The Magus

68

Rome.

In my mind Greece lay weeks, not the real hours, behind. The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of luxury, a cosmetic of the overindulged senses, between the light, the truth, and their real selves. I couldn’t stand the loss of the beautiful nakedness, the humanity of Greece, and so I couldn’t stand the sight of the opulent, animal Romans; as one sometimes cannot stand one’s own face in a mirror.

Early the morning after my arrival I caught a local train out towards Tivoli and the Alban hills. After a long bus ride I had lunch at Subiaco and then walked up a road above a green chasm. A lane branched off into a deserted glen. I could hear the sound of running water far below, the singing of birds. The road came to an end, and a path led up through a cool grove of ilex, and then tapered out into a narrow flight of steps that twisted up around a wall of rock. The monastery came into sight, clinging like an Orthodox Greek monastery, like a martin’s nest, to the cliff. A Gothic loggia looked out prettily over the green ravine, over a little apron of cultivated terraces falling below. Fine frescoes on the inner wall; coolness, silence.

There was an old monk in a black habit sitting behind the door through to an inner gallery. I asked if I could see John Leverrier. I said, an Englishman, on a retreat. Luckily I had his letter ready to show. The old man carefully deciphered the signature, then nodded and silently disappeared down into some lower level of the monastery. I went on into a hall. A series of macabre murals: death pricking a young falconer with his longsword; a medieval strip-cartoon of a girl, first titivating herself in front of a glass, then fresh in her coffin, then with the bones beginning to erupt through the skin, then as a skeleton. There was the sound of someone laughing, an old monk with an amused face scolding a younger one in French as they passed through the hall behind me. Oh, si tu penses que le football est un digne su jet de meditation…

Then another monk appeared; and I knew, with an icy shock, that this was Leverrier.

He was tall, very close-cut hair, with a thin-checked brown face, and glasses with “standard” National Health frames; unmistakably English. He made a little gesture, asking if it was I who had asked for him.

“I’m Nicholas Urfe. From Phraxos.”

He managed to look amazed, shy, and annoyed, all at the same time. After a long moment’s hesitation, he held out his hand. It seemed dry and cold; mine was stickily hot from the walk. He was nearly four inches taller than myself, and as many years older, and he spoke with a trace of the incisiveness that young dons sometimes affect.

“You’ve come all this way?”

“It was easy to stop off at Rome.”

“I thought I’d made it clear that—”

“Yes you did, but…”

We both smiled bleakly at the broken-ended sentences. He looked me in the eyes, affirming decision.

“I’m afraid your visit must still be considered in vain.”

“I honestly had no idea that you were…” I waved vaguely at his habit. “I thought you signed your letters…”

“Yours in Christ?” He smiled thinly. “I am afraid that even here we are susceptible to the forces of anti-pretension.”

He looked down, and we stood awkwardly. He came, as if impatient with our awkwardness, to a kinder decision; some mollification.

“Well. Now you are here—let me show you round.”

I wanted to say that I hadn’t come as a tourist, but he was already leading the way through to an inner courtyard. I was shown the traditional ravens and crows, the Holy Bramble, which put forth roses when Saint Benedict rolled on it—as always on such occasions the holiness of self-mortification paled in my too-literal mind beside the vision of a naked man pounding over the hard earth and taking a long jump into a blackberry bush… ow! yarouch!… and I found the Peruginos easier to feel reverence for.

I discovered absolutely nothing about the summer of 1951, though I discovered a little more about Leverrier. He was at Sacro Speco for only a few weeks, having just finished his novitiate at some monastery in Switzerland. He had been to Cambridge and read history, he spoke fluent Italian, he was “rather unjustifiably believed to be” an authority on the pre-Reformation monastic orders in England, which was why he was at Sacro Speco—to consult sources in the famous library; and he had not been back to Greece since he left it. He remained very much an English intellectual, rather self-conscious, aware that he must look as if he were playing at being a monk, dressing up, and even a little, complicatedly, vain about it.

Finally he took me down some steps and out into the open air below the monastery. I perfunctorily admired the vegetable and vineyard terraces. He led the way to a wooden seat under a fig tree a little farther on. We sat. He did not look at me.

“This is very unsatisfactory for you. But I warned you.”

“It’s a relief to meet a fellow victim. Even if he is mute.”

He stared out across a box-bordered parterre into the blue heat of the sun-baked ravine. I could hear water rushing down in the depths.

“A fellow. Not a victim.”

“I simply wanted to compare notes.”

He paused, then said, “The essence of… his… system is surely that you learn not to ‘compare notes.’” He made the phrase sound repellent; cheap. His wanting me to go was all but spoken. I stole a look at him.

“Would you be here now if…”

“A lift on the road one has already long been traveling explains when. Not why.”

“Our experiences must have varied very widely.”

“Why should they be similar? Are you a Catholic?” I shook my head. “A Christian even?” I shook my head again. He shrugged. He had dark shadows under his eyes, as if he was tired.

“But I do believe in… charity?”

“My dear man, you don’t want charity from me. You want confessions I am not prepared to make. In my view I am being charitable in not making them. In my position you would understand.” He added, “And at my remove you will understand.”

His voice was set cold; there was a silence.

He said, “I’m sorry. You force me to be more brusque than I wish.”

“I’d better go.”

He seized his chance, and stood up.

“I intend nothing personal.”

“Of course.”

“Let me see you to the gate.”

We walked back; into the whitewashed door carved through the rock, up past doors that were like prison cells, and out into the hall with the death murals.

He said, “I meant to ask you about the school. There was a boy called Aphendakis, very promising. I coached him.”

We lingered a little in the loggia, beside the Peruginos, exchanging sentences about the school. I could see that he was not really interested, was merely making an effort to be pleasant; to humiliate his pride. But even in that he was self-conscious.

We shook hands.

He said, “This is a great European shrine. And we are told that our visitors—whatever their beliefs—should leave it feeling… I think the words are ‘refreshed and consoled.’” He paused as if I might want to object, to sneer, but I said nothing. “I must ask you once again to believe that I am silent for your sake as well as mine.”

“I’ll try to believe it.”

He gave a formal sort of bow, more Italian than English; and I went down the rock staircase to the path through the ilexes.

I had to wait till evening in Subiaco for a bus back. It ran through long green valleys, under hilltop villages, past aspens already yellowing into autumn. The sky turned through the softest blues to a vesperal amber-pink. Old peasants sat at their doorways; some of them had Greek faces, inscrutable, noble, at peace. I felt, perhaps because I had drunk almost a whole bottle of Verdicchio while I waited, that I belonged, and would forever belong, to an older world than Leverrier’s. I didn’t like him, or his religion. And this not liking him, this half-drunken love of the ancient, unchangeable Greco-Latin world seemed to merge. I was a pagan, at best a stoic, at worst a voluptuary, and would remain forever so.

Waiting for the train, I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo-blue hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten thousand Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realized that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem.

69

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a gray-blue sky; and I could hear people saying “Lovely day, isn’t it?” But all those tired greens, grays, browns… they seemed to compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks—how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face.

I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o’clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialed Ann Taylor’s number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited; the idea that Alison would be waiting for me. Some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour.

At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor’s flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions.

I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.

Footsteps.

A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.

I backed.

“Terribly sorry. Wrong flat.” I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, “It’s all right. Second floor.” I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.

I walked back to the pub, and later I went to an Italian restaurant Alison and myself had used to go to. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers’ staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was off-put, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.

I went and had one more look at the flat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.

The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The flat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July—ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.

“Must have been sharing,” said the clerk.

And that was that.

And what did I care? Why should I go on searching for her?

But I waited in all the evening after my visit to the estate agent, hoping for another message. The next day I moved to the Russell Hotel, so that I had only to stroll out of the entrance and look across the square to see the house, to wait for the windows on that black third floor to light. Four days passed, and no lights; no letters, no phone calls, not the smallest sign.

I grew impatient and frustrated, hamstrung by this inexplicable lapse in the action. I thought perhaps that they had lost me, they did not know where I was, and that worried me; then it angered me that I was worried.

The need to see Alison drowned everything else. To see her. To twist the secret out of her; and other things I could not name. A week passed, a week wasted in cinemas, theatres, in lying on my hotel bed and staring at the wall, waiting for that implacably silent telephone beside me to ring. I nearly sent a cable to Bourani with my address; but pride stopped that.

