Then from the house I heard the bell. It rang three times. I looked at my watch – teatime. The bell rang again: quick, quick, slow, and I realized it was sounding the syllables of my name.
I ought, I suppose, to have felt frightened. But I wasn’t. Apart from anything else I was too intrigued and too bewildered. Both the man and the whey-faced girl had looked remarkably English; and whatever nationality they really were, I knew they didn’t live on the island. So I had to presume that they had been specially brought; had been standing by, hiding somewhere, waiting for me to read the Foulkes pamphlet. I had made it easy by falling asleep, and at the edge of the gulley. But that had been pure chance. And how could Conchis have such people standing by? And where had they disappeared to?
For a few moments I had let my mind plunge into darkness, into a world where the experience of all my life was disproved and ghosts existed. But there was something far too unalloyedly physical about all these supposedly ‘psychic’ experiences. Besides, ‘apparitions’ obviously carry least conviction in bright daylight. It was almost as if I was intended to see that they were not really supernatural; and there was Conchis’s cryptic, doubt-sowing advice that it would be easier if I pretended to believe. Why easier? More sophisticated, more polite, perhaps; but ‘easier’ suggested that I had to pass through some ordeal.
I stood there in the trees, absolutely at a loss; and then smiled. I had somehow landed myself in the centre of an extraordinary old man’s fantasies. That was clear. Why he should hold them, why he should so strangely realize them, and above all, why he should have chosen me to be his solitary audience of one, remained a total mystery. But I knew I had become involved in something too uniquely bizarre to miss, or to spoil, through lack of patience or humour.
I recrosscd the gulley and picked up Time and the pamphlet. Then, as I looked back at the dark, inscrutable carob tree, I did feel a faint touch of fear. But it was a fear of the inexplicable, the unknown, not of the supernatural.
As I walked across the gravel to the colonnade, where I could see Conchis was already sitting, his back to me, I decided on a course of action – or rather, of reaction.
He turned. ‘A good siesta?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘You have read the pamphlet?’
‘You’re right. It is more fascinating than any historical novel.’ He kept a face impeccably proof to my ironic undertone. ‘Thank you very much.’ I put the pamphlet on the table.
Calmly, in my silence, he began to pour me tea.
He had already had his own and he went away to play the harpsichord for twenty minutes. As I listened to him, I thought. The incidents seemed designed to deceive all the senses. Last night’s had covered smell and hearing; this afternoon’s, and that glimpsed figure of yesterday, sight. Taste seemed irrelevant – but touch … how on earth could he expect me even to pretend to believe that what I might touch was ‘psychic’? And then what on earth – appropriately, on earth – had these tricks to do with ‘travelling to other worlds’ ? Only one thing was clear; his anxiety about how much I might have heard from Mitford and Leverrier was now explained. He had practised his strange illusionisms on them, and sworn them to secrecy.
When he came out he took me off to water his vegetables. The water had to be drawn up out of one of a battery of long-necked cisterns behind the cottage, and when we had done that and fed the plants we sat on a seat by the Priapus arbour, with the unusual smell, in summer Greece, of verdant wet earth all around us. He did his deep-breathing exercises; evidently, like so much else in his life, ritual; then smiled at me and jumped back twenty-four hours.
‘Now tell me about this girl’ It was a command, not a question; or a refusal to believe I could refuse again.
‘There’s nothing really to tell.’
‘She turned you down.’
‘No. Or not at the beginning. I turned her down.’
‘And now you wish … ?’
‘It’s all over. It’s all too late.’
‘You sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?’
There was a silence. I took the step; something that had nagged me ever since I had discovered he had studied medicine; and also to shock his mocking of my fatalism.
‘As a matter of fact I have.’ He looked sharply at me. ‘By syphilis. I managed to get it early this year in Athens.’ Still he observed me. ‘It’s all right. I think I’m cured.’
‘Who diagnosed it?’
‘The man in the village. Patarescu.’
‘Tell me the symptoms.’
‘The clinic in Athens confirmed his diagnosis.’
‘No doubt.’ His voice was dry; so dry that my mind leapt to what he hinted at. ‘Now tell me the symptoms.’
In the end he got them out of me; in every detail.
‘As I thought. You had soft sore.’
‘Soft sore?’
‘Chancroid. Ulcus molle. A very common disease in the Mediterranean. Unpleasant, but harmless. The best cure is frequent soap and water.’
‘Then why the hell…’
He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the ubiquitous Greek gesture for money, for money and corruption.
‘You have paid?’
‘Yes. For this special penicillin.’
‘You can do nothing.’
‘I can damn well sue the clinic’
‘You have no proof that you did not have syphilis.’
