‘What happened to him?’
‘He died in 1937. A stroke. They did not discover him till a fortnight later. By then all his goats were dead too. It was winter, so you see the door was fastened.’
His eyes on mine, Conchis grimaced, as if he found death a joker. His skin clung very close to his skull. Only the eyes lived. I had the strange impression that he wanted me to believe he was death; that at any moment the leathery old skin and the eyes would fall, and I should find myself the guest of a skeleton.
Later we went back indoors. There were three other rooms on the north side of the first floor. One room he showed me only a glimpse of, a lumber-room. I saw crates piled high, and some furniture with dust-covers on. Then there was a bathroom, and beside the bathroom, a small bedroom. The bed was made, and I saw my duffel bag lying on it. I had fully expected one locked room, the woman-of-the-glove’s room. Then I thought that she lived in the cottage – Maria looked after her, perhaps; or perhaps this room that was to be mine for the weekend was normally hers.
He handed me the seventeenth-century pamphlet, which I had left on a table on the landing.
‘I usually have an aperitif downstairs in about half an hour. I will see you then?’
‘Of course.’
‘I must tell you something.’
‘Yes.’
‘You have heard some disagreeable things about me?’
‘I only know one story about you and that seems very much to your credit.’
‘The execution?’
‘I told you last week.’
‘I have a feeling that you have heard something else. From Captain Mitford?’
‘Absolutely nothing. I assure you.’
He was standing in the doorway, giving me his intensest look. He seemed to gather strength; to decide that the mystery must be cleared up; then spoke.
‘I am psychic’
The house seemed full of silence; and suddenly everything that had happened earlier led to this.
‘I’m afraid I’m not psychic. At all.’
We seemed drowned in dusk; two men staring at each other. I could hear a clock ticking in his room.
‘That is unimportant. In half an hour?’
‘Why did you tell me that?’
He turned to a small table by the door, struck a match to light the oil-lamp, and then carefully adjusted it, making me wait for an answer. At last he straightened and smiled.
‘Because I am psychic’
He went down the passage and across the landing into his own room. His door shut, then silence welled back.
16
The bed was a cheap iron one. Besides a second table, a carpet, and an armchair, there was only an old, locked cassone, of a kind to be found in every cottage on the island. It was the least likely millionaire’s spare-room imaginable. The walls were bare except for a photograph of a number of village men standing in front of a house -the house. I could make out a younger Conchis in the centre, wearing a straw hat and shorts, and there was one woman, a peasant-woman, though not Maria, because she was Maria’s age in the photo and it was plainly twenty or thirty years old. I held up the lamp and turned the picture round to see if there was anything written on the back. But the only thing there was a fragile gecko, which clung splayfooted to the wall and watched me with cloudy eyes. Geckoes like seldom-used rooms.
On the table by the head of the bed there was a flat shell to serve as an ashtray, and three books: a collection of ghost stories, an old Bible and a large thin volume entitled The Beauties of Nature. The ghost stories purported to be true, ‘authenticated by at least two reliable witnesses’. The list of contents – ‘Borley Rectory’, ‘The Isle of Man Polecat’, ‘No. 18 Dennington Road’, ‘The Man with the Limp’ – reminded me of being ill at boarding school. I opened The Beauties of Nature. The nature was all female, and the beauty all pectoral. There were long shots of breasts, shots of breasts of every material from every angle, and against all sorts of background, closer and closer, until the final picture was of nothing but breast, with one dark and much larger-than-natural nipple staring from the centre of the glossy page. It was much too obsessive to be erotic.
I picked up the lamp and went into the bathroom. It was well fitted out, with a formidable medicine chest. I looked for some sign of a woman’s occupation, and found none. There was running water, but it was cold and salt; for men only.
I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The sky in the open window was a pale night-blue and one or two first faint northerly stars blinked over the trees. Outside, the crickets chirped monotonously, with a Webern-like inconsistency yet precision of rhythm. I heard small noises from the cottage below my window, and I could smell cooking. In the house was a great stillness.
I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so dogmatic that I wanted to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me – not only as a rich man with some enviable works of art in his house. And now he frightened me. It was the kind of illogical fear of the supernatural that in others made me sneer; but all along I had felt that I was invited not out of hospitality, but for some other reason. He wanted to use me in some way. I now discounted homosexuality; he had had his chances and ignored them. Besides, the Bonnards, the fiancee, the book of breasts, all discounted it.
Something much more bizarre was afoot. ‘Are you elect?’ … ‘I am psychic’… it all pointed to spiritualism, to table-tapping. Perhaps the lady of the glove was a medium of some kind. Certainly Conchis hadn’t got the petty-bourgeois gentility and the woolly vocabulary I associated with séance-holders; but he was equally certainly not a normal man.
