by John Fowles
‘Je veux vous parler, Monsieur Urfe.’
I had another surprise then, because he had never spoken to me before in anything but Greek; I had always assumed that he knew no other language. I let him come in. He glanced quickly down at the suitcases open on my bed, then invited me to sit behind the desk. He took a seat himself by the window and folded his arms: shrewd, incisive eyes. He very deliberately let the silence speak for him. I knew then. For the headmaster, I was simply a bad teacher; for this man, something else besides.
I said coldly, ‘Eh bien?’
‘I regret these circumstances.’
‘You didn’t come here to tell me that.’
He stared at me. ‘Do you think our school is a good school?’
‘My dear Mr Mavromichalis, if you imagine – ‘
He raised his hands sharply but pacifyingly. ‘I am here simply as a colleague. My question is serious.’
His French was ponderous, rusty, but far from elementary.
‘Colleague … or emissary?’
He lanced a look at me. The boys had a joke about him: how even the cicadas stopped talking when he passed.
‘Please to answer my question. Is our school good?’
I shrugged impatiently. ‘Academically. Yes. Obviously.’
He watched me a moment more, then came to the point. ‘For our school’s sake, I do not want scandals.’
I noted the implications of that first person singular.
‘You should have thought of that before.’
Another silence. He said, ‘We have in Greece an old folksong that says, He who steals for bread is innocent, He who steals for gold is guilty.’ His eyes watched to see if I understood. ‘If you wish to resign … I can assure you that Monsieur le Directeur will accept. The other letter will be forgotten.’
‘Which Monsieur le Directeur?’
He smiled very faintly, but said nothing; and would, I knew, never say anything. In an odd way, perhaps because I was behind the desk, I felt like the tyrannical interrogator. He was the brave patriot. Finally, he looked out of the window and said, as if irrelevantly, ‘We have an excellent science laboratory.’
I knew that; I knew the equipment in it had been given by an anonymous donor when the school was re-opened after the war and I knew the staff-room ‘legend’ was that the money had been wrung out of some rich collaborationist.
I said, ‘I see.’
‘ I have come to invite you to resign.’
‘As my predecessors did?’
He didn’t answer. I shook my head.
He tacked nearer the truth. ‘I do not know what has happened to you. I do not ask you to forgive that. I ask you to forgive this.’ He gestured: the school.
‘I hear you think I’m a bad teacher anyway.’
He said, ‘We will give you a good recommandation.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
He shrugged. ‘If you insist…’
‘Am I so bad as that?’
‘We have no place here for any but the best.’
Under his oxgoad eyes, I looked down. The suitcases waited on the bed. I wanted to get away, to Athens, anywhere, to non-identity and non-involvement. I knew I wasn’t a good teacher. But I was too flayed, too stripped elsewhere, to admit it.
‘You’re asking too much.’ He waited in silence, implacably. ‘I’ll keep quiet in Athens on one condition. That he meets me there.’
‘Pas possible.’
Silence. I wondered how his monomaniacal sense of duty towards the school lived with whatever allegiance he owed Conchis. A hornet hovered threateningly in the window, then caroomed away; as my anger retreated before my desire to have it all over and done with.
I said. ‘Why you?’
He smiled then, a thin, small smile. ‘Avant la guerre.’
I knew he had not been teaching at the school; it must have been at Bourani. I looked down at the desk. ‘I want to leave at once. Today.’
‘That is understood. But no more scandals?’ He meant, after that at breakfast.
‘I’ll see. If… ‘I gestured in my turn. ‘Only because of this.’
‘Bien.’ He said it almost warmly, and came round the desk to take my hand; and even shook my shoulder, as Conchis had sometimes done, as if to assure me that he took my word.
Then, briskly and sparsely, he went.
And so I was expelled. As soon as he had gone, I felt angry again, angry that once again I had not used the cat. I did not mind leaving the school; to have dragged through another year, pretending Bourani did not exist, brewing sourly in the past … it was unthinkable. But leaving the island, the light, the sea. I stared out over the olive-groves. It was suddenly a loss like that of a limb. It was not the meanness of making a scandal, it was the futility. Whatever happened, I was banned from ever living again on Phraxos.
After a while I forced myself to go on packing. The bursar sent a clerk up with my pay cheque and the address of the travel agency I should go to in Athens about my journey home. Just after noon I walked out of the school gate for the last time.
