‘One evening I could stand it no longer. I slipped out of my hiding-place and went to St John’s Wood. It was an evening when I knew Lily went to a weekly patriotic sewing and knitting circle in a near-by parish hall. I waited in the road I knew she must take. It was a warm May dusk. I was fortunate. She came alone. Suddenly I stepped out into her path from the gateway where I had been waiting. She went white with shock. She knew something terrible had happened, by my face, my civilian clothes. As soon as I saw her my love for her overwhelmed me – and what I had planned to say. I cannot remember now what I said. I can remember only walking beside her in the dusk towards Regent’s Park, because we both wanted darkness and to be alone. She would not argue, she would not say anything, she would not look at me for a long time. We found ourselves by the gloomy canal that runs through the north of the park. On a seat. Then she began to cry. I was not allowed to comfort her. I had deceived her. That was the unforgivable. Not that I had deserted. But that I had deceived. For a time she stared away from me, down the black canal. Then she put her hand on mine and stopped me talking. Finally she put her arms round me, and still without words. And I felt myself all that was bad in Europe in the arms of all that was good.
‘But there was so much misunderstanding between us. It is possible, even normal, to feel right in front of history and very wrong in front of those one loves. After a while Lily began to talk, and I realized that she understood nothing of what I had said about the war. That she saw herself not as I so much wanted, as my angel of forgiveness, but as my angel of salvation. She begged me to go back. She thought I would be spiritually dead until I did. Again and again she used the word “resurrected”. And again and again, on my side, I wanted to know what would happen to us. And finally she said, this was her judgment, that the price of her love was that I should return to the front – not for her, but for myself. To find my true self again. And that the reality of her love was as it had been in the wood: she should never marry anyone else, whatever happened.
‘In the end we were silent. You will have understood. Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce – determined to survive, whatever the cost. I still see her face. Her face staring, staring into the darkness, trying to gaze herself into another world. It was as if we were locked in a torture chamber. Still in love, yet chained to opposite walls, facing each other for eternity and for eternity unable to touch.
‘Of course, as men always will, I tried to extract some hope from her. That she would wait for me, not judge me too quickly … such things. But she stopped me with a look. A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgin Mary’s; it reversed the entire order of nature.
‘I walked back beside her, in silence. I said goodbye to her under a street lamp. By a garden full of lilac trees. We did not touch. Not a single word. Two young faces, suddenly old, facing each other. The moment that endures when all the other noises, objects, all that dull street, have sunk into dust and oblivion. Two white faces. The scent of lilac. And bottomless darkness.’
He paused. There was no emotion in his voice; but I was thinking of Alison, of that last look she had given me.
‘And that is all. Four days later I spent a very disagreeable twelve hours crouched in the bilges of a Greek cargo boat in Liverpool docks.’
There was a silence.
‘And did you ever see her again?’
A bat squeaked over our heads.
‘She died.’
I had to prompt him.
‘Soon after?’
‘In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916.’ I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. ‘There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital.’
‘Poor girl.’
‘All past.’
‘You make it seem present.’ He inclined his head. ‘The scent of lilac’
‘Old man’s sentiment. Forgive me.’
He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.
‘Is this why you never married?’
‘The dead live.’
The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.
‘How do they live?’
And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.
‘By love.’
It was as if he said it not to me, but equally to everything around us; as if she stood listening, in the dark shadows by the doors; as if the telling of his past had reminded him of some great principle he was seeing freshly again. I found myself touched, and this time let the silence stay.
A minute later, he turned to me.
‘I should like you to come next week. If your duties permit.’
‘If you invite me nothing could keep me away.’
‘Good. I am glad.’ But his gladness now sounded merely polite. Pcremptoriness had regained command. He stood. ‘To bed. It is late.’
I followed him through to my room, where he bent to light the lamp.
‘I do not want my life discussed over there.’
‘Of course not.’
He straightened, faced me.
‘So. I shall see you next Saturday?’
I smiled. ‘You know you will. I shall never forget these last two days. Even though I don’t know why I’m elect. Or elected.’
‘Perhaps your ignorance is why.’
‘As long as you know the election feels a great privilege.’
He searched my eyes, then did something strange: reached out, as he had in the boat, and touched my shoulder paternally. I had indeed, it seemed, passed some test.
‘Good. Maria will have some breakfast for you. Till next week.’
And he was gone. I went to the bathroom, closed my door, turned the lamp out. But I didn’t undress. I stood by the window and waited.
25
For at least twenty minutes there was no sound. Conchis went to the bathroom and back to his room. Then there was silence. It went on so long that finally I did undress and started to give in to the sleep I could feel coming on me. But the silence was broken. His door opened and closed, quietly, but not secretively, and I heard him going down the stairs. A minute, two minutes passed; then I sat up and swung out of bed.