I lit a cigarette, and after a while I smiled. In that small bare room, it seemed not to matter, even if I was a shade scared. The truth was that I was full of a sort of green stir. Conchis was no more than the chance agent, the event that had come at the right time; just as in the old days I might, after a celibate term at Oxford, have met a girl and begun an affaire with her, I had begun something exciting with him. It seemed linked in a way with my wanting to see Alison again. I wanted to live again.
The house was as quiet as death, as the inside of a skull; but the year was 1953, I was an atheist and an absolute non-believer in spiritualism, ghosts and all that mumbo-jumbo. I lay there waiting for the half-hour to pass; and the silence of the house was still, that day, much more a silence of peace than one of fear.
17
When I went downstairs, the music-room was lamplit but empty. There was a tray on the table in front of the stove with a bottle of ouzo, a jug of water, glasses, and a bowl of fat blue-black Amphissa olives. I poured out some ouzo and added enough water to make it go milkily opaque. Then, glass in hand, I began a tour of the bookshelves. The books were methodically arranged. There were two entire sections of medical works, mostly in French, including many -they hardly seemed to go with spiritualism – on psychiatry, and another two of scientific books of all kinds; several shelves of philosophical works, and also a fair number of botanical and ornithological books, mostly in English and German; but the great majority of the rest were autobiographies and biographies. There must have been thousands of them. They appeared to have been collected without any method: Wordsworth, Mae West, Saint-Simon, geniuses, criminals, saints, nonentities. The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library.
Behind the harpsichord and under the window there was a low glass cabinet which contained two or three classical pieces. There was a rhyton in the form of a human head, a black-figure kylix on one side, a small red-figure amphora on the other. On top of the cabinet were also three objects: a photo, an eighteenth-century clock, and a white-enamelled snuff-box. I went behind the music-stool to look at the Greek pottery. The painting on the flat inner bowl of the kylix gave me a shock. It involved two satyrs and a woman and was very obscene indeed. Nor were the paintings on the amphora of a kind any museum would dare put o
n display.
Then I looked closer at the clock. It was mounted in ormolu with an enamelled face. In the middle was a rosy little naked cupid; the shaft of the one short hand came through his loins, and the rounded tip at its end made it very clear what it was meant to be. There were no hours marked round the dial, and the whole of the right-hand half was blacked out, with the one word Sleep in white upon it. On the white enamel of the other half were written in neat black script the following faded but still legible words: at six, Encounter; at eight, Enchantment; at ten, Erection; at twelve, Ecstasy. The cupid smiled; the clock was not going and his manhood hung permanently askew at eight. I opened the innocent white snuff-box. Beneath the lid was enacted, in Boucheresque eighteenth-century terms, exactly the same scene as some ancient Greek had painted in the kylix two thousand years before.
It was between these two objets that Conchis had chosen, whether with perversion, with humour, or with simple bad taste, I couldn’t decide, to place another photo of the Edwardian girl, his dead fiancee.
She looked out of the oval silver frame with alert, smiling eyes. Her splendidly white skin and fine neck were shown off by a square décolletage, messy swathes of lace tied over her bosom by what seemed a white shoe-lace. By one armpit was a floppy black bow. She looked very young, as if she was wearing her first evening dress; and in this photo she looked less heavy-featured; rather piquant, a touch of mischief, almost a shy delectation in being queen of a cabinet of curiosa.
A door closed upstairs, and I turned away. The eyes of the Modigliani seemed to glare at me severely, so I sneaked out under the colonnade, where a minute later Conchis joined me. He had changed into a pair of pale trousers and a dark cotton coat. He stood silhouetted in the soft light that flowed out of the room and silently toasted me. The mountains were just visible, dusky and black, like waves of charcoal, the sky beyond still not quite drained of afterglow. But overhead -I was standing on the steps down to the gravel – the stars were out. They sparkled less fierily than they do in England; tranquilly, as if they were immersed in limpid oil.
‘Thank you for the bedside books.’
‘If you see anything more interesting on the shelves, take it. Please.’
There was a strange call from the dark trees to the east of the house. I had heard it in the evenings at the school, and at first thought it made by some moronic village boy. It was very high-pitched, repeated at regular intervals: Kew. Kew. Kew. Like a melancholy transmigrated bus-conductor.
‘There is my friend,’ said Conchis. For an absurd and alarming moment I thought he must mean the woman of the glove. I saw her flitting through the island trees in her Ascot gloves, for ever searching for Kew. The call came again, eery and stupid, from the night behind us. Conchis counted five slowly, and the call came as he raised his hand. Then five again, and again it came.
‘What is it?’
‘Otus scops. The scops owl. It is very small. Not twenty centimetres. Like this.’
‘I saw you had some books on birds.’
‘Ornithology interests me.’
‘And you have studied medicine.’
‘I studied medicine. Many years ago.’
‘And never practised?’
‘Only on myself.’
Far out to sea to the west I saw the bright lights of the Athens boat. On Saturday nights it went on south down to Kythera. But instead of relating Bourani to the ordinary world, the distant ship seemed only to emphasize its hiddenness, its secrecy. I took the plunge.
