Nightspawn

PART ONE

I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man. I think my life is diseased. Only a flood of spleen now could cauterize my wounds. This is it. Hear the slap and slither of the black tide rising. The year has blundered through another cycle, and another summer has arrived, bringing the dogrose to the hedge, the clematis swooning to the door. The beasts are happily ravening in the sweltering fields of June. How should I begin? Should I say that the end is inherent in every beginning? My hyacinth is dead, and will never bloom again, but I keep the pot, like Isabella, and water with my tears in vain the torn and withered roots. What else is there for me to do? They took everything from me. Everything.

The island torments me. I open the box and there it is, an image cut from jewels, quivering between the azure lid and bed of sapphire silk. At dawn the sky bloomed with a warm wet shade of pearl, at evening was suffused with a delicate heartrending lavender. At first I knew no rest there. My life was fitful, disturbed by savage dreams. The land appeared arid and irretrievably dead, forsaken by the seasons. The sea was stupefying in the monotonous regularity of its tides. I scurried over the rocks, averting my eyes and mind from the harshness of the desert around me, saying, my life is more than this, the value of my life lies in the sum of all I have lost by coming here. But always I was left, alone, stranded, gaping at the blazing brown hills, the shattered sea, my brain a bright blank void. I lived on a spit which turned me slowly through the heat of the days, my vision fractured by light from the sky, from stark white walls, by light clattering on the sea in shards. Sometimes even the sheen of sweat on my own skin was enough to scorch my eyeballs. At last I surrendered. At the still centre of a certain day, while a hot wind gasped out of the north, I discovered the desert which lay within me. It was not a totally unpleasant discovery. By inexplicable means it freed me. I began to notice the thousand small signs of the seasons which all along had been stirring bravely but unnoticed on the parched earth. The lines of hill and sky no longer looked to me like the silent reefs of an alien planet, but were perceived to hold within them a thrilling purity and logic, a simplicity of staggering proportions. The two constants, sea and sky, now set the rhythm of my days. Time as I thought I knew it was put out of joint. I became a master of improvisation. Peace was the easiest thing to find, and my taste for drama was sated by fits of lust and their consequences. I lost the tedious intensity which had tormented me all my years. I learned to relax. I was happy. That was the island. I sailed there by devious and forlorn ways, and there it was one day in a late spring that Julian and his cursed brood sailed with majestic aplomb into my life. My life. Imagine a wry smile.

Clear sea light blazed upon the harbour that day, upon the water, splintered into swaying columns of fierce blue and gold. A boat with a black sail glided silently across the bar, and down on the beach the fishermen were beating squid on the rocks. The fat pink pelican, mascot of the island, morosely eyed the quayside from its perch on the prow of a grounded skiff. I sat by a table in the little square before Constantinou’s taverna. The place was almost empty at that early hour. There was a mad old man in a dirty hat, talking earnestly to his dog, a gigantic one-eyed beast with slavering jaws. In a far corner, the village barber slept and snored with a handkerchief over his face. I looked at the pelican. The pelican looked at the dog. The dog barked suddenly, and the old man, with a terrible roar, gave it a clout of his stick and sent the miserable animal howling across the quay. The barber awoke, and clawed the handkerchief from his mouth. He rubbed his eyes. His face opened in a yawn.

Boom.

I started in fright. The white liner was already dropping its anchor beyond the harbour bar. There came the grinding of the winch, the ringing shouts of sailors. Four weatherbeaten trawlers coughed their way across the water, and stopped, rearing and rolling in the wash, beside the four step-ladders which came clattering down from the liner’s deck. I left the table and strolled out along the pier. The sun was licking the last patches of dew from the flagstones, and a moist green odour was in the air. The trawlers returned and disgorged their passengers on the quay. Hot and flustered tourists wandered groggily among the jumble of baggage. Screaming children’s ears were boxed with furious abandon. The village opened like a mouth and the widows came streaming out, waving little pasteboard cards which described, in decorous though erratic English, the hospitality and splendour of their vacant rooms. The harsh Greek voices and bewildered little squeaks of the tourists grated against each other in the tranquil morning. The boats chugged and spluttered, and the sea birds shrieked, beside themselves at the sight of such potential targets. Above the clamour, the liner’s siren boomed majestically. I was jostled and jabbed on all sides, and a fearsome Scandinavian lady, all ash-blonde plaits and tanned fat calves, struck me on the knee with her suitcase. When I turned to complain, she glared at me, baring her fine strong teeth. I retreated, and stepped up on the sea wall to implement my modest sixty-seven and one half inches. The German was the last passenger to disembark. He was not alone. I fought my way to his side, and touched his shoulder.

‘Bonjour,’ I said brightly. ‘Je m’appelle White, Ben White. Peut-être vous —’

‘What?’

He whirled about, with one elbow raised defensively, and peered over the top of my head. He was a tall, gangling creature dressed in an extraordinary tubular suit, which must have once been black but was now a shiny bluebottle green. His fearsome yellow teeth stood marooned like crooked tombstones in the midst of an awkward mouth, and the spikes of red hair standing upright on his diminutive skull glittered in the sunlight like severed strands of wire. Through battered steel-rimmed spectacles two small grey eyes peered out with an expression of slowly dawning surprise, as though grappling with the baffling slip and slide of a world continuously changing. I lifted an uncertain hand and said in more certain English,

‘You are Erik Weiss, aren’t you? My name is White. We met once, some time ago, in Doctor Rabin’s shop.’

He nodded swiftly, his head wobbling at the end of its pale stalk of neck.

‘Yes yes, yes, I know you. I remember. How are you?’

His gaze slithered down from my face, crossed the space between us to his large brown mountaineering boots, paused briefly there, and climbed his own legs. Having verified himself, he yawned, and put his head on one side and smacked a cupped palm sharply to his ear. One of the Scandinavian’s sawing elbows poked him in the ribs, and, mistaking the direction from which the prompt had come, he quickly turned and swept his companion forward.

‘This is Andreas.’

Andreas was a dark Greek gentleman with a handsome face, furious eyes, and a hideously crooked back. He gave me a wisp of a smile and crunched my fingers in his pale hand. With a rigid forefinger, Erik inscribed a swift little cross beneath his nose, sniffed, then plunged the finger on to point across the quay.

‘Breakfast.’

We went to my table, matching our pace to Andreas’s complicated lurch. The waiter came, a mournful boy with a failed moustache, and Erik ordered coffee and eggs for the three of us. I wanted to say that I had already eaten, but instead I cleared my throat and gravely considered the pelican. It clacked its beak disdainfully and looked away. The morning was becoming intolerably hot and gummy. Out over the sea a gathering of ugly black cloud was smeared like a grease stain on the sky. Erik unwound the spectacles from behind his ears, folded them carefully, and jabbed his fingers into his eyes. Andreas sat between us in a perfect and unsettling stillness, his thin lips pursed.

‘Did you have a bad crossing?’ I asked.

Erik merely groaned, and shook his head in despair. Andreas said,

‘There was a storm, yes.’

I nodded.

‘Ah.’

The food arrived. I sipped the bitter seedy coffee and watched the others eat. Erik wolfed the mushy concoction of eggs, his little eyes fixed on a point of empty space, while Andreas wielded his fork with dainty and precise economy. A cloud shadow swept abruptly across the quay, engulfing us, but the shade seemed to bring only a deeper intensity of damp heat. Erik leaned back in his chair, cast a wistful eye at my untouched plate, belched, and then looked at me with a frown.

‘They told me your name was … Turbine, or something,’ he said.

I shook my head.

‘No, it’s White.’

The German fumbled in his pocket and brought out a fat worn wallet, from which he fished a tattered scrap of paper, and peered at it myopically.

‘Twinbein,’ he read. ‘James H. Twinbein, yes?’

‘No.’

‘But they said —’

I explained everything to him, in detail, speaking slowly and carefully, as to a child. He listened to the first couple of sentences. To see his concentration waver and slowly crumble was like witnessing the gradual collapse of an intricate, finely wrought mast. He seemed ill, or drunk, or both. My voice faded, and in the ensuing silence, Andreas suddenly laughed.

‘Erik drank too much last night,’ he said. ‘First brandy, and then ouzo, and … well, you know.’

I looked at the cripple, at his handsome impassive face. There was something about him, a quality of his calm perhaps, which filled me with a vague disquiet. He folded his hands on his breast and lapsed again into silence.

‘Is it clear now?’ I asked of Erik.

He scowled at us both, and buried his nose in his coffee cup.

‘Pah,’ he grunted.

The passengers from the liner were still struggling on the quay, vainly trying, under the harassment of the widows, to sort out their belongings. Something moved behind the pier, and a yacht, a gorgeous thing composed of sleek spare lines, came slipping between the beacons, into the harbour. The rattle and crack of stiff cloth sounded peremptorily across the water, and the tall sail crumpled and slowly fluttered to the deck, leaving the needle-slim mast splendidly alone to pierce the sky. The babble of voices on the quayside faded, and all turned, captivated by the glimmering white presence of the craft. An anchor plopped into the water, and the upturned pointed prow turned its disdainful gaze all along the length of the quay, seemed profoundly repelled by the vulgarity it saw, and went on to contemplate the ocean from whence it had come. And a fat black cloud, lying low in the middle distance, sent a livid shaft of lightning plunging down into the sea. Oh yes, indeed yes, only the trumpets were missing.

Erik was singularly unimpressed by this arrival. I do not think he even noticed it. He rubbed his spectacles with a dirty handkerchief, clipped them back on his nose, and, having sucked a tasty morsel from his tooth, he asked of me,

‘Is there somewhere for me to stay?’

‘Yes. I have a room for you.’

I glanced uncertainly at Andreas, and, seeing my glance, Erik’s gloom lifted for the first time. A wicked grin contorted his face, and he snickered and said,

‘Andreas will be all right, he will dig a hole in the ground, it will be all right.’

The cripple calmly smiled, and his claws stirred in anticipation on his breast. They gazed at each other for a moment, during which I had the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of becoming transparent. Then Erik’s laugh rang out, a high-pitched squawk falling abruptly to a frantic snigger. He stood up, and picked up their bags, the straps of which were being devoured by growths of green mould. He said,

‘All right.’

I was left to pay the bill.

A skiff bobbed by the landing stage, a daughter to the great yacht out on the water turning slowly around the axis of its anchor chain. Three passengers disembarked on the quay. There was a short, fat man with a club foot. Yes, a club foot. The other two looked like his son and daughter. The boy was perhaps thirteen, with a mass of wild black curls and the delicate pale face of a sullen angel. The girl I thought to be four or five years older than her brother. All three of them had large, strangely beautiful blue eyes, the blue of crystals in the sea. They advanced across the quay, the father in front, supported by a heavy stick, the children some paces behind him, each staggering under the weight of a heavy, brown leather trunk. I felt the ghosts of caliphs smiling upon the procession with nostalgia and approval. I hurried in the wake of Erik and the cripple, trying to force my wallet into a pocket which, I discovered, I had forgotten to unbutton. I paused for a moment, a fatal moment, and wherever that button is now, and that wallet, I fervently hope that they have souls with which to suffer the unmitigated agony of an eternity of thoughtfully assorted hells. The father limped past me without a glance, puffing and snorting, but the girl, as she drew near me, began to totter, clawing wildly at the straps of the trunk. Being a gentleman and an idiot, I sprang to her aid. She saw me coming, and with a great gasp of relief she let go her hold of the thing. It toppled slowly into my waiting arms, and I was thrown back a pace, hearing, as I went, an ominous creak from one of my thumbs. The girl and I started into a little dance, weaving our way back and forth on the flagstones and affording some amusement to the onlookers. The boy set down his trunk, with an ease for which I could have bitten him, and watched us with a faint smile. At last she was loaded again with her pack. I heard a Strange noise behind me, and glanced over my shoulder to find the father leaning on his stick, chortling in high amusement. He bowed to me, and turned, and stamped off on his way. The girl gave me a brilliant, false smile and said in a slightly accented English,

‘Thank you, thank you so much, you are very kind, thank you.’

I simpered, and turned away to follow my two loyal friends, who by now had reached the other end of the quay, where they lounged in wait for me with their hands in their pockets. I cannot now say how I knew, but I did know, and was distinctly conscious of somewhere a strut tightening, a wheel squeaking, and the great fragile contraption, like an antediluvian bicycle, beginning to wheeze and whir.

The room was large, with four high white walls and a ceiling above them of bare polished beams slanting down to the window, open now, the grey gauze curtains stirring with a tiny noise, like the dry voice of an insect. Beneath the window a narrow bed stood draped in a blanket of bright island weave. There was a table and two straight-backed chairs which matched neither each other nor the table. The walls were bare but for a small square ikon of a cross-eyed Virgin which hung above the bed. Erik stood in the middle of the floor and peered about him vacantly. Andreas was touching things with his fingertips, verifying them. He opened the windows and stepped out on to what was the black roof of the kitchen below. A bitter breath of tar invaded the room. I leaned in the open doorway with my arms and ankles crossed. Erik gave a grunt and heaved his bag up on the bed, then sat beside it and passed a weary hand over his mouth, his forehead. From the landlord’s quarters below us came the muted sounds of an argument, then the click of a well-placed slap, silence. Erik lifted his eyes to mine.

‘Well,’ he began, and paused to cough uproariously into his fist. ‘How long have you been here, on the island?’

‘Quite a while.’

‘Ah, I see. And you say we met once, somewhere, yes?’

‘Doctor Rabin introduced us. And I know your work, of course.’

Erik was a journalist, and was well known as a political commentator, whatever that may be.

‘My work?’ he murmured, baffled. He turned and peered through the window, and absently stuck his finger into a small brown-rimmed cigarette burn in the curtain.

‘I was twice sick on that boat,’ he said sorrowfully.

Andreas came back into the room and sat down slowly on one of the hard chairs.

‘Well?’ I asked.

The cripple smiled at me.

‘In Greece, Mr White, we have an old saying …’ At least that was what he should have said, he looked so wise and darkly Levantine. But he turned away from me without speaking, and his gaze settled on the German.

‘There are turkeys, Erik, in the garden below. You will have no rest.’

As though to corroborate his words, one of those revolting birds sent up an hysterical outraged squawk.

‘This room is the best I could find,’ I said coldly.

Andreas grinned, and Erik flapped a mollifying paw in my direction. There was a small silence. Erik lit a cigarette. His hands trembled, and he looked at them reproachfully. I unfolded my arms and turned to go, but Erik’s voice, with a new ringing note of authority in it, stopped me.

‘White.’

‘Yes?’

For a moment he stroked his cheek with three blunt fingers and a thumb, considering me the while.

‘When are we to meet this man?’ he asked.

‘Tonight, on Delos, at the festival.’

‘The festival?’

‘Yes. We won’t be noticed in the crowds.’

‘Ah. Very cloak and sword.’

‘Dagger.’

‘Dagger.’

He sucked his teeth, and then abruptly slumped back upon the bed. The springs of the mattress groaned miserably.

‘Good.’

The word seemed to rise, black and bleak, from a pit in the ground below us. Andreas smiled his smile, and bade me adieu. Downstairs, the landlord had begun to slap his wife around the walls.

I wandered without purpose, listening to the teeth grinding in my head. Cataleptic noon pressed down upon the village out of a hot white sky, bruising the parched earth, torturing the trees, pouring light like acid through the streets. I thought of going home, but home was an armchair with ape-tufts of horsehair under its arms, a broken bed, and a window looking down upon the rear of a café. In the open at least, it was possible to join battle with the sun. There, in the violet splashes of shadow, one could find release. High in the heavy air a bell tolled slowly, and a pale man with horn-rimmed glasses, hovering by a gift shop window, peered owlishly at me as I went past. Sweat ran unheeded into my eyes, and my hair was hot and damp. I came to a little square with dusty olive trees. The tiny bright white houses were closed against the day. The sun came down there at its angle like a burning blade, and to cross from one side to the other was to feel the hot sky fall. I shuffled to a halt in the shadow of a balcony, and stood with my mouth open, panting slowly. In the hills, the cicadas throbbed relentlessly. An ugly black bird with a sick look in its little eye stumbled from the roof tops into the tree beside me. Thunder crepitated faintly in the distance, and then the silence returned. Something began to happen in my ears, a strange sensation, as though the minute fur of hairs inside them were stirring, realigning itself to a variation in the silence. I realized that I was listening intently for a sound, a word; I knew only that it was about to reach me. I was rewarded. A sharp crack set the air aquiver like a dancing nerve, a little noise that was, in its crisp precision, oddly at variance with the plump moist heat, the crystal light, that cat asleep on the windowsill, and for a moment I thought that I had imagined it. I looked across the square, and the mouth of an alleyway revealed momentarily a fat man in a red shirt dancing a jig. He hopped out from behind the angle of a wall, lifted his knees in a few high-kicking steps, and then retreated backward out of my view. Some seconds of complete silence followed, during which I was conscious of my left eyebrow travelling in rapid jerks up my forehead, then came another crack, and a roar, and the fat man shot out of the alley and charged toward me across the square, his arms flapping, ankles wobbling, a scarlet blossom bursting in his throat. Suddenly he halted. I swear I could hear his breathing. Time passed. He looked from right to left, leaning slightly forward, with his head bent. A crafty gleam flashed from his spectacles, and one of his plump hands stole to the back of his neck. What his fingers found there was too much for him. He rose up on his toes, threw back his head and let fly at the sky a howl of woe, groaned, gagged, there was blood in his mouth, came a tinkle of glass and six spilled coins as he spun through a pirouette and crashed to the ground spraying dark gore and the contents of his pockets before him into the dust. His legs twitched. The bird above me in the tree flapped its wing and sang a little song.