I went straight to Patarescu’s house. A peasant-woman came to the door; the doctor had gone to Rhodes for a month. Then I went to the house on the hill. I knocked on the gate. No one answered; it was locked. Then I went back down through the village to the old harbour, to the taverna where I had met old Barba Dimitraki. Georgiou, as I hoped, knew of a room for me in a cottage near by. I sent a boy back to the school with a fish-trolley to get my bags; then ate some bread and olives.
At two, in the fierce afternoon sun, I started to toil up between the hedges of prickly pear towards the central ridge. I was carrying a hurricane lamp, a crowbar and a hacksaw. No scandal was one thing; but no investigation was another.
65
I came to Bourani about half past three. The gap beside and the top of the gate had been wired, while a new notice covered the Salle d’attente sign. It said in Greek, Private property, entrance strictly forbidden. It was still easy enough to climb over. But I had no sooner got inside than I heard a voice coming up through the trees from Moutsa. Hiding the tools and lamp behind a bush, I climbed back.
I went cautiously down the path, tense as a stalking cat, until I could see the beach. A caïque was moored at the far end. There were five or six people – not islanders, people in gay swimming-costumes. As I watched, two of the men picked up a girl, who screamed, and carried her down the shingle and dumped her into the sea. There was the blare of a battery wireless. I walked a few yards inside the fringe of trees, half expecting at any moment to recognize them. But the girl was small and dark, very Greek; two plump women; a man of thirty and two older men. I had never seen any of them before.
There was a sound behind me. A barefooted fisherman in ragged grey trousers, the owner of the caïque, came from the chapel. I asked him who the people were. They were from Athens, a Mr Sotiriades and his family, they came every summer to the island.
Did many Athenian people come to the bay in August? Many, very many, he said. He pointed along the beach: In two weeks, ten, fifteen caïques, more people than sea.
Bourani was pregnable: and I had my final reason to leave the island.
The house was shuttered and closed, just as I had last seen it. I made my way round over the gulley to the Earth. I admired once again the cunning way its trapdoor was concealed, then raised it. The dark shaft stared up. I climbed down with the lamp and lit it; climbed back and got the tools. I had to saw halfway through the hasp of the padlock on the first side-room; then, under pressure from the crowbar, it snapped. I picked up the lamp, shot back the bolt, pulled open the massive door, and went in.
I found myself in the north-west corner of a rectangular chamber. Facing me I could see two embrasures that had evidently been filled in, though little ventilator grilles showed they had some access to the air. Along the north wall opposite, a long built-in wardrobe. By the east wall, two beds, a double and a single. Tables and chairs. Three armchairs. The floor h
ad some kind of rough folkweavc carpeting on top of felt, and three of the walls had been whitewashed, so that the place, though windowless, was less gloomy than the central room. On the west wall, above the bed, was a huge mural of Tyrolean peasants dancing; Lederhosen and a girl whose flying skirt showed her legs above her flower-clocked stockings. The colours were still good; or re-touched.
There were a dozen or so changes of costume for Lily in the wardrobe, and at least eight of them were duplicated for her sister; several I had not seen. In a set of drawers there were period gloves, handbags, stockings, hats; even an antiquated linen swimming-costume with a lunatic ribboned Tarn o’Shanter cap to match.
Blankets were piled on each mattress. I smelt one of the pillows, but couldn’t detect Lily’s characteristic scent. Over a table between the old gunslits, there was a bookshelf. I pulled down one of the books. The Perfect Hostess. A Little Symposium on the Principles and Laws of Etiquette as Observed and Practised in the Best Society. London. 1901. There were a dozen or so Edwardian novels. Someone had pencilled notes on the flyleaves. Good dialogue, or Useful clichés at 98 and 164. See scene at 203, said one. ‘Are you asking me to commit osculation ?’ laughed the ever-playful Fanny.
A chest, but it was empty. In fact the whole room was disappointingly empty of anything personal. I went back and sawed through the other padlock. The room behind was similarly furnished; another mural, this time of snow-covered mountains. In a wardrobe there I found the horn that the ‘Apollo’ figure had called with; the Robert Foulkes costume; a chef’s white overall and drum hat; a Lapp smock; and the entire uniform of a First World War captain with Rifle Brigade badges.