It was music again, but from downstairs, the harpsichord. It echoed, percussive but dim, through the stone house. For a few moments I felt disappointment. It seemed merely that Conchis was sleepless, or sad, and playing to himself. But then there was a sound that sent me swiftly to the door. I cautiously opened it. The downstairs door must also have been open, because I could hear the clatter of the harpsichord mechanism. But the thing that sent a shiver up my back was the thin, haunted piping of a recorder. I knew it was not on a gramophone; someone was playing it. The music stopped and went on in a brisker six-eight rhythm. The recorder piped solemnly along, made a mistake, then another; though the player was evidently quite skilled, and executed professional-sounding trills and ornaments.
I went out naked on the landing and looked over the banisters. There was a faint radiance on the floor outside the music-room. I was probably meant to listen, not to go down; but this was too much. I pulled on a sweater and trousers and crept down the stairs in bare feet. The recorder stopped and I heard the rustle of paper being turned – the music-stand. The harpsichord began a long lute-stop passage, a new movement, as gentle as rain, the sounds stealing through the house, mysterious, remote-sounding harmonies. The recorder came in with an adagio-like slowness and gravity, momentarily wobbled off-key, then recovered. I tiptoed to the open door of the music-room, but there something held me back ??
? an odd childlike feeling of misbehaving after bedtime. The door was wide open, but it opened towards the harpsichord, and the end of one of the bookshelves blocked the view through the crack.
The music came to a stop. A chair shifted, my heart raced, Conchis spoke a single indistinguishable word in a low voice. I flattened myself against the wall. There was a rustle. Someone was standing at the door of the music-room.
It was a slim girl of about my own height, in her early twenties. In one hand she held a recorder, in the other a small crimson flue-brush for it. She was wearing a wide-collared blue-and-white striped dress, that left her arms bare. There was a bracelet above one elbow, and the skirt came down, narrowing at the bottom, almost to her ankles. She had a ravishingly pretty face, but completely untanned, without any make-up, and her hair, her outline, the upright way she held herself, everything about her was of forty years before.
I knew I was supposed to be looking at Lily. It was unmistakably the same girl as in the photographs; especially that on the cabinet of curiosa. The Botticelli face; grey-violet eyes. The eyes especially were beautiful; very large, their ovals faintly twisted, a cool doe’s eyes, almond eyes, giving a natural mystery to a face otherwise so regular that it risked perfection.
She saw me at once. I stood rooted to the stone floor. For a moment she seemed as surprised as I was. Then she looked swiftly, secretly with her large eyes back to where Conchis must have been sitting at the harpsichord, and then again at me. She raised the flue-brush to her lips, shook it, forbidding me to move, to say anything, and she smiled. It was like some genre picture – The Secret. The Admonition. But her smile was strange – as if she was sharing a secret with me, that this was an illusion it was for us two, not the old man, to foster. There was something about her mouth, calm and amused, that was at the same time enigmatic and debunking; pretending and admitting the pretence. She flashed another covert look back at Conchis, then leant forward and lightly pushed my arm with the tip of the brush, as if to say, Go away.
The whole business can’t have taken more than five seconds. The door was closed, and I was standing in darkness and an eddy of sandalwood. I think if it had been a ghost, if the girl had been transparent and headless, I might have been less astonished. She had so clearly implied that of course it was all a charade, but that Conchis must not know it was; that she was in fancy-dress for him, not for me.
I went swiftly down the hall to the front door, and eased its bolts open. Then I padded out on to the colonnade. I looked through one of the narrow arched windows and immediately saw Conchis. He had begun to play again. I moved to look for the girl. I was sure that no one could have had time to cross the gravel. But she was not there. I moved round behind his back, until I had seen into every part of the room. And she was not there. I thought she might be under the front part of the colonnade, and peered cautiously round the corner. It was empty. The music went on. I stood, undecided. She must have run through the opposite end of the colonnade and round the back of the house. Ducking under the windows and stealing past the open doors, I stared out across the vegetable terrace, then walked round it. I felt sure she must have escaped this way. But there was no sign of anybody, no sound. I waited out there for several minutes, and then Conchis stopped playing. Soon the lamp went out and he disappeared. I went back and sat in the darkness on one of the chairs under the colonnade. There was a deep silence. Only the crickets cheeped, like drops of water striking the bottom of a gigantic well. Conjectures flew through my head. The people I had seen, the sounds I had heard, and that vile smell, had been real, not supernatural; what was not real was the absence of any visible machinery – no secret rooms, nowhere to disappear – or of any motive. And this new dimension, this suggestion that the ‘apparitions’ were mounted for Conchis as well as myself, was the most baffling of all.
I sat in the darkness, half hoping that someone, I hoped ‘Lily’, would appear and explain. I felt once again like a child, like a child who walks into a room and is aware that everyone there knows something about him that he does not. I also felt deceived by Conchis’s sadness. ‘The dead live by love ; and they could evidently also live by impersonation.