I did not move. It was not that I could not move, no, none of your paralysis of shock or any of that nonsense, just, I did not move. I was waiting for something, as I had waited for the sound of the first shot. Once again my patience had its prize. It must have been one of my better days. Another figure came from the alleyway into the square. He was short and stringy, with a scarred mouth, and the blank still eyes of a bird. A sailor certainly, he brought no hint of the sea, but of the back streets of a hundred seaport cities, the mean bars, the whores, the gutters rife with discarded prophylactics. A great deal to perceive in a split and violent second? I came upon him again, of course, of course. He did not see me, or if he did he chose to regard me as an hallucination. He crept across the square and knelt beside the fat man, and his hands went scurrying swiftly from pocket to pocket. Then I moved. The sailor lifted his head at my slow approach, and we gaped at each other in something like astonishment, though why I should have been surprised, I could not, and can not say. He turned, crouched like a sprinter, and fled soundlessly.

I showed a threatening foot to the drowsy cat which had left its windowsill to investigate with sly sidelong glances the figure upon the ground. The fat felled man lay on his back with his legs flung wide and both arms trapped under him. One of his shoes had come off, and stood now beside the deserted foot, where a plump pink toe sprouted from a hole in the sock. He wore a baggy pair of trousers, and a gay red shirt, across which a troupe of dusky maidens danced, evoking the far south seas. His spectacles, shattered, dangled from his ear, and his wide eyes stared heedlessly at the luminous sky. There was a neat round puncture in his chest, which left a dancing girl decapitated, and a second ragged mouth gaped in his throat, marking the last bullet’s exit. His attitude was one of extreme embarrassment, at being caught in such a helpless and undignified position. An angry red stain was spreading beneath him in the dust, and an ant with a broken leg staggered through the mire. Bright coins lay scattered around him, and there was a little phial of blue-tinted glass, violet almost, the lid and neck of which had been shot away. The broken points were tipped with beads of blood, like a tiny crown of rubies. The memory of a drowned man seen long ago came to me. Querulous and strident voices approached, in the streets or in my head, I knew not which, it was all one, I turned and ran.

Some of my happiest times on the island were spent sniggering in secret at the newly-arrived tourists wandering through the maze of the village, in lost blithe circles, toward a harbour they would never reach, unless deflected by someone in the know. How precious was that look of surprise dawning on the face of a blue-haired matron, clad in indecent shorts, as she glimpsed for the third time my solemn face (only a tic in the eyelid to betray the boiling glee) caught like a minor moon in the shadowed pane. Confronted everywhere by such an unsettling abundance of twins and triplets, what conclusions they must have reached, those poor wayfaring strangers. Did the islanders have a genetic strain, unknown to science, which multiplied to grotesque abundance each little fish within the womb? Was the ground a warren of passageways by which these grinning urchins scurried from corner to identical corner, intent on driving the foreigner away gibbering and mad? Oh, the times I had. Consider, then, my plight when I found myself hopelessly lost in the very streets where I had laughed at the helplessness of others. Covered with sweat, nerves in tatters, a hot scald squeezing my bladder, consider all this and pride besides and there I was, reeling through the village, calm confidence twitching on my haughty mouth while my little strabismic glinty green eyes searched on all sides for a set of steps, a rickety but welcoming doorway. At length I could go no further, and sat down in the burning dust beneath a ruined tree. I was finished. In a moment they would arrive with their glittering gats. My bowels writhed in anticipation of the bullets. Then I lifted my head and looked to the other side of the street. These things are so simple. I climbed the steps, on my knees I suspect, crawled along the corridor and flopped into the room. Erik lay spreadeagled on the bed like a dead horse, his mouth open and eyes closed. He was naked. I looked at his great pink lolling sex where it reared out of its bush, and then I went galloping across the room, through the open windows and out to the roof. I struck the parapet of the wall with a soft plop, and found myself gaping down into a ragged garden two storeys below. A startled turkey gobbled and fled out of my range, crimson comb aquiver, a wise bird but too wary, for my stomach was not yet ready to give up its treasures, not yet. I turned away from the garden and wiped the sweat from my eyelids. Andreas sat in a deckchair beside the window and gazed at me placidly, his hands folded in his lap.

‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘The white man.’

I nodded to him.

‘Hello.’

I went back into the room, my lips forming the German’s name. He was gone. The bed still bore the imprint of his bones, but of the man himself, there was not a sign. In the second or two while I stood there staring, my mind went back to search for a lapse in the time I took to gag above the garden. Andreas came in and found me with one finger raised, the smile of the ‘r’ in Erik still lingering on my jowls.

‘Has something happened?’ he asked.

I turned to him, and my teeth, of their own will, clenched themselves. I was not capable of telling him about that blood and death. It was a shyness almost.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing, I felt sick for a minute. Where has he gone? He was here a minute ago.’

‘Was he? You are very pale.’

He was humouring me. I wanted to kick him in his fine gleaming teeth.

‘For Christ’s sake yes, he was here, on this bloody bed.’

He went to where their bags lay in a corner with their guts out on the floor. I watched his fingers scrabbling inside one of them, and for an instant I glimpsed the beasts. Later they were to come in herds. He drew out a flat leather flask, unscrewed the cap (eek eek) and filled it to the brim with tawny liquor.

‘Here,’ he said, bringing to me the little cup. ‘Drink this.’

The brandy spread its thin hot roots along my nerves. I sat down on the bed. Eek eek, said the cap. Andreas watched me with a sidelong look as he put away the flask. I began to whistle soundlessly, tapping a finger on my knee. The cripple sat down on one of the straight-backed chairs and carefully arranged his misshapen limbs to fit the severity of the wood.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked irritably.

He continued to study me with mild curiosity. At length he said,

‘I am trying to … to place you, is that the word? But you do not fit. Tell me about yourself. You are Irish? They said you were a writer.’

‘I was.’

‘Not any more?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m still a writer. Is that all you want to know?’

My impatience amused him. He smiled and clasped his hands. The chair cracked its joints.

‘You don’t like me, Mr White, do you?’

‘I don’t dislike you. I have no reason to dislike you.’

‘Ah. You should be a politician.’

‘I leave that to others.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Nothing. It sounded right.’

Now it was my turn to smile. He touched the corner of his mouth with a fingertip, and said,

‘It is a pity you don’t speak Greek.’

‘How do you know I don’t?’

‘I do not know, of course, but you always speak to me in English.’

‘Always? This is the second time I’ve met you.’

‘Well, yes. But my English is not equal to yours.’

Ice crackled among his words.

‘You do all right,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’m keeping it simple for your sake.’

‘You are very kind.’

‘Think nothing of it.’

‘Do you trust me?’

‘No.’

I had not been prepared for the question, and the answer was out before I could check it.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think I know.’

We said no more for a time. He watched me with his head held on one side.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

He laughed. It was an oddly musical sound.

‘If we are to do this correctly, as the movies tell us, you should now say, “Look, what is this.”’

‘Look, what is this?’

‘I am trying to find who you are, what you are, why you are with us. Why are you with us, Mr White?’

‘Does it matter? What do I know about you?’

‘But I need to know.’

‘Why? Don’t you trust me?’

‘I also have no reason to distrust you. But there is something which tells me that you do not take seriously what we are trying to do. It is a game to you.’

I pursed my lips for a moment thoughtfully. Then I asked,

‘Do you take it seriously?’

‘Yes.’

‘To the point of melodrama, right?’

Without noticing it, we had been leaning steadily forward, until now our noses almost met. We retreated, and took a deep breath each.

‘The army, Mr White, the king … what is there to say? Perhaps you do not realize how things really are here.’

‘I realize.’

‘Then you agree that it is serious? You agree that the … the little thing for which we are searching is very important?’

‘If you say so.’

His calm cracked for the first time, and his hands began to tear at each other.

‘It is not because I say so, it is not —’

I stood up, saying,

‘I’m off.’

‘Mr White, you make me afraid. Cowards make me afraid.’

In the doorway I turned. This was my moment. I said,

‘You know, I have a notion that our friend Herr Twinbein will be the man to help you. Toodle-oo.’

Endgame. There are jaws that can really drop. Andreas had such a one.

I walked down the hill toward the harbour. The heat was oppressive, and the still air crackled with static electricity. Far out over the sea, the sun had ripped the clouds, and below the rent, the water was alive with molten gold. Part of me knew where I was going, and part of me was trying desperately to deny that destination. But all my bravado had been expended on Andreas, and I was a leaf in the wind. I came again to the little square, so changed now by what it had lost, sunlight, silence, the dead man. A small group of villagers stood talking together in hushed voices, and a stout policeman kept guard over a dull brown stain in the dust. I walked slowly around the perimeter of the square, each step descending without a sound, as though I moved through water. By the stunted tree I halted. The waning day was luminous with silver light filtering down through the clouds. A small wind came up from the harbour and stirred my hair. I took a coin and a bit of broken glass from my pocket, and bending low, I scooped a hollow to bury them in the ground at the base of the tree. I should have chanted a spell or two. I turned, and turning halted. Something of the square was moving, some subtle thing was shifting through a tiny violence, as though the very light were rending itself asunder. From an alleyway came the flash of a fang and one red eye, there, gone. A bird rose from the tree, its wings disturbing the sky, and left behind it to float down the air a single, tufted feather.

I went to my room and crawled into the narrow bed, feeling like a very sick little old man. The sky lowered and pressed against the window with soft blunt insistence. Strange evening light was about me. I fell into a hot and horrible sleep as the thunder began to bellow.

In herds.

Epataphios, procession of death, wound snake-like through the streets, with little bells, and voices weeping in the dying light. First came the cross grotesquely leaping in the acolyte’s small hands, Christ recrucified in gold, ringed round by candle blades, and after that the bier, draped in a purple pall. Petals of flowers fell like snow among the wreaths of roses, the yellow lemon blossom. Came the shy girls and widows, the wives, old men and boys, the priests in robes of stately red and purple. Incense and wax, sweat, death, fire and flower, all these were brought together into the image of a tiny angelic child in white, singing plaintively, mourning with unconscious splendour the little lost hopes of men. I turned away, troubled by things which I dared not investigate, and took to the lanes and deserted back streets of the village, a three-legged dog at my heels. The storm had washed the air, and now a drenched limpid tenderness was abroad on the evening. Darkness drifted slowly down, like soft black glass, from out of a pale sky. With my hands in my pockets I wandered aimlessly, musing on the passage of time, death, the mystery of art. At least, if those were not my thoughts, they should have been, on such an evening.

I met Erik. He came stalking out of the darkness like some strange armorial beast, his lips drawn back from his teeth: a cemetery gate open in the moonlight. He was washed, and even shaved, and the deeper wrinkles had been shaken from his tubular suit. His huge boots banged on the cobbles. It took him a moment to remember me, to place me in the context of his awful morning. He halted uncertainly.

‘Hello Erik,’ I said.

He smiled, nodding ruefully, and jabbed a finger at me.

‘White, my friend, how are you?’

‘Fine.’

We set off down the alleyway. Erik clasped his hands behind his back, and pursed his lips. I suspect he was trying to think of something to say. Who knows what depths of groundless malice gave to my voice its careless inflexion when I said,

‘You heard about the murder, I suppose? It was our friend Black. I’m afraid you won’t be able to meet him now.’

Sea-sickness and drink had dulled the edge of his perception. It took him the space of two or three steps to realize the significance of what I had told him. He came to a standstill and looked at me like an inquisitive crow.

‘Black?’ he murmured.

I nodded.

‘Yes indeed. Hadn’t you heard?’

‘But they have not yet identified the body. How could you know?’

‘I was there.’

‘I see.’

I became bored with the game. He was too calm. Had he been better material, I would have kept him dancing for a good ten minutes more, shooting tiny fragments of tantalizing information at his toes like bullets. But Erik was a professional survivor, had seen more disasters than I could imagine, and he was too calm. Besides, he knew the rules of my game. I told him what I had seen, what I had done. I was proud of myself and my handling of the situation, I admit it, I was pleased as I could be. What did it matter if terror had for a moment made a gibbering imbecile of me? There was no need to mention that. Erik was silent for a long while, scratching his jaw, then he clicked his teeth, and said,

‘Fang.’

‘What do you mean, Fang?’

He stared at me as though he had forgotten, yet again, who I was.

‘Well?’ I cried.

He grinned. This would not do, by god, this was mutiny, now he was playing with me. He patted my arm.

‘Everything is fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. Come along, we must have a drink to mourn the dead.’

I turned on my heel and strode away from him. Soft laughter rattled the darkness at my back.

After a search, we found a taverna that was open in that penitential season, a gloomy place with some chairs, a table or two, and an oil lamp swinging under the blackened ceiling. We peered into the shadows, and something spoke.

‘What you want?’

From a corner a single eye regarded us malevolently.

‘Retsina,’ I said, in my very best Greek. ‘Retsina parakalo.’

The eye came forward, and the lamplight set beside it a dirty black patch, a head around it, a twisted trunk below with one sleeve of a jacket hanging empty. Another mutilated relic of forgotten wars.

‘What you want?’ the moist mouth barked again.

‘Wine, some wine for my friend and me. Retsina, yes?’

‘No retsina, no wine.’

‘Oh for the love of Jesus.’

Erik was already sitting at a table near the door, chewing his nails abstractedly and looking at the street. I joined him. After a time the cripple brought a carafe and a pair of greasy glasses. He banged them down on the table with a grunt, and shuffled back into his corner. I filled a measure of wine for Erik and myself. I said,

‘Andreas doesn’t trust me. He called me a coward.’

Erik softly sniggered.

‘Andreas trusts no one,’ he said.

‘Not even himself?’

‘Himself least of all.’

He shrugged, and frowned, and it came to me that Andreas was not the only cripple in that strange pair, for Erik also seemed to be wounded in some deep-lying fibre, though what that wound was, or what that fibre, I could not yet say. It took me a long time to realize that Erik … but no matter, no matter, everything in its place. He sat half turned away from me, his untidy profile cut against the last faint light in the doorway. I had a crimson glimpse of blood and screams.

‘Do you really think all this is necessary here in Greece now?’ I asked.

He did not look at me, but pursed his lips, and lifted his four fingers to let them fall one by one in rapid succession, a little tune on the scale of hopelessness. I clacked my teeth irritably, and his little grey eyes swivelled round and glanced at me quizzically.

‘Why do you do that?’ he asked, with real interest.

I cast about for the root of what had angered me, and could see it but dimly.

‘This whole revolution thing,’ I cried, waving my arms.

‘What about it?’

‘Ah, I don’t know. It’s not real.’

‘Then why are you —’

‘Because I’m bored.’

The answer surprised us both, and we fell silent. It was true, and I was sorry I had said it. Accidie was my greatest fear. I tried to retrieve something.

‘He was shot in the neck, there, it blew a hole that size. I mean, you didn’t see it. I don’t know. Deaths, murders … I just want to write a little book, that’s all.’

I took a drink and watched the darkness deepen in the street. Nightheat lay heavy about us. Suddenly Erik cackled. His laughter, if it could be called that, died as abruptly as it had begun. He took off his spectacles and folded them carefully on the table before him, then with a thumb and forefinger he massaged the bridge of his nose.

‘I was in Zurich once,’ he said. ‘For my nerves, you know? They put me into a little room with rubber walls, a rubber floor. There were six of us. We were given rubber knives, hatchets, everything was rubber. One of us was a fetish — how do you call it?’

‘Fetishist.’

‘He was happy. We were supposed to rid ourselves of our in — ah, what is the word?’

‘Inhibitions.’

‘Something like that, yes. At the end of the first day we begged for steel weapons. We wanted murder, my friend, we wanted murder.’

I had been laughing soundlessly, with my fist pressed to my mouth, at his excitement and growing incoherence. But soon I stopped, hearing mysterious black echoes reverberating in the distance. Erik put on his spectacles again, and sighed.

‘What will you do now, Ben White?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are afraid.’

‘Ha.’

He nodded slowly, but I had the notion that he was agreeing with some secret thought of his own. For a moment I felt an enormous, inexplicable pity for him. Or perhaps it was myself that I pitied. He finished the wine in his glass, and slowly refilled it. A wave of pure weariness that was tangible came off him.

