‘I do trust you. Please trust us.’
‘What’s going to happen now?’
‘I don’t know. But don’t start arguing. Just go back to the house.’
She leant quickly forward, pulling me a little towards her, and kissed my cheek. Then she was walking down towards the white coat. When she was near the man, I followed her. He stood silently aside to let her pass into the deeper darkness between the trees, but then blocked the opening between the bushes again. With a shock, almost greater than seeing him in the first place, I suddenly realized as I came down to him that he wasn’t wearing a mask. He was a Negro: a big, tall man, perhaps five years older than myself. He stared at me without expression. I came to within some ten feet of him. He extended his arms, warning, forbidding the way. I could see he was lighter-skinned than some black men, a smooth face, intent eyes, somehow liquid and animal, concentrated purely on the physical problem of my next move. He stood poised yet coiled, like an athlete, a boxer.
I stopped and said, ‘You look prettier with your jackal mask on.’
He did not move. But June’s face reappeared behind him. It was anxious, beseeching.
‘Nicholas. Go back to the house. Please.’ I looked from her concerned eyes to his. She said, ‘He can’t speak. He’s a mute.’
‘I thought black eunuchs went out with the Ottoman Empire.’
His expression did not change a millimetre, and I had the impression that he hadn’t even understood my words. But after a moment he folded his arms and widened his stance. I could see a black polo-neck jumper under the medical coat. I knew he wanted me to come at him, and I was tempted to take him on.
I let June decide. I looked past him at her. ‘Will you be all right?’
‘Yes. Please go.’
‘I’ll wait by the statue.’
She nodded and turned away. I went back to the sea-god, and sat on the rock he stood on; for some reason, I don’t know why, reached out a hand and grasped his bronze ankle. The Negro stood with folded arms, like a bored attendant in a museum – or perhaps indeed like some scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem. I relinquished the ankle and lit a cigarette to counter the released adrenalin. A minute passed, two. I listened, despite the sisters’ talk of a hiding-place, for a boat engine. But there was silence. I felt, beyond the insult to my virility before an attractive girl, ill-at-ease and guilty. The news of the clandestine meeting would obviously go straight back to Conchis now. Perhaps he would appear. It wasn’t so much that I was frightened of having a show-down over the schizophrenia nonsense; but that having broken his rules so signally, I would be sent off the field for good. I contemplated trying to suborn the Negro in some way, argue with him, plead. But he simply waited in the shadows, a doubly, both racially and personally, anonymous face.
From somewhere down by the sea there was a whistle. Things happened very fast then.
The white figure strode swiftly up towards me. I stood and said, ‘Now wait a minute.’ But he was strong and quick as a leopard, two inches taller than I am. An obviously humourless face, and an angry one. It was no good – I was frightened – there was something insanely violent about his eyes, and it flashed through my mind that he was a black surrogate of Henrik Nygaard. Without warning he spat full in my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back on to the rock pedestal of the statue. The edge caught the back of my knees and I had to sit. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him already walking away down the slope. I opened my mouth to shout something after him, then swallowed it. I pulled out a handkerchief, kept wiping my face. It was filthy, defiled. I would have murdered Conchis if he had stood in front of me then.
But in fact I went back to the gate and down the path to Moutsa; I had to be outside the domaine. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea; rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the “water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches.
I had long suspected there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into his puppets… and I was not going to stand much more of it. June had impressed me, her common-sense view of the situation. I was clearly the only male around that they could trust; and quite apart from anything else, they needed my help, my strength. I knew it would be no good storming into the house and having it out with the old man – he would only feed me more lies. He was like some animal in a den, he had to be coaxed out a little more before he could be trapped and destroyed.
I slowly trod water, with the dark slope of Bourani across the silent water to the east; and gradually I quietened down. It might have been worse than just that spit; and I had insulted the man. I possessed a lot of faults, but racialism wasn’t one of them … or at least I liked to think racialism wasn’t one of them. Besides, the ball was now firmly in the old man’s court; however he reacted, I would discover something about him. I must wait to sec what change this brought to tomorrow’s ‘script’. There returned that old excitement -let it all come, even the black Minotaur, so long as it came; so long as I might reach the centre, and have the final prize I coveted.
I went ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house. It was silent. I listened, without bothering to conceal it from anyone who might have been listening in return, outside Conchis’s bedroom door. There was no sound.
46
I woke up feeling more slugged, more beaten-steak – the heat does it in Greece – than usual. It was nearly ten o’clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs under the colonnade. I looked under the muslin on the table; my breakfast, the spirit-stove to heat up the usual brass vriki of coffee. I waited a moment, but no one appeared. There was a deserted silence about the house that puzzled me. I had expected Conchis, more comedy; not an empty stage. I sat down and ate my breakfast.
