by John Fowles
I picked my way down through alleys between whitewashed houses. An old peasant-woman stood in her doorway with a bowl of vegetable parings she had been emptying for her chickens. I must have looked very strange, carrying a suitcase, unshaven, foreign.
‘Kal’ espera.’
‘Pois eisai?’ she wanted to know. ‘Pou pas?’ The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant: Who art thou? Where goest thou?
I said I was English, a member of the company who had been making the film, epano.
‘What film up there?’
I waved, said it didn’t matter, and ignoring her indignant queries, I came at last to a forlorn little main street, not six feet wide, the houses crammed along it, mostly shuttered, or empty; but over one I saw a sign and went in. An elderly man with a moustache, the keeper of the wineshop, came out of a dim corner.
Over the blue iron mug of retsina and the olives we shared I discovered all there was to discover. First of all, I had missed a day. The trial had not been that morning, but the day before; it was Monday, not Sunday. I had been drugged again for over twenty-four hours; and I wondered what else. What probing into the deepest recesses of my mind. No film company had been in Monemvasia; no large group of tourists; no foreigners since ten days ago … a French professor and his wife. What did the professor look like? A very fat man, he spoke no Greek … No, he had heard of no one going up there yesterday or today. Alas, no one came to see Monemvasia. Were there large cisterns with paintings on the walls up there? No, nothing like that. It was all ruins. Later, when I walked out of the old town gate and under the cliffs I saw two or three crumbling jetties where a boat could have slipped in and unloaded three or four men with a stretcher. They need not have passed the handful of houses that were still inhabited in the village; and they would have come by night.
There were old castles all over the Peloponnesus: Korone, Methone, Pylos, Koryphasion, Passava. They all had huge cisterns; could all be reached in a day from Monemvasia.
I went over the causeway through the gusty wind to the little mainland hamlet, which was where the steamer called. I had a bad meal in a taverna there, and a shave in the kitchen – yes, I was a tourist – and questioned the cook-waiter. He knew no more than the other man.
Pitching and rolling, the little steamer, made late by the meltemi, came at midnight; like a deep-sea monster, festooned with glaucous strings of pearly light. I and two other passengers were rowed out to her. I sat for a couple of hours in the deserted saloon, fighting off seasickness and the persistent attempts to start a conversation made by an Athenian greengrocer who had been to Monemvasia to buy tomatoes. He grumbled on and on about prices. Always in Greece conversation turns to money; not politics, or politics only because it is connected with money. In the end the seasickness wore off and I came to like the greengrocer. He and his mound of newspaper-wrapped parcels were referable and locatable; totally of the world into which I had returned; though for days I was to stare suspiciously at every stranger who crossed my path.
When we came near the island I went out on deck. The black whale loomed out of the windy darkness. I could make out the cape of Bourani, though the house was invisible, and of course there were no lights. On the foredeck, where I was standing, there were a dozen or so slumped figures, poor peasants travelling steerage. The mystery of other human lives: I wondered how much Conchis’s masque had cost; fifty times more, probably, than one of these men earned in a year’s hard work. So had cost their lifetime.
De Deukans. Millet. Hoeing turnips.
Beside me was a family, a husband with his back turned, his head on a sack, two small boys sandwiched for warmth between him and his wife. A thin blanket lay over them. The wife had a white scarf tied in a medieval way, tight round her chin. Joseph and Mary; one of her hands rested on the shoulder of the child in front. I fumbled in my pocket; there were still seven or eight pounds left of the money that had been given me. I looked round, then swiftly stooped and put the little wad of notes in a fold of the blanket behind the woman’s head; then furtively left, as if I had done something shameful.
At a quarter to three I was silently climbing the stairs in the masters’ wing. My room was tidy, all in order. The only thing that had changed was that the piles of examination papers were no longer there. In their place were several letters.
The first one I opened I chose because I couldn’t think who would be writing to me from Italy.
July 14th
Monastery of Sacro Speco,
Near Subiaco
Dear Mr Urfe,
Your letter has been forwarded to me. I at first decided not to reply to it, but on reflection I think it is fairer to you if I write to say that I am not prepared to discuss the matter that you wish me to discuss. My decision on this is final.
I should greatly appreciate it if you would not renew your request in any way.
Yours sincerely,
JOHN LEVERRIER
The writing was impeccably neat and legible, though rather crabbed into the centre of the page; I saw – if it was not a last forgery – a neat, crabbed man behind it. Presumably on some sort of retreat, one of those desiccated young Catholics that used to mince about Oxford when I was an undergraduate, twittering about Monsignor Knox and Farm Street.