‘Sometimes you lose the meaning of things, and everything is just … funny.’

He breathed the last word on a sighing fall of breath. He was mocking us both, but there was a grain of real despair in his voice. Not knowing what I meant, I said to comfort him,

‘There’s magic to combat any force.’

‘Do you really believe in the power of magic?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly he grinned, and asked,

‘But then people are murdered in the street before you, and where is the magic to combat that, eh my friend?’

My gaze shifted to the street, the dark, and my fingers sought each other in my lap, found and clasped. A little wind came in at the door, carrying with it odours out of the deadened pits of that murderous day. Something flew past in the street; dark bird or bat. I waited, hardly breathing, for the shuffle of claws, and the squeaking of bloodied mouths, the soughing of dark wings high in the air. A small child entered, and stopped before our table. Erik quickly drew in his breath. The child offered me a scrap of paper. I shifted under that impassive stare, and took the paper. Strange hieroglyphs were printed there, a message without meaning.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

The child said nothing, but held a tiny hand toward me. I filled the little palm with coins. I looked at Erik. His eyes were closed. The child turned and went slowly out into the street. I crushed the paper and dropped it to the floor, where it writhed a moment, turned over, and was still. My eyes were on the coins which lay, burning dimly, on the table. How had they come there? Erik stood up, and took up his knapsack.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘The last boat will leave soon.’

The village was quiet, with somewhere a girl’s voice softly singing. We walked through the glimmering white-paved laneways without speaking. Odours wafted about us, of bread and baked fish, spices and resin. On the hills the faint shadows of the windmills were motionless against the great web of star-blossoms burning in the dark. It was at times like this that I loved the island best, times when I felt it offering me something of incalculable value, a place to live, where I might be happy. A cat came from an open doorway to watch us as we passed.

The last boat lay by the harbour wall, preparing to depart. Nightsounds crossed the quay, a clink of metal, the languid fall of a little wave, the whisper and soft hushing of sand stirring under water. A word of command punctuated the darkness with an abrupt, blunt little explosion. Out on the bar the green and red beacons winked at each other across the channel at the harbour mouth, eternally enticing.

‘Kalispera, kalispera.’

The captain of the boat, a bandy little islander with a huge white moustache, greeted us with an elaborate salute. He smiled at me, and put a steadying hand under my elbow as I climbed aboard. Dim figures stood in silence about the deck, and from the air of guilt and daring which they exuded, I took them to be island people off for a mild debauch that black Friday. Down in the dark water the lights of the waterfront burned again, mysterious and sad. In silence the boat slipped away from the pier, small waves licking the hull. All eyes were turned toward the village. I had an intimation of another, final departure in the future, and suddenly cursed myself for putting in jeopardy all this heartrending beauty to which I was heir. Then the engine came alive, a great bubble of white foam boiled up astern, a girl giggled, and we were off under the wild sky of stars.

‘I hope it will not be rough,’ Erik’s voice said with some apprehension at my ear.

‘Rough? How could it be rough? It’s like a mirror, look.’

His long gawky form leaned out over the bulwark.

‘It’s very dark tonight,’ he murmured.

We sat down on the deck with our backs against a huge coil of rope. I lit a cigarette, and in the brief yellow flare of the match saw the flash of Erik’s eyes as he turned them toward me.

‘I think it’s time for us to talk,’ I said.

He made a noncommittal sound. Someone walked past us, and for a second the flame of my cigarette was reproduced in duplicate on a pair of lenses.

‘I want to know what this little thing, this little document is,’ I said.

There was a long silence. Erik’s answer, when it came, had the mechanical sound of something oft-repeated.

‘It is a document containing certain signatures, which, if we make it public at the right time, would help our cause very much. Or it might be used to put those certain people in our power. Do you see?’

I considered this for a while, and then laughed loud and long.

‘Erik, you sound the perfect villain. Vich if vee make —’

‘But I am not the villain. I am the hero.’

There was the faintest touch of sadness in his voice. I smoked my cigarette and watched the dark bulk of the island sliding past. Someone began to sing, and someone ordered the singer to be quiet. There was an air of apprehension aboard, though what there was to fear I could not say, unless it was the wrath of god.

Delos received us into its little harbour. The other boats, deserted now, were moored in a line along the pier. The other passengers shuffled off into the darkness, while Erik and I stood on the sacred earth and looked about us. The brave stone lions stood outlined against the stars, and below them and around them the levelled town brooded in utter silence on its former glory, the ancient gods, the priests and princes who had been its first sons. I saw the dark handsome men, the women with their heavy tresses, the beggars and athletes, the children crowned with careless leaves, saw them all in the town miraculously rebuilt, moving through the streets with a dignity and elegance never achieved before or since, at ease in the knowledge that the god of all beauty was their protector; and standing there in that darkness, I felt one second of the deepest grief I had ever known, mourning the lost dead world. Then the bandy-legged captain passed us by, and called to us, and Erik said,

‘Everything is not lost.’

I do not know what he was thinking about, but perhaps he was also mourning the barren island, and he was right, for all was not completely lost, and never could be lost. We left the harbour and the ruins, and climbed the hill. Secret winds went with us, and the voice of the sea was at our ears like lost music. I watched Erik’s dark form blunder over the stones ahead of me, and I realized that I loved him. I had known him for little more than a day, and in that time he had given me no cause for love, none for hatred, and yet … and yet.

‘Erik. Erik.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

At last we found the place, lighted, a wide shingled plateau with three plane trees and some sparse dry grass. The sea lay below us now, and on its dark distance the lights of the other island glistened, a fallen nest of stars. Above us, the hill ascended into the night. A fire was being prepared, and the lamps in the trees shed a flickering light on figures moving to and fro with bundles of kindling and dry branches. I stopped for a moment on the edge of the hill and listened to the murmur of voices, and the music of a little pipe. All was not lost. We went forward. At the far end of the plateau, a makeshift bar had been set up, two barrels with rough planks laid across them. A fat old woman was busy filling bottles from a wine cask. A sharp blow with the heel of her hand and tunk, the corks were driven home. I was fascinated. Erik moved toward her, and I caught his arm.

‘I can’t drink any more tonight,’ I said.

He stared at me.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, why not, indeed.’

The old woman showed us one lonesome discoloured tooth. We carried our bottle reverently away, and sat down on the grass beneath the central tree. I sighed contentedly and sniffed at the fine dry night. The crowd on the plateau was taking to the stony ground in groups, talking together in low voices, drinking, rattling their worry beads. There were few women present. Under a further tree the musicians were gathered. There was the piper, and one or two old men with flowing white whiskers and shiny double-breasted suits. A young boy was tuning a bouzouki, bending his ear intently to the soft singing of the strings. One of the old men slowly brushed the skin of a little drum with his fingertips.

‘We’re not welcome here,’ I said.

Cold looks were being cast our way, and colder comments made behind cupped hands. Erik looked around.

‘We will not be noticed in the crowd,’ he said, mimicking me with gentle derision.

How tedious this is. Could I not take it all as understood, the local colour and quaint customs, and then get on to the real meat of things? But I suppose the conventions must be observed. And anyway, there are pearls here strewn among this sty of words. Time enough to rend and tear, time enough. Erik shall say something.

‘Nikos is in prison.’

I took a drink from the bottle. The wine was bitter, and left in my mouth a taste of the bad blood of roots and stems. I considered the stars and asked,

‘Who?’

‘Nikos. He was Andreas’s driver sometimes, you know, he drove the car sometimes. He’s in the Bouboulinas. And the boy also, do you remember him?’

‘Should I remember these people?’

‘They came to you here a year ago and asked for your help.’

‘Did they?’

‘You refused.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now how do you know that, Erik?’

Once again I was privileged to witness that rarity, Erik’s sly grin.

‘I know everything.’

The plateau suddenly descended into a new level of silence, and for one wild instant I expected a round of applause for Erik. The fire — no no, not yet. I turned and saw, coming into the flickering light, the entourage I had met upon the quay. There was father, moving slowly with his oddly fluent lurch, and his brood marching behind him, boy and girl. We all watched. Someone laughed, and lapsed immediately into confused silence. The family halted where a table (barrels and planks again) had been placed under the third plane tree. They sat upon crates. A finger was lifted, and the old woman waddled briskly forward. The father said something to her, and they both laughed heartily. I thought he might give her a playful pinch. Wine and glasses were brought, and a lamp, their private lamp. Erik belched. The girl glanced in my direction, and I looked away. I must have had a secret intimation. I looked at Erik. He was watching me, smiling, it seemed. He coughed, and touched his spectacles with his fingertips. The fire was lighted. Voracious flames leapt through the kindling and sent showers of sparks dancing up into the darkness. The red light flashed on the faces around and made of them strange masks with empty eyeholes, ruined mouths.

‘I wonder why you didn’t help them,’ Erik said, and relinquished the bottle.

‘I did. She would have dropped that trunk if I hadn’t —’

‘Nikos, I meant Nikos and the boy.’

‘I thought they were insane. That was sixty-two or something.’

He looked at me.

‘But even now you see no reason to —’

‘Ah shit, Erik.’

I lay back upon the grass with my hands behind my head. The stars were above me, splendid and innocent at once. I do not think that I ever saw them again in their innocence after that night. In the darkness, by that fire, a process was begun which murdered something in me, which … what can I say? How to recount in a sentence all those murders, losses, betrayals? I must not brood. Sing heigh ho the wind and rain, there is laughter trapped in every howl.

‘Excuse me.’

I was lying on the ground, recumbent, cruciform. That is important, I feel. He stood above me, leaning on his stick, smiling, with the firelight on his face. He could not have been more than a few inches over five feet. Later on he was to outgrow me by a bit, a matter of some feet, I do believe. His fat frame was held captive in a wrinkled suit of tweed too heavy for the climate. A full sail of white shirt showed below his waistcoat. His head was far too large for that small body, and its grotesque size was increased by a woolly mop of grizzled hair which curled about his delicately pointed ears. A wide red sensuous mouth was drawn back in a grin of secret glee, and his huge hooked nose, made for looking down, was surmounted by those bright blue eyes which looked down on me now with good-humoured attention. I remember his nostrils, two neat black holes. He said,

‘My name is Kyd, Julian Kyd. You were helpful to my wife today. Perhaps you’d care to join us for a drink?’

I got to my feet, puffing and belching, and almost fell down again.

‘Do you live here?’ I asked, with rapturous inanity. Some distant connection was in my mind between the way he looked and the waking dream I had experienced that night when I first set foot upon the soil of this holy island. Julian’s grin widened.

‘Oh no,’ he said, feigning shock. ‘I’m English, old man.’

He turned and walked away from me. The sole of his left boot was two inches thick, it was, at the very least, old man. I followed him, and glancing back over my shoulder found Erik dogging my steps. When I looked again, Julian had reached the table, and was murmuring something to the girl. My feet missed a step. Wife? Wife? What the hell did he …?

‘This is my wife Helena, and her brother, Yacinth.’

She gave me her smile, and the boy looked at my left ear. I grinned like a gargoyle while my poor mind sorted this new set of relationships into some kind of order. Husband, wife, daughter, no; wife, brother, in-law, husband, wife, brother-in-law and brother. Simple. Did I say pearls? Diamonds, for god’s sake, rubies.

‘I’m Ben White, and this is …’

This was a little man who was very drunk, dancing gaily in the middle distance. My wavering hand at last found Erik sitting with his back against the tree trunk, gaping vacantly at us. His rapid plummet into drunkenness unnerved me.

‘This is Erik White, I mean Weiss, ha ha.’

Well well, all games must have their end. I can no longer avoid it. Mrs Kyd, Helena, my Helena. Is it in my power to describe her, and do her full justice? I think not. She was lovely, I would not deny it (you see, my dear, wherever you are, I do not lie), lovely indeed, made with a delicacy of which I would not have thought that bungler in the sky was capable. She was small, very slim, with no real hips or breasts, none worth the mentioning. Her hair was long and blonde, face the shape of some flower, her nose perfect. As to her eyes, I have already spoken of crystals and the sea. Have I noted everything? Later I shall fill in the details, the whorl of hair on the nape of her neck, soft lashes, little teeth, that particular way she had of walking barefoot across thick carpets, all these things when I get to the smut. Here, let me clarify: I was dazzled by her, came to love her, hate her now. Facts are simply stated, but when are they as simple as the stating would have them appear? But to these things I can attest, and there are scars to prove them.

Sweet Jesus, look upon this wreath of bleeding roses.

I cannot remember every detail of that first part of the night, that is to say that I cannot remember as much as I would wish. We talked a great deal, we talked without cease. I was feeling gay. My gaiety had the faintest touch of hysteria. Long tracts of conversation remain intact in my memory, but the methods by which we slipped from one topic to another, they elude me. I am tormented by the notion that had I listened more closely to each tangential remark, and watched with a sharper eye each flickering glance, I might somehow have been warned. Oh I would not have behaved other than I did, no, I have always been a fool, but perhaps, had I suspected, I might have held back some reserves, kept some of my poor paltry secrets. What does it matter now, for the love of Christ, what does it matter?

‘So you are a writer?’ said Helena, inclining her long Greek face toward me in the firelight. She spoke slowly, pronouncing her English with infinite care. Her grasp of the language was a matter of great pride to her. I looked at her, and caught the wrinkles which lay beside her magnificent eyes. I had thought her to be seventeen. She was twenty-six, nine months and fourteen days my senior, I counted, yes.

‘Benjamin S. White, The Writer,’ I said, and swept a low bow, grazing my nose on the rough wood of the table.

Julian laughed, and Helena too, somewhat over-loud and long. The boy looked away from me, frowning in a mixture of embarrassment and contempt. His disapproval filled me with a sudden depression. I sucked the last drop of wine from my glass. There was a silence. Julian looked toward the fire, the flames of which were falling now, and he asked,

‘Do you know this ceremony?’

I shook my head. He went on.

‘In Macedonia they have one very like this, on St Constantine’s day. This particular ritual is unique. It can be traced back to the matriarchal societies of Greece, and the yearly slaying of the king. Are you interested in history at all?’

His lecturing tone irritated me. I lifted my head to shoot some cutting remark at him, but saw that he was smiling. He was aware of my irritation, and was delighted by it.

‘Rituals frighten me,’ I said.

It was something to say. He lifted a bushy black eyebrow.

‘Frighten you, why?’

‘Everything frightens me. The sea, the sky. I suffer from not only claustrophobia but also agoraphobia. I was born in the darkest hour of the darkest night in a black year, and —’

I stopped, glimpsing thieves crucified among the leaves of the trees.

‘Nightspawn,’ Julian murmured, very softly, and smiled a smile I was to see very often. It seemed to be directed at something funny just above my left shoulder. I was being mocked.

‘The English,’ I said evenly, ‘are the wonder of science. No one knows how they can walk upright, lacking vertebrae.’

He gazed at me very solemnly along his nose, and his eyes began to twitch, the corner of his mouth to stir, and suddenly he threw back his head and gave a great roar of laughter. His flesh shook, and his grizzled hair quivered, and he banged the table with his fist. At last the spasm passed, and he sat panting, and wiped his eyes with the back of a plump fist, gazing fondly at me all the while. He was captivated by me, it is the only word.

‘My boy,’ he said. ‘My dear boy, when the English come via Smyrna and points east, then their backbones are of the finest links, indeed yes, ha, dear me.’

He laughed some more. Smyrna. Odessa and Trebizond, Tiflis, the black waters of the Bosphorus. The old names marched through my mind in a magnificent caravan. I watched the man before me snuffling and wheezing, shaking his head, attending to his nose with a florid handkerchief. I liked him.

Two things happened then, small at the time, of shattering significance later. I felt Helena’s knee touch mine under the table. It was not an accidental touch, it was a caress. I did not look at her, but went on watching Julian, and at last I knew what his face, his whole bearing expressed as he sat there at the head of the table. He exuded satisfaction, and pride, the smug complacency of a man who has just become a father. I was his baby. Helena’s eyes were on me, filled with tender concern.

‘Take no notice of my husband, Mr White, his sense of humour is very wicked.’

I looked quickly away from her. The musicians advanced, and took up a position near the fire. The light glanced on their instruments and sent little flashes flying with the sparks into the sky. A hand fell on my shoulder, and a blast of fetid breath whistled past my ear. Erik stood unsteadily above me, peering down with one eye comically closed.

‘So you woke up,’ I said.

‘Agh.’

‘Why don’t you go to sleep again.’

He winked. That left both eyes closed. The sudden cessation of the lamplight baffled him. Then he opened his eyes again. I could almost hear the lids creak as they lifted. A sly hand went into the pocket of his jacket, a sly tongue-tip slipped into the corner of his mouth, and he drew out a flat leather flask. I had seen it somewhere before. I took a sip of the brandy. As it exploded in some tender recess of my gut I discovered that ouzo had been added to it since Andreas (that was it) had given me the healing cup. I put the flask into Erik’s hands, and tried to push him away from me. He swayed a little, but stayed on his feet. Julian watched us with interest.