At last I gave in. I could stand the hotel and Russell Square, that eternally empty flat, no longer. I saw a place advertised on a tobacconist’s board. It was a scruffy attic “flat” over two floors of sewing rooms at the north end of Charlotte Street, on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road. It was expensive, but there was a telephone and, though the landlady lived in the basement, she was an unmistakable Charlotte Street bohemian of the 1930s vintage: sluttish, battered, chain-smoking. She managed to let me know within the first five minutes I was in the house that Dylan Thomas had once been “a close friend”—”God, the times I’ve had to put him to bed, poor sod.” I didn’t believe her. “Dylan slept (or slept it off) here” is to Charlotte Street rather what the similar claim about Queen Elizabeth used to be to the country inns of England. But I liked her—”My name’s Joan, everyone calls me Kemp.” Kemp’s intellect, like her pottery and paintings, was a mess; but her heart was in the right place.

“Okay,” she said at the door, after I’d agreed to take the rooms. “As long as I have your money. Bring in who you want when you want. The last boy was a ponce. An absolute sweetie. The bloody fascists got him last week.”

“Good Lord.”

She nodded. “Them.” I looked round, and saw two young policemen standing on the corner.

I also bought an old MG. The body was bad and the roof leaked, but the engine seemed to have a year or two of life left. I took Kemp out to Jack Straw’s Castle on a grand inaugural run. She drank like a trooper and talked like one, but in every other way she was what I wanted and what I needed: a warm heart and a compulsive gossip about herself, who accepted without suspicion my explanation of my joblessness; partly reconciled me, in her bitter-warm way, to London and being English; and—at least to begin with—stopped me from being, whenever I felt it, too morbidly abandoned and alone.

A long August passed, and I had fits of acute depression, fits of torpid indifference. I was like a fish in stale water, stifled by the grayness of England. Just as I looked back, Adam after the fall, to the luminous landscapes, the salt and thyme of Phraxos, I looked back to the events of Bourani, which could not have happened, but which had happened, and found myself, at the end of some tired London afternoon, as unable to wish that they had not happened as I was to forgive Conchis for having given me the part he did. Slowly I came to realize that my dilemma was in fact a sort of de facto forgiveness, a condonation of what had been done to me; even though, still too sore to accept that something active had taken place, I thought of “done” in a passive sense.

70

I thought in the same way of Lily. One day I nearly crashed, breaking hard at the glimpse of a girl with long blonde hair walking down a side street. I swerved the car into the curb and raced after her. Even before I saw the plain face I knew it was not Lily. But if I had rushed after the girl in the side street it was because I wanted to face Lily, to question her, to try to understand the ununderstandable; not because I longed for her. I could have longed for certain aspects of her, for certain phases—but it was that very phasality that made her impossible to love. So I could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one’s life, and yet still hate her for what she had done.

But I had to do something while I waited, while I absorbed the experience osmotically into my life. So throughout the latter half of August I pursued the trail of Conchis and Lily in England; and through them, of Alison.

It kept me, however tenuously and vicariously, in the masque; and it dulled my agonizing longing to see Alison. Agonizing because a new feeling had seeded and was growing inside me, a feeling I wanted to eradicate and couldn’t, not least because I knew the seed of it had been planted by Conchis and was germinating in this deliberate silence and absence he had surrounded me with; a feeling that haunted me as the embryo grows in the reluctant mother’s womb, sweeping her day and night, that I despised, disproved, dismissed, and still it grew, with rage, then in green moments melting her with… but I couldn’t say the word.

And for a time it lay buried under inquiries, conjectures, letters.

The newspaper cuttings. Different type from that of the Holborn Gazette, where the inquest report would have appeared; and did not appear.

Foulkes pamphlet. Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis’s are not.

Theatre costumier’s. I tried Berman’s and one or two others, without the least success.

Earthquakes. There were earthquakes in 1884 and 1892 in the Ionian Islands. In a tragic way that part of Conchis’s story was confirmed just before I began my research. On August 9, 1953, 450 people died in the Ionian disaster.

Military history. Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones.

De Deukans. No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at.

The fire at Givray-le-Duc on August 17, 1922. Unreported in The Times and the Telegraph. Perhaps not surprisingly, as I found Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider Theridion deukansii: doesn’t exist, though there is a genus Theridion.

Seidevarre. Letter from Johan Fredriksen.

Lily’s mother. I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find either an Ansty Cottage or a Silver Street. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I’d once known two girls from Cerne Abbas—twins, very pretty, but I’d forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried—she knew everyone in the village and couldn’t think who it could have been. The “headmaster” at the primary school: in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters had been intercepted on Phraxos; and a reply sent to England for posting.

Charles-Victor Bruneau. Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Conchis.

Conchis’s costume at the “trial.” On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and passed an antique shop on my way to the hotel. Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them was a man dressed exactly as Conchis had been; even to the same emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words Le Sorcier—the sorcerer. The shop was shut, but I took its address and later they sold me the card by post; a “nice eighteenth-century card.”

It gave me a sharp shock when I first saw it—I looked round, as if it had been planted there for me to notice; as if I was being watched.

The “psychologists” at the trial. I tried the Tavistock Clinic and the American Embassy. All the names totally unknown, though some of the institutes exist.

Nevinson. This was the man whose Oxford college was in a book in the school library. The Bursar’s Office at Balliol sent me an address in Japan. I wrote him a letter. Two weeks later I had a reply.

Faculty of English,

Osaka University

The incident on the ridge. When the kapetan called me prodotis (traitor). Of course they knew one day I would know what treachery they meant.

Wimmel. In late August, a piece of luck. One of my teeth began to hurt and Kemp sent me to her dentist to have it seen to. While I was in the waiting room I picked up an old film magazine of the previous January. Halfway through I came on a picture of “Wimmel.” He was even dressed in Nazi uniform. Underneath there was a caption paragraph. Ignaz Pruszynski, who plays the fiendish Town Commandant in Poland’s much praised film of the Resistance, Black Ordeal, in real life played a very different role. He led a Polish underground group all through the Occupation, and was awarded the Polish equivalent of our own Victoria Cross.

Hypnotism. I read a couple of books on this. Conchis had evidently learnt the technique professionally. It was “virtually impossible” to get the person hypnotized to do acts that “run deeply counter to his moral beliefs.” But post-hypnotic suggestion, implanting commands that are carried out on a given signal after the subject has been woken from the hypnotic state and is in all other ways back to normal, was “perfectly feasible and frequently demonstrated.”

Raising both arms above the head. Conchis got this from ancient Egypt. It was the Ka sign, used by initiates “to gain possession of the cosmic forces of mystery.” In many tomb paintings. It meant: “I am master of the spells. Strength is mine. I impart strength.”

The wheel symbol. “The mandala, or wheel, is a universal symbol of existence.

The ribbon on my leg, the bare shoulder. From masonic ritual, but believed to descend from the Eleusinian mysteries. Associated with initiation.

Maria. Probably really was a peasant, though an intelligent one. She spoke only two or three words of French to me; sat silent all through the trial, rather conspicuously out of place. Unlike the others, she was what she first seemed.

Lily’s bank. I wrote another letter, and got back a reply from the manager of the real Barclay’s branch. His name was not P. J. Fearn; and the headed paper he wrote on was not like that I had received.

Her school. Julie Holmes—unknown.

Mitford. I wrote a card to the address in Northumberland I had had the year before and received a letter back from his mother. She said Alexander was now a courier, working in Spain. I got in touch with the travel firm he was working for, but they said he wouldn’t be back till September. I left a letter for him.

The paintings at Bourani. I started with the Bonnards. The first book of reproductions of his work I opened had the picture of the girl drying by the window. I turned to the attributions list at the back. It was in the Los Angeles County Museum. The book had been printed m 1950. Later I “found” the other Bonnard; at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Both had been copies. The Modigliani I never traced; but I suspect, remembering those curiously Conchis-like eyes, that it was not even a copy.

Evening Standard of January 8, 1952. No sign of a photo of Lily and Rose, in any edition.

L’Astrée. Did Conchis remember that I believed myself remotely connected with d’Urfé? The story of L’Astrée is: The shepherdess Astrée, hearing evil reports of the shepherd Celadon, banishes him from her presence. A war breaks out, and Astrée is taken prisoner. Celadon manages to rescue her, but she will not forgive him. He does not gain her hand until he has turned the lion and unicorns who devour unfaithful lovers into statues of stone.

Chaliapin. Was at Covent Garden in June, 1914, and in Prince Igor.

“You may be elect.” When he said that, at our first strange meeting, he meant simply, “I’ve decided to use you.” That was also the only sense in which, at the end, I could be elect. He meant, “We have used you.”

Lily and Rose. Two twin sisters, both very pretty, gifted (though I came to doubt Lily’s classical education), must, if they had been up at Oxford or Cambridge, have been the double Zuleika Dobsons of their years. I could not believe that they had been at Oxford—since our years must have overlapped—but on the principle that Lily never told me the truth if she could possibly mislead me, I tried it first. I concocted a story about my being a scout for an American film producer who needed a pair of fair-haired English twins and “had heard” of two at Oxford. It wasn’t a very good story and it involved me in some ludicrous improvising—which incidentally made me realize in retrospect how great had been Lily’s skill in that art. I tried the magazines, I tried the OUDS and the ETC, I even braved several of the women’s college bursaries; and got nowhere. I went to Cambridge and did the same thing; and got nowhere; least of all at Girton. Of course I realize that because they were twin sisters there was no reason why they should have gone to the same university. But at both Cambridge and Oxford I was shown stills from all the main undergraduate productions of the last few years—and no Lily-Rose face in any of them.

