by John Fowles
If you are ever in this part of the world, I should be delighted to talk over old times with you, and to offer you, if not an ouzo, at least a sake pou napinete.
Yours sincerely,
DOUGLAS NEVINSON
Wimmel. In late August, a piece of luck. One of my teeth began to hurt and Kemp sent me to her dentist to have it seen to. While I was in the waiting-room I picked up an old film magazine of the previous January. Halfway through I came on a picture of the false Wimmel. He was even dressed in Nazi uniform. Underneath there was a caption paragraph.
Ignaz Pruszynski, who plays the fiendish German Town Commandant in Poland’s much-praised film of the resistance, Black Ordeal, in real life played a very different role. He led a Polish underground group all through the Occupation, and was awarded the Polish equivalent of our own Victoria Cross.
Hypnotism. I read a couple of books on this. Conchis had evidently learnt the technique professionally. Post-hypnotic suggestion, implanting commands that are carried out on a given signal after the subject has been woken from the trance state and is in all other ways returned to normal, was ‘perfectly feasible and frequently demonstrated’. But I thought back. At no point could I see that I had been unconsciously forced to behave any differently than I would have done consciously – than I had in fact behaved. No doubt I had been ‘pumped’ under hypnosis. But my own free will must have made further manipulation, except in very minor things, unnecessary.
Raising both arms above the head. Conchis got this from ancient Egypt. It was the Ka sign, used by initiates ‘to gain possession of the cosmic forces of mystery’. In many tomb-paintings. It meant: ‘I am master of the spells. Strength is mine. I impart strength.’ Another Egyptian symbol was the ring-topped cross on the walls of the trial room. It was their ‘key of life’.
The wheel symbol. ‘The mandala, or wheel is a universal symbol of existence.’
The ribbon on my leg, the bare shoulder. From masonic ritual, but believed to descend from the Eleusinian mysteries. Associated with initiation.
‘Maria.’ Probably really was a peasant, though an intelligent one. She spoke only two or three words of French to me; sat silent all through the trial, rather conspicuously out-of-place. Unlike the others, she may have been what she first seemed.
Lily’s bank. I wrote another letter, and got back a reply from the manager of the real Barclay’s branch. His name was not P. J. Fearn; and the headed paper he wrote on was not like that I had received.
Her school. Julie Holmes – unknown.
Mitford. I wrote a card to the address in Northumberland I had had the year before and received a letter back from his mother. She said Alexander was now a courier, working in Spain. I got in touch with the travel firm he was working for, but they said he wouldn’t be back till September. I left a letter for him.
The paintings at Bourani. I started with the Bonnards. The first book of reproductions of his work I opened had the picture of the girl drying by the window. I turned to the attributions list at the back. It was in the Los Angeles County Museum. The book had been printed in 1950. Later I ‘found’ the other Bonnard; at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Both had been copies. The Modigliani I never traced; but I suspect, remembering those curiously Conchis-like eyes, that it was not even a copy.
‘Evening Standard’ of January 8th, 1952. No sign of a photo of Lily and Rose, in any edition.
L’Astrée. Did Conchis remember that I believed myself remotely connected with d’Urfé? The story of L’Astrée is: The shepherdess Astrée, hearing evil reports of the shepherd Celadon, banishes him from her presence. A war breaks out, and Astrée is taken prisoner. Celadon manages to rescue her, but she will not forgive him. He does not gain her hand until he has turned the lion and unicorns who devour unfaithful lovers into statues of stone.
Chaliapin. Was at Covent Garden in June 1914, and in Prince Igor.
‘You may he elect.’ When he said that, at our first strange meeting, he meant simply, ‘I’ve decided to use you.’ That was also the only sense in which, at the end, I could be elect. He meant, ‘We have used you.’
Lily and Rose. Two twin sisters, both very pretty, gifted (though I came to doubt Lily’s classical education), must, if they had been at Oxford or Cambridge, have been the double Zuleika Dobsons of their years. I could not believe they had been at Oxford – since our years must have overlapped – so I tried the ‘other’ place. I searched through student magazines, tracked down stills from various college and university theatre productions, even braved one or two of the women’s college bursaries … and all in vain. Girton, her supposed college, had not a single likely candidate. London University proved a similar blank.
I also tried a few London theatrical agencies. Three times I was shown photographs of twin sisters; and was three times disappointed. I had no more luck at Berman’s and one or two other theatrical costumiers I went to. The Tavistock Repertory had not put on any production of Lysistrata. rada could not help. Indeed all I derived from the whole exercise – since my inquiries involved the concocting of various reasons for them – was a grudging retrospective admiration for the two girls’ own skill in improvising lies.
Of course there was one extra cunning in the ‘Julie Holmes’ invention. We always tend to believe people who have had the same experiences as ourselves. Her Cambridge equalled my Oxford, and soon.
Othello, Act I, Scene III.
She is abus’d, stol’n from me, and corrupted
By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks;
For nature so preposterously to err,
Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,
Sans witchcraft could not.