‘And do you know why they are in the Bouboulinas?’ Erik asked, as though there had been no lapse between his last remark and this one.

‘Oh go away Erik, you’re drunk.’

He made a short speech in German, and awaited my reply.

‘Erik, will you go back to sleep.’

His knees gave way, and he sat down abruptly in the dust beside me, one arm draped amicably across my knees. He belched thoughtfully.

‘Because some one person got drunk, and told a very secret thing to the Colonel,’ he said, and then put his face into his hands and began to weep. Helena peered at him over the edge of the table.

‘Is your friend unwell?’

‘He’s all right.’

I took the flask away from him, and emptied a mouthful of the scalding stuff down my throat. I wanted to be drunk. I was drinking the right poison. Erik’s shoulder shook with sobs. I kicked him, not very hard. He rolled over on his side and went to sleep. Two young men of the village had begun to dance. With their arms outstretched they circled the fire, while the musicians played a mournful melody. The shirts of the dancers were open on their chests, and their feet were bare.

‘The anastenarides,’ Helena whispered.

‘It’s what the world needs,’ I said wildly.

Her knee was against mine again.

‘Pardon?’ Julian asked, leaning forward with a hand cupped around his ear.

‘Ritual and magic,’ I cried, trying not to laugh, for I was sure that somewhere something hilarious was happening. ‘Ritual, rhetoric and magic, the foundations of the ancient world. The Senecan sweet, do you see, a pagan St Sebastian with a soft centre.’

I looked at Julian. His eyes, bright red in the firelight, rested mischievously upon me.

‘Magic?’ he murmured.

‘Magic? Magic is the language of the devil, and very useful to know.’

Erik, on the ground, woke up for long enough to raise a fist and cry,

‘Der Teufel, ach, was könnten Sie über der —’

The music ceased. There was silence. Into the black sky the echoes faded, tinkling like small steel springs uncoiling. Silence. My drunken brain stopped reeling for an instant, and I saw enormous cylinders of polished glass gliding in utter silence through the depths of space. Then, from somewhere close at hand, I heard small sounds, the scuffling of feet in dry dust, and a gasp, another, of laboured breath and, last of all, a grunt. The one-armed cripple from the taverna came limping into the firelight, leading on a piece of string a — what was it? — what? … a little lamb. They halted near the flames, two oddly pathetic creatures, and looked vacantly around them. The lamb licked its lips. Panting and shuffling, the cripple loosed the cord from the animal’s neck, and, grasping its haunches between his knees, he pulled back its head. (Look, it was not I who arranged this particular farce, so do not blame me if the leading players are hams, the script unspeakably banal, the whole shebang played out years ago — personally, I despise such shoddy trappings.) A knife appeared in his hand, the cripple’s hand, yes, he had only one, and with one swift stroke he opened the fleecy throat. The little pipe sent up a shivering cry.

Sweaty pencils poised, panting hunters of the symbol? There is wealth in store.

The animal’s hoofs were still twitching in the dust when the cripple swept it up in his arm and scattered its black blood into the fire. The flames roared a note in harmony with the pipe, and the other instruments broke out into a wild dance. The young men leapt to the whine of drum and strings, whirled and turned, sweeping low to smack their palms on the ground, yelping, groaning, weirdly gasping. I found myself leaning forward on the crate where I sat. One arm hung down, and my fingers tore the roots of grass. Helena lifted her hand to her forehead, and the gesture seemed extraordinarily slow and graceful, a branch lifting in the wind, a flower falling. The cripple now was dancing in his way, leaping and hopping among the dying embers of the fire. I rose unsteadily and wobbled across the plateau, climbed blindly to the summit of the hill, and stood there a moment to survey the night. A hint of the sea came up, and a cool wood wind. I saw towers falling, and for all I know heard voices too, speaking out of exhausted wells. Then, with a sigh, I leaned out toward the welcoming darkness and calmly threw down the side of the hill my day’s remains, salts and acids, blood, wine, and the shadow of murder, all went flying out into the void in a black and burning stew. Then, as they say, I must have fainted.

To be honest, I did nothing of the kind. I puked for a while, and coughed, and wiped my nose on my sleeve, felt very sorry for myself, groaned, and began the process all over again, until there was nothing left inside me but bad air and spleen. Why do I make drama from a fit of drunken vomiting? Because the drama was not there.

After the climb down the broken slopes in the dark, under the stars that gave no guidance, after the thorns, the stones, I came to a little grove of pines, and sat down exhausted with my back against a rock. Far below, through the trees, there was the faint glimmer of water. The night had turned cold. My bones were stiff. With my arms around my shivering knees, I nodded, nodded, waves of sleep carrying me down to the sea, the weeds and the wild water. I thought I wanted to die, but I knew nothing yet of that black wish. Twigs crackled behind me, and soft steps approached through the wood. My teeth chattered with fear. Cautiously I peered around the rock, and squeaked in terror to find before my eyes a pair of knees.

‘Mrs Kyd? Jesus Christ.’

She moved past me without a word, and took a step or two to the other side of the clearing. I could barely see her slim outline against the murmurous trees, though she was not more than six feet away from me. A wind sprang up.

‘You frightened me,’ I said.

‘Did I?’

Her voice had changed. I listened vainly for it to come again, and tried to think of some question to provoke it. We were silent, not moving, catching faint words in the wind. At last I asked,

‘Is that the sea down there?’

‘Yes. The channel.’

‘The channel?’

‘Yes.’

I sighed.

‘A channel. Not even the ocean, not even that. It’s always the same with me, always second best. If it was the ocean now I might have indulged in a soliloquy. A word about the fish. Pisces my sign. The fish is a noble animal, and recognized as such is given, like man, a singular plurality.’

The trees took my worthless words, examined them, and set them free into the sky. The figure before me said nothing, and for a moment I had the notion, for some reason terrifying, that I had not spoken at all. I dug my fingers into the soft pine needles beneath me and cried,

‘Well say something, can’t you?’

There was a soft laugh, and then what sounded like,

‘I missed her night looking for you.’

‘What? What the hell is that supposed to mean? All right, all right, I don’t want to know.’

I sulked for a while, wrapped in my cocoon of arms and legs, my arse slowly turning to ice. Then, since my partner would contribute nothing to the general merriment, I said,

‘Listen, all right, I’ll tell you a story, that will keep our spirits up, or those other spirits down, ho ho. Ahem. I’ll tell you the one about Cain. He went up into the mountains one day, and … no, I can’t. He went up into the mountains, to the old man who lived there. “Old man, “he said, “my life lacks direction.” This is ridiculous. Are you sure you never heard it? Well anyway. “My life lacks direction, I’m enclosed on all sides and I can’t see.” The old man told him to go back into the valley and break down his house, and Cain said,

‘“But I built that house with my own hands. It’s all I have.”

‘But he went down, and brought out his wife from the house, and with an axe he smashed the walls and windows, and the great roof-tree. Lying that night in the open fields, he looked up at the dark mountain, thinking. In a little while he was back with the old man, who said,

‘“Your wife is still with you.”

‘So Cain left his wife. It went on like that. Cain gave away all his money, and all his clothes save for one torn shroud.

‘“Put away your pipe and drums,” the old man told him.

‘Cain broke them all, and there was no more music. That was the hardest loss of all.’

I paused, and looked up through the branches. A star fell.

‘When he had destroyed everything, Cain was happy for a while, wandering like a leper. Happy, yes, yes, but soon he had travelled every road, and there was nothing before him, and the sea seemed all around him. Bent and broken he climbed the mountain. The old man scratched his chin, and looked at the sky.

‘“You have a brother,” he mused.

‘“I have,” Cain answered. “I have a brother that I dearly love —”

‘“Kill your brother.”

‘“What? But I love him.”

‘“Kill him, kill him tonight while he prays.”

‘“But he’s all and everything I have,” said Cain. “He’s all I have to love.”

‘“While you love you will never be free,” the old man told him, shaking his head vehemently.

‘Cain went down, and in the violent night he stole an axe and opened his brother’s head while he prayed. Then he went back to the old man, his hands still bathed in blood, and he asked,

‘“Now what shall I do?”

‘The old man said nothing.

‘“What shall I do?” Cain screamed, falling to his knees.

‘“Now you’re free,” the old man answered softly.

‘“And what shall I do with freedom?”

‘The old man smiled.

‘“I told you how you might be free,” he said, “but I can tell nothing to a free man, and you must find your own ways.”

‘“But I’m afraid,” Cain whimpered. “I have nothing, my brother is dead, my life lies about me, broken and dead. Can you not tell me what god would have me do?”

‘The old man raised his eyebrows, and laughed, and asked him if he was blind.

‘“Do you not see who I am?” he cried, chuckling.

‘Cain ran in despair and terror down out of the mountains.’

The wind was rising steadily; it came up the hill and stirred the fretful trees. The stars glimmered, turning through their enormous courses. A hard light filtered through the branches as the moon swung up over the hill.

‘And Cain stole a boat and sailed to an island. There he would sit and do nothing, moving only when the things he had lost and destroyed sent their little creatures to disturb him. He tried to make a pipe from the wild reeds, but he failed. Then he turned to the sand and tried to build something, anything, but it fell asunder in his hands. So he watched the coming and going of the sea, and listened to the days go away, and smelled the winds, and felt the world grow older. And he tasted the bitter fruits of freedom. One day, who should come walking on the beach but the old man from the mountains. He named for Cain those bitter fruits, calling them loss, and dread, and something else for which the only name is wormwood. And then he went away.’

I looked at the still figure before me. Now in the moonlight I could see a little better, but not well enough, no.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Did you like that fairytale?’

There was a short, and, it seemed to me, a thoughtful pause. The figure stirred, and slipped down like liquid shadow to the ground. The voice spoke, indifferent and drowsy.

‘Who have you ever killed?’

‘That I’m not able to tell you,’ I said, and put my head upon the carpet of pine needles.

Time passed.

‘Ah, dear god,’ said I.

So we lay, somewhat together, sighing and shifting, listening to the voices of tree and grass, the whisper of the wind stealthily dismantling the forest floor, the murmur of things, and beyond that, the deeper sounds, the far wild silences and music of the night.

Dark, dark.

Leave this place. Too many fanged and flesh-devouring beasts are slouching through the undergrowth. I have not the courage.

The day was crazed with the wind tearing the rocks and bushes, and the land tormented by a thundering purple sea. The sun was well off the horizon, touching the sky, in spite of the storm, with a brave and delicate blue, the burnt hills with gold. A fine salt spray was threaded in the air. It stung my lips and eyes as I slowly climbed the hill. My skin was suffused with a dry fire, burning yet with the sour dregs of too much alcohol, and the roots of my hair pained me when the wind shook it. I was dressed in faded denim, and the shirt was open at my throat. Sandals bound my dust-soiled feet. I needed a shave. There is nothing else. What my thoughts were is my own affair. As to the method by which I was returned from the holy island to this profane one, I had only vague and dubious recollections.

The house was built into a recess of the hill, so that the rear side of the roof was always shaded, while the front wall blazed in the sunlight with a bluish blinding ferocity. The original had been a two-roomed structure of severe simplicity, but Julian had added to it year by year, and now it clambered up and down the hillface in a confusing jumble of planes and ledges. I stopped by the gate, my hand on the crumbling stone pillar, and took a deep breath to clear the wool from my eyes. Around the corner of one wall, an ear, a ragged curl of hair, and a fat hand holding a cane were visible. I walked toward that corner over the quiet dust. Julian stood there, very still, peering down into the ground at his feet, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke, for the arse of the fat man’s trousers to burst. I think he knew that I was there, watching him. I think he was waiting for me.

‘Good morning,’ I said, but the words did not come out of my mouth. I coughed and tried again, and produced a slightly more successful croak. Julian started melodramatically and turned, a smile already forming on his goatish jowls.

‘Ah, Mr White, you came. How are you? Recovered from last night, eh?’

‘Somewhat.’

‘You shouldn’t drink so much, you know,’ he said roguishly.

We looked at each other for a moment of awkward silence (at least my side of the silence was awkward) and then our gazes slipped elsewhere. Julian cut with his cane three neatly considered lines in the dust beside his malformed foot. He said something, but the wind whirled his words away.

‘What?’ I cried.

‘I said, have you seen my well? I had it dug —’

Another blast of wind severed the sentence. A hole, not more than eighteen inches in diameter, was open in the ground behind him, ringed with a ledge of flat stones. It was down into its depths that he had been peering when I found him. I watched him, wondering if this were another trick to set me up for his mockery, but his eyes were innocent.

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

He nodded complacently.

‘Yes, I’m fascinated by these things.’

There was a sound behind us, and we turned. A slight, pale man in horn-rimmed spectacles stood in the doorway of the villa. He seemed ill at ease, and looked at us with an aggrieved moroseness, as though we had no right to whirl about so suddenly and catch him like that. His neat dark suit (jagged teeth of a frayed trouser cuff clenched on the back of his shoe) Struck an incongruous note against the fierce wind-blasted landscape about him.

‘Ah, Charles,’ said Julian. ‘This is Mr White, the writer I spoke of.’

He turned to me.

‘This is Charles Knight, a fellow-countryman of mine.’

I shook a moist warm hand, while Julian looked from one of us to the other, beaming. He said,

‘Charlie wanted to meet you, didn’t you, Charlie? Charlie is very interested in literature.’

There was the faintest hint of a pause before that last word … at least, there should have been some hesitation. Charlie Knight’s blue jowls registered a further depth of gloom.

‘Yes,’ he moaned. ‘I’m very interested in literature.’

He blinked slowly, sadly, behind the powerful lenses of his spectacles, and heaved a tiny sigh. His voice, vivid and thrilling as a Lancashire smog, was utterly without cadence; the voice of a weary executive contemplating the arrival of his second ulcer. I began to laugh. I could not help it. The scene was ridiculous.

‘Oh,’ I cried, somewhat unsteadily, to stifle the boiling glee, ‘you’re interested in literature?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded slowly. A thought seemed to stir in his brain, for his left eye began to flicker, and a vein ticked in his forehead. I had a vision of him slowly falling to pieces before me, like a clockwork man gone wrong. My hilarity could not be checked. I gave a muffled sneeze of joy.

‘Bless you,’ Charlie murmured absently, and began to turn away. ‘You’ll be on the island for a while, I suppose, Mr White?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Ah.’

I glanced at Julian. He stood a step away from us with his hands clasped on his stomach, grinning, in a rapture of delight. I thought he might wink, but instead he swung away across the garden in the wake of his friend. At the gate he halted.

‘Do say hello to Helena,’ he called, waving a hand toward the house.

Then they were gone around a spur of the hill. I stood pulling at my lip, and looked into the well. The water lay ten feet down, like black shining steel. From its surface, my own eyes stared back at me, cold and unwavering, changed by depth into the eyes of some animal. What vengeful urges were stirring in that bile in the bowels of the earth? I shivered. Julian was on my mind. I had never met anyone like him before, and never will again. To be in his presence was to glimpse the infinite possibilities of laughter which the world could offer. He carried always a great cauldron of laughter trapped within him, which at intervals released little jets of merriment. Absurdity was his drug. Whether such a sense of humour was of value, or was anarchic and vicious, that I could not decide. But it occurred to me, standing by the well, that death, death indeed was the great joke which Julian sought. A massive heart attack, I decided, would be the most hilarious thing of all, and Julian would die with laughter bubbling in the blood on his lips. A very pretty notion, but unfortunately mistaken. Julian’s joke of a lifetime was something quite different from death, and I, surprise surprise, was the one who set it up for him.

But that is enough of Julian for the moment. On, on to his charming wife, if that is not too precise an imperative.

‘You too, Mr White?’

She stood behind me with one hand, palm inward, fingers splayed, resting on her hip. The blonde hair was gathered into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, held by a large gold pin. She wore a tight blue pullover without sleeves, and a worn pair of white cord trousers. Her toes were out through battered tennis shoes. Standing there before me, with the wind shaking the hills around her, she seemed a Cycladean queen, the patrician line of each small bone formed by a millennium of aristocrats. Aye, and a lady into whom this poor peasant could never hope to plunge his hairy claws. She advanced, smiling, her eyes on mine, fully aware of the effect she had on me, and pleased with it.

‘Me too?’ I asked.

She glanced at the well.

‘Do you also have a fascination with holes in the ground?’

‘Not in the ground, no.’

I tried to bite off my tongue. She was good enough to ignore that remark. I studied the hand which she lifted to her forehead to brush away a strand of hair, and a whole night of forgotten drunkenness came flooding back to me. Her nails were badly bitten.

‘Julian says that his greatest ambition is to buy Syntagma Square, dig an enormous crater in the middle of it, and then spy from the palace windows on the people who come to gape into it …’

She wheeled around to face me, and considered me curiously.

‘I wondered if you have the same kind of mind.’