Armed with a slightly less implausible story—my rich American producer had become an eccentric rich American producer—I went round a few London theatrical agencies. Several of them had pairs of twins on their books, even blonde (or platinum blonde) twins; but not Lily or Rose.

The Tavistock Repertory: a total blank. No productions of Lysistrata. The agent’s name: unknown.

I tried RADA; with similar unsuccess.

One cunning device in the “Julie Holmes” invention: we tend to believe people who have had the same experiences as ourselves; who mirror us. So her naval commander father equaled my brigadier father; her Cambridge, my Oxford; her unhappy love affaire, mine; her year’s teaching, mine.

Her being “interfered with” was an irony, obviously; or perhaps an echo of Artemis’s mythical fear of the pains of childbirth. But perhaps she told me this to make it easier for me to confess in return. Looks she gave me: as if she was waiting for something. And if I had spoken… ?

And:

Polymus Films. I didn’t see the obvious, that one misplaced letter, until painfully late.

The famous whore Io. Lemprière: “In the ancient Gothic Io and Gio signified earth, as Isi or Isa signified ‘ice’ or water in its primordial state; and both were equally titles of the goddess, who represented the productive and nutritive power of the earth.” Indian Kali, Syrian Astarte (Ashtaroth), Egyptian Isis and Greek Io were considered one and the same goddess. She had three colors (on the walls in the trial): white, red, and black, the phases of the moon, and also the phases of woman: virgin, mother, and crone. Lily was evidently the goddess in her white, virgin phase; and perhaps in the black, as well. Rose would have stood for the red phase; but then Alison was given that role.

Tartarus. The more I read, the more I began to reidentify the whole situation at Bourani—or at any rate the final situation—with Tartarus. Tartarus was ruled by a king, Hades (or Conchis); a Queen, Persephone, bringer of destruction (Lily)—who remained “six months with Hades in the infernal regions and spent the rest of the year with her mother Demeter on earth.” There was also a supreme judge in Tartarus—Minos (the presiding “doctor” with a beard?); and of course there was Anubis-Cerberus, the black dog with three heads (three roles?). And Tartarus was where Eurydice went when Orpheus lost her.

I was aware that in all this I was acting the role I had decided not to act: that of detective, of hunter, and several times I abandoned the chase.

But then one, and one of the apparently least promising, of my hits of research bore spectacular results.

71

It began, one Monday, with a very long shot, the assumption that Conchis had lived in St. John’s Wood as a boy and that there had indeed been an original Lily Montgomery. I went to Marylebone Central Library and asked to look at the street directories for 1912 to 1914. Of course the name Conchis would not appear; I looked for Montgomery. Acacia Road, Prince Albert Road, Henstridge Place, Queen’s Grove… with an A to Z of London by my side I worked through all the likely streets on the east of Wellington Road. Suddenly, with a shock of excitement, my eyes jumped a page. Montgomery, Fredk, 20 Allitsen Road.

The neighbors’ names were given as Smith and Manningham, although by 1914 the latter had moved and the name Huckstepp appeared. I wrote down the address, and then went on searching. Almost at once, on the other side of the main artery, I came across another Montgomery; this time in Elm Tree Road. But I no sooner caught sight of it than I was disappointed, because the full name was given as Sir Charles Penn Montgomery; an eminent surgeon, by the look of the trail of initials after his name; and obviously not the man Conchis described. The neighbors’ names there were Hamilton-Dukes and Charlesworth. There was another title among the Elm Tree Road residents; a “desirable” address.

I searched on, double-checking everything, but without finding any other Montgomery.

I then followed up in later directories the two I had found. The Allitsen Road Montgomery disappeared in 1920. Annoyingly the Elm Tree Road Montgomery went on much longer, though Sir Charles must have died in 1922; after that the owner’s name appeared as Lady Florence Montgomery, and continued so right up to 1938.

After lunch I drove up to Allitsen Road. As I swung into it, I knew it was no good. The houses were small terrace houses, nothing like the “mansions” Conchis had described.

Five minutes later I was in Elm Tree Road. At least it looked more the part: a pretty circumflex of mixed largish houses and early Victorian mews and cottages. It also looked encouragingly unaltered. No. 46 turned out to be one of the largest houses in the road. I parked my car and walked up a drive between banks of dead hydrangeas to a neo-Georgian front door; rang a bell.

But it sounded in an empty house, and sounded so all through August. Whoever lived there was on holiday. I found out his name in that year’s directory—a Mr. Simon Marks. I also found out from an old Who’s Who that the illustrious Sir Charles Penn Montgomery had had three daughters. I could probably have found out their names, but I had by then become anxious to drag my investigations out, as a child his last few sweets. It was almost a disappointment when, one day early in September, I saw a car parked in the driveway, and knew that another faint hope was about to be extinguished.

The bell was answered by an Italian in a white housecoat.

“I wonder if I could speak to the owner? Or his wife.”

“You have appointment?”

“No.”

“You sell something?”

I was rescued by a sharp voice.

“Who is it, Ercole?”

She appeared, a woman of sixty, a Jewess, expensively dressed, intelligent-looking.

“Oh, I’m engaged on some research and I’m trying to trace a family called Montgomery.”

“Sir Charles Penn? The surgeon?”

“I believed he lived here.”

“Yes, he lived here.” The houseboy waited, and she waved him away in a grande-dame manner; part of the wave came my way.

“In fact… this is rather difficult to explain… I’m really looking for a Miss Lily Montgomery.”

“Yes. I know her.” She was evidently not amused by the astonished smile that broke over my face. “You wish to see her?”

“I’m writing a monograph on a famous Greek writer—famous in Greece, that is, and I believe Miss Montgomery knew him well many years ago when he lived in England.”

“What is his name?”

“Maurice Conchis.” She had clearly never heard of him.

The lure of the search overcame a little of her distrust, and she said, “I will find you the address. Come in.”

I waited in the splendid hall. An ostentation of marble and ormolu; pier glasses; what looked like a Fragonard. Petrified opulence, tense excitement. In a minute she reappeared with a card. On it I read: Mrs. Lily de Seitas, Dinsford House, Much Hadham, Herts.

“I haven’t seen her for several years,” said the lady.

“Thank you very much.” I began backing towards the door.

“Would you like tea? A drink?”

There was something glistening, obscurely rapacious, about her eyes, as if while she had been away she’d decided that there might be a pleasure to suck from me. A mantis woman; starved in her luxury. I was glad to escape.

Before I drove off I looked once more at the substantial houses on either side of No. 46. In one of them Conchis must have spent his youth. Behind No. 46 was what looked like a factory, though I had discovered from the A to Z that it was the back of the stands of Lord’s cricket ground. The gardens were hidden because of the high walls, but the “little orchard” must now be dwarfed by the stands overhead, though very probably they had not been built before the First War.

The next morning at eleven I was in Much Hadham. It was a very fine day, cloudless September blue; a day to compare with a Greek day. Dinsford House lay some way out of the village, and although it was not quite so grand as it sounded, it was no hovel; a five-bay period house, posed graciously and gracefully, brick-red and white, in an acre or so of well-kept grounds. This time the door was opened by a Scandinavian au pair girl. Yes, Mrs. de Seitas was in—she was down at the stables, if I’d go round the side.

I walked over the gravel and under a brick arch. There were two garages, and a little further down I could see and smell stables. A small boy appeared from a door holding a bucket. He saw me and called, “Mummy! There’s a man.” A slim woman in jodhpurs, a red headscarf and a red tartan shirt came out of the same door. She seemed to be in her early forties; a still-pretty, erect woman with an open-air complexion.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m actually looking for Mrs. de Seitas.”

“I am Mrs. de Seitas.”

I had it so fixed in my mind that she would be gray-haired, Conchis’s age. Closer to her, I could see crows-feet and a slight but telltale flabbiness round the neck; the still-brown hair was probably dyed. She might be nearer fifty than forty; but that made her still ten years too young.

“Mrs. Lily de Seitas?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got your address from Mrs. Simon Marks.” A minute change in her expression told me that I had not recommended myself. “I’ve come to ask you if you would help on a matter of literary research.”

“Me!”

“If you were once Miss Lily Montgomery.”