And:
A maiden never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush’d at herself; and she – in spite of nature,
Of years, of country, credit, everything –
To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on!
The fabulous whore Io. Lemprière: In the ancient Gothic Io and Gio signified ‘earth’, as Isi or Isa signified ‘ice’ or water in its primordial state; and both were equally titles of the goddess, who represented the productive and nutritive power of the earth. Indian Kali, Syrian Astarte (Ashtaroth), Egyptian Isis and Greek Io were considered one and the same goddess. She had three colours (on the walls in the trial): white, red, and black, the phases of the moon, and also the phases of woman: virgin, mother, and crone. Lily was evidently the goddess in her white, virgin phase; and perhaps in the black, as well. Rose would have stood for the red phase; but then Alison was given that role.
Polymus Films. I didn’t see the obvious, that one misplaced letter, until painfully late.
Tartarus. The more I read, the more I began to re-identify the whole situation at Bourani – or at any rate the final situation – with Tartarus. Tartarus was ruled by a king, Hades (or Conchis); a queen, Persephone, bringer of destruction (Lily) – who remained ‘six months with Hades in the infernal regions and spent the rest of the year with her mother Demeter on earth’. There was also a supreme judge in Tartarus – Minos (the presiding ‘doctor’ with a beard?); and of course there was Anubis-Cerberus, the black dog with three heads (three roles?). And Tartarus was where Eurydice went when Orpheus lost her.
I was aware that in all this I was acting the role I had decided not to act: that of detective, of hunter, and several times I abandoned the chase. But then one, and one of the apparently least promising, of my bits of research bore spectacular results.
71
It began, one Monday, with a very long shot, the assumption that Conchis had lived in London as a boy and that there had indeed been an original Lily Montgomery in St John’s Wood. I went to Marylebone Central Library and asked to look at the street directories for 1912 to 1914. Of course the name Conchis would not appear; I looked for Montgomery. Acacia Road, Prince Albert Road, Henstridge Place, Queen’s Grove … with an A to Z of London by my side I worked through a
ll the likely streets on the east of Wellington Road. Suddenly, with a shock of excitement, my eyes jumped a page. Montgomery, Fredk, 20 Allitsen Road.
The neighbours’ names were given as Smith and Manningham, although by 1914 the latter had moved and the name Huckstepp appeared. I wrote down the address, and then went on searching. Almost at once, on the other side of the main artery, I came across another Montgomery; this time in Elm Tree Road. But I no sooner caught sight of it than I was disappointed, because the full name was given as Sir Charles Penn Montgomery; an eminent surgeon, by the look of the trail of initials after his name; and obviously not the man Conchis described. The neighbours’ names there were Hamilton-Dukes and Charlesworth. There was another title among the Elm Tree Road residents; a ‘desirable’ address.
I searched on, double-checking everything, but without finding any other Montgomery.
I then followed up in later directories the two I had found. The Allitsen Road Montgomery disappeared in 1922. Annoyingly the Elm Tree Road Montgomery went on much longer, though Sir Charles must have died in 1922; after that the owner’s name appeared as Lady Florence Montgomery, and continued so right up to 1938.
After lunch I drove up to Allitsen Road. As I swung into it, I knew it was no good. The houses were small terrace houses, nothing like the ‘mansions’ Conchis had described.
Five minutes later I was in Elm Tree Road. At least it looked more the part: a pretty circumflex of mixed largish houses and early Victorian mews and cottages. It also looked encouragingly unaltered. Number 46 turned out to be one of the largest houses in the road. I parked my car and walked up a drive between banks of hydrangeas to an imposing front door; rang a bell.
But it sounded in an empty house, and sounded so all through August. Whoever lived there was on holiday. I found out his name in that year’s directory – a Mr Simon Marks. I also found out from an old Who’s Who that the illustrious Sir Charles Penn Montgomery had had three daughters. I could probably have found out their names, but I had by then become anxious to drag my investigations out, as a child his last few sweets. It was almost a disappointment when, one day early in September, I saw a car parked in the driveway, and knew that another faint hope was about to be extinguished.
The bell was answered by an Italian in a white housecoat.
‘I wonder if I could speak to the owner? Or his wife?’
‘You have appointment?’
‘No.’
‘You sell something?’
I was rescued by a sharp voice.
‘Who is it, Ercole?’
She appeared, a woman of sixty, Jewish, expensively dressed, intelligent-looking.
‘Oh, I’m engaged on some research and I’m trying to trace a family called Montgomery.’
‘Sir Charles Perm? The surgeon?’
‘I believe he lived here.’
‘Yes, he lived here.’ The houseboy waited, and she waved him away in a grande-dame manner; part of the wave came my way.
‘In fact… this is rather difficult to explain … I’m really looking for a Miss Lily Montgomery.’
‘Yes. I know her.’ She was evidently not amused by the astounded smile that broke over my face. ‘You wish to see her?’
‘I’m writing a monograph on a famous Greek writer – famous in Greece, that is, and I believe Miss Montgomery knew him well many years ago when he lived in England.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Maurice Conchis.’ She had clearly never heard of him.