‘You mean Patarescu –’
‘I mean nothing. He acted with perfect medical correctness. A test is always advisable.’ It was almost as if he were on their side. He shrugged gently: thus the world goes.
‘He could have warned me.’
‘Perhaps he considered it more important to warn you against venery than venality.’
‘Christ.’
In me battled a flood of relief at being reprieved and anger at such vile deception. After a moment Conchis spoke again.
‘Even if it had been syphilis – why could you not return to this girl you love?’
‘Really – it’s too complicated.’
‘Then it is usual. Not unusual.’
Slowly, disconnectedly, prompted by him, I told him a bit about Alison; remembering his frankness the night before, produced some of my own. Once again I felt no real sympathy coming from him; simply his obsessive and inexplicable curiosity. I told him I had recently written a letter.
‘And if she does not answer?’ I shrugged. ‘She doesn’t.’
‘You think of her, you want to see her – you must write again.’ I smiled then, briefly, at his energy. ‘You are leaving it to hazard. We no more have to leave everything to hazard than we have to drown in the sea.’ He shook my shoulder. ‘Swim!’
‘It’s not the swimming. It’s knowing in which direction.’
‘Towards the girl. She sees through you, you say, she understands you. That is good.’
I was silent. A primrose-and-black butterfly, a swallowtail, hovered over the bougainvillaea round the Priapus arbour; found no honey, and glided away through the trees. I scuffed the gravel. ‘I suppose I don’t know what love is, really. If it isn’t all sex. And I don’t even really care a damn any more, anyway.’
‘My dear young man, you are a disaster. So defeated. So pessimistic’
‘I was rather ambitious once. I ought to have been blind as well. Then perhaps I wouldn’t feel defeated.’ I looked at him. ‘It’s not all me. It’s in the age. In all my generation. We all feel the same.’
‘In the greatest age of enlightenment in the history of this earth? When we have destroyed more darkness in this last fifty years than in the last five million?’
‘As at Neuve Chapelle? Hiroshima?’
‘But you and I! We live, we are this wonderful age. We are not destroyed. We did not even destroy.’
‘No man is an island.’
‘Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, aeroplanes, tel
ephones, wireless – what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear for ever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.’
‘It seems possible.’
‘Come with me.’ He stood up, as if time was vital. ‘Come. I will show you the innermost secret of life. Come.’ He walked quickly round to the colonnade. I followed him upstairs. There he pushed me out on to the terrace.
‘Go and sit at the table. With your back to the sun.’
In a minute he appeared, carrying something heavy draped in a white towel. He put it carefully on the centre of the table. Then he paused, made sure I was looking, before gravely he removed the cloth. It was a stone head, whether of a man or a woman it was difficult to say. The nose had been broken short. The hair was done in a fillet, with two sidepieces. But the power of the fragment was in the face. It was set in a triumphant smile, a smile that would have been smug if it had not been so full of the purest metaphysical good humour. The eyes were faintly oriental, long, and as I saw, for Conchis put a hand over the mouth, also smiling. The mouth was beautifully modelled, timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused.
‘That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.’
‘It’s Cycladic, isn’t it?’
‘Never mind what it is. Look at it. Look into its eyes.’
He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen; or not so much a divinity, as a having known divinity, in it; of being ultimately certain. But as I looked, I began to feel something else.
‘There’s something implacable in that smile.’
‘Implacable?’ He came behind my chair and looked down over my head. ‘It is the truth. Truth is implacable. But the nature and meaning of this truth is not.’
‘Tell me where it came from.’
‘From Didyma in Asia Minor.’
‘How old is it?’
‘The sixth or seventh century before Christ.’
‘I wonder if it would have that smile if it knew of Belsen.’
‘Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.’ Then he said, ‘When I die, I shall have this by my bedside. It is the last human face I want to see.’
The little head watched our watching; bland, certain, and almost maliciously inscrutable. It flashed on me that it was also the smile that Conchis sometimes wore; as if he sat before the head and practised it. At the same time I realized exactly what I disliked about it. It was above all the smile of dramatic irony, of those who have privileged information. I looked back up at Conchis’s face; and knew I was right.
24
A starry darkness over the house, the forest, the sea; the dinner cleared away, the lamp extinguished. I lay back in the long chair. He let the night silently envelop and possess us, let time fall away; then began to draw me back down the decades.