“But my father—”

“It’s not about your father.” A pony whinnied inside the stable. The little boy stared at me hostilely; his mother urged him away, to go and fill his bucket. I put on all my Oxford charm. “If it’s terribly inconvenient, of course I’ll come back another time.”

“We’re only mucking out.” She leant the besom she was carrying against the wall. “But who?”

“I’m writing a study of—Maurice Conchis?”

I watched her like a hawk; but I was over a bare field.

“Maurice who?”

“Conchis.” I spelt it. “He’s a famous Greek writer. He lived in this country when he was young.”

She brushed back a strand of hair rather gauchely with her gloved hand; she was, I could see, one of those country Englishwomen who are abysmally innocent about everything except horses, homes and children. “Honestly, I’m awfully sorry, but there must be some mistake.”

“You may have known him under the name of… Charlesworth? Or Hamilton-Dukes? A long time ago. The First World War.”

“But my dear man—I’m sorry, not my dear man… oh dear—” she broke off rather charmingly. I saw a lifetime of dropped bricks behind her; but her tanned skin and her clear bluish eyes, and the body that had conspicuously not run to seed, made her forgivable. She said, “What is your name?”

I told her.

“Mr. Urfe, do you know how old I was in 1914?”

“Obviously very young indeed.” She smiled, but as if compliments were rather continental and embarrassing.

“I was ten.” She looked to where her son was filling the bucket. “Benjie’s age.”

“Those other names—they mean nothing?”

“Good Lord yes, but… this Maurice—what did you call him?—he stayed with them?”

I shook my head. Once again Conchis had tricked me into a ridiculous situation. He had probably picked the name with a pin in an old directory: all he would have had to find was the name of one of the daughters. I plunged insecurely on.

“He was the son. An only son. Very musical.”

“Well, I’m afraid there must be a mistake. The Charlesworths were childless, and there was a Hamilton-Dukes boy but—” I saw her hesitate as something snagged her memory—”he died in the war.”

I smiled. “I think you’ve just remembered something else.”

“No—I mean, yes. I don’t know. It was when you said musical.” She looked incredulous. “You couldn’t mean Mr. Rat?” She laughed, and put her thumbs in the pockets of her jodhpurs. “The Wind in the Willows. He was an Italian who came and tried to teach us the piano. My sister and me.”

“Young?”

She shrugged. “Quite.”

“Could you tell me more about him?”

She looked down. “Gambellino, Gambardello… something like that. Gambardello?” She said the name as if it was still a joke.

“His first name?”

She couldn’t possibly remember.

“Why Mr. Rat?”

“Because he had such staring brown eyes. We used to tease him terribly.” She pulled an ashamed face at her son, who had come back, and now pushed her, as if he was the one being teased. She missed the sudden leap of excitement in my own eyes; the certainty that Conchis had used more than a pin.

“Was he shortish? Shorter than me?”

She clasped her headscarf, trying to remember; then looking up, puzzled. “Do you know… but this can’t be… ?”

“Would you be very kind indeed and let me question you for ten minutes or so?”

She hesitated. I was politely adamant; just ten minutes. She turned to her son. “Benjie, run and ask Gunnel to make us some coffee. And bring it out in the garden.”

He looked at the stable. “But Lazy.”

“We’ll do for Lazy in a minute.”

Benjie ran up the gravel and I followed Mrs. de Seitas, as she peeled off her gloves, flicked off her headscarf, a willowy walk, down beside a brick wall and through a doorway into a fine old garden; a lake of autumn flowers; on the far side of the house a lawn and a cedar. She led the way round to a sun loggia. There was a canopied swing-seat, some elegant cast-iron seats painted white. Money; I guessed that Sir Charles Penn had had a golden scalpel. She sat in the swing-seat and indicated a chair for me. I murmured something about the garden.

“It is rather jolly, isn’t it? My husband does almost all this by himself and now, poor man, he hardly ever sees it.” She smiled. “My husband’s an economist. He’s stuck in Strasbourg.” She swung her feet up; she was a little too girlish, too aware of her good figure; reacting from a rural boredom. “But come on. Tell me about your famous writer I’ve never heard of. You’ve met him?”

“He died in the Occupation.”

“Poor man. What of?”

“Cancer.” I hurried on. “He was, well, very secretive about his past, so one has to deduce things from his work. We know that he was Greek, but he may have pretended to be Italian.” I jumped up and gave her a light for her cigarette.

“I just can’t believe it was Mr. Rat. He was such a funny little man.”

“Can you remember one thing—his playing the harpsichord as well as the piano?”

“The harpsichord is the plonkety-plonk one?” I nodded, but she shook her head. “You did say a writer?”

“He turned from music to literature. You see, there are countless references in his early poems—and in, well, a novel he wrote—to an unhappy but very significant love affaire he had when he was still in England. Of course we just don’t know to what extent he was recalling reality and to what extent embroidering on it.”

“But—am I mentioned?”

“There are all sorts of clues that suggest the girl’s name was a flower name. And that he lived near her. And that the common bond was music…”

She sat up, fascinated.

“How on earth did you trace this to us?”

“Oh—various clues. From literary references. I knew it was very near Lord’s cricket ground. In one… passage he talks of this girl with her ancient British family name. Oh, and her famous doctor father. Then I started looking at street directories.”

“How absolutely extraordinary.”

“It’s just one of those things. You meet hundreds of dead ends. But one day you really hit a way through.”

Smiling, she glanced towards the house. “Here’s Gunnel.” For two or three minutes we had to go through the business of getting coffee poured; polite exchanges about Norway—Gunnel had never been further north than Trondheim, I discovered. Benjie was ordered to disappear; and the ur-Lily and I were left alone again.

For effect, I produced a notebook.

“If I could just ask you a few questions…”

“I say—glory at last.” She laughed rather stupidly; horsily; she was enjoying herself.

“I believed he lived next to you. He didn’t. Where did he live?”

“Oh I haven’t the faintest idea. You know. At that age.”

“You knew nothing about his parents?” She shook her head. “Would your sisters perhaps know more?”

Her face gravened.

“My eldest sister lives in Chile. She was ten years older than me. And my sister Rose—”

“Rose!”

She smiled. “Rose.”

“God, this is extraordinary. It clinches it. There’s a sort of… well a sort of mystery poem that belongs to the group about you. It’s very obscure, but now we know you have a sister called Rose…”

“Had a sister. Rose died just about that time. In 1916.”

“Of typhoid?”

I said it so eagerly that she was taken aback; then smiled. “No. Of some terribly rare complication following jaundice.” She stared out over the garden for a moment. “It was the great tragedy of my childhood.”

“Did you feel that he had any special affection for you—or for your sisters?”

She smiled again, remembering. “We always thought he secretly admired May—my eldest sister—she was engaged, of course, but she used to come and sit with us. And yes… oh goodness, it’s strange, it does come back, I remember he always used to show off, what we called showing off, if she was in the room. Play frightfully difficult bits. And she was fond of that Beethoven thing—For Elise? We used to hum it when we wanted to annoy him.”

“Your sister Rose was older than you?”

“Two years older.”

“So the picture is really of two little girls teasing a foreign music teacher?”

She began to swing on the seat. “Do you know, it’s frightful, but I can’t remember. I mean, yes, we teased him, I’m jolly sure we were perfect little pests. But then the war started and he disappeared.”

“Where?”

“Oh. I couldn’t tell you. No idea. But I remember we had a dreadful old hattie-axe in his place. And we hated her. I’m sure we missed him. I suppose we were frightful little snobs. One was in those days.”

“How long did he teach you?”

“Two years?” She was almost asking me.

“Can you remember any sign at all of strong personal liking—for you—on his side?”

She thought for a long moment, then shook her head. “You don’t mean… something nasty?”

“No, no. But were you, say, ever alone with him?”

She put on an expression of mock shock. “Never. There was always our governess, or my sister. My mother.”

“You couldn’t describe his character at all?”

“I’m sure if I could meet him now I’d think, a sweet little man. You know.”

“You or your sister never played the flute or the recorder?”

“Goodness no.” She grinned at the absurdity.

“A very personal question. Would you say you were a strikingly pretty little girl… I’m sure you were—but were you conscious that there was something rather special about you?”

She looked down at her cigarette. “In the interests, oh dear, how shall I say it, in the interests of your research, and speaking as a poor old raddled mother, the answer is… yes, I believe there was. Actually, I was painted. It became quite famous. All the rage of the 1913 Academy. It’s in the house—I’ll show you in a minute.”

I consulted my notebook. “And you just can’t remember what happened to him when the war came?”

She pressed her fine hands against her eyes. “Heavens, doesn’t this make you realize—I think he was interned… but honestly for the life of me I…”

“Would your sister in Chile remember better? Might I write to her?”

“Of course. Would you like her address?” She gave it to me and I wrote it down.