Afterwards I carried the breakfast things round to Maria’s cottage, on the pretext of being helpful; but her door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis’s door, tried it: second failure. Then I went round all the ground-floor rooms in the house. I even cursorily searched the book-cases in the music-room for his psychiatric papers, also without success. I knew a sudden fear: because of last night, it was all over. They were all vanished for good.
I walked to the statue, all round the domaine, like a man searching for a lost key – then back to the house, nearly an hour had passed. It remained as deserted as before. I began to feel desperate and at a loss – what should I do now? Go to the village, tell the police? In the end I went down to the private beach. The boat was gone. I swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high, fell into the sea among a litter of boulders and broken rocks. The cliffs curved in a very flat concave arc half a mile eastwards, not really making a bay, but finally jutting sufficiently from the coast to hide the beach where the three cottages were. I examined every yard of the cliffs: no way down, no place where even a small boat could land. Yet this was the area the two sisters supposedly headed for when they went ‘home’. There was only low scrub on the abrupt-sloping cliff-tops after the pines ended, manifestly impossible to hide in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages.
I swam a little further out to sea, but then a colder vein of water made me turn back. I saw at once. A girl in a pale pink summer dress was standing under the edge of the pines on top of the cliff, some hundred yards to the east of where I was; in shadow, but brilliantly, exuberantly conspicuous.
She waved down and I waved back. She walked a few yards along under the green wall of trees, the sunlight between the pines dappling the pale rose of the dress; and then, with a leap of surprise, I saw another flash of pink, a second girl. They stood, each replica of each, and the closer waved again, beckoning me ashore. They both turned and disappeared, as if they were setting off to meet me halfway.
Five or six minutes later I arrived, very out of breath, with a shirt pulled over my wet trunks, at the far side of the gulley. They weren’t by the statue, and I had a few moments’ angry suspicion that I was being teased again – shown them only to lose them. But I went down towards the cliffs, past the carob. The sea seared blue through the furthermost pines. Suddenly I saw their two figures. They were sitting on a shaded hummock of earth and rock, to the east. I walked more slowly, sure of them now. The identical dresses were very simple, with short faintly puffed sleeves, scalloped deep above the breast; they wore powder-blue stockings, pale grey shoes. They looked very feminine, pretty, a pair of nineteen-year-olds in their Summer Sunday best … yet to my mind vaguely over-dressed, towny – even, weirdly, there was a rush basket beside June, as if they were still students at Cambridge.
June stood as I got near and came to meet me. She had her hair down, like her sister; golden skin, an even deeper tan than I had realized the previous night; and there was a facial difference at close range, a greater openness, even a touch of impudent tomboyishness. Behind her Julie watched us meet. She was noticeably unsmiling and holding herself aloof. June grinned.
‘I told her you said you didn’t care which of us you met this morning.’
‘That was kind of you.’
She took my hand and led me to the foot of the hummock.
‘Here’s your knight in shining armour.’
Julie looked coolly down at me. ‘Hallo.’
Her sister said, ‘She knows all.’
Julie slid a look at her. ‘I also know whose fault it was.’
But then she stood and came down beside us. The reproof in her eyes gave way to concern.
‘Did you get back all right?’
I told them what had happened, the spitting. The first moments of sisterly banter rapidly disappeared. I had the benefit of two pairs of disturbed blue-grey eyes. Then they looked at each other, as if this confirmed something they had been discussing. Julie spoke first.
‘Have you seen Maurice this morning?’
‘Not a sign.’
There was another exchanged glance.
June said, ‘Nor have we.’
‘The whole place seems deserted. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
June glanced behind me, into the trees. ‘It may seem. But I bet it isn t.
‘Who is that damned black man?’
‘Maurice calls him his valet. When you’re not here he even serves at table. He’s supposed to look after us when we’re in hiding. Actually he gives us both the creeps.’
‘Is he really a mute?’
‘You may well ask. We suspect not. He just sits and stares. As if he could say worlds.’
‘He’snever … ?’
Julie shook her head. ‘He hardly even seems aware we’re female.’
‘He must be blind as well.’
June made a little grimace. ‘It would be insulting if it wasn’t such a relief.’
‘The old man must know what happened last night.’
‘That’s what we’re trying to work out.’
June added, ‘The mystery of the dog that didn’t bark in the night.’
I looked at her. ‘I thought you and I weren’t supposed to meet officially.’
‘We were always going to, today. I was supposed to back Maurice’s story.’
Julie added, After I’d put on another of my celebrated madwoman acts.’
‘But he must … ‘
‘That’s what puzzles us. The trouble is he hasn’t told us the next chapter. What we’re supposed to be when you’ve seen through the schizophrenia.’