‘April, 1915. I returned without trouble to England. I did not know what I should become. Except that I had in some way to justify myself. At nineteen one is not content simply to do things. They have to be justified as well. My mother fainted when she saw me. For the first and last time in my life I saw my father in tears. Until that moment of confrontation I had determined that I would tell the truth. That I could not deceive them. Yet before them … perhaps it was pure cowardice, it is not for me to say. But there are some truths too cruel, before the faces one has to announce them to, to be told. So I said that I had been lucky in a draw for leave, and that now Montague was dead I was to rejoin my original battalion. I grew possessed by madness to deceive. Not economically, but with the utmost luxury. I invented a new battle of Neuve Chapelle, as if the original had not been bad enough. I even told them I had been recommended for a commission.
‘At first fortune was on my side. Two days after I returned, official notification came that I was missing, believed killed in action. Such mistakes occurred frequently enough for my parents to suspect nothing. The letter was joyously torn up.
‘And Lily. Perhaps what had passed had made her see more clearly her real feelings for me. Whatever it was, I could no longer complain that she treated me more like a brother than a lover. You know, Nicholas, that whatever miseries the Great War brought it destroyed a great deal that was unhealthy between the sexes. For the first time for a century woman discovered that men wanted something more human from them than a nun-like chastity, a bien pensant idealism. I do not mean that Lily suddenly lost all reserve. Or gave herself to me. But she gave as much to me as she could. The time I spent alone with her … those hours allowed me to gather strength to go on with my deception. At the same time as they made it more terrible. Again and again I was possessed by a desire to tell her all, and before justice caught up with me. Every time I returned home I expected to find the police waiting. My father outraged. And worst of all, Lily’s eyes on mine. But when I was with her I refused to talk about the war. She misinterpreted my nervousness. It touched her deeply and brought out all her gentleness. Her warmth. I sucked on her love like a leech. A very sensual leech. She had become a very beautiful young woman.
‘One day we went for a walk in woods to the north of London -near Barnet, I think, I no longer recall the name, except that they were in those days very pretty and lonely woods for a place so near London.
‘We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.
‘That afternoon Lily said she wanted to marry me. To marry by special licence, and if necessary without her parents’ permission, so that before I went away again we should have become one in body as we were in – dare I say spirit? – at any rate, in mind. I longed to sleep with her, I longed to be joined to her. But always my dreadful secret lay between us, like the sword between Tristan and Isolde. So I had to assume, among the flowers, the innocent birds and trees, an even falser nobility. How could I refuse her except by saying my death was so probable that I could not allow such a sacrifice? She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery … she said, “Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you.”‘
He stopped speaking for a moment, like a man walking who comes to a brink; perhaps it was an artful pause, but it made the stars, the night, seem to wait, as if story, narration, history, lay imbricated in the nature of things; and the cosmos was for the story, not the story for the cosmos.
‘My fortnight’s supposed leave drew to an end. I had no plan, or rather a hundred plans, which is worse than having none at all. There were moments when I considered returning to France. But then I saw ghastly yellow figures staggering like drunkards out of the wall of smoke … I saw the war and the world and why I was in it. I tried to be blind, but I could not.
‘I put on my uniform and let my father and mother and Lily see me off at Victoria. They believed I had to report to a camp near Dover. The train was full of soldiers. I once again felt the great current of war, the European death-wish, rushing me along. When the train stopped at some town in Kent I got off. For two or three days I stayed there in a commercial travellers’ hotel. I was hopeless. And purposeless. One could not escape the war. It was all one saw, all one heard. In the end I went back to London to the one person in England where I thought there might be refuge: to my grandfather’s – my great-uncl
e in fact. I knew he was Greek, that he loved me because I was my mother’s child, and that a Greek will put family above every other consideration. He listened to me. Then he stood up and came to me. I knew what he was going to do. He struck me hard, very hard, so hard that I still feel it, across the face. Then he said, “That is what I think.”
‘I knew very well that when he said that he meant “in spite of whatever help I shall give you”. He was furious with me, he poured every insult in the Greek language over my head. But he hid me. Perhaps because I said that even if I returned I should now be shot for desertion. The next day he went to see my mother. I think that he may have given her the choice. Of doing her duty as a citizen or as a mother. She came to see me, with a lack of spoken reproach that was worse to me than o Pappous’s anger. I knew what she would suffer when my father heard the truth. She and o Pappous came to a decision. I would have to be smuggled out of England to our family in the Argentine. Fortunately o Pappous had both the money and the necessary friends in the shipping world. The arrangements were made. A date was fixed.
‘I lived in his house for three weeks, unable to go out, in such an agony of self-disgust and fear that many times I wanted to give myself up. Above all it was the thought of Lily that tortured me. I had promised to write every day. And of course I could not. What other people thought of me, I did not care. But I was desperate to convince her that I was sane and the world was mad. It may have something to do with intelligence, but I am certain it has nothing to do with knowledge – I mean that there are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations as Indian peasants can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. And I craved her approval.