Benjie came and stood about twenty yards away, by an astrolabe on a stone column, looking plainer than words that his patience was exhausted. She beckoned to him; caressed back his forelock.

“Your poor old mum’s just had a shock, darling. She’s discovered she’s a muse.” She turned to me. “Is that the word?”

“What’s a muse?”

“A lady who makes a gentleman write poems.”

“Does he write poems?”

She laughed and turned back to me. “And he’s really quite famous?”

“I think he will be one day.”

“Can I read him?”

“He’s not been translated. But he will be.”

“By you?”

“Well…” I let her think I had hopes.

She said, “I honestly don’t think I can tell you any more.” Benjie whispered something. She laughed and stood up in the sunlight and took his hand. “We’re just going to show Mr. Orfe a picture, then it’s back to work.”

“It’s Urfe, actually.”

She put her hand to her face, in shame. “Oh dear. There I go again.” The boy jerked her other hand; he too was ashamed of her silliness.

We all walked up to the house, through a drawing room into a wide hall and then into a room at the side. I saw a long dining table, silver candlesticks. On the paneling between two windows was a painting. Benjie ran and switched on a picture light above it. It showed a little Alice-like girl with long hair, in a sailor dress, looking round a door, as if she was hiding and could see whoever was looking for her searching in vain. Her face was very alive, tense, excited, yet still innocent. In gilt on a small black plaque beneath I read: Mischief, by Sir William Blunt, R.A.

“Charming.”

Benjie made his mother bend down and whispered something.

“He wants to tell you what the family calls it.”

She nodded at him and he shouted, “How Soppy Can You Get.” She pulled his hair as he grinned.

Another charming picture.

She apologized for not being able to invite me to lunch, but she had a “Women’s Institute do” in Hertford; and I promised that as soon as a translation of the Conchis poems was ready I would send her a copy.

Driving back down the lane to Much Hadham, I laughed. I might have guessed that Conchis was compensating for some deep feeling of inferiority towards her and her sisters, towards his own youth, towards England and the English; just as I ought to have had more confidence in my inevitably arriving, one day, at the real truth about him. In a sense I, and all the others who had been through the “system” at Bourani, must represent his revenge for all the humiliations and unhappiness he had suffered in the Montgomery household, and probably others like them, during those distant years.

I came out into the main street. It was half-past twelve and I decided to get a bite to eat before I did the drive back into London. So I stopped at a small half-timbered pub. I had the lounge bar all to myself.

“Passing through?” asked the landlord, as he drew me a pint.

“No. Been to see someone. Dinsford House.”

“Nice place she’s got there.”

“You know them?”

He wore a bow tie; had a queasy in-between accent.

“Know of them. I’ll take the sandwiches separate.” He rang up the till. “Used to see the children round the village.”

“I’ve just been out there on business.”

“Oh yes.”

A peroxided woman’s head appeared round the door. She held out a plate of sandwiches. As he handed me back my change, he said, “Singer in opera, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s what they say round here.”

I waited for him to go on, but he evidently wasn’t very interested. I finished half a sandwich. Thought.

“What’s her husband do?”

“Isn’t a husband.” He caught up my quick look. “Well we been here two years now and I never heard of one. There’re… gentlemen friends, I’m told.” He gave me a minute wink.

“Ah. I see.”

“Course they’re like me. London people.” There was a silence. He picked up a glass. “Good-looking woman. Never seen her daughters?” I shook my head. He polished the glass. “Real corkers.” Silence.

“How old are they?”

“Don’t ask me. I can’t tell twenty from thirty these days. The eldest are twins, you know.” If he hadn’t been so busy polishing the glass in the old buy-me-a-drink ploy he would have seen my face freeze into stone. “What they call identicals. Some are normals. And others are identicals.” He held the glass up high to the light. “They say the only way their own mother can tell them apart one’s got a scar or something on her wrist.”

I was out of the bar so fast that he didn’t even have time to shout.

72

I didn’t feel angry at first; I drove very fast, and nearly killed a man on a bicycle, but I was grinning most of the way. This time I didn’t park my car discreetly by the gate. I skidded it on the gravel in front of the black door; and I made the lion-headed knocker give the hardest banging it had sounded in years.

Mrs. de Seitas herself answered the door; she had changed, but only from her jodhpurs into a pair of pale fawn trousers. She looked past me at my car, as if that might explain why I had returned. I smiled.

“I see you’re not going out for lunch after all.”

“Yes, I made a stupid mistake over the day.” She gathered her shirt collar together. “Did you forget something?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” I said nothing and she went on brightly but a fraction too late, “What?”

“Your twin daughters.”

Her expression changed; she didn’t appear in the least guilty, but she gave me a look of concession and then the faintest smile. I wondered how I had not seen the similarity; the eyes, the long mouth. I had let that spurious snapshot Lily had shown me linger in my mind. A silly woman with fluffed-up hair. She stepped back for me to enter.

“Yes. You did.”

Benjie appeared at a door at the end of the hall. She spoke calmly to him as she closed the door behind me.

“Benjie, go and have your lunch.”

“Benjie.” I went quickly and bent a little in front of him. “Benjie, could you tell me something? The names of your twin sisters?”

He frowned and looked at his mother. She must have nodded.

“Lil’ and Rose.”

“Thank you.”

He gave me one last doubtful look, and disappeared. I turned to Lily de Seitas.

She said, as she moved self-possessedly towards the drawing room, “We called them that to placate my mother. She was a hungry goddess.” Her manner had changed with her clothes; and a vague former disparity between her vocabulary and her looks was accounted for. It was suddenly credible that she was fifty; and incredible that I had thought her rather unintelligent. I followed her into the room.

“I’m interrupting your lunch.”

She gave me a dry backwards look. “I’ve been expecting an interruption for several weeks now.”

She sat in an armchair and gestured for me to sit on the huge sofa in the center of the room, but I shook my head. She glanced at a silver tray of drinks by the wall; I shook my head again. She was not nervous; even smiled.

“Well?”

“We start from the fact that you have two enterprising daughters. Let me hear you re-invent from there.”

“I’m afraid my invention’s at an end. I can only fall back on the truth now.” But she was still smiling as she said it; smiling at my not smiling. “Maurice is the twins’ godfather.”

“You do know who I am?” It was her calmness; I could not believe she knew what they had done at Bourani.

“Yes, Mr. Urfe. I know exactly who you are.” Her cool eyes warned me; and annoyed me.

“And what happened?”

“And what happened.” She looked down at her hands, then back at me. “My husband was killed in 1945. In the Far East. He never saw Benjie.” She saw the impatience on my face and checked it. “He was also the first English master at the Lord Byron School.”

“Oh no he wasn’t. I’ve looked up all the old prospectuses.”

“Then you remember the name Hughes.”

“Yes.”

She crossed her legs. She sat in an old wingchair covered in pale gold brocade; very erectly. All her “county” horsiness had disappeared.

“I wish you’d sit down.”

“No thank you.”

She accepted my bleakness with a little shrug, and looked me in the eyes; a shrewd, unabashed and even haughty stare. Then she began to speak.

“My father died when I was eighteen. Mainly to escape from home I made a disastrous—a very stupid—marriage. Then in 1929 I met my second husband. My first husband divorced me. We married. We wanted to be out of England for a time and we hadn’t much money. He applied for a teaching post in Greece. He was a classical scholar… loved Greece. We met Maurice. Lily and Rose were conceived on Phraxos. In a house that Maurice lent us to live in.”

“I don’t believe a word. But go on.”

“I funked having twins in Greece and we had to come back to England.” She took a cigarette from a silver box on the tripod table beside her. I refused her offer of one; and let her light her cigarette herself. She was very calm; in her own house; mistress. “My mother’s maiden name was de Seitas.” She appraised me; her daughter’s look. “You can confirm that at Somerset House. She had a bachelor brother, my uncle, who was very well off and who treated me—especially after my father’s death—as much as a daughter as my mother would allow him to. She was a very domineering woman.”

“You’re saying now that you never met… Maurice before 1930?”

She smiled. “Of course not. But I supplied him with all the details of that part of his story to you.”

“And a sister called Rose?”

“Go to Somerset House.”

“I shall.”

She contemplated the tip of her cigarette; made me wait a moment.

“The twins arrived. A year later my uncle died. We found he had left me nearly all his money on condition that Bill changed his name by deed-poll to de Seitas. Not even de Seitas-Hughes. My mother was mainly responsible for that meanness.” She looked at the group of miniatures that hung beside her, beside the mantelpiece. “My uncle was the last male of the de Seitas family. My husband changed his name to mine. In the Japanese style. You can confirm that as well.” She added, “That is all.”

“It’s very far from all. My God.”

“May I, as I know so much about you, call you Nicholas?”

“No.”

