by John Fowles
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.
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 …’
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‘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 past 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 g
one. 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.