-pink. Old peasants sat at their doorways; some of them had Greek faces, inscrutable, noble, at peace. I felt, perhaps because I had drunk a bottle of Verdicchio while I waited, that I belonged, and would for ever belong, to an older world than Leverrier’s. I didn’t like him, or his religion. And this not liking him, this half-drunken love of the ancient, unchanging Greco-Latin world seemed to merge. I was a pagan, at best a stoic, at worst a voluptuary, and would remain for ever so.
Waiting for the train, I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realized that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem.
69
If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a grey-blue sky; and I could hear people saying ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’ But all those tired greens, greys, browns … they seemed to compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks – how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face.
I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o’clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialled Ann Taylor’s number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited. Alison would be waiting for me, or if not there would be some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour.
At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor’s flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions.
I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.
Footsteps.
A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting-room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.
I backed.
‘Sorry. Wrong flat.’ I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did
I want, but I said, ‘It’s all right. Second floor.’ I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.
I walked back to the pub, and later that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers’ staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.
I went and had one more look at the flat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.
The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The flat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July – ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.
‘Must have been sharing,’ said the clerk.
And that was that.
And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her?
But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone-calls, not the smallest sign.
I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; and then it angered me that I was worried.
The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the ceiling, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that.
At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist’s board. It was a scruffy attic ‘flat’ over two floors of sewing-rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the ‘thirties vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been ‘a close friend’ – ‘God, the times I’ve put him to bed, poor sod.’ I didn’t believe her; ‘Dylan slept (or slept it off) here’ is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her – ‘My name’s Joan, everyone calls me Kemp.’ Her intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place.
‘Okay,’ she said at the door, after I’d agreed to take the rooms. ‘As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week.’
‘Good Lord.’
She nodded. ‘Them.’ I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner.
I also bought an old M.G. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw’s Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and – at least to begin with – stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone.
70
A long August passed, and I had fits of acute depression, fits of torpid indifference. I was like a fish in stale water, stifled by the grey-ness of England. Just as I looked back, Adam after the fall, to the luminous landscapes, the salt and thyme of Phraxos, I looked back to the events of Bourani, which could not have happened, but which had happened, and found myself, at the end of some tired London afternoon, as unable to wish that they had not happened as I was to forgive Conchis for having given me the part he did. Slowly I came to realize that my dilemma was in fact a sort of de facto forgiveness, a condonation of what had been done to me; even though, still too sore to accept that something active had taken place, I thought of ‘done’ in a passive sense.
I thought in the same way of Lily. One day I nearly crashed, braking hard at the glimpse of a slim girl with long blonde hair walking down a side street. I swerved the car into the kerb and raced after her. Even before I saw the face I knew it was not Lily. But if I had rushed after the girl in the side street it was because I wanted to face Lily, to question her, to try to understand the ununderstandable; not because I longed for her. I could have longed for certain aspects of her, for certain phases – but it was that very phasality that made her impossible to love. So I could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one’s life; and yet still hate her for her real, her black present being.
But I had to do something while I waited, while I absorbed the experience osmotically into my life. So throughout the latter half of August I pursued the trail of Conchis and Lily in England; and through them, of Alison.
It kept me, however tenuously and vicariously, in the masque; and it dulled my agonizing longing to see Alison. Agonizing because a new feeling had seeded and was growing inside me, a feeling I wanted to eradicate and couldn’t, not least because I knew the seed of it had been planted by Conchis and was germinating in this deliberate silence and absence he had surrounded me with; a feeling that haunted me day and night, that I despised, disproved, dismissed, and still it grew, as the embryo grows in the reluctant mother’s womb, sweeping her with rage, then in green moments melting her with … but I couldn’t say the word.
And for a time it lay buried under inquiries, conjectures, letters. I decided to ignore everything I had been told by Conchis and the girls as to what was false and what was true. In many things I merely wanted to discover some trace, some fingerprint: just to catch them out at their own skill at deception.
The newspaper cutting about Alison. Different type from that of the Holborn Gazette, where the inquest report would have appeared.
Foulkes pamphlet. Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis’s are not.
Military history. Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones.
Dear Mr Urfe,
I’m afraid your letter does ask, as you say yourself, for the impossible. The units engaged in the Neuve Chapelle set-piece were mostly regular ones. I think it most unlikely that any Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment volunteers would have seen that engagement, even under the circumstances you suggest. But of course we have poor detailed records of that chaotic time, and I can’t hazard more than an opinion.
I can find no trace in the records of a captain called Montague. Usually one is on safer ground with o
fficers. But perhaps he was seconded from one of the county regiments.
De Deukans. No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at. Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider Theridion deukansii: doesn’t exist, though there is a genus Theridion.
Seidevarre. Letter from Johan Fredriksen.
Dear Sir,
The mayor of Kirkenes has passed to me, who is the schoolmaster, your letter to answer. There is in Pasvikdal a place of the name Seidevarre and there was in that place many years from now a family of the name Nygaard. I am very sorry we do not know what is become with this family.
I am very pleased to help you.
I was even more pleased to have been helped. Conchis had once been there, something had happened there. It was not all fiction.
Lily’s mother. I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find Ansty Cottage – or anything else. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I’d once known two girls from Cerne Abbas – twins, very pretty, but I’d forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried – she knew everyone in the village and couldn’t think who it could have been. The ‘headmaster’ at the primary school: in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters had been invented on Phraxos.
Charles-Victor Bruneau. Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Conchis.
Conchis’s costume at the ‘trial’. On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and passed an antique shop on my way to the hotel. Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them was a man dressed exactly as Conchis had been; even to the same emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words LE SORCIER – the sorcerer. The shop was shut, but I took its address and later they sold me the card by post; ‘a nice eighteenth-century card’.