She looked down, once again with that infuriating small smile that haunted all their faces—her daughters’, Conchis’s, even Anton’s and Maria’s in their different ways, as if they had all been trained to give the same superior, enigmatic smiles; as perhaps they had. And I suspected that if anyone had done the training, it would be this woman.

“You mustn’t think that you are the first young man who has stood before me bitter and angry with Maurice. With all of us who help him. Though you are the first to reject the offer of friendship I made just now.”

“I have some ugly questions to ask.”

“Ask.”

“Some others first. Why are you known in the village as an opera singer?”

She paused before answering, as if warning me not to interrogate too roughly. I sensed formidable powers of snubbing.

“I’ve sung once or twice in local concerts. I was trained.”

“‘The harpsichord is the plonkety-plonic one’?”

“It is rather, isn’t it?”

I turned my back on her; on her gentleness; her weaponed ladyhood.

“My dear Mrs. de Seitas, no amount of charm, no amount of intelligence, no amount of playing with words can get you out of this one.”

She left a long pause. “It is you who make our situation. You must have been told that. You come here telling me lies. You come here for all the wrong reasons. I tell you lies back. I give you wrong reasons back.”

“Are your daughters here?”

“No.”

I turned to face her. “Alison?”

“Alison and I are very good friends.”

“Where is she?”

She shook her head; no answer.

“I demand to know where she is.”

“In my house no one ever demands.” Her face was bland, but as intent on mine as a chessplayer’s on the game.

“Very well. We’ll see what the police think about that.”

“I can tell you now. They will think you very foolish.”

I turned away again, to try to get her to say more. But she sat in the chair and I felt her eyes on my back. I knew she was sitting there, in her corn-gold chair, and that she was like Demeter, Ceres, a goddess on her throne; not simply a clever woman of nearly fifty, in 1953, in a room with a tractor droning somewhere nearby in the fields; but playing a role so deep-rooted in fidelity to concepts I did not understand, to people I did not like, that it had almost ceased to be a role.

She stood up and went to a bureau in the corner and came back with some photos, which she laid out on a table behind the sofa. Then she went back to her chair; invited me to look at them. There was one of her sitting on the swing-seat in front of the loggia. At the other end sat Conchis; between them was Benjie. Another photo showed Lily and Rose. Lily was smiling into the camera, and Rose, in profile, as if passing behind her, was laughing. Once again I could see the loggia in the background. The next photo was an old one. I recognized Bourani. There were five people standing on the steps in front of the house. Conchis was in the middle, a pretty woman beside him was obviously Lily de Seitas. Beside her, his arm round her, was a tall man. I looked on the back; Bourani, 1935.

“Who are the other two?”

“One was a friend. And the other was a predecessor of yours.”

“Geoffrey Sugden?” She nodded, but with a touch of surprise. I put the photo down; decided to have a small revenge. “I traced one prewar master at the school. He told me quite a lot.”

“Oh?” A shadow of doubt in her calm voice.

“So do let’s stick to the truth.”

There was an awkward moment’s silence; her eyes on me. “Was he… still bitter?”

“Yes. Very.”

We stared at each other. Then she stood up again and went to the desk. She took a letter out and detached a bottom sheet; checked it, then came and handed it to me. It was a carbon copy of Nevinson’s letter to me. On the top he had scrawled: “Hope this dust does not cause any permanent harm to the recipient’s eyes!” She had turned away and was looking along some bookshelves beside the desk, but now she came back, with a wide-eyed look, half of warning, half of reproach, and silently handed me the books in exchange for the letter. I swallowed a sarcasm and looked at the top book—a school textbook, clothbound in blue. An Intermediate Greek Anthology for Schools, compiled and annotated by William Hughes, M.A. (Cantab.), 1932.

“He did that as hackwork—for bread. The other two he did for love.”

One was a limited edition of a translation of Longus, dated 1936.

“1936. Still Hughes?”

“An author can use whatever name he likes.”

The other book was an edition of translations from the poems of Palamas, Solomos, and other modern Greek poets; even some by Seferis.

“Maurice Conchis, the famous poet.” I looked sourly up. “Brilliant choice on my part.”

She took the books and put them on the table. “I thought you did it very intelligently.”

“Even though I’m a very foolish young man.”

“Silliness and intelligence are not incompatible. Especially in your sex and at your age.”

She went and sat in her wingchair again, and smiled again at my unsmiling face; an insidiously warm, friendly smile from an intelligent, balanced woman. But how could she be balanced? I went to the window. Sunlight touched my hands. I could see Benjie and the Norwegian girl playing catch down by the loggia. Every so often their cries reached back to us.

“Supposing I’d believed your story about Mr. Rat?”

“I should have remembered something very interesting about him.”

“And?”

“You would have come out again to hear it.”

“Supposing I’d never traced you in the first place?”

“A Mrs. Hughes would in due course have asked you to lunch.”

“Just like that?”

“Of course not. She would have written a letter.” She sat back, closed her eyes. “My dear Mr. Urfe, I must explain that I have obtained your name from the British Council. My husband, who was the first English master at the Lord Byron School, died recently and among his private papers we have come across an account, hitherto unknown to me, of a remarkable experience that…” she opened her eyes and raised her eyebrows interrogatively.

“And when would this call have come? How much longer?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

“Won’t tell me.”

“No. It is not for me to decide.”

“Look, there’s just one person who has to do the deciding. If she—”

“Precisely.”

She reached up to the mantelpiece beside her and took a photo out from behind an ornament there; handed it to me.

“It’s not very good. Benjie took it with his Brownie.”

It was of three women on horseback. One was Lily de Seitas. The second was Gunnel. The third, in the middle, was Alison. She looked insecure, and was laughing down into the camera.

“Has she met… your daughters?”

Her blue-gray eyes stared up at me. “Please keep that. I had it made for you.”

I flung my will against hers.

“Where is she?”

“You may search the house.”

She watched me, chin on hand, in the yellow chair; unnettled; in possession. Of what, I didn’t know; but in possession. I felt like a green young dog in pursuit of a cunning old hare; every time I leapt, I bit brown air. I looked at the photo of Alison, then tore it in four and threw it into an ashtray on a console table by the window. Silence, which eventually she broke.

“My poor resentful young man, let me tell you something. Love may really be more a capacity for love in oneself than anything very lovable in the other person. I believe Alison has a very rare capacity for attachment and devotion. Far more than I have ever had. I think it is very precious. And all I have done is to persuade her that she must not underestimate, as I believe she has all her life till now, what she has to give.”

“How kind.”

She sighed. “Sarcasm again.”

“Well what do you expect? Tears of remorse?”

“Sarcasm is so ugly. And so revealing.”

There was silence. After a time, she went on.

“You are really the luckiest and the blindest young man. Lucky because you are born with some charm for women, even though you seem determined not to show it to me. Blind because you have had a little piece of pure womankind in your hands. Do you not realize that Alison possesses the one great quality our sex has to contribute to life? Beside which things like education, class, background, are nothing? And you’ve let it slip.”

“Helped by your charming daughters.”

“My daughters were nothing but a personification of your own selfishness.”

A dull, deep rage brewing in me.

“I happened—stupidly, I grant you—to fall in love with one of them.”

“As an unscrupulous collector falls in love with a painting he wants. And will do anything to get.”

“Except that this wasn’t a painting. It was a girl with as much morality as a worn-out whore from the Place Pigalle.”

She let a little silence pass, the elegant drawing-room reprove, then said quietly, though with a feminine irony, “Strong words.”

I turned on her. “Look, I begin to wonder how much you know. First of all, your not so virgin daughter—”

“I know precisely what she did.” She sat calmly facing me; but a little more erect. “And I know precisely the reasons behind what she did. But if I told you them, I would tell you everything.”

“Shall I call those two down there? Tell your son how his sister performs—I think that’s the euphemism—with a Negro?”

She let silence pass again, as if to isolate what I said; as people leave a question unanswered in order to snub the questioner.

“Does a Negro make it so much worse?”

“It doesn’t make it any better.”

“He is a very intelligent and charming man. They have been sleeping together for some time.”

“And you approve?”

“My approval is unasked for and ungiven. Lily is of age.”

I grinned sourly at her, then looked out at the garden. “Now I understand why you grow so many flowers.” She shifted her head, not understanding. I said, “To cover the stink of sulphur.”

She got up and stood with one hand on the mantelpiece, watching me as I walked about the room; still calm, alert, playing me as if I was a kite. I might plunge and flare; but she held the string.

“Are you prepared to listen without interrupting?”

I looked at her; then shrugged assent.

“Very well. Now let us get this business of what is and what is not sexually proper out of the way.” Her voice was cold; a fierceness. “Because I live in a Queen Anne house do not think I live, like most of the rest of our country, by a Queen Anne morality.”

“Nothing was further from my mind.”