I did not know what to make of that question. I giggled, and then looked gravely down into the well, giving her the benefit of my dignified profile. The wind roared around us.

‘There was a man driving alone one night on a country road in Ireland,’ I said. ‘He was going home. He crashed, and was thrown through the windscreen into a field. Various important bones were broken. At the other side of the field there were lights. He crawled toward them. It was a farmhouse. He got so near to it that he could see the farmer sitting by the fire with a newspaper, and the farmer’s wife bathing a child in a tin bath. With a great effort he started forward for the last few yards. Nearer and nearer, almost there, he began to laugh with relief, and laughing fell into a pond, and was drowned.’

Somehow that was not what I had meant to say. Helena made a gesture of distaste, and stepped away from me.

‘Oh no,’ I cried. ‘Listen.’

I caught her by the arm, but released her instantly. She stood with her back to me, her head bent, waiting.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Kyd. That story sounds differently, it should sound … I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

She smiled at me over her shoulder, and without a word went into the house. I moved toward the gate, and met the boy, Yacinth, coming in from the road. He moved slowly, with his hands plunged in the pockets of his shorts. He seemed bored. I watched him, searching for Helena’s face in his, but, strangely, could not find it.

‘Hello,’ I said brightly.

He looked at me from under his lashes, tossing the black curls away from his forehead with an angry turn of his head. He muttered a greeting of sorts, and went quickly past me, through the dim doorway. A short laugh sounded in the house, the wind blew, and then Helena appeared, carrying a bundled towel under her arm.

‘I don’t think your brother likes me,’ I said.

‘Yacinth? He’s a strange child.’

We walked down the hill to the village. Helena bought chocolate and grapes, while I stood in the doorway kicking my heels. Above the heads of the crowd, a familiar thatch of red hair approached. I slipped into the shop and stood behind Helena.

‘Hide me,’ I said.

‘What?’

She looked at me, at the street, at me again, and smiled.

‘Your German friend?’

‘Not so much a friend.’

‘Oh’

Already, it seemed, I had traded an old love for a new.

The road took us away from the village, and along the coast high above the peaceful sea, the rocks, the rubbish dump, the shambles. Lizards lay torpid in the dust, too drugged with heat to stir at our approach. My shirt was damp and dark with sweat, and Helena now and then drove her hands into the heat of her hair. We followed in the silence of our steps the winding road, and at last, the hill crest crossed, we found the little bay and the deserted beach, the taverna at the water’s edge, and the tall parched reeds behind it. A great gust of wind met us, and died away. The day was growing calm. I found Helena smiling at me.

‘Everything,’ she murmured, and shook her head in wonder and amusement.

‘What?’

‘Everything, you said that everything frightens you.’

We took a table in the shade of the olive tree before the taverna. The beach was at our feet. The old woman of the place approached us warily. I asked her for beer, and she smiled, and nodded, and backed away. Helena said,

‘Are you writing a book now?’

‘A wha—? Oh yes, indeed, yes, like a beaver I am.’

She searched in her bag, her small bright tongue touching her lip, and brought out a crumpled packet of fat sweet Turkish cigarettes. I shifted, sitting sideways on the chair, for god, it would not do to have it nudge her knee under the table.

‘We had difficulty in bringing you back last night,’ she said, and picked a piece of tobacco from her lip. ‘From Delos, you know? You were very drunk, and sick. Do you remember?’

‘Not very well.’

‘I am not surprised.’

I turned the matchbox end over end on the table. The old woman of the crazed smile returned and set the beer before us. While I counted my money, she slowly wiped her hands in her apron, watching me. I paid her, and then said sharply,

‘Wait.’

Her smile wavered. I retrieved one of the coins from her palm and replaced it with another.

‘This is for luck, you see.’

She said something, which I did not catch, and went away. I slipped the coin into the pocket of my shirt.

‘For luck,’ I told Helena.

‘Of course.’

We drank our beer, and watched the water, the comings and goings of the little waves, wrestling with the silence. I dared to eat a grape. A boat rounded the headland and turned toward the beach. The soft liquid sound of the oars came clearly to us. Helena put a hand against her cheek and looked down at her glass. Light through the leaves above her had cut a tiny jewel on the rim. She was very still, and suddenly, without provocation, all her hair came loose and fell about her. It was long, and of one colour with the sunlight, it fell over her arm, over the table. I bent and picked up the gold pin which had fallen to the dust. The point pricked my finger and suddenly I paused, wondering how I had come to be there. No force of my own had carried me down the hill, along the road, to this beach with this woman whom I did not know. I looked at her with a new curiosity. She was grinning at me through delicate blue wreaths of smoke. A woman whom I did not know. She dropped her cigarette into the sand, and lowered her eyes.

‘Have you ever been to France?’ she asked idly. ‘We went there last year. It was the end of winter, and very cold, we had not thought of that. On our last day there, the sun came out. We went to Versailles, and it was spring just in one moment, with a bird singing. In the gardens of the palace there were such trees and flowers. Perhaps you need to come from a barren country like this to appreciate such things.’

‘Greece is not barren,’ I said.

She did not look at me. One eyebrow twitched in annoyance, and then she was smiling again.

‘But the flowers, they were magnificent.’

She cupped her hands before her face, delineating a wondrous bloom. I watched her silently, with a fist against my teeth. She went on,

‘And I bought one of those little books, to read about the king. When he was dying, he said how everyone had told him it was difficult to die, but no, he knew it was easy. The women were crying, and he told them that he was nothing, that they should not cry. And then he was afraid that he might cry himself, but he didn’t.

With her fingertip she traced designs on the table, vainly trying to capture the patterns of leafshadow.

‘And so the king died,’ she murmured.

I lifted my glass.

‘Long live the king.’

We drank; or at least, I did. She looked at my ironic smile, and did not seem to like it very much. But she laughed anyway.

The dull sound of an explosion came to us. A little cloud of dust floated half-way up the hillside behind us, another rose, and a moment later came the sound, crump. The taverna keeper, a burly old man in a cummerbund and a sailor’s cap, was drawing his boat up the beach. He jerked his head toward the hill, and called,

‘Some day he will blow us all up.’

He left the boat and came to our table, smoothing his heavy white moustache with the backs of his hands.

‘My son,’ he said, and laughed. ‘A grown man and he stays all day up there, playing with his fireworks.’

‘What is he doing?’ Helena asked.

The old man shrugged histrionically.

‘He says if we blow all the rocks away the olives will grow. Blow all the rocks away, have you ever heard such a thing?’

He shook his head, and tramped away into the taverna. Helena looked at me and smiled. She began to say something, but stopped, and bit her lip. We laughed, and fingered our glasses, and looked out over the bay. A breath of wind crossed the water, wrinkling it like shaken green silk, came on and stirred the leaves above us, stirred the reeds, the wild dry reeds.

‘There’s going to be a storm,’ I said.

She nodded. I went on.

‘I hate storms. Lord, there’s always something, something always happens, just when you think that you’ve found it.’

‘Found what?’

I took one of her cigarettes and lit it, and watched the smoke disperse.

‘The little thing,’ I murmured. ‘The little thing which means so much.’

She looked at me warily, somewhat distrustfully, annoyed, I thought, that I should compel her to question me. One cannot put very much poetry into a question, and the one who has the answer has also any mystery which may be around.

‘What is it?’ she asked, ‘this little thing.’

I grinned, and showed her my empty palms.

‘How would I know, not having found it yet?’

Her hands stirred on the table before her. She stood up, saying,

‘It’s time for my swim.’

She pulled off her trousers and her pullover, revealing an intricately made body covered in places by a tiny black bikini. If people really do gulp, as it is said they do, then I gulped. A dark cicatrice was inscribed under her left shoulder blade, which heightened the pale lucidity of her skin. She walked across the beach, hopping on the hot sand, and slipped into the sea. She was a good and graceful swimmer. From my pocket I took a scrap of paper and looked at it. When again I lifted my eyes, she had left the water, and stood now with her back toward me. The little waves lapped at her feet. For a time she stayed motionless, her face turned seaward, and then began to wade through the shallows. Her long hair hung down her back, and her shoulders gleamed. She came to where the sun burned on the water in a golden mist, and the light took her form and blurred its outline, so that she seemed to tremble on the brink of sea and light. She paused, and turned from the waist to look back at me, lifting her hand in a strange small gesture, languidly.

She came back to the table, tossing her head, running her fingers through her hair. Damp dark fern-strands gleamed in the pits of her arms.

‘Do you not swim?’ she asked.

I closed my mouth, and cleared my throat, and said,

‘No.’

She smiled, showing her small white teeth.

‘Another thing you fear, yes?’

She went and lay down in the sand beyond the shadow of the tree. After a while I followed her, and sat beside her on my heels. With her chin on her hands, she gazed at the white sand before her.

‘What do you write about?’ she asked.

‘Things.’

‘Not people?’

‘As seldom as I can.’

‘Tell me,’ she persisted.

I would say nothing. She frowned, and pushed damp hair away from her cheek with the pale soft underside of her wrist.

‘If I wrote, it would be about people.’

I shaded my eyes and looked out at the holy island on the sea.

‘Yes, I write about people too,’ I admitted. ‘But you have to be careful with them. They always want to have meanings, or be symbols, always something more than they are. They want to think, while all that matters is what happens in the little space between one person and the next.’

I bit my lip. She noticed nothing.

‘Like electricity and metal,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Or is it magnets? I never know. I shall buy one of your books.’

‘There is only one.’

‘Well I shall buy it, and if I do not understand it, then you can explain it to me.’

I shook my head and said solemnly,

‘That wouldn’t do at all, Mrs Kyd.’

I was eager to end the conversation. Helena sat up, and her swim suit sagged with the weight of damp sand which clung to it. Silver beads of water lay between her breasts. I left her, and went back to the table to finish my beer and curse at myself for a while, for no particular reason, apart from the eternal one of knowing myself to be a fool.

The afternoon went imperceptibly away into the enormous sky. The heatstorm raged briefly on the horizon, with lightning, and distant understated thunder. Nothing of that rage came to the beach but for a fitful murmuring of the olive tree, and a moment while the sea was alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence. Helena put on her clothes, smiled at me, took up her bag, and started slowly away up the road with her head bent. The sun slipped down the sky above the headland, and the light ebbed on the beach. The old woman, sighing and nodding, came and asked me if I would take another drink, or a salad perhaps, a nice roasted fish. I thanked her, and refused, and went to the road. Purple shadows were flooding the sea. The wild reeds were clacking. There was the voice of the sea. I found her sitting on a low stone wall some distance up the hill. We said nothing, but moved away together. The sky turned through its colours, pale rose to blue, a wild soft purple shading to white on the horizon. The burnt barren fields around us were touched with gold, and the bushes gave up their shadows lingeringly from among the leaves and thorns. A cloud of white glittering light exploded slowly on the sea below us, as though a huge invisible hand had smacked its quiet surface. Somewhere a cock sent up a querulous and irritated squawk. We crossed the spine of the island. A fresh breeze sprang up, and a hawk climbed the liquid air.

Well, well, a new day.

Noonday burned above the olive grove, in the trees among the boughs, on the ground where the little lizards stalked with their fragile and considered tread. Crazed with heat and the wild blue light, we rolled and writhed on the clay, grappling, joined at thigh and mouth, but she would not yield, and would not speak, and fought me in a savage silence. All round about us the air was singing, and through the leaves and the bitter fruits, something slowly moved. The lizards saw it and were still, transfixed by a hypnotic throbbing of the air and light, the yellow sun, the music and weird chanting high in the limitless sky. The limp leaves stirred, and the lizards watched, and the sun-drunk piping song grew loud and cried, and cried, and receded, slowly, with a dying fall, and died, into the trembling distance. I released her, and lay on my back in a silence of my own. She sat with her arms around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. With a quivering lower lip clenched in her teeth, she sifted a handful of dust through her fingers. There were leaves in her yellow hair. I got to my feet and went away, stooping under the branches and plucking the dull green buds. She took up her towel and followed me.

On the road, I turned my face away from her, whistling carelessly. The cicadas sang in the fields, and somewhere, distantly, a dog was barking. A far clear silence was abroad on the air. She said,

‘Mr White — Ben, I have something to say. If you want us to remain friends then you must never do that again.’

‘Fuck.’

‘What —’

‘Look, you can see the yacht from here.’

‘That is not what you said. I heard what you said. I think, Mr White, it would be better if we do not see each —’

‘Listen, lady.’

‘Well?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

One pace, two, three paces through a tight silence, and then,

‘I am a married woman,’ she said.

I began to laugh. I could not stop. She stood and glared at me, quivering with fury, said something which I did not hear, stamped her foot and stalked away. I galloped after her, flapping my hands.

‘Helena, listen, I’m sorry. Helena.’

I caught her arm, but she wrenched away from me and strode on down the hill, arms stiffly flying, knees bouncing, an angry little soldier. I trotted by her side.

‘I’m very bad. The lady is very good. I’m nothing but a big stiff prick.’

‘Do not think that I do not know these words.’

‘Yes yes, but listen, I love you.’

Whoops, she halted. We stood and faced each other, panting. With her head on one side, frowning as she tried to absorb what I had said, she stared at me, absently fidgeting with her hair. I shrugged, and threw out my arms, grinning helplessly.

‘How can —’ she began, but I gave her no time to finish. Spiderlike, legs and arms crook’d, I took a leap at her. We crashed into the ditch among the stones. Helena screamed. I had been a little too enthusiastic. A stab of pain shot through my leg, and then I found myself lying on my back, clutching my knee, and Helena was running headlong down into the village with a small angry cloud of dust following on her heels. Gone, gone forever. I took up a rock and gave my already wounded knee a fine new wallop. I was left with a crushed slab of chocolate and a burst bag of grapes. I laid my face into her fragrant towel and wept bitter tears of rage and pain.

Like salt-sea-washed grapes on the tongue, her first kisses, fierce through their unwillingness, stayed with me for days, a memory, a tiny desolation, tangible as the pain of a hot tear in a wound. I could not rid myself of her taste, her smell, the sound of her voice. She clung to me, a phantom of the earth and air. I crawled about the village, the island, yearning for a sight of her, and I think that had I seen her, in a distance of miles even, I would have fainted. And why, why such frenzy? She was, after all, a banal, tiresome little woman. The reasons were too devious for me to recognize then, and too devious for me to admit them yet. I must creep toward them by circuitous routes. Watch me closely.

So much happened before I was to see her again.

I climbed the steps and went down the dim corridor. The door stood open an inch. I knocked. There was no reply. Small, strange sounds came from the room. I put my toe to the door and pushed it open. Chairs were overturned, and the table on three legs leaned drunkenly against the wall. The fourth leg had been ripped off and used to smash small breakables. A tape recorder lay with its guts uncoiled all over the floor. The sheets were torn from the bed, and the mattress slashed. Papers were scattered everywhere, like a flock of slaughtered white birds. Erik stood in the midst of the carnage, gazing thoughtfully around him, while he in turn was scrutinized by the doubtful eyes of the Virgin on the wall, one of the few survivors, which was only fitting. I stepped into the room and closed the door. He glanced at me vaguely. I opened my mouth to ask a question, but thought better of it.

He set the chairs upright, and stuffed his clothes back into the disembowelled wardrobe. From its top shelf he took down a battered briefcase, and, sitting with it in the middle of the floor, he began to sort his papers into it. Silence lay around him, and, beyond the window, the day was filled with little sighs and shouts. He worked steadily, smoothing out the sheets and lining up the edges, pinning them together, weeping silently, unconsciously, lugubrious great tears falling in torrents around him. When the last papers were retrieved, and the last cutting gathered, he slipped his passport into a side pocket of the case. There was also a cheque book from a Swiss bank, an official form of some kind, and a packet of musty fruit sweets. Satisfied, he took the lot under his arm and went past me into the corridor. I followed him. He carefully closed and locked the door, and then, as an afterthought, drew back his foot and kicked a gaping hole in the flimsy panels. He limped out into the street, wiping his eyes.

‘Erik.’

He would not listen. We raced through the streets, Erik bounding along on his long legs with me trotting in his wake. People turned to stare at us. A yacht lay at anchor by the end of the pier. We made toward it. For one fearful moment, I thought that it was Julian’s, but it was smaller and grubbier than that magnificent craft. In the stern, a sailor with a peaked cap was sprawled on the deck, a bottle of beer in his paw. Erik halted at the top of the landing stage, and the sailor gave us both a look. My mouth was open. The sailor was quite calm.

‘Erik,’ I whispered frantically. ‘That’s the one, that …’

He was not listening to me. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and called,

‘Where is he?’

The sailor squinted at him, at the teeth and the grey eyes burning behind the spectacles. He transferred a cigarette stub from behind his ear to his mean mouth, and with leisurely contempt he asked,

‘Who?’

Erik sighed. The sailor’s gaze wavered, and he shouted,

‘Boss.’