But I waited most for whoever had acted Lily. I had to know the owner of that young, intelligent, amused, dazzlingly pretty North European face. I wanted to know what she was doing on Phraxos, where she came from, the reality behind all the mystery.
I waited nearly an hour, and nothing happened. No one came, I heard no sounds. In the end I crept back up to my room. But I had a poor night’s sleep. When Maria knocked on the door at half past five I woke as if I had a hangover.
Yet I enjoyed the walk back to the school. I enjoyed the cool air, the delicate pink sky that turned primrose, then blue, the still-sleeping grey and incorporeal sea, the long slopes of silent pines. In a sense I re-entered reality as I walked. The events of the weekend seemed to recede, to become locked away, as if I had dreamt them; and yet as I walked there came the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth; a knowledge of what it was like physically, moment by moment, to have been young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny. I could not describe it. It was not in the least a literary feeling, but an intensely mysterious present and concrete feeling of excitement, of being in a situation where anything still might happen. As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, been re-invented, and for me alone.
26
There was a letter. The Sunday boat had brought it.
Dear Nicholas,
I thought you were dead. I’m on my own again. More or less. I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to see you again -the point is, I could. I come through Athens now. I mean I haven’t decided whether you aren’t such a pig that it’s crazy to get involved with you again. I can’t forget you, even when I’m with much nicer boys than you’ll ever be. Nicko, I’m a little bit drunk and I shall probably tear this up anyway.
Well, I may send a telegram if I can work a few days off at Athens. If I go on like this you won’t want to meet me. You probably don’t now as it is. When I got your letter I knew you’d just written it because you were bored out there. Isn’t it awful I still have to get boozed to write to you. It’s raining, I’ve got the fire on it’s so bloody cold. It’s dusk, it’s grey it’s so bloody miserable. The wallpaper’s muave or is it mauve hell with green plums. You’d be sick all down it.
A.
Write care of Ann.
Her letter came at the wrongest time. It made me realize that I didn’t want to share Bourani with anyone. After the first knowledge of the place, and still after the first meeting with Conchis, even as late as the Foulkes incident, I had wanted to talk about it – and to Alison. Now it seemed fortunate that I hadn’t; just as it seemed, though still obscurely, fortunate that I hadn’t lost my head in other ways when I wrote to her.
One doesn’t fall in love in five seconds; but five seconds can set one dreaming of falling in love, especially in a community as un-relievedly masculine as that of the Lord Byron School. The more I thought of that midnight face, the more intelligent and charming it became; and it seemed too to have had a breeding, a fastidiousness, a delicacy, that attracted me as fatally as the local fishermen’s lamps attracted fish on moonless nights. I reminded myself that if Conchis was rich enough to own Modiglianis and Bonnards, he was rich enough to pick the very best in mistresses. I had to presume some sort of sexual relationship between the girl and him – to do otherwise would have been naive; but for all that there had been something much more daughterly, affectionately protective, than sexual in her glance back at him.
I must have read Alison’s letter a dozen times that Monday, trying to decide what to do about it. I knew it had to be answered, but I came to the conclusion that the longer I left it, the better. To stop its silent nagging I pushed it away in the bottom drawer of my desk;
went to bed, thought about Bourani, drifted into various romantic—sexual fantasies with that enigmatic figure; and failed entirely, in spite of my tiredness, to go to sleep. The crime of syphilis had made me ban sex from my mind for weeks; now I was found not guilty -half an hour with a textbook Conchis had given me to look at had convinced me his diagnosis was right – the libido rose strong. I began to think erotically of Alison again; of the dirty weekend pleasures of having her in some Athens hotel bedroom; of birds in the hand being worth more than birds in the bush; and with better motives, of her loneliness, her perpetual mixed-up loneliness. The one sentence that had pleased me in her unfastidious and not very delicate letter was the last of all – that simple ‘Write care of Ann.’ Which denied the gaucheness, the lingering resentment, in all the rest.
I got out of bed and sat in my pyjama trousers and wrote a letter, quite a long letter, which I tore up at the first re-reading. The second attempt was much shorter and hit off, I thought, the right balance between regretful practicality and yet sufficient affection and desire for her still to want to climb into bed if I got half a chance.
I said I was rather tied up at the school over most weekends; though the half-term holiday was the weekend after next and I might just be in Athens then – but I couldn’t be sure. But if I was, it would be fun to see her.
As soon as I could I got Méli on his own. I had decided that I had to have a partial confidant at the school. One did not have to attend school meals with the boys over the weekend if one was off duty; and the only master who might have noticed I had been away was Méli himself, but as it happened he’d been in Athens. We sat after lunch on Monday in his room; or rather he sat chubbily at his desk, living up to his nickname, spooning Hymettus honey out of a jar and telling me of the flesh and fleshpots he had bought himself in Athens; and I lay on his bed, only half listening.