“Will you listen?” I went and stood by the window, my back to her. I lit a cigarette; I felt that at last I ought to have her in a corner; I must have her in a corner.

“How shall I explain to you? If Maurice were here he would tell you that sex is perhaps a greater, but in no way a different, pleasure from any other. He would tell you that it is only one part—and not the essential part—in the relationship we call love. He would tell you that the essential part is truth, the trust two people build between their minds. Their souls. What you will. That the real infidelity is the one that hides the sexual infidelity. Because the one thing that must never come between two people who have offered each other love is a lie.”

I stared out over the lawn. I knew it was prepared, all she was saying; perhaps learnt by heart, a key speech.

“Are you daring to preach to me, Mrs. de Seitas?”

“Are you daring to pretend that you do not need the sermon?”

“Look—”

“Listen to me.” If her voice had held the least sharpness or arrogance, I should not have done so. But it was unexpectedly gentle; almost beseeching. “I am trying to explain what we are. Maurice convinced us—over twenty years ago—that we should banish the normal taboos of sexual behavior from our lives. Not because we were more immoral than other people. But because we were more moral. We attempted to do that in our own lives. I have attempted to do it in the way I have brought up our children. And I must make you understand that sex is for us, for all of us who help Maurice, not an important thing. Or not the thing it is in most people’s lives. We have more important things to do.”

I would not turn and look at her.

“Before the war I twice played roles somewhat similar to Lily’s with you. She is prepared to do things that I was not. I had far more inhibitions to shed. I also had a husband whom I loved sexually as well as in the other more important ways. But since we have penetrated so deep into your life, I owe it to you to say that even when my husband was living I sometimes gave myself, with his full knowledge and consent, to Maurice. And in the war he in his turn had an Indian mistress, with my full knowledge and consent. Yet I believe ours was a very complete marriage, a very happy one, because we kept to two essential rules. We never told each other lies. And the other one… I will not tell you until I know you better.”

I looked around then, contemptuously. I found her calm vehemence uncomfortable; the madness erupting out of calm. She sat down again, on her throne.

“Of course, if you wish to live in the world of received ideas and received manners, what we did, and what my daughter did, is disgusting. Very well. But remember that there is another possible explanation. She may have been being very brave. Neither I nor my children pretend to be ordinary people. They were not brought up to be ordinary. We are rich and we are intelligent and we mean to live rich, intelligent lives.”

I said without turning. “Lucky you.”

“Of course. Lucky us. And we accept the responsibility that our good luck in the lottery of existence puts upon us.”

“Responsibility!” I wheeled round on her again.

“Do you really think we do this just for you? Do you really believe we are not… charting the voyage?” I stared back at her, then turned away. She went on in a milder voice. “All that we did was to us a necessity.” She meant, not self-indulgence.

“With all the necessity of gratuitous obscenity.”

“With all the necessity of a very complex experiment.”

“I like my experiments simple.”

“The days of simple experiments are over.”

A long silence fell between us. I was still full of spleen; and in some obscure way frightened to think of Alison in this woman’s hands. As one hears of a countryside one has loved being sold to building developers. And I also felt left behind, abandoned again. I did not belong to this other-planet world. She came behind me and put her hand on my shoulder and made me turn.

“Do I look an evil woman? Did my daughters?”

“Actions. Not looks.” My voice sounded raw; I wanted to slap her arm down, to get out.

“Are you absolutely sure our actions have been nothing but evil?”

I looked down. I wouldn’t answer. She took her hand away, but stayed close in front of me.

“Will you trust me a little—just for a little while?” I shook my head, but she went on. “You can always telephone me. If you want to watch the house, please do. But I warn you that you will see no one you want to see. Only Benjie and Gunnel and my two middle children when they come home from France next week. Only one person is making you wait at the moment.”

“She should tell me so herself.”

She looked out of the window, then sideways at me.

“I should so like to help you.”

“I want Alison. Not help.”

“May I call you Nicholas now?” I turned away from her; went to the sofa table, stared down at the photos there. “Very well. I will not ask again.”

We faced each other.

“I could go to a newspaper and sell them the story. I could ruin your whole blasted…”

“Just as you could have brought that cat down across my daughter’s back.”

I looked sharply back at her. “It was you? In the sedan?”

“No.”

“Alison?”

“You were told. It was empty.” She met my disbelieving eyes. “I give you my word. It was not Alison. Or myself.” She smiled at my still-suspicious look. “Well. Perhaps there was someone there.”

“Who?”

“Someone… quite famous in the world. Whose face you might have recognized. That is all.”

Tendrils of her sympathy began to sneak their way through my anger. With a curt look, I wheeled and walked towards the door. She came after me, snatching up a sheet of paper from the top of the desk.

“Please take this.”

I saw a list of names; dates of birth; Hughes to de Seitas, February 22, 1933; the telephone number.

“It doesn’t prove anything.”

“Yes it does. Go to Somerset House.”

I shrugged, pushed the list carelessly in my pocket and went on without looking at her. I opened the front door with her just behind me; and she came down the steps after me. I got in and she stood by the car. I gave her a quick glance up and reached for the ignition key, but her hand stopped my arm.

“I shall be waiting.”

“You’ll have to wait then.” I stared balefully up at her. “Because I’ll see Alison in hell before I come to you again.”

Her hand stayed, as if she wanted to say something more. I stared at the dashboard. The moment her hand lifted I switched on. As I went out of the gate I saw her in the mirror. She was standing there on the step in front of the open door, and her arms were raised in the Ka gesture.

73

Yet even then I knew I was pretending to be angrier than I really was; that just as she was trying to break down my hostility by charm, I was trying to break down her charm by hostility. I didn’t in the least regret being ungracious, rebuffing her overtures; and I more than half meant, at the time, what I said about Alison.

Because this was now the active mystery: that I was not allowed to meet Alison. Something was expected of me, some Orphean performance that would gain me access to the underworld where she was hidden… or hiding herself. I was on probation. But no one gave me any real indication of what I was meant to be proving. I had apparently found the entrance to Tartarus. But that brought me no nearer Eurydice.

Just as the things Lily de Seitas had told me brought me no nearer the permanent mystery: what voyage, what charts?

My anger carried me through the next day; but the day after that I went to Somerset House and found that every fact Lily de Seitas had given me to check was true, and somehow this turned my anger into a depression. That evening I rang up her number in Much Hadham. The Norwegian girl answered the phone.

“Dinsford House. Please, who is it?” I said nothing. Someone must have called, because I heard the girl say, “There is no one to answer.”

Then there came another voice.

“Hello. Hello.”

I put down the receiver. She was still there. But nothing would make me speak to her.

The next day, the third after the visit, I spent in getting drunk and in composing a bitter letter to Alison in Australia. I had decided that that was where she was. It said everything I had to say to her; I must have read it twenty times, as if by reading it enough I could turn it into the definitive truth about my innocence and her complicity. But I kept on putting off posting it, and in the end it spent the night on the mantelpiece.

I had got into the habit of going down and having breakfast with Kemp most mornings, though not those last three, when I had carried with me a scowl against the whole human condition. Kemp had no time at all for the kitchen, but she could make a good cup of coffee; and on the fourth morning, I badly needed it.

When I came in she put the Daily Worker down—she read the Worker “for the truth” and a certain other paper “for the fucking lies”—and sat there smoking. Her mouth without a cigarette was like a yacht without a mast; one presumed disaster. We exchanged a couple of sentences. She fell silent. But during the next few minutes I became aware that I was undergoing a prolonged scrutiny through the smoke she wore like a merciful veil in front of her Gorgon-like morning face. I pretended to read; but that didn’t deceive her.

“What’s up with you, Nick?”

“Up with me?”

“No friends. No girls. Nothing.”

“Not at this time of the morning. Please.”

She sat there dumpily, in an old red dressing gown, her hair uncombed, as old as time.

“You’re not looking for a job. That’s all my fanny.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“I know you are, Kemp.”

I looked up at her. Her face was a disaster. She had long ago let it go to rack and ruin. It was pasty, bloated, with the eyes permanently narrowed against tobacco smoke; somehow like a mask in a Noh play, which in an odd way suited the Cockney resonances that loitered in her voice and the hard anti-sentimentality she affected. But now, in what was for her an extraordinary gesture of affection, she reached across the table and patted my hand. She was, I knew, five years younger than Lily de Seitas; and yet she looked ten years older. She was by ordinary standards foulmouthed; a blatant member of what had been my father’s most hated regiment, one he used to consign far lower even than the Damned Socialists and the Blasted Whitehall Airy Fairies—the Longhaired Brigade. I had a moment’s vision of his standing, his aggressive blue eyes, his bushy colonel’s moustache, in the door of the studio; the unmade divan, the stinking old rusty oil-stove, the mess on the table, the garish sexual-fetal abstract oils that littered the walls; a tat of old pottery, old clothes, old newspapers. But in that short gesture of hers, and the look that accompanied it, I knew there was more real humanity than I had ever known in my own home. Yet still that home, those years, governed me; I had to repress the natural response. Our eyes met across a gap I could not bridge; her offer of a rough temporary motherhood, my flight to what I had to be, the lonely son. She withdrew her hand.