The cabin door opened, and an elderly man in a loose white shirt and fisherman’s blue trousers came out on deck.

‘Erik,’ he cried, opening his arms. ‘My dear Erik.’

Thin grey hair, dark in streaks from too much oil, plastered down on a rapidly balding skull, a fine face with features sharp as a hawk’s, and a tall, once well-made frame now going to seed, with an incongruous paunch bulging from the middle of it.

‘Aristotle,’ said Erik, and smiled bleakly.

He went down the steps to the deck, and Aristotle took his hands and pressed them warmly.

‘It’s good to see you, Erik, truly it is.’

In the stern, the sailor began to pick his teeth with a broken matchstick. I could feel his eyes on me, lazily curious. He seemed to take no interest in the sentimental reunion. Aristotle turned to him.

‘Fang, we won’t be disturbed.’

Fang, that fearful sailor, spat out a sliver of matchwood. His wedge-shaped face formed the faintest grin.

‘Aye aye,’ he said softly.

Erik caught sight of me where I hovered on the steps.

‘Aristotle, this is my friend Mr White,’ he said. ‘Colonel Aristotle Sesosteris, of the Royal Greek Army.’

The Colonel gave Erik a look, of reproach, it seemed, and turned to me with his cold smile.

‘I am always delighted, Mr …’

‘White.’

‘… Mr White, to meet any friend of Erik’s. Erik and I have known each other for a long time. But come now and have a drink, both of you.’

We went down into the cabin, a rich little room washed by the soft sea light. Erik sat on a low couch, and I shuffled my feet near the hatchway, while Aristotle unfolded a card table and placed upon it three glasses and a bottle. A miniature refrigerator on the wall supplied him with a tray of crackling ice. He asked over his shoulder,

‘How did you know I was here?’

Erik was looking dreamily at his hands.

‘Oh, there were signs,’ he murmured.

‘I meant to come a week ago, but that storm took most of my rigging, and I had to return to Piraeus for repairs. It has been quite a journey.’

‘And all to find me.’

Aristotle lowered his eyelids modestly and smiled. His hands were shaking. He gave a glass to both of us. Neither of us drank. I thought that very soon now I would scream. Erik seemed to notice nothing. Aristotle moved to sit on the couch beside his friend, but abruptly changed his mind, and went back to lean against the table. I saw his hand, behind him, flutter in panic. His fingers found the reassuring edge of the wood, and he relaxed a little, and tried to smile. I cleared my throat, a compromise for that scream, and he glanced at me quickly. Erik cradled the glass in his large hands and looked through a porthole at the village and the burnt hills behind it. Aristotle watched him avidly, devouring each tiny movement, and asked,

‘Are you enjoying your holiday?’

His voice was too loud. Fingers flew to his lips. Erik started, as though he had forgotten that he was not alone.

‘What?’

‘Your, your holiday, are you enjoying it?’

‘Holi— yes yes, of course.’

Aristotle’s eyes swivelled round and fixed appealingly on me.

‘And you, Mr Black?’

‘White.’

‘Eh?’

‘My name is White.’

‘I know that. Are you on holiday here?’

‘Yes, I’m on holiday too.’

‘Ah. English, are you?’

‘Yes, no, Irish.’

‘Irish? Ah.’

Some gay exchanges there. Erik broke harshly in upon our little duet.

‘There are some very curious people here, Colonel.’

Aristotle’s eyes dragged themselves away from mine, slithered across the floor, clambered up the couch and came finally to rest on Erik’s breastbone. Erik laid his head back on the cushion, and went on,

‘Yes, very curious, very … inquisitive, I should say. They come to your room and smash your possessions. They are … uncouth.’

He smiled, delighted with the word, and whispered it once again under his breath. Aristotle turned to the table and refilled his glass, drank it off, and filled it yet again. A wisp of sour breath laced with whiskey wafted past me. He asked,

‘Why did you leave the city, Erik? Are you in trouble again? You realize that I cannot —’

Erik interrupted him by throwing back his head and giving a squawk of laughter which startled all of us, Erik included. Then he frowned, and carefully took off his spectacles.

‘You’re a fat old man, Colonel, and full of shit,’ he said, with some sadness.

A sprung nerve uncoiled at the corner of Aristotle’s mouth, twisting his smile into a grimace. Through the silence came the kiss of water on the hull, kiss, and the distant yapping of a dog. Sea shadows stirred on the cabin walls. A breeze sang gaily in the traces. Erik rubbed a few flakes of dry skin from his chin. The ice clattered in the old man’s glass. We looked, all three, at his trembling hand.

‘Useless,’ Erik muttered, with muted fury. ‘Useless.’

He put his glass untouched down on the floor beside him, took the briefcase in both hands and held it aloft. Aristotle peered at it, trying to muster his attention.

‘Everything I have is here,’ Erik said between clenched teeth. ‘All my papers, my files. I have nothing to fear.’

He loosened his fingers, and the case dropped. A corner of it hit the polished planks of the cabin floor, and it sprang up, turned, and flopped down on its side. Aristotle looked at the case, at Erik, at the case, at Erik again, his eyebrows raised and head inclined in a silent question.

‘If you want to search, then search,’ Erik shouted. His voice cracked on the first search, and the squeal so produced knocked an exquisite little note of music from the glass upon the table. That little song gave us all pause, and we turned and looked in wonder at the singer standing in transparent modesty on the green baize stage. Then Aristotle made a little sound of distress and stepped forward to pick up the case, while Erik at the same time began to rise. There was a scuffle, and Erik sat down again, upon the unprepared and protesting couch. The Colonel, stooping, looked at him beseechingly.

‘Erik —’ he began, and then, whether of his own volition or by an action of Erik’s I cannot say, he suddenly pitched forward and dropped his head (plop) into the German’s lap. Erik shrieked, and flung him away. The old man fell on his back and wallowed on the floor like a great stranded fish. I took a step forward, and halted, my hand outstretched. Erik picked up the briefcase and slapped him with it across the face, caught him by the throat and shook him violently, ramming a knee into his chest.

‘You fat pig, I’ll kill you, ‘he shouted. ‘What did you expect to find?’

Aristotle’s face flooded with blood beneath the ashen flesh. His eyes bulged, and he croaked,

‘I wanted only —’

‘Shut your mouth.’

Erik released him, and he lay and gurgled with his hands to his bruised throat. There came a banging on the cabin door, and the sailor’s scrawny face appeared at the glass. He goggled at the scene, grinned gleefully, and disappeared. Erik stood up and hitched up his trousers. Two large tears slipped down the old man’s cheeks. His mouth began to tremble. He clawed at the couch and screamed,

‘I wanted only to know why you are here. I sent Fang. Whatever he did it was not my fault. It was nothing to do with … it was only for myself.’

Erik put a frantic hand to his forehead.

‘Please stop,’ he begged.

Aristotle grew calm. He sat with his back against the couch, his hands hanging limp in his lap. He breathed with difficulty, blowing a bubble or two. He shook his head.

‘Erik,’ I said, and was startled to hear my own voice after all this time. Erik gave a small shake of his head, as though he had felt the passage of a fly’s wing. Aristotle stared at my knees. I was invisible.

‘I loved you, Erik,’ Aristotle said. ‘A sick old man, who could blame me for wanting something to … something to love.’

Erik turned his face away. Aristotle glanced at him with one of the slyest and most calculating looks I have ever seen. He went on.

‘But it’s finished now. I can take no more risks.’

Erik went to the table and poured a drink. Kneeling beside the old man, he put an arm around his shoulders and held the glass to his lips. Aristotle drank a little, and coughed, and Erik watched him, looking at the brown sunspots on his forehead where the fine hair was receding, the deep wrinkles around the mouth.

‘But you need me,’ Erik said.

Aristotle suddenly gave a bleak little cackle of laughter.

‘You think I need you to make my death easier, is that it?’ he asked. ‘You are a fool, Erik. What is Greece with so much evil in the world? What are these stupid people that you want to die for them? They will never be willing to die for you. When you are gone they will forget you and go on playing their stupid games, pretending to be soldiers. Go back to your cripple, help him. Pah.’

Erik sat down on the floor beside him. Aristotle considered him with a smile.

‘Erik,’ he said softly. ‘Erik, if you betray me, I’ll kill you.’

‘You will send someone to do it for you.’

‘No, no, I shall do it.’

They fell silent, more from exhaustion than a lack of things to say. I saw dismay settle between them like a black and monstrous bird. They gazed through the porthole beside my left ear at the blue blind sky, two sad souls awaiting a saviour whom they knew would never come. I walked on tiptoe to the cabin door, and closed it softly behind me.

Fang was gone. An empty beer bottle stood on the deck, a somehow selfconscious relic of his presence. I stepped up to the pier, and was half-way across the quay before I discovered in my hand the whiskey glass, with the frozen heart of an ice cube melting in its amber depths. Twelve bells came down over the village, announcing noon.

I went back to my room. I had a visitor. Andreas sat coiled in my armchair, with a hand under his chin. His eyes were closed. He opened them and looked at me. I stood just inside the door. Through the window I caught a glimpse of a fat man in a bloody apron emptying a bucket of offal into a barrel down at the back of the café. Andreas coughed, cutting a little nick into the silence.

‘Have you seen Erik?’ he asked.

‘How did you get in here?’

I wonder if any answer ever really satisfies that particular question. One slender finger snaked out from under his chin and pointed past my shoulder.

‘Through the door.’

‘I don’t remember inviting you,’ I snapped.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You didn’t. I thought Erik would be here.’

I crossed the room and sat down on the bed with my legs folded under me.

‘Erik has met a friend,’ I said sweetly. ‘It was very touching to watch.’

Andreas smiled, and bowed his head.

‘So Aristotle has arrived,’ he murmured.

I was silent, grinding my teeth, and then I said,

‘You’re a clever bastard, aren’t you? Know everything, don’t you? Well tell me something, who is this Aristotle?’

‘A colonel, in the army.’

‘The guy who killed our good friend Black is working for him. You knew that too, I suppose? I’ll tell you something, I begin to wonder about you two, you and Erik. Listen to me, damn it.’

He was thinking about something else, drumming a finger on the bridge of his nose and looking through the window at the distant hills. With a corner of his mind receiving me, he asked,

‘What do you wonder?’

‘I wonder about this movement you’re supposed to be setting up. I wonder if this refusal to give me information is just a subtle way of making a fool of me. I wonder how valuable this document really is. And I wonder what you’re covering up with all this melodrama. That, for a start, is what I wonder.’

I picked up a box from the table and began to twist it in my ringers. Andreas closed his eyes again. He said,

‘Have you ever wondered why people were willing to kill for that docu—’

‘Why this Aristotle freak was willing to kill for it; come on, let’s start putting names to these vague devils you hint at.’

He grinned, and went on imperturbably,

‘And have you ever wondered —’

I would not let him escape.

‘Listen, answer the question.’

‘What question?’

‘Was it Aristotle who killed Black?’

‘But Mr White, you were there.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

He sighed.

‘You have a very simple mind, Mr White. You deal too much in … what would I call it? … Too much in absolutes. You see someone murdered, you discover that the murderer works for someone, ergo, that someone — all right, don’t shout again, Aristotle, there, I have named him. You decide that Aristotle must be the real force behind the killing. Is that logical?’

‘It’s not illogical. But all right, all right, tell me, why did Fang want to kill him?’

‘Who?’

‘Black.’

‘Him, ah. But again you have leapt to a conclusion. Did I say that Aristotle was not the one who ordered the killing?’

‘Jesus.’

‘But don’t worry about these things, my friend. Everything will be explained. You have one task, to wait; to be patient and to wait. That’s all we ask you to do.’

‘But —’

‘Well, here, think on this. Why is it that no one outside this island seems to have heard about the murder? You saw the newspapers. Not a word about the affair.’

‘Protecting the tourist industry. Look, I want facts, dates, figures. I want the truth. I can afford to make demands, and don’t forget it, friend.’

‘But Mr White, Mr White, what is the truth?’

I flung the box down on the bed and glared at him. He had such a tender, attentive smile, his eyes moist with concern.

‘I want an approximation of the truth,’ I snarled.

He shrugged, which action, with his shape, was impressive.

‘Ask Erik,’ he said. ‘He will tell you all you want to know … perhaps.’

‘Erik is too busy just now.’

‘Mr White, why do you dislike me?’

‘I think we had this conversation before.’

‘But you gave no answer then either.’

‘No, I suppose I didn’t.’

A web of frost laced the air between us. Then I laughed, and shook my head, and heard my voice repeat an echo.

‘Useless,’ I said. ‘Useless.’

Andreas leaned forward in the chair, considered the folded flower of his fists, and, suddenly brisk, he said,

‘The reason I came here, Mr White, was to apologize to you.’

‘Apologize for what?’

‘I called you a coward. I’m sorry. Also I wish to say goodbye. I leave tonight for Athens. Erik will be travelling with me. At least, that was his plan.’

I sniggered.

‘He won’t be leaving just yet, not if I know anything.’

‘Mr White, what do you know about such things?’

He left the chair and shuffled about the room, looking at this and that. By the table he halted and glanced at the jumble of papers lying there.

‘This is your book, yes?’ he asked. ‘What is it called?’

‘It’s called I Was Just The Gipsy In My Mother’s Soul.’

He nodded. What a sense of humour the man had. He bent closer to the table in an effort to decipher my scrawl. I looked at his hump and had a vision of him wooing a widow over the brand-new boards of a coffin.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ I mused. ‘The rash of lechers with yachts there is about these days.’

He lurched away from the table, knocked against a chair, and went to the window where he stood with his back, that back, turned resolutely toward me. Twist that knife.

‘Of course, a colonel in the —’

‘Stop,’ he said.

I stopped, and wrenched at one of my fingers until it hurt. A turkey cackled somewhere, and was joined in song by a chorus of its mates. A girl laughed down in the street. From the kitchens below, a sniff of rancid fat slithered in through the window. Andreas said,

‘I first met him two years ago. He was to give a lecture at the university, on the role of journalism in politics. He arrived very drunk, and one hour late. We took him to the lecture room. He clung to the desk and looked at the students gathered before him, blinking one eye, just one, and grinning. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have lost my spectacles.”’ Here Andreas did a fair impersonation of Erik’s peculiar voice. ‘“Some oily Greek stole them, I think. Without them my notes are useless. So I shall tell you a story. I once met Jean-Paul Sartre. M. Sartre, I said, I think I have heard of you. And he said to me …” We never discovered what it was that Sartre said to him, for the desk which he clutched so tightly overturned, and Erik fell down at our feet, shouting and swearing. We picked him up and carried him from the hall. In the corridor he ran away from us, and raced out of the building, scattering the leaves of his notebook behind him. I went to search for him, all over the city. I knew the places where he would be. They were my places also, you see. In every one there was news of him. Here, he pretended to be dumb, there, he sat at the bar without his shirt, singing Nazi war-songs and toasting the Greek army. Oh yes, Mr White, you do not know all the sides of him. I could not find him. I returned home. There were my books, my possessions. Something was missing. I searched for hours, not knowing what it was that I was searching for. There was a storm that night, it seemed to shake the ground. I stood by the window and watched the rain fall on the city. I heard my name called above the roofs. It was very strange. In the morning Erik came to apologize, but still I had not found that thing which was missing. I never found it.’

He turned to me.

‘There is no end to my story, you see, Mr White. Just as there was none to Erik’s. Now tell me if you know anything.’

I had a friend once who was afflicted with a hare-lip. To draw attention away from that wound, he wore a black patch over a perfectly sound eye. So Andreas had manufactured for himself a diffidence and calm of character, a whole fastidious and mysterious personality which would hide the cruel twist of his back. Now a cord had snapped, the mask had slipped. Some sense of human pain was communicated to me, but all I could do was turn away from him in pity and disgust. He left. I closed my ears to his clumsy step on the stairs.

I am tired of these, all these people, tired of them, what are they to me, this is my story, god damn it, mine.

The cripple had been gone not five minutes when there was a furtive tapping on my door. No, I moaned, no, holding my head in my hands. Again the knock.

‘All right all right, it’s open.’

Erik came sidling in, and cast a look back through a crack of the door before closing it. Then he turned to me, rubbing his jaw. Our eyes met and parted. He sat down by the table, his long legs coiled together, and drummed his fingers on the wood.

‘Have you seen —’

‘He just left,’ I said.

‘Oh.’

Another lapse into the awful silence. Erik tried again.

‘You must understand that Andreas —’

‘I understand Andreas, I understand.’

He frowned, and began to whistle softly. I flung myself from the bed and paced the length of the floor, once, twice, halfway, halt.

‘I’m thinking of starting a salon here,’ I said. ‘Or a lonely hearts club.’

‘A what?’

‘Never mind.’

I lit a cigarette. Erik was reading my manuscript, his nose almost touching the paper. Things repeat themselves. I went and slapped my hand down on the page. He continued to gaze at my splayed fingers before him as though they were transparent.