June said, ‘So we’ve decided to be ourselves. And see what happens.’
‘You must tell me all you know now.’
Julie gave her sister a dry look. June gave a little start of mock surprise.
Tm not de trop by any chance?’
‘You can go and improve your nauseating tan. We’ll perhaps tolerate you at lunch.’
June made a little curtsey, then went and picked up the basket; but as she came back, she raised a warning finger. ‘I shall want to hear all that concerns me.’
I smiled, then belatedly realized, as June walked away, that I was getting a cool and wide-eyed look from Julie.
‘It was so dark. The same clothes, I … ‘
Tm very angry with her. Things are quite complicated enough without that.’
‘She’s very different from you.’
‘We’ve rather cultivated that.’ But then her voice was gentler, more honest. ‘We’re very close, really.’
I took her hand. ‘I prefer you.’
But she wouldn’t let me pull her close, though the hand was not withdrawn. ‘I’ve found a place along the cliff. Where at least we can talk without being seen.’
We went through the trees to the east.
‘You’re not seriously angry?’
‘Did you enjoy kissing her?’
‘Only because I thought it was you.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘A few seconds.’
She jerked on my hand. ‘Liar.’
But there was a hidden smile on her face. She led the way round an outcrop of rock; a solitary pine, then the steep slope down to the cliff-edge. The outcrop formed a natural wall shielding us from eyes inland, behind us. Another basket stood on a dark green rug spread in the thin shade of the wind-bent tree. I glanced round, then took Julie in my arms. This time she let me kiss her, but only briefly before she turned her head away.
‘I so wanted to come last night.’
‘It was awful.’
‘I had to let her meet you.’ There was a little outbreath. ‘She complains I have all the excitement, apart from anything else.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Now we’ve got all day.’
She kissed my shoulder through my damp shirt. ‘We must talk.’
She slipped out of her flat-heeled shoes, then sat down on the rug with her legs curled beside her. The pale-blue stockings ended just below her bare knees. The dress was really white, but thick-sewn with a close pattern of tiny roses. It was cut deep round the neck, to where the breasts began to swell apart. The clothes gave her a kind of sensual innocence, a schoolgirlishness. The sun-wind teased the ends of her hair against her back, as when she had been ‘Lily’ on the beach – but all that side of her had drained away, like water between stones. I sat beside her, and she turned away and reached for the basket. The fabric tightened over the breasts, the small waist. She faced back and our eyes met; those fine grey-hyacinth eyes, tilted corners, lingering a little in mine.
‘Go on. Ask me anything.’
‘What did you read at Cambridge?’
‘Classics.’ She saw my surprise. ‘My father’s subject. He was like you. A schoolmaster.’
‘Was?’
‘He died in the war. In India.’
‘And June as well?’
She smiled. ‘I was the sacrificial lamb. She was allowed to do what she liked. Modern languages.’
‘When did you come down?’
‘Last year.’ She opened her mouth, then changed her mind, and set the basket between us. ‘I’ve brought all I could. I’m so scared they’ll see what I’m doing.’ I looked round, but the natural wall protected us completely. Only someone on top of it could have observed us. She produced a book. It was small, half bound in black leather, with green marbled-paper sides; rubbed and worn. I looked at the title-page: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Parisiis.
‘It’s a Didot Aîné.’
‘Who’s he?’ I saw the date 1800.
‘A
famous French printer.’
She turned me back to the flyleaf. On it, in very neat writing, was an inscription: From the ‘idiots’ of IVB to their lovely teacher, Miss Julia Holmes. Underneath were fifteen or so signatures: Penny O’Brien, Susan Smith, Susan Mowbray, Jane Willings, Lea Gluckstein, Jean Ann Moffat…
‘Where was this?’
‘Please look at these first.’
Six or seven envelopes. Three were addressed to ‘Miss Julia and Miss June Holmes, c/o Maurice Conchis, Esquire, Bourani, Phraxos, Greece’. They had English stamps and recent postmarks, all from Dorset.
‘Read one.’
I took out a letter from the top envelope. It was on headed paper, Ansty Cottage, Cerne Abbas, Dorset. It began in a rapid scrawl:
Darlings, I’ve been frantically busy with all the doodah for the Show, on top of that Mr Arnold’s been in and he wants to do the painting as soon as possible. Also guess who – Roger rang up, he’s at Bovington now, and asked himself over for the weekend. He was so disappointed you were both abroad -hadn’t heard. I think he’s much nicer – not nearly so pompous. And a captain!! I didn’t know what on earth to do with him so I asked the Drayton girl and her brother round for supper and I think it went off rather well. Billy is getting so fat, old Tom says it’s all the grass, so I asked the D. girl if she’d like to give him a ride or two, I knew you wouldn’t mind …