‘Of course. But I am not talking of architecture.’ He paused, seemingly at a loss to say what he did mean. ‘I came to Phraxos looking for a house to rent. A house for a summer. I did not like the village. I do not like coasts that face north. On my last day I had a boatman take me round the island. For pleasure. By chance he landed me for a swim at Moutsa down there. By chance he said there was an old cottage up here. By chance I came up. The cottage was crumbled walls, a litter of stones choken with thorn-ivy. It was very hot. About four o’clock on the afternoon of April the eighteenth, 1928.’
He paused again, as if the memory of that year had stopped him; and to prepare me for a new facet of himself, a new shift.
‘There were many more trees then. One could not see the sea. I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction, the future. I speak in analogies. You understand?’
I nodded, cautious, not concerned with understanding; because underlying everything he did I had come to detect an air of stage-management, of the planned and rehearsed. He did not tell me of his coming to Bourani as a man tells something that chances to occur to him; but far more as a dramatist tells an anecdote where the play requires. He went on.
‘I knew at once that I must live here. I could not go beyond. It was only here that my past would merge into my future. So I stayed. I am here tonight. And you are here tonight.’
In the darkness he was looking sideways at me. I said nothing for a moment; there had seemed to be some special emphasis on the last sentence.
‘Is this also what you meant by being psychic?’
‘It is what I mean by hazard. There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Not perhaps. For certain.’
‘What happens if one doesn’t recognize the … point of fulcrum?’ But I was thinking, I have had it already – the silence in the trees, the siren of the Athens boat, the black mouth of the shotgun barrel.
‘You will be like the many. Only the few recognize this moment. And act on it.’
‘The elect?’
‘The elect. The chosen by hazard.’ I heard his chair creak. ‘Look over there. The lamp-fishermen.’ Away at the far feet of the mountains there was a thin dust of ruby lights in the deepest shadows. I didn’t know whether he meant simply, look; or that the lamps were in some way symbolic of the elect.
‘You’re very tantalizing sometimes, Mr Conchis.’
‘I am prepared to be less so.’
‘I wish you would be.’
He was silent again.
‘Suppose that what I tell you should mean more to your life than the mere listening?’
‘I hope it would.’
Another pause.
‘I do not want politeness. Politeness always conceals a refusal to face other kinds of reality. I am going to say something about you that may shock you. I know something about you that you do not know yourself He paused, again as if to let me prepare myself. ‘You too are psychic, Nicholas. You are sure you are not. I know that.’
‘Well, I’m not. Really.’ I waited, then said, ‘But I’d certainly like to know what makes you think I am.’
‘I have been shown.’
“When?’
‘I prefer not to say.’
‘But you must. I don’t even know what you really mean by the word. If you merely mean some sort of intuitive intelligence, then I hope I am psychic. But I thought you meant something else.’
Again silence, as if he wanted me to hear the sharpness in my own voice. ‘You are treating this as if I have accused you of some crime. Of some weakness.’
‘I’m sorry. But I’ve never had a psychical experience in my life.’ I added, naively, ‘Anyway, I’m an atheist.’
His voice was gentle and dry. ‘If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence. But I am not talking about God. I am talking about science.’ I said nothing. His voice became much drier. ‘Very well. I accept that you believe that you are … not psychic’
‘You can’t refuse to tell me what you promised now.’
‘I wished only to warn you.’
‘You have.’
‘Excuse me for one minute.’
He disappeared into his bedroom. I got up and went to the corner of the parapet, from where I could see in three directions. All round the house lay the silent pine trees, dim in the starlight. Absolute peace. High and very far to the north I could just hear an aeroplane, only the third or fourth I had heard at night since coming to the island. I thought of an Alison on it, moving down a gangway with a trolley of drinks. Like the ship the faint drone accentuated, rather than diminished, the remoteness of Bourani. I had an acute sense of the absence of Alison, of the probably permanent loss of her; I could imagine her beside me, her hand in mine; and she was human warmth, normality, standard to go by. I had always seen myself as potentially a sort of protector of her; and for the first time, that evening at Bourani, I saw that perhaps she had been, or could have been, a protector of me.
A few seconds later Conchis returned. He went to the parapet, and breathed deeply. The sky and the sea and the stars, half the universe, stretched out before us. I could still just hear the aeroplane. I lit a cigarette, as Alison, at such a moment, would have lit a cigarette.
18
‘I think we should be more comfortable in the lounging-chairs.’
I helped him pull the two long wicker chairs from the far end of the terrace. Then we both put our feet up and sat back. And at once I could smell it on the tied-on head-cushion – that same elusive, old-fashioned perfume of the towel, of the glove. I was sure it did not belong to Conchis or old Maria. I should have smelt it by then. There was a woman, and she often used this chair.
‘It will take me a long time to define what I mean. It will take me the story of my life.’
‘I’ve spent the last seven months among people who can speak only the most rudimentary English.’