‘Erik.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Tell me something. Tell me the truth. Are we planning a revolution?’

For the first time since I had known him, I saw Erik emerge completely from that preoccupation which sat like a barrier of frosted glass between him and the world. His head jerked up, and he stared at me in amazement. Then his long bony face softened, and he laughed. It was also the first real laugh I had heard from him, one which contained real surprise and pleasure. A day for new and bright experiences, this. He went on laughing for a while, then he jumped up, caught me by the hand and dragged me to the door.

‘Come. I shall show you the revolution, come.’

I hung back, trying to pull my arm away from his fierce grip.

‘Look, I just want a yes or no answer.’

‘Come with me. You shall have an answer.’

He was grinning, almost gay. This I did not trust at all.

‘I don’t want to go out now. It’s too hot.’

‘Come.’

‘No. I’m not going.’

We went. Erik led me through the village, and out along the road toward the beach. Now and then he glanced at me and laughed, shaking his head. When the beach was in view we left the road (a stab of grief for another lost day on that hillcrest) and took to a donkey track which ran away diagonally across the hills. The way was difficult, with thorns and stones cutting our feet. The blazing sun knocked splinters into our eyes. In the heat I began to have illusions, of strange voices high in the air, of a dark figure following behind us, but when I stopped to listen, there was only the silence and cicadas, and when I looked, there was only the empty road. The path descended into a gully, the dry bed of an ancient stream. We came upon a little oasis of bushes, the tiny leaves of which gave to the air a familiar but unidentifiable sweetness. Erik halted, and I sank down into the dust, bathed in sweat.

‘You ask a question,’ I moaned. ‘You ask a simple little question, and look what you get.’

Erik paid no attention to me. A large flat rock was set into the bank of the gulley. He put his hands to it, bracing his feet, and rolled it away. He beckoned to me. I crawled across on hands and knees and looked into the hole. No redeemer rested there, no winding-sheet and flower, but there was a brace of hand grenades, a huge awkward pistol, and a wooden crate bearing on its flank the hieroglyphs of an eastern tongue.

‘Dynamite,’ said Erik.

I nodded, saying nothing. Erik went on,

‘That is our revolution. In Athens we have perhaps this much again. The army would have no hope against us, when we are so well armed. And then, we have more than a dozen rebels with us. One of them, Apostolos, will take over this entire island. He is teaching himself to use this dynamite by blowing up rocks.’

‘All right,’ I cried. ‘I’m not entirely stupid.’

‘No,’ he murmured, but left a faint doubt in the air.

We sat down together in the shade of the bushes. Erik mopped his brow. His good humour had departed, and that vague moroseness, his most faithful mood, had laid hands on him again. The air was sweet where we sat. I lay down on my back and looked through the leaves at the fragile blue sky. Erik asked,

‘What did they tell you in Athens, what did Rabin tell you?’

‘Nothing. To meet you here.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No.’

‘And how much do you know of our plans?’

‘Very little, I was trying to get An—’

‘I see.’

He ruminated, biting a thumbnail. I could almost hear the calculations clicking in his brain.

‘There is no need for you to know very much,’ he said at last.

The decision had gone against me. I laughed softly.

‘Why do you laugh?’

‘You still don’t trust me,’ I said.

He shrugged, and turned away from me. A bird screamed somewhere, out over the sea. Erik said,

‘I will tell you this. If you have power over a few important people, then the rest is of no importance.’

‘You astound me with revelations.’

‘What else do you need to know?’

I sat upright, and tried to brush the dust from my damp shirt. My eyelids were swollen with heat.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you publish what you know? You’re famous, you have a voice in the world. Why don’t you publish, why don’t you do that, Erik? That’s what I want to know.’

He set his mouth stubbornly.

‘I have reasons.’

‘I see. Well I’m getting out. I said it before, I know, but this time I mean it. You don’t trust me, I don’t trust you, Andreas doesn’t trust me, I don’t trust either of you, you don’t trust … let me put it this way: nobody trusts anybody, right? It’s a farce. And I’m afraid; I admit it. I’m not cut out for this kind of nonsense. So before I get really involved, I’m going. Don’t look for me in Athens, because I won’t be found. All right?’

He was watching me from the corner of his eye.

‘But you are involved,’ he said quietly.

‘Not that much, not so much that I can’t get out. There’s no blood on my hands.’

I turned to glare at him, and saw a curious little tableau. He sat bolt upright, with his hands pressed to the dust on either side of him. His eyes were wide, staring into the hole opposite us in the bank. A small gun, which is, I believe, known as a burp gun, resting in a grimy hand, protruded from the bush with the barrel laid against the back of his skull. A voice said,

‘Careful now, friends.’

The gun slowly retreated, and then the sailor, Fang, climbed carefully down the bank and stood before us with a lovely grin. He looked from one of us to the other, casually tossing the gun in his hand. But there was nothing very casual about his eyes. Imagine little chips of black glass embedded in something blue. Need I say that I was terrified?

‘What do you want?’ Erik asked.

Fang’s grin widened, and he sat down on the rock, pushing the cap to the back of his head.

‘Hot,’ he said. ‘Very hot.’

Immobility was becoming unbearable, but when I stirred my foot, the little blueblack snout of the pistol stared straight at my navel. Fang sucked his teeth. He said to Erik,

‘The Colonel sent me to follow you. I think he was worried that you might get into trouble. It’s beautiful, how he worries about you. A pity you don’t show a little loyalty in return.’

He took a quick glance at the arsenal in the bank, then shook his head at us, and clicked his tongue.

‘Very bad,’ he murmured. ‘Well now, here’s the position, friends. You see me following you, waited for me in hiding, then jumped out with guns blazing. Luckily, I managed to shoot the German in the stomach with the first shot, and the other one was very little trouble. The Colonel will be very upset, but what, I ask, could I do? It was me or them, as they say. So. Now tell me, friends, what do you think of my story. Does it ring of truth, eh?’

He looked from one of us to the other, inquiringly, humorously.

‘Erik,’ I said. ‘Erik, this is a joke, isn’t it?’

Fang waved the gun at me.

‘Keep your mouth shut, hawkeye.’

Erik began to laugh. I nearly swallowed my teeth at the sound.

‘Erik,’ I squeaked, terrified lest that gun should go off. ‘Erik, for god’s sake.’

Fang was staring at the German uncertainly. Of all the things he had expected, laughter was not one of them. Erik said,

‘Fang, you are a fool, and you see too many films. Now go away.’

Our bold seaman did not like that, not at all did he like it. He lifted the gun, two yellow teeth biting his lower lip. But Erik, like all of us, had also been a student of the cinema. A handful of dust, whoosh in the eyes, bop said the gun, and then Erik was on his feet and kicking Fang in the stomach. Poh, and the sailor’s breath and breakfast flew out of his mouth. Erik wrenched the gun away and fired one little bullet straight down into the top of Fang’s head, who breathed blood through his nose and rolled over slowly, very slowly, on to his side. The hills shook with noise as Erik sent five more bullets into the poor prone creature. Tok, said each blunt lump of lead as it landed. Silence, reverberations, wind, a bird, silence. Erik’s arm shook, and he dropped the gun, closed his eyes and gave a little squeal of grief and disgust. Fang’s jaws stopped snapping, and his fingers uncurled, and he surrendered quietly into dust and peace. I crawled across and touched the broken heap of flesh. Erik stumbled up out of the gully, and I followed him, pausing long enough to wipe my hands in the green leaves of the bushes. With mild surprise, I saw that the sun was still shining.

The wind was up. It came crying off the sea to blast the hillside, the bushes and the little stones. The waters of the bay crashed on the rocks, bursting in slow white blooms. A fury as of lost and destroyed small things was moving in the sea. We sat on the dunes behind the beach. Erik’s shoulders were bowed, his hands over his face. I spoke to him for a long time. I did not know what I was talking about, but my voice, as though it did not really belong to me, seemed to be insinuating things for which there were no words, delivering an inexpressible message to ears that could but barely hear, as in a withered garden of darkness, in autumn, a nightingale will sing to you of mysteries long since buried. I cannot understand these things, I am not god, I did not invent human beings, why is it expected that I should understand everything? Stop. Stop, and go on, it is the only way.

He spoke not a word. I went away and left him there to mourn the dead by whatever means he knew.

The land was alive, was emanating orders and advice. I had my finger on the nerve of the world. Down through the winding hills I sauntered, holding my arms captive at my sides for fear that if I lifted them they would turn to wings and take me soaring breathless into the limits of the sky. I think I was grinning. The wind cavorted about me, whispering, shouting, promising miracles. I could feel each hair of my head as though they were charged wires, could feel each eye seeing its separate view, each toe doing its little business of balancing. I jangled in every sinew, poised for flight, singing and capering, teeth bared, my heart tingling with the magic touch of murder. Do I make sense? How can I? But I was alive, exulting in my terror, and waiting eagerly for a message from the beasts.

As I approached the villa, there was strange music in the wind. I stopped to listen, but it had ceased. Through the broken gateway I went, cut across the garden to the well, winked at the eyes down there, and spat on them. Then, hitching up my trousers, I went resolutely to the door. It stood open. That was to be expected. I found myself in the dimness of a hall, and paused a moment to give my sight time to adjust itself. I needed all my faculties about me, for that message had come through at last, and with devastating simplicity it said: fuck. Primitive tapestries hung on the walls on either side of me. Hunters pranced with uplifted spears, and priests were carrying sacrifices to an altar. I saluted the holy men and went on my way. The first door, to my left, was locked. A touch to its handle brought that music again, a small discordant phrase, slipping into silence. I tried another door, with success.

The room was long and narrow, with grey walls and a low white ceiling. A window at one end looked out across the hills to the misty sea, and the light that came through was gold touched with the faintest chill of blue. Two elderly armchairs sat crouched by the open fireplace, silently brooding over the situation of an unfinished chess game laid out between them on a table. A tall clock ticked away with a calm indifference to the terrors of time. A single red rose, strangest of all rarities here, drooped in languid elegance from a narrow vase atop the writing desk. On the gleaming parquet floor the designs of a rug turned slowly through their circular abstractions. I stepped inside and softly closed the door. By the window a grand piano stood, teeth bared and lid uplifted. The boy Yacinth sat on the low stool, one leg folded under him, his candid gaze turned toward me. A furry aureole of soft silver light trembled around his tousled head. I said,

‘So you’re the musician?’

By way of an answer, he put his fingers to the gleaming keys and set them jingling, vibrato, pianissimo. I crossed the floor; a stretch of silence on the rug, then slap and clap of sandals on the wood once more; I reached the window. Out there the sea, and a sleek liner slicing the horizon. I turned to the boy. He still watched me, without interest, without curiosity.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Are you real, or do I just imagine you?’

‘Why?’

‘You never say anything. Why don’t you ever say anything?’

That shrug again, a slight lift of the left shoulder, left corner of the mouth. I leaned on the edge of the piano, and said,

‘Play something for me.’

He bowed his head, and pursed his lips, and touched a fingertip to a fluttering eyelid. Then abruptly he turned on the seat, his leg coming out from under him with a tiny squeak of the leather; he frowned heavily, and brought his hands to the keys. A fiercely discordant plashing and clashing of chords followed. As he tore this hideous music from the instrument, he watched me from under his eyelashes, defiance and spite in the tight line of his mouth.

I wandered back down the long length of the room, my hands in my pockets. I went into the corridor. The music followed me. The door which had been locked was open now, perhaps it was a different door, perhaps it had not been locked the first time, good Christ what difference does it make? I opened it, and went where I was led. Led, led?

This room was a small room, containing a big bed. If there was other furniture there, I did not see it, for this bed was overpowering. Squat and low, it knelt on its tubby legs like a satiated frog. It was indecent. Upon its tangled sheets, Helena lay asleep. One arm rested by her side, the fingers flexed against her thigh, while the other lay twisted into an odd attitude of abandon above her head. Her face was inclined toward me on the pillow, eyes lightly closed, lips parted. She wore only a long blue shirt, open at the neck. There was a small window above her, and her yellow hair was strewn across the pillow like tendrils of flowers creeping toward the light. I closed the door. In her sleep, the shirt had ridden its way up to her navel. One leg was bent, and the foot rested against her other knee, clumsy description, try again, no time, I am panting. I found myself suddenly without my clothes. The cool starched sheets brushed against my knees and sent an intolerable shiver along my spine. I knelt down. She made a small sound of annoyance, and shifted her legs. I said,

‘Helena … Mrs Kyd.’

I was beginning to have a sense of general foolishness. She turned her head, and her eyelids fluttered. It was at that moment that I wounded her. Now, here is a point. For that wound alone I ask forgiveness; all the other sins can be bound together and hung upon my balls for all eternity, but for that one, that plunge into the world of all nocturnal adolescent dreams made living flesh, I plead tolerance and mercy, for that was one time when the freedom of my will was denied me. Strangely enough, I feel that I shall be forgiven, providing god is not a woman. This woman whom I had skewered now sprang awake. Her eyes clicked open, and she gave a great squawk of astonishment and fright, and made an effort to rear up off the pillow. I held her down, and laid soothing hands upon her face. I grinned and said,

‘Hello there.’

She began to speak. That is to say, her mouth opened and closed, but no words came out, only garbled quacking sounds. I kissed her, and took a few experimental leaps. She lay rigid and unyielding. I took my mouth away from hers, and she snarled,

‘God damn you.’

‘Yes yes, no doubt, but not yet,’ I panted.

And I laughed. She closed her eyes tightly, and bit her lips, but she could no longer resist. Her legs twined with mine, and she relaxed. I put my hands on her backside, and we were away. At the end I was overcome by a little fit of rage, and casting about in my mind for some likely victim, I could think only of Julian, so I gave her one last stab for him, cried out a foul word, and then felt profoundly ashamed. I slipped away from her, and lay with my face buried in the pillow, listening to her laboured breath beside me. In a while, it grew calm, and I fell asleep with the distant sound of music in my head.

Aye, and in the darkness of that sleep I saw the fanged black creatures creep into the room and surround the bed, their tiny red eyes flashing. They snapped at me, and snarled, and tried to tear my face, until at length they trapped one of their own in a corner and devoured it alive.

My shabby room, the dry flat smell of heat, the air empty, useless, sucked dry by the countless creatures who had haunted it before me. I moved with a torpid slowness from wall to wall, from the chair to the window, smoking, eating crumbs of biscuits, trying not to think. At last I lay down on the bed. Through the long hours of the afternoon I watched the window, the curtains stirring. The sun travelled its journey, a finger of light which moved across the floor to climb the shutters and retreat. The sounds of the village faded. Strange twilight came and trembled on the glass. I covered my eyes. I could bear no more, of the silence, the screams which made no sounds, of the endless days with their wild lights and moods, no more of this island, its timeless savage sadness.

Get out, that was all she had said, lying with her face turned away from me in disgust. When I bent to kiss the pink flower of a nipple, she had not even bothered to push me away. A scene of satyrs and woodland nymphs by a river was painted on the bed-head. I put on my clothes and left her. The music, that intolerable music, followed me from the house and down the hill.

There was a knock upon the door. I sprang off the bed, leaving the springs of the mattress jangling like violated nerves. She stood outside, with her arms folded, leaning against the wall. Her face seemed expressionless. Without a word, she pushed past me, stood a moment surveying my kingdom, then walked across and sat down on the bed. The little room was instantly changed, was diminished for me. Her entrance alone was enough to rob it of the tenuous links I had worked so hard to create there. I saw her shadow fall across the floor, and her critical gaze fall on my books, the sad view through the window of roof and hill, a patch of sky absurdly blue, and I no longer belonged there. Soon each part would have its separate memory of her. The room would be truly hers then, and I would be usurped. It would be she who lived there, even when she was gone.

‘“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”,’ I murmured, and sat down in my armchair.

‘What shall we talk about?’ she asked coldly.

‘Your mother, perhaps?’

‘Ha.’

‘What then?’

She shrugged, and joined her hands together in her lap, saying,

‘I wonder if there is anything to talk about.’

‘But of course not. Still, we will talk, and when we stop, then we shall make a journey, perhaps. Now, ask me about my book.’

She laughed. It was a humourless kind of sound. A rage, well caged, seethed in her eyes.

‘Tell me about your book,’ she said.

‘I’ve given it up.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I wanted to do it.’

‘Why did you want to —’

‘No no, you misunderstand. I wanted to write it.’

‘Then why did you stop?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course not. We’re doing very nicely here.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she cried, and her hair shook with the vehemence of her cry. I considered her through half-closed eyes.

‘Mrs Kyd, I’ll make a bargain. First, what have we? You want to know why I stopped writing while wanting to continue, and I want to know why you came here when you said you never wanted to see me again. Are you with me?’

She stood up suddenly from the bed and started to the door.

‘I’m going now.’

‘Listen, wait,’ I cried, bouncing after her.

She halted, and whirled about to meet me. Her eyes really could flash.