The next letter was from London, from someone who purported to be a headmistress, on nicely authentic headed notepaper.
Miss Julie Holmes
Miss Holmes was with us only for one year, in which she taught the classics and also some English and Scripture to our lower forms. She promised to develop into a good teacher, was most reliable and conscientious and also popular with her pupils.
I understood that she was embarking upon a stage career, but I am very pleased to hear that she is returning to teaching.
I should add that she was a very successful producer of our annual play, and also took a leading part in our Young Christians’ school society.
I recommend Miss Holmes warmly.
Very funny.
Next I opened another envelope from London. Inside was my own letter to the Tavistock Repertory Company. Someone had done impatiently but exactly as I requested, and scrawled the name of June and Julie Holmes’s agent across the bottom of the page in blue pencil.
Then there was a letter from Australia. In it was a printed black-edged card with a blank space for the sender’s name to be written in; a rather pathetically childlike hand had done so.
R.I.P.
Mrs Mary Kelly
thanks you for your kind letter
of condolence in her recent
tragic bereavement.
The last letter was from Ann Taylor: inside, a postcard and photographs.
We found these. We thought you might like copies. I’ve sent the negatives to Mrs Kelly. I understand what you say in your letter, we must all feel to blame in different ways. The one thing I don’t think Allie would want is that we take it hard, now that it won’t do any good. I still can’t believe it. I had to pack all her things and you can imagine. It seemed so unnecessary then, it made me cry again. Well, I suppose we must all get over it. I am going home next week, shall see Mrs K. at the earliest possible time. Yours, Ann
Eight bad snaps. Five of them were of me or of views; only three showed Alison. One of her kneeling over the little girl with the boil, one of her standing at the Oedipus crossroads, one of her with the muleteer on Parnassus. She was closest to the camera in the one at the crossroads, and she had that direct, half-boyish grin that somehow always best revealed her honesty… what had she called herself? Coarse salt; the candour of salt. I remembered how we had got in the car, how I had talked about my father, had even then only been able to talk to her like that because of her honesty; because I knew she was a mirror that did not lie; whose interest in me was real; whose love was real. That had been her supreme virtue: a constant reality.
I sat at my desk and stared at that face, at the strand of hair that blew across the side of the forehead, that one m
oment, the hair so, the wind so, still present and for ever gone.
Sadness swept back through me. I could not sleep. I put the letters and photographs in a drawer and went out again, along the coast. Far to the north, across the water, there was a scrub fire. A broken ruby-red line ate its way across a mountain; as a line of fire ate its way through me.
What was I after all? Near enough what Conchis had had me told: nothing but the net sum of countless wrong turnings. I dismissed most of the Freudian jargon of the trial; but all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour – a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike variation of the super-ego I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defence; but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late.
I sat by the shore and waited for the dawn to rise on the grey sea.
Intolerably alone.
64
Whether it was in the nature of my nature, or in that of whatever Coue-method optimism Conchis had pumped into me during my last long sleep, I got progressively more morose as the day dawned. I was well aware that I had no evidence and no witnesses to present in support of the truth; and such a firm believer in logistics as Conchis would not have left his line of retreat unorganized. He must know that his immediate risk was that I should go to the police; in which case his move was obvious. I guessed that by now he and all the ‘cast’ had left Greece. There would be no one to question, except people like Hermes, who was probably even more innocent than I suspected; and Patarescu, who would admit nothing.
The only real witness was Demetriades. I could never force a confession out of him, but I remembered his sweet innocence at the beginning; and that there must have been a time, before I went to Bourani, when they had relied largely on him for information. As I knew from discussing students with him, he was not without a certain shrewdness of judgment, especially when it came to separating genuine hard workers from intelligent idlers. It enraged me to think what his more detailed report must have been on me. I wanted some sort of physical revenge on someone. I also wanted the whole school to know I was angry.
I didn’t go to the first lesson, reserving my spectacular re-entry into school life till breakfast. When I appeared there was the sudden silence you get when you throw a stone into a pool of croaking frogs; an abrupt hush, then the gradual resumption of noise. Some of the boys were grinning. The other masters stared at me as if I had committed the final crime. I could see Demetriades on the far side of the room. I walked straight towards him, too quickly for him to act. He half rose, then evidently saw what was coming and, like a frightened Peter Lorre, promptly sat down again. I stood over him.
‘Get up, damn you.’
He made a feeble attempt at a smile; shrugged at the boy next to him. I repeated my request, loudly, in Greek, and added a Greek jibe.
‘Get up – brothel-louse.’
There was a total hush again. Demetriades went red and stared down at the table.