‘What did you mean by saying that you were psychic?’
‘What did you think I meant?’
‘Spiritualism?’
‘Infantilism.’
‘That’s what I think.’
‘Of course.’
I could just make out his face in the light from the doorway. He could see more of mine, because I had swung round during that last exchange.
‘You haven’t really answered my question.’
‘Your first reaction is the characteristic one of your contrasuggestible century: to disbelieve, to disprove. I see this very clearly underneath your politeness. You are like a porcupine. When that animal has its spines erect, it cannot eat. If you do not eat, you will starve. And your prickles will die with the rest of your body.’
I swilled the last of the ouzo round in my glass. ‘Isn’t it your century too?’
‘ I have lived a great deal in other centuries.’
‘You mean in literature?’
‘In reality.’
The owl called again, at monotonously regular intervals. I stared out into the darkness of the pines.
‘Reincarnation?’
‘Is rubbish.’
‘Then … ‘ I shrugged.
‘I cannot escape my human life-span. So there is only one way I could have lived in other centuries.’
I was silent. ‘I give up.’
‘Not give up. Look up. What do you see?’
‘Stars. Space.’
‘And what else? That you know are there. Though they are not visible.’
‘Other worlds?’
I turned to look at him. He sat, a black shadow. I felt a small chill run down my spine. He took the thought out of my mind.
‘I am mad?’
‘Mistaken.’
‘No. Neither mad nor mistaken.’
‘You … travel to other worlds?’
‘Yes. I travel to other worlds.’
I put the glass down and pulled out a cigarette; lit it before speaking.
‘In the flesh?’
‘If you can tell me where the flesh ends and the mind begins, I will answer that.’
‘You um … you have some evidence of this?’
‘Ample evidence.’ He allowed a moment to pass. ‘For those with the intelligence to see it.’
‘This is what you meant by election and being psychic?’
‘In part.’
I was silent, thinking that I must make up my mind what course of action to take. I sensed an inherent hostility, which rose from beyond anything that had passed between us; the subconscious resistance of water to oil. A course of polite scepticism seemed best.
‘You do this … travelling by, I don’t know, something like telepathy?’
But before he could answer there was a soft slap of footsteps round the colonnade. Maria stood and bobbed.
‘Sas efcharistoume, Maria. Dinner is served,’ said Conchis.
We stood and went into the music-room. As we put our glasses on the tray he said, ‘There are things that words cannot explain.’
I looked down. ‘At Oxford we were taught to assume that if words can’t explain, nothing else is likely to.’
‘Very well.’ He smiled. ‘May I call you Nicholas now?’
‘Of course. Please.’
He poured a drop of ouzo into our glasses. We raised and clinked them.
‘Eis ’ygeia sas, Nicholas.’
‘Sygeia.’
But I had a strong suspicion even then that he was drinking to something other than my health.
The table in the corner of the terrace glittered, an unexpectedly formal island of glass and silver in the darkness. It was lit by one tall lamp with a dark shade; the light flowed downwards, concentrated on the white cloth, and was then reflected up, lighting our faces strangely, Caravaggio fashion, against the surrounding darkness.
The meal was excellent. We ate small fish cooked in wine, a delicious chicken, herb-flavoured cheese and a honey-and-curd flan, made, according to Conchis, from a medieval Turkish recipe. The wine we drank had a trace of resin, as if the vineyard had merely been beside a pine-forest, and was nothing like the harsh turpentine-tasting rotgut I sometimes drank in the village. We ate largely in silence. He evidently preferred this. If we talked, it was of the food. He ate slowly, and very little, but I left nothing to take away.
When we had finished, Maria brought Turkish coffee in a brass pot and took the lamp, which was beginning to attract too many insects. S
he replaced it by a single candle. The flame rose untrembling in the still air; now and again a persistent insect would fly round, in, round and away. I lit my cigarette, and sat like Conchis, half-turned towards the sea and the south. He did not want to talk, and I was content to wait.
Suddenly there were footsteps below on the gravel. They were going away from the house towards the sea. At first I took them for Maria’s, though it seemed strange that she should be going down to the beach at that time. But a second later I knew that they could not, or could no more plausibly than the glove, be hers.
They were light, rapid, quiet steps, as if the person was trying to make as little noise as possible. They might even have belonged to a child. I was sitting away from the parapet, and could see nothing below. I glanced at Conchis. He was staring out into the darkness as if the sound was perfectly normal. I shifted unobtrusively, to crane a look over the parapet. But the steps had passed away into silence. With alarming speed a large moth dashed at the candle, repeatedly and frantically, as if attached to it by elastic cord. Conchis leant forward and snuffed the flame.
‘You do not mind sitting in darkness?’
‘Not at all.’
It occurred to me that it might after all have really been a child, from one of the cottages at the bay to the east; someone who had come to help Maria.
‘I should tell you how I came here.’
‘It must have been a marvellous site to find.’