At last I returned to the shelf of books. In irritation I pulled down the whole lot and out of one of the books, an old bound copy of Punch 1914 (in which various pictures had been ticked in red crayon), spilled a little folded pile of what I thought at first were letters. But they were not. They were pieces of roneographed paper. They had apparently conveyed some kind of orders. None was dated.
1. The Drowned Italian Airman
We have decided to omit this episode.
2. Norway
We have decided to omit the visits with this episode.
3. Hirondelle
Treat with caution. Still tender.
4. If subject discovers Earth
Please be sure you know the new procedure for this eventuality by next weekend. Lily considers the subject likely to force such a situation on us.
I noted that ‘Lily’.
5. Hirondelle
Avoid all mention with the subject from now on.
6. Final Phase
Termination by end of July for all except nucleus.
7. State of subject
Maurice considers that the subject has now reached the malleable stage. Remember that for the subject any play is now better than no play. Change modes, intensify withdrawals.
The eighth sheet was a typewritten copy of the Tempest passage Lily had recited to me. Finally, on different paper, a scrawled message:
Tell Bo not to forget the unmentionables and the books. Oh and tissues, please.
Each of these pieces of paper had writing on the back, obviously (or 548 obviously intended to look like) Lily’s rough drafts. There were crossings-out, revisions. They all seemed to be in her hand.
1. What is it?
If you were told its name
You would not understand.
Why is it?
If you were told its reasons
You would not understand.
Is it?
You are not even sure of that,
Poor footsteps in an empty room.
2. Love is the course of the experiment.
Is to the limit of imagination.
Love is your manhood in my orchards. Love is your dark face reading this. Your dark, your gentle face and hands. Did Desdemona
This was evidently unfinished.
3. The Choice
Spare him till he dies.
Torment him till he lives.
4. ominus dominus
Nicholas
homullus est
ridiculus
igitur mcus parvus pediculus multo vult dare sine morari
in cuius illius ridiculus Nicholas colossicus ciculns
5. Baron von Masoch sat on a pin;
Then sat again, to push it in.
‘How exquisite,’ cried Plato, ‘The idea of a baked potato.’ But exquisiter to some Is potato in the turn.
‘My dear, you must often be frightened,’ Said a friend to Madame de Sade. ‘Oh not exactly frightened, But just a little bit scarred.’
Give me my cardigan, Let me think hardigan.
That must have been some game between the sisters; alternate different handwritings.
6. Mystery enough at noon.
The blinding unfrequented paths
Above the too frequented sea
Hold labyrinth and mask enough.
No need to twist beneath the moon.
Here on the rising secret cliff In this white fury of the light
Is mystery enough at noon.
The last three sheets had a fairy story on them.
THE PRINCE AND THE MAGICIAN
Once upon a time there was a young prince, who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domaines, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
‘Are those real islands?’ asked the young prince.
‘Of course they are real islands,’ said the man in evening dress.
‘And those strange and troubling creatures?’
‘They are all genuine and authentic princesses.’
‘Then God also must exist!’ cried the prince.
‘I am God,’ replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
‘So you are back,’ said his father, the king.
‘I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,’ said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
‘Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God, exist.’
‘I saw them!’
‘Tell me how God was dressed.’
‘God was in full evening dress.’
‘Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?’
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
‘That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.’
At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
‘My father the king has told me who you are,’ said the young prince indignantly. ‘You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.’
The man on the shore smiled.
‘It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.’
The prince returned pensively home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.
‘Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?’
The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.
‘Yes, my son, I am only a magician.’
‘Then the man on the shore was God.’
‘The man on the shore was another magician.’
‘I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic’
/> ‘There is no truth beyond magic,’ said the king.
The prince was full of sadness.
He said, ‘I will kill myself
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I can bear it.’
‘You see, my son,’ said the king, ‘you too now begin to be a magician.’
The ‘orders’ looked suspiciously as if they had all been typed out at the same time, just as the poems were all scribbled in the same pencil with the same pressure, as if they had been written ad hoc in one sitting. Nor did I believe such ‘orders’ could ever have been sent. I puzzled over Hirondelle … still tender; must not be mentioned to me; some surprise, some episode I was never shown. The poems and the little epistemological fable were easier to understand; had clear applications. Obviously they could not have been sure that I would break into the Earth. Perhaps there were such clues littered all over the place, it being accepted on their side that I would find only a very small proportion of them. But what I did find would come to me in a different way from the blatantly planted clue – with more conviction; and yet might be as misleading as all the other clues i had been given.