‘My French is better than my English now. But no matter. Comprendre, c’est tout.’
‘ “Only connect.” ’
‘Who said that?’
‘An English novelist.’
‘He should not have said it. Fiction is the worst form of connection.’
I smiled in the darkness. There was silence. The stars gave signals. He began.
‘I told you my father was English. But his business, importing tobacco and currants, lay mainly in the Levant. One of his competitors was a Greek living in London. In 1892 this Greek had tragic news. His eldest brother and his wife had been killed in an earthquake over the mountains there on the other side of the Peloponnesus. Three children survived. The two youngest, two boys, were sent out to South America, to a third brother. And the eldest child, a girl of seventeen, was brought to London to keep house for her uncle, my father’s competitor. He had long been a widower. She had the prettiness that is characteristic of Greek women who have some Italian blood. My father met her. He was much older, but quite good-looking, I suppose, and he spoke some demotic Greek. There were business interests which could be profitably merged. In short, they married … and I exist.
‘The first thing I remember clearly is my mother’s singing. She always sang, whether she was happy or sad. She could sing classical music quite well, and play the piano, but it was the Gree
k folk-tunes I remember best. Those she always sang when she was sad. I remember her telling me – much later in life – of that standing on a distant hillside and seeing the ochre dust float slowly up into the azure sky. When the news about her parents came, she was filled with a black hatred of Greece. She wanted to leave it then, never to return. Like so many Greeks. And like so many Greeks she never accepted her exile. That is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world.
‘My mother sang – and music was the most important thing in my life, from as far back as I can remember. I was something of a child prodigy. I gave my first concert at the age of nine, and people were very kind. But I was a bad pupil at all the other subjects at school. I was not stupid, but I was very lazy. I knew only one obligation: to play the piano well. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical, and I was never accomplished at that.
‘I was fortunate, I had a very remarkable music-teacher – Charles-Victor Bruneau. He had many of the traditional faults of his kind. Vain of his methods and vain of his pupils. A sarcastic agony if one was not talented, and a painstaking angel if one was. But he was a very learned man musicologically. In those days that meant he was rarissima avis. Most executants then wanted only to express themselves. And so they developed accomplishments like enormous velocity and great skill at expressive rubato. No one today plays like that. Or could play like it, even if they wanted to. The Rosenthals and Godowskis are gone for ever. But Bruneau was far in advance of his time and there are still many Haydn and Mozart sonatas I can hear only as he played them.
‘However, his most remarkable acquirement – I speak of before 1914 – was the then almost unknown one of being as good a harpsichordist as a pianist. I first came under him at a period in his life when he was abandoning the piano. The harpsichord requires a very different finger technique from the piano. It is not easy to change. He dreamed of a school of harpsichord players trained as early as possible as pure harpsichordists. And not, as he used to say, des pianistes en costume de bal masqué.
‘When I was fifteen, I had what we could call today a nervous breakdown. Bruneau had been driving me too hard. I never had the least interest in games. I was a day-boy, I had permission to concentrate on music. I never made any real friends at school. Perhaps because I was taken for a Jew. But the doctor said that when I recovered I would have to practise less and go out more often. I made a face. My father came back one day with an expensive book on birds. I could hardly tell the commonest birds apart, had never thought of doing so. But my father’s was an inspired guess. Lying in bed, looking at the stiff poses in the pictures, I began to want to sec the living reality – and the only reality to begin with for me was the singing that I heard through my sickroom window. I came to birds through sound. Suddenly even the chirping of sparrows seemed mysterious. And the singing of birds I had heard a thousand times, thrushes, blackbirds in our London garden, I heard as if I had never heard them before. Later in my life – fa sera pour un autre jour – birds led me into a very unusual experience.
‘You see the child I was. Lazy, lonely, yes, very lonely. What is that word? A cissy. Talented in music, and in nothing else. And I was an only child, spoilt by my parents. As I entered my fourth lustre, it became evident that I was not going to fulfil my early promise. Bruneau saw it first, and then I did. Though we tacitly agreed not to tell my parents, it was difficult for me to accept.
Sixteen is a bad age at which to know one will never be a genius. But by then I was in love.
‘I first saw Lily when she was fourteen, and I was a year older, soon after my breakdown. We lived in St John’s Wood. In one of those small white mansions for successful merchants. You know them? A semi-circular drive. A portico. At the back was a long garden, at the end of it a little orchard, some six or seven overgrown apple and pear trees. Unkempt, but very green. I had a private “house” under a lime tree. One day – June, a noble blue day, burning, clear, as they are here in Greece – I was reading a life of Chopin. I remember that exactly. You know at my age you recall the first twenty years far better than the second – or the third. I was reading and no doubt seeing myself as Chopin, and I had my new book on birds beside me. It is 1910.