‘I came here,’ she said quietly, ‘I came here with the intention of … I don’t know, tearing out your eyes. You raped me, and now you play word games. Before, I thought you were very evil. Now, I think you are just a fool. So I shall waste no more of my time. But I shall say one thing. Some day you will suffer for what you have —’

‘Ah god,’ said I wearily. ‘Will you go away and leave me alone. I’m tired. I’ve had enough for one day.’

Then I turned my back to her. Had I planned it like that, I could not have found a better way to hold her there. The door closed again, but when I looked, I found that she was still on my side of it, standing with her back pressed against the panels, her eyes lowered. I took a book and sank down into the armchair, my shoulders hunched. She did not move. Her presence was unsettling, if that is the word. At length I said,

‘If you’re preparing another speech, I don’t want to hear it.’

She shook her head, still not looking at me. She returned to the bed, sat down, and began to pick at the blanket with her fingernails. I laid down the book with a weary sigh.

‘Mrs Kyd,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t know all the circumstances of what happened today. I —’

She held up a hand to silence me, and then began to speak softly herself, her head still hanging.

‘I lied to you, Mr White. I came here because … well, you have met my husband. He’s a good man, I would not deny that, and I love him. But today you touched something in me, something which I did not know was there. It was as if …’

Oh Jesus, I can reproduce no more of this twaddle. Did she really say all that, and expect me to take her seriously? It seems incredible. And yet, what am I saying? I took her seriously, indeed I did. I was looking through the window, laughing to myself and wondering how in the world I could imagine that I loved such a melodramatic, boring, hysterical, stupid, utterly humourless woman as this one, and all the while, with both big ears, I was agog to catch even the most banal of the clichés spilling from her mouth, and was enraptured with it, every syllable. At last she came to an end of sorts, and heaved a great sigh. I cleared my throat, and shifted my feet, and said,

‘Yes. I see. Well.’

She looked at me then.

‘Now I must go,’ she murmured, a deep throb of grief in her voice, Anna K. preparing to dive under that train. Oh, she was magnificent, I cannot deny it, she had me teetering on the edge of tears. She pinned up her hair (an encore) and the light through the window set a fire in the down on her uplifted arms.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked, and had she said, drop dead, I would have commanded my heart to be still. But she said nothing, and shook her head hopelessly. She stood up. On the table something which gleamed among the litter of books and papers caught her eye. She picked it up and examined it curiously. It was a small oblong silver box, perfectly smooth, without a catch or clasp on the closely-fitting lid. I sat sprawled deep in the armchair, my chin on my breast, watching her. I wonder if my tongue was hanging out.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

I held out my hand.

‘Here, let me show you.’

I took the box and pressed a thumb and middle finger against both sides. With a tiny click, the lid sprang open. I closed it again and gave it back to her. She pressed it with the heels of her hands, but it would not open for her.

‘It’s just a small thing,’ I said. ‘There’s a knack to it.’

‘Teach me.’

I shook my head.

‘I’d be thrown out of the magicians’ union.’

We stood together and looked through the window. The sun trembled on the brink of the hills, shaking the sky with a last fury of light. It went down, the gold become crimson, the dry hills aflame. I was weary; each of my bones seemed to have its own private ache. Something flashed in the corner of my eye. Helena had drawn her hand above her head. I made a grab at her, but too late. With a little grunt for the effort, she flung the box through the window. It tore a neat hole in the centre of the pane, and disappeared. The glass shivered around its wound, and the pieces came slowly apart in long wicked spikes. I caught her by the shoulder.

‘You stupid bitch.’

She tore herself away from me, and lifted her hands to protect her face. We glowererd at each other, teeth clenched.

‘Look —’ I began, but she flew at me, and her nails ripped my cheek. I leapt away, trying to hold my balance, and with an open fist I caught her a crack on the side of the head which must have loosened a filling or two. The knot of her hair flew asunder as she whirled away from me. A rug slipped under her feet, and she crashed to the floor. There she lay motionless with her head in her arms. I touched my cheek, and my fingers came away bloodied.

I flung open the door and went clattering down the stairs, and reached the street in time to meet a small boy coming from the lane with a dented but unbroken silver box in his little paws. He halted in fright at the appearance of this toothed creature with arms spread bat-like above him, and whipped the box behind his back. The presence of mind the little bastard could muster.

‘Little man, may I have my box?’

He looked at me silently with round brown eyes. I put my face in front of his and breathed brimstone at him.

‘Give. It’s mine.’

‘No.’

‘Sweet Jesus. Look, I warn you.’

‘No, I won’t, it’s mine, I found it.’

There was a light patter of steps behind me, and I looked over my shoulder to see Helena slip out of the doorway and disappear into the dusk. I gave a shriek, and caught the child by the throat. His eyes opened very wide, and his tongue came out. I reached down behind him and wrenched the box from his hands (please god he will some day beget a battalion of retards and die roaring after a long life of unmitigated failure), then threw him to one side and fled down the street with my knees knocking against my chin and the silver prize clutched to my breast. Behind me the child let out a roar. Helena was gone. Again. My heart.

I walked to the harbour, through streets luminous with the last light of day. The shops were closing, the owners sleepily gathering in their wares. The dusk rang with the far clear shouts of children, and those other cries, less easily identified, which seemed to reverberate above the roof tops, sounds that were out of time and place, that carried with them other times and places, the voices of nightingales and kings.

The white liner calmly rode at anchor beyond the harbour bar, and by the pier two yachts were anchored. The water barely stirred, bearing another island, another harbour on its back. Down there were windows washed with blue, the palest green, and boats drifted upside-down on the hulls of their progenitors. People came and went, came and went, their voices flying out across the bay to the other shores and islands. The trawlers were already setting off for the liner, bearing the first cargoes of mail and baggage, and the mysterious things which, with the rats, are the first arrivals on an outbound ship. The lights were coming on in the tavernas, and the nightclub on the hill was sending down the first strains of music, calling its few revellers. Hold this overworked twilight for a little longer, just a little longer.

I strolled along the waterfront, looking idly at the souvenirs, the postcards, the miniature plaster lions of Apollo. My steps took me toward the police barracks, which crouched in the shame of its drab grey stone, flanked on one side by the sea, by the astonishing geometry of the little blue-domed chapel on the other. I paused below the barracks steps, with my hands in my pockets, and craned my neck to peer through the open doorway. A large gaunt room was there, dimly illumined by the dying light from the sky which crept through a grimed mean window set high up in the wall. From where I stood, I could see the head and shoulders of a fat policeman in shirt sleeves, with his hands behind his head, bent as though in prayer over an ancient black typewriter. At intervals he emerged from his concentration, and his arms would drop and pounce upon the keys. The sharp little blows ravished the silence, and danced across the room like so many exclamation points. Beside his machine there stood a cabinet of gleaming steel. One of its drawers gaped, overflowing with dirty crockery, like a mouthful of broken teeth. The man at the typewriter stood up, punching a cramped arm, and touched a switch behind him on the wall. The light which he called forth was hardly brighter than that in the window, and the naked bulb dangled from the ceiling like a fat yellow tear. The policeman squinted at it, and shook his head. He caught sight of me, and we looked at each other in silence. A dog barked, a child squealed, and a little bell tinkled in the chapel. The sequence of sounds had about them the ineluctable precision of a mathematical formula, and, like the product of the equation, boots thudded somewhere inside the room, and an unintelligible phrase slithered down the steps. The fat policeman turned from me to the invisible speaker. He laughed, and nodded, and sat down again, tucking up the sleeves of his shirt. Strange how these inconsequential moments stay with one through all vicissitudes, doling out a little comfort now and then on the long journey from cave to grave. I turned, and walked away.

The taverna was crowded with diehards left over from a wedding feast held that morning. There was shouting and singing, and rampant smashing of crockery. I made my way to the bar. Constantinou, the proprietor, stood behind it in his usual pose, one hand on his hip, the other resting on the counter. He was a tall, diffident man, with the gentlest of smiles. He lifted his eyebrows at me, and was polite enough to ignore the wound on my cheek.

‘Ouzo,’ I said. ‘A bottle.’

‘Eh?’

I shouted my request. Crash, there went another plate against the wall. Constantinou looked to heaven, and set the bottle before me.

‘You leave tonight, yes?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m not leaving.’

‘It’s a pity.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘We shall miss you.’

Crash.

‘I’m not leaving. I said, I’m not leaving.’

‘Yes. You’ll have a good journey, the sea is calm tonight.’

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Me? No, I could never leave the island.’

‘Yes, but I asked, how much? For the ouzo. How much?’

He lifted his hands, shoulders and eyebrows, and pushed out his lower lip, his way of saying, who cares.

‘Take it for your journey,’ he yelled. ‘A gift.’

I laughed, and shook my head ruefully, but said only,

‘Efcharisto, Constantinou.’

‘Kali andamosi.’

I made my way out to the little square, where extra tables had been set up, but still not enough to cater for the throng. A familiar voice wound its way to my ear.

‘And there were such flowers, you would …’

She sat at a table near me, her back turned. She was talking to … my Jesus, Erik. Over her left shoulder he was looking at me, his face betraying not the slightest sign of recognition. Helena made a gesture with her hands, and I went away.

In the little shop by the further pier, I bought a piece of cheese and a loaf of bread. As I was leaving, the island girl who had served me said,

‘Have a good journey.’

Before I could turn to speak she had fled in confusion to the back room. Outside, the painted lanterns which hung below the eaves came suddenly, wondrously to life, laying tender stains of light at my feet. With my provisions tucked against me, I went slowly out along the pier. At the end, where the green beacon flashed, I sat down behind the sea wall and laid out the meagre meal on the stones. I broke a piece of cheese and bit a chunk from the bread, and with my arms folded, and my legs crossed before me, I looked across the harbour. Over there, by the white yachts, the red light winked at its partner above me. The sky was of the palest blue, with one star burning faintly. The water lapped at the sea wall. I took a drink of ouzo, and ate another piece of cheese.

A figure left Constantinou’s and started slowly along the quay, making toward me. The sea was running with shadow now as the breathless twilight ended. A strange violet light hovered over the village and the hills. The white houses and the little chapels were touched with a glowing rose tint, and a burnt lilac lay in the crevices of shadow. The fishing boats rolled gently by the quayside on the brittle green water. The bronze tolling of a bell came down the hills and crossed the bay, drawing in its wake the other evening sounds. Erik walked slowly out along the pier, studiously ignoring me. He was wearing his suit, the green of which gave an echo to the water. Around his neck was tied an exotic red silk scarf. I chewed a piece of bread and watched him approach. He put his hands into his pockets and turned to the sea, whistling softly as he looked at the red beacon blinking. At length he came and sat beside me. We glanced at each other, and then considered our feet. I offered him the bottle, but he shook his head. He took a piece of cheese and nibbled halfheartedly at it. The lights of the quay were coming into their own as darkness fell out of the sky. Erik took a flat silver case from his pocket and selected a cigarette. He passed the case to me, and I took one also, examined it, and nodded. We watched the smoke drift to the edge of the pier, slide over and drop down to the water.

‘Where did you get the scarf?’ I asked.

His fingers went to the flimsy piece of cloth, and he said uncertainly,

‘You think it foolish?’

‘No, no, of course not.’

We sat for a while, sustained by silence, riding its calm evening deeps.

‘I see you were talking to Mrs Kyd,’ I said.

‘No, she was talking to me.’

‘Oh. Leaving tonight, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Andreas?’

‘No.’

‘I see. Going on the yacht, eh?’

‘Yes. Your cheek …’

‘Walked into a door.’

‘Ah.’

Across the quay walked Julian and the boy. I recognized their white clothes. Helena joined them at the pier. They stopped for a moment to give directions for the stowing of their luggage, then they clambered into the skiff and were whisked across the harbour to their yacht. Erik said,

‘She is going away?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m going away too. Erik.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why did Aristotle want us killed?’

‘Aristotle want us … did he want us killed?’

‘Then why did you kill the sailor?’

‘He would have killed us.’

‘Why?’

‘He likes to kill.’

That tense was interesting. I glanced at him. He was frowning at his hands.

‘But Aristotle must have —’

‘I don’t know,’ he cried. ‘I don’t know.’

He brought out from the pocket of his suit a moth-eaten pair of black woollen swimming trunks. They were too big for him, and when he put them on, and stood up, his scrawny frame looked even more emaciated in that ridiculous gear. He went and dived into the water, making hardly a splash. I stood and watched him. Down there he was almost graceful, his long thin figure sliding through the liquid darkness with perfect ease. After a few strokes he came out again, shaking his head and spitting uproariously. On the seaweed-covered steps, he slipped and bruised his knee. We sat down again, and Erik examined his wounded leg. He cleaned his spectacles with a dirty handkerchief and clipped them behind his ears again.

‘What will you do?’ he asked, clawing at his hair.

‘Go back to Rabin’s. I never intended to do otherwise.’

‘And what about the girl?’

‘What about her?’

He shrugged, and lapsed into silence. I threw the last crusts of the loaf toward the water, but before they could reach the surface, two seagulls came down like flashes of light and took them in their beaks. We watched them soar away, two beautiful beasts, and then Erik said sheepishly,

‘Perhaps, just a small drink, to wish us both luck.’

I handed him the bottle and listened to the liquor gurgle in his throat. He gasped, and wiped his mouth. I made the motions of a toast, but could find no suitable words. Erik belched, and immediately the liner’s siren sent up an outrageous echo. He stood up and put on his suit again, over the wet trunks.

‘Isn’t it strange how all these things work together,’ I mused. ‘The wind lifts the waves, and the waves pound the shore. These strange cycles. People too, with their cycles and reversals that cause so much anguish. It’s amazing.’

I looked at Erik. Erik looked at the sea. I went on,

‘Imitating the seasons, I suppose. The rages and storms, the silences. If only the world would imitate us once in a while. That would be something, wouldn’t it? But the world maintains a contemptuous silence, and what the heart desires, the world is incapable of giving.’

A pretty speech. I would refuse to believe that I had made it, did I not have evidence, which I have. Erik hitched up his trousers, and blew his nose. I wondered if he had been listening to me. He had.

‘I must go now,’ he said.

‘Good luck.’

‘I shall see you in Athens, yes?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Well. Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

But he had not gone six paces when he stopped, and retraced his steps.

‘I wanted to say that …’

He closed his mouth.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

I did not know, but what difference did that make? He nodded, and went away. I did not have time to watch him go, for the white yacht, the great craft, was pulling away from the pier, out of the harbour, under full sail.

I walked through the little streets, humming to myself, sniffing the gorgeous odours of the island, lime and salt, fish, incense, bread and burning charcoal, and I realized that it was not I who was departing, but these things, this island, this beauty, they were going, were already becoming a memory. There were a few tears, yes.

From a sidestreet, a dim figure crept out and laid a hand on my shoulder. I let out a shriek, and leapt a foot into the air, and whirled about with the bottle lifted in my hand.

‘It’s me, Andreas. Erik tells me you’re leaving.’

‘Yes.’

He came with me to my room, where I packed a bag, and tied my papers with a piece of twine. Then I cast one last look around me, and switched off the light. Out of the darkness, Andreas’s voice said,

‘You don’t want to leave?’

‘Come on.’

We reached the quay as the last trawler was preparing to depart. Both yachts were gone now. Andreas saw me looking at the vacant mooring places, and he smiled, and said,

‘It seems we both have our losses, Mr White.’

‘Aye.’

The lights of the village trembled on the black water. The little boat rolled and shuddered around the thrust of its engine.

‘Ten hours to Athens,’ said Andreas gloomily.

I ignored him. The white flank of the liner loomed above us, and we climbed the swaying steps to the deck. Andreas found two seats for us on a bench under the canvas awning of the third-class area. We left our baggage there, and went out to stand by the rail. I felt that he was offering me something, a truce maybe, perhaps, even, friendship. I wondered what I would need to surrender in return, and decided that I would not be able to accept the bargain. But all these considerations were incidental to what was foremost in my mind, this awful sadness of departure, and I paid little attention to the poor creature by my side who was waiting for a word. Small sounds lapped about us, the calm sea swell, the deep thrumming of the engines. A bell clanged thrice. I clenched my hands on the damp rail. Across the water, the quayside was thronged with vague dark figures. Hands waved, and faint voices called farewells. Behind me, my fellow passengers stood locked in silence, and watched, with amazement almost, the little lights recede, and the twin white wakes set out behind us on their backward journey. The sky was blue, an impossible, deep blue, as though the night, falling from it, had drained half of its darkness. I watched the last of the world I was deserting, imagining that I would never see it again, and the voices from the quay, beating ever more weakly across the bay, seemed the voice of the island itself, of its inviolable hills and shores, bidding me, whom it was losing, its last farewell.

What did I say? It was a lie. I was not happy. There was no peace. Lust was the least of my terrors. The land was waste, nothing flourished. Time trammelled me in all my days, the light blinded me, broke my sight, and I saw nothing, nothing.