He had in front of him a plate of pappy bread and milk sprinkled with honey, a dish he always treated himself to at breakfast. I reached forward and flipped it back in his face. It ran down his shirt and his expensive suit. He jumped up, flicking down with his hands. As he looked up in a red rage, like a child, I hit him where I wanted, plug in his right eye. It was not Lonsdale, but it landed hard.
Everyone got to their feet. The prefects shouted for order. The gym master rushed behind me and seized my arm, but I snapped at him that it was all right, it was all over. Demetriades stood like a parody of Oedipus with his hands over his eyes. Then without warning he whirled forwards at me, kicking and clawing like an old woman. The gym master, who despised him, stepped past me and easily pinned his arms.
I turned and walked out. Demetriades started to shout petulant curses I didn’t understand. A steward was standing in the door and I told him to bring coffee to my room. Then I sat there and waited.
Sure enough, as soon as second school began, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. Besides the old man there was the deputy headmaster, the senior housemaster and the gym master; the latter, I presumed, in case I should cut up rough again. The senior housemaster, Androutsos, spoke French fluently and he was evidently there to be the translator at this court martial.
As soon as I sat down I was handed a letter. I saw by the heading that it was from the School Board in Athens. It was in French officialese ; dated two days before.
The Board of Governors of the Lord Byron School having considered the report submitted by the headmaster has regretfully decided that the said Board must terminate the contract with you under clause 7 of the said contract: Unsatisfactory conduct as teacher.
As per the said clause your salary will be paid until the end of September and your fare home will be paid.
There was to be no trying; only sentencing. I looked up at the four faces. If they showed anything it was embarrassment, and I could even detect a hint of regret on Androutsos’s; but no sign of complicity.
I said, ‘I didn’t know the headmaster was in Mr Conchis’s pay.’ Androutsos was obviously puzzled. ‘A la solde de qui?’ He translated what I angrily repeated; but the headmaster too seemed nonplussed. He was in fact far too dignified a figurehead, more like an American college president than a real headmaster, to make it likely that he would connive in an unjust dismissal. Demetriades had deserved his black eye even more than I suspected. Demetriades, Conchis, some influential third person on the Board. A secret report…
There was a swift conversation in Greek between the headmaster and his deputy. I heard the name Conchis twice, but I couldn’t follow what they said. Androutsos was told to translate.
‘The headmaster does not understand your remark.’
‘No?’
I grimaced menacingly at the old man, but I was already more than half persuaded that his incomprehension was genuine.
At a sign from the vice-master Androutsos raised a sheet of paper and read from it. ‘The following complaints were made against you. One: you have failed to enter the life of the school, absenting yourself almost every weekend during this last term.’ I began to grin. ‘Two: you have twice bribed prefects to take your supervision periods.’ This was true, though the bribery had been no worse than a letting them off compositions they owed me. Demetriades had suggested it; and only he could have reported it. ‘Three: you failed to mark your examination papers, a most serious scholastic duty. Four: you –’
But I had had enough of the farce. I stood up. The headmaster spoke; a pursed mouth in a grave old face.
‘The headmaster also says,’ translated Androutsos, ‘that your insane assault on a colleague at breakfast this morning has done irreparable harm to the respect he has always entertained for the land of Byron and Shakespeare.’
‘Jesus.’ I laughed out loud, then I wagged my finger at Androutsos. The gym master got ready to spring at me. ‘Now listen. Tell him this. I am going to Athens. I am going to the British Embassy, I am going to the Ministry of Education, I am going to the newspapers, I am going to make such trouble that
I didn’t finish. I raked them with a broadside of contempt, and walked out.
I was not allowed to get very far with my packing, back in my room. Not five minutes afterwards there was a knock on the door. I smiled grimly, and opened it violently. But the member of the tribunal I had least expected was standing there: the deputy headmaster.
His name was Mavromichalis. He ran the school administratively, and was the disciplinary dean also; a kind of camp adjutant, a lean, tense, balding man in his late forties, withdrawn even with other Greeks. I had had very little to do with him. The senior teacher of demotic, he was, in the historical tr
adition of his kind, a fanatical lover of his own country. He had run a famous underground news-sheet in Athens during the Occupation; and the classical pseudonym he had used then, o Bouplix, the oxgoad, had stuck. Though he always deferred to the headmaster in public, in many ways it was his spirit that most informed the school; he hated the Byzantine accidie that lingers in the Greek soul far more intensely than any foreigner could.
He stood there, closely watching me, and I stood in the door, surprised out of my anger by something in his eyes. He managed to suggest that if matters had allowed he might have been smiling. He spoke quietly.