‘Suddenly I hear a noise on the other side of the brick wall which separates the garden of the next house from ours. This house is empty, so I am surprised. And then … a head appears. Cautiously. Like a mouse. It is the head of a young girl. I am half hidden in my bower, I am the last thing she sees, so I have time to examine her. Her head is in sunshine, a mass of pale blonde hair that falls behind her and out of sight. The sun is to the south, so that it is caught in her hair, in a cloud of light. I see her shadowed face, her dark eyes, and her small half-opened inquisitive mouth. She is grave, timid, yet determined to be daring. She sees me. She stares at me for a moment in her shocked haze of light. She seems more erect, like a bird. I stand up in the entrance of my bower, still in shadow. We do not speak or smile. All the unspoken mysteries of puberty tremble in the air. I do not know why I cannot speak … and then a voice called her name.
‘The spell was broken. And all my past was broken, too. There is a line from Seferis – “The broken pomegranate is full of stars”? It was like that. She disappeared, I sat down again, but to read was impossible. I went to the wall near the house, and heard a man’s voice and silver female voices that faded through a door.
‘I was in a morbid state. But that first meeting, that mysterious… how shall I say, message from her light, from her light to my shadow, haunted me for weeks.
‘Her parents moved into the house next door. I met Lily face to face. And there was some bridge between us. It was not all my imagination, this something came from her as well as from me – a joint umbilical cord, something we dared not speak of, of course, yet which we both knew was there.
‘She was not unlike me in many ordinary ways. She too had few friends in London. And the final touch to this fairy story was that she too was musical. Not very strikingly gifted, but musical. Her father was a peculiar man, Irish, with private means, and with a passion for music. He played the flute very well. Of course he had to meet Bruneau, who sometimes came to our house, and through Bruneau he met Dolmetsch, who interested him in the recorder. Another forgotten instrument in those days. I remember Lily playing her first solo on a flat-sounding descant recorder made by Dolmetsch and bought for her by her father.
‘Our two families grew very close. I accompanied Lily, we sometimes played duets, sometimes her father would join us, sometimes the two mothers would sing. We discovered a whole new continent of music. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Arbeau, Frescobaldi, Froberger – in those years people suddenly realized that there had been music before 1700.’
He paused. I wanted to light a cigarette, but more than that I wanted not to distract him; his reaching back. So I held the cigarette between my fingers, and waited.
‘She had, yes, I suppose a Botticelli beauty, long fair hair, grey-violet eyes. But that makes her sound too pale, too Pre-Raphaelite. She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress. I make her sound too colourless to you. Of course, in those days, what we young men looked for was not so much the body as the soul. Lily was a very pretty girl. But it was her soul that was sans pareil.
‘No obstacles except those of propriety were ever put between us. I said just now that we were alike in interests and tastes. But we were opposites in temperament. Lily was always so very self-controlled, patient, helping. I was temperamental. Moody. And very selfish. I never saw her hurt anyone or anything. But if I wanted something I wanted it at once. Lily used to disgust me with myself. I used to think of my Greek blood as dark blood. Almost Negro blood.
‘And then too I soon began to love her physically. Whereas she loved me, or treated me, as a brother. Of course we knew we were
going to marry, we promised ourselves to each other when she was only sixteen. But I was hardly ever allowed to kiss her. You cannot imagine this. To be so close to a girl and yet so rarely be able to caress her. My desires were very innocent. I had all the usual notions of the time about the need for chastity. But I was not completely English.
‘There was o Pappous – my grandfather – really my mother’s uncle. He had become a naturalized Englishman, but he never carried his anglophilia to the point of being puritan, or even respectable. He was not, I think, a very wicked old man. What I knew of him corrupted me far less than the false ideas I conceived. I always spoke with him in Greek, and as you perhaps realize, Greek is a naturally sensual and uneuphemistic language. I surreptitiously read certain books I found on his shelves. I saw La Vie Parisienne. I came one day on a folder full of tinted engravings. And so I began to have erotic daydreams. The demure Lily in her straw hat, a hat I could describe to you now, still, as well as if I had it here in front of me, the crown swathed in a pale tulle the colour of a summer haze … in a long-sleeved, high-necked, pink-and-white striped blouse … a dark-blue hobble skirt, beside whom I walked across Regent’s Park in the spring of 1914. The entranced girl I stood behind in the gallery at Covent Garden in June, nearly fainting in the heat – such a summer, that year – to hear Chaliapin in Prince Igor ... Lily – she became in my mind at night the abandoned young prostitute. I thought I was very abnormal to have created this second Lily from the real one. I was bitterly ashamed again of my Greek blood. Yet possessed by it. I blamed everything on that, and my mother suffered, poor woman. My father’s family had already humiliated her enough, without her own son joining in.
‘I was ashamed then. I am proud now to have Greek and Italian and English blood and even some Celtic blood. One of my father’s grandmothers was a Scotswoman. I am European. That is all that matters to me. But in 1914 I wanted to be purely English so as to be able to offer myself untainted to Lily.