The lure of the search overcame a little of her distrust, and she said, ‘I will find you the address. Come in.’
I waited in the splendid hall. As ostentation of marble and ormolu; pier-glasses; what looked like a Fragonard. Petrified opulence, tense excitement. In a minute she reappeared with a card. On it I read: Mrs Lily de Seitas, Dinsford House, Much Hadham, Herts.
‘I haven’t seen her for several years,’ said the lady.
‘Thank you very much.’ I began backing towards the door.
‘Would you like tea? A drink?’
There was something glistening, obscurely rapacious, about her eyes, as if while she had been away she’d decided that there might be a pleasure to suck from me. A mantis-woman; starved in her luxury. I was glad to escape.
Before I drove off I looked once more at the substantial houses on either side of number 46. In one of them Conchis had perhaps spent his youth. Behind number 46 was what looked like a factory, though I had discovered from the A to Z that it was the back of the stands of Lord’s cricket ground. The gardens were hidden because of the high walls, but the ‘little orchard’ must now be dwarfed by the stands overhead. Very probably they had not been built before the First War.
The next morning at eleven I was in Much Hadham. It was a very fine day, cloudless September blue; a day to compare with a Greek day. Dinsford House lay some way out of the village, and although it was not quite so grand as it sounded, it was no hovel; a five-bay period house, posed graciously and gracefully, brick-red and white, in an acre or so of well-kept grounds. This time the door was opened by a Scandinavian au pair girl. Yes, Mrs de Seitas was in – she was down at the stables, if I’d go round the side.
I walked over the gravel and under a brick arch. There were two garages, and a little farther down I could see and smell stables. A small boy appeared from a door holding a bucket. He saw me and called, ‘Mummy! There’s a man.’ A slim woman in jodhpurs, a red headscarf, and a red tartan shirt came out of the same door. She seemed to be in her early forties; a still pretty, erect woman with an open-air complexion.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m actually looking for Mrs de Seitas.’
‘I am Mrs de Seitas.’
I had it so fixed in my mind that she would be grey-haired, Conchis’s age. Closer to her, I could see crow’s-feet and a slight but telltale flabbiness round the neck; the rich brown hair was probably dyed. She might be nearer fifty than forty; but that made her still ten years too young.
‘Mrs Lily de Seitas?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got your address from Mrs Simon Marks.’ A minute change in her expression told me that I had not recommended myself. ‘I’ve come to ask you if you would help in a matter of literary research.’
‘Me!’
‘If you were once Miss Lily Montgomery.’
‘But my father – ‘
‘It’s not about your father.’ A pony whinnied inside the stable. The little boy stared suspiciously at me; his mother urged him away, to go and fill his bucket. I put on all my Oxford charm. ‘If it’s terribly inconvenient, of course I’ll come back another time.’
‘We’re only mucking out.’ She leant the besom she was carrying against the wall. ‘But who?’
‘I’m writing a study of-Maurice Conchis?’
I watched her like a hawk; but I was over a bare field.
‘Maurice who?’
‘Conchis.’ I spelt it. ‘He’s a famous Greek writer. He lived in this country when he was young.’
She brushed back a strand of hair rather gauchely with her gloved hand; she was, I could see, one of those country Englishwomen who are abysmally innocent about everything except horses, homes, and children. ‘Honestly, I’m awfully sorry, but there must be some mistake.’
‘You may have known him under the name of … Charlesworth? Or Hamilton-Dukes? A long time ago. The First World War.’
‘But my dear man – I’m sorry, not my dear man … oh dear – ‘ she broke off rather charmingly. I saw a lifetime of dropped bricks behind her; but her tanned skin and her clear bluish eyes, and the body that had conspicuously not run to seed, made her forgivable. She said, ‘What is your name?’
I told her.
‘Mr Urfe, do you know how old I was in 1914?’
‘Obviously very young indeed.’ She smiled, but as if compliments were rather continental and embarrassing.
‘I was ten.’ She looked to where her son was filling the bucket. ‘Benji
e’s age.’
‘Those other names – they mean nothing?’
‘Good Lord yes, but … this Maurice – what did you call him? – he stayed with them?’
I shook my head. Once again Conchis had tricked me into a ridiculous situation. He had probably picked the name with a pin in an old directory; all he would have had to find was the name of one of the daughters. I plunged insecurely on.
‘He was the son. An only son? Very musical.’
‘I’m afraid there must be a mistake. The Charlesworths were childless, and there was a Hamilton-Dukes boy but –’ I saw her hesitate as something snagged her memory – ‘he died in the war.’
‘I think you’ve just remembered something else.’
‘No – I mean, yes. I don’t know. It was when you said musical’ She looked incredulous. ‘You couldn’t mean Mr Rat?’ She laughed, and put her thumbs in the pockets of her jodhpurs. ‘The Wind in the Willows. He was an Italian who came and tried to teach us the piano. My sister and me.’