I said, “It’s too complicated.”

“I’ve got all day.”

Her face peered at me through the blue smoke, and suddenly it seemed as blank, as menacing, as an interrogator’s. I liked her, I liked her, yet I felt her curiosity like a net drawn round me. I was like some freakish parasitic species that could establish itself only in one rare kind of situation, by one precarious symbiosis. They had been wrong, at the trial. It was not that I preyed on girls; but the fact that my only access to normal humanity, to social decency, to any openness of heart, lay through girls, preyed on me. It was in that that I was the real victim.

There was only one person I wanted to talk with. Till then I could not move, advance, plan, progress, become a better human being, anything; and till then, I carried my mystery, my secret, around with me like a defense; as my only companion.

“One day, Kemp. Not now.”

She shrugged; gave me a stonily sibylline look, auguring the worst.

The old char who cleaned the stairs once a fortnight bawled through the door. My phone was ringing. I raced up the stairs, lifting the receiver on what seemed the dying ring.

“Hello. Nicholas Urfe.”

“Oh, good morning, Urfe. It’s me. Sandy Mitford.”

“You’re back!”

“What’s left of me, old man. What’s left of me.” He cleared his throat. “Got your note. Wondered if you were free for a spot of lunchington.”

A minute later, a time and place fixed, I was reading once more my letter to Alison. The injured Malvolio stalked through every line.

In another minute there was no letter; but, as with every other relationship in my life, pounded ashes.

Mitford hadn’t changed at all, in fact I could have sworn that he was wearing the same clothes, the same dark-blue blazer, dark-gray flannels, club tie. They looked a little more worn out, like their wearer; he was far less jaunty than I remembered, though after a few gins he got back some of his old guerrilla cockiness. He had spent the summer “carting bands of Americans” round Spain; no, he’d received no letter from Phraxos from me. They must have destroyed it. There was something they hadn’t wanted him to tell.

Over sandwiches we had a talk about the school. Bourani wasn’t mentioned. He kept on saying that he’d warned me, and I said, yes, he’d warned me. I waited for a chance to broach the only subject that interested me. Eventually, as I’d been hoping, he made the opening himself.

“Ever get over to the waiting room?”

I knew at once that the question was not as casual as he tried to make it sound; that he was both afraid and curious; that in fact we both had the same secret reason for meeting.

“Oh God, now I meant to ask you about that. Do you remember, just as we said goodbye…”

“Yes.” He gave me a tightly cautious look. “Never went to a bay called Moutsa? Rather jolly, over on the south side?”

“Of course. I know it.”

“Ever notice the villa on the cape to the east?”

“Yes. It was always shut up. I was told.”

“Ah. Interesting. Very interesting.” He looked reminiscently across the lounge; left me in suspense. I watched him lift, an infuriating upward arc, his cigarette to his lips; the gentleman connoisseur of fine Virginia; then fume smoke through his nostrils. “Well that was it, old boy. Nothing really.”

“But why beware?”

“Oh it’s nothing. No-thing at all.”

“Then you can tell me.”

“I did, actually.”

“You did!”

“Row with collaborationist. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Same man who has the villa.”

“Oh, but…” I flicked my fingers… “wait a moment. What was his name?”

“Conchis.” He had an amused smile on his face, as if he knew what I was going to say. He touched his moustache; always preening his moustache.

“That’s right. But I thought he did something rather fine during the Resistance.”

“Not on your nelly. Actually he did a deal with the Germans. Personally organized the shooting of eighty villagers. Then got his kraut chums to line him up with them. See. As if he was all brave and innocent.”

“But wasn’t he badly wounded, or something?”

He blew out smoke, despising my innocence. “You don’t survive a German execution, old boy. No, the bugger pulled a very fast one. Acted like a traitor and got treated like a bloody hero. Even forged a phony German report on the incident. One of the neatest little cover-up jobs of the war.”

I looked sharply at him. A dreadful new suspicion crossed my mind. New corridors in the labyrinth.

“But hasn’t anyone… ?”

Mitford made the Greek corruption gesture; thumb and forefinger.

I said, “You still haven’t explained the waiting-room business.”

“His name for the villa. Waiting for death or something. Had it nailed up on a tree in Frog.” His finger traced a line. “Salle d’attente.”

“What happened between you?”

“Nothing, old boy. Absolutely nothing.”

“Come on.” I smiled ingenuously. “Now I know the place.”

I remembered as a very small boy lying on the bough of a willow over a Hampshire stream; I was watching my father casting for a trout. It was his one delicacy, casting a dry fly, posing it on the water as soft as thistledown. I could see the trout he was trying to coax into a rise. And I remembered that moment when the fish floated slowly up and hovered beneath the fly, a moment endlessly prolonged in a heart-stopping excitement; then the sudden swift kick of the tail and the lightning switch of my father’s strike; the ratcheting of the reel.

“It’s nothing, old boy. Really.”

“Oh for God’s sake. What’s it matter?”

“All damned absurd.” The fish took the fly. “Actually I was out walking one day. May or June, I can’t remember. Bit browned off at the school. Went over to Moutsa to swim and well, I came down, you know the place, through the trees and what did I see—not just a couple of girls. But a couple of girls in bikinis. Quick recce. Niftiest beeline I knew how towards them, said something in Greek, and damn me they answered in English. They were English. Gorgeous creatures. Twins.”

“Good Lord. Let me get you another gin.”

I stood at the bar waiting for the drinks and watched myself in the mirror; gave myself the smallest wink.

“Sygeia. Well you can imagine, I moved in poly fast. Consolidated position. Found out who they were. Old boy’s godchildren up at the villa. Bang out of the top drawer, both been to Roedean, finished in Switzerland. All that. Said they were there for the summer and that the old boy would very much like to meet me, why didn’t I come up for tea. Nuff said. Off we trotted. Meet the old boy. Tea.”

He had the same old habit of stretching his neck up, as if his collar was too tight; to make himself look a man of the world.

“This what’s-his-name spoke English?”

“Perfect. Moved round Europe all his life, best society and all that. Well, actually I found one of the twins a shade off. Not my type. Rather marked the other for my area of ops. Okay, the old man and the not-on twin faded away after tea and this girl, June, that was her name, took me round the property.”

“Nice work.”

“Didn’t actually get round to unarmed combat at that point, but I sort of felt she was ready and willing. You know how it was on the island. Full magazine on and nothing to shoot at.”

“Rather.”

He flexed his arm, caressed the back of his hair. “Right. I trotted off back to the school. Tender farewell. Invitation to dinner the next weekend. Week passes, I present myself over there in my number ones. Other necessary equipment. Drinks for dinner, girls looking smashing. But then.” He gave me a taut, suspenseful look. “Well as a matter of fact the other girl, not June, got stinkers.”

“Christ.”

“I’d got her number the week before. One of these bloody intellectual girls. Pretend to be as tough as nuts, but a couple of gins put ‘em out stone cold. Well, it got pretty bloody dicey during dinner. Damned embarrassing. This Julie girl took against me. Didn’t take much notice at first. I thought, well, the girl’s a bit squiffy. Time of the month or something. But… actually she began, well she began to make fun of me in a damn silly sort of way.”

“How?”

“Oh… you know, copied my voice. Way I say things. I suppose she was quite good at it. Damned offensive, all the same.”

“But what was she saying?”

“Oh a load of stupid cock about pacifism and the bomb. You know the type. And I just wasn’t having any.”

“Didn’t the others join in?”

“Hardly said a word. Too damn embarrassed. Well anyway suddenly wham this Julie girl shouted a whole string of really bloody nasty insults. Lost her temper completely. And then all hell broke loose. This other June girl got up and went for her. The old man flapped his hands like a wounded crow. Then the Julie one rushed away. Then her sister. I was left sitting there with the old man. He started talking about them being orphans. Load of guff. Sort of apology.”

“What were these insults she shouted?”

“Old boy, I can’t remember now. The girl was pissed.” He dredged his memory. “Called me a Nazi, actually.”

“A Nazi!”

“One of the things we were rowing about was Mosley.”

“You’re not a—”

“Of course not, old boy. Good God.” He laughed, then flicked a look at me. “But let’s face it, not all Mosley says is rot. If you ask me this country has got bloody sloppy.” He stretched his neck. “Bit more discipline. National pride…”

“Maybe, but Mosley?”

“Old man, don’t get me wrong. Who the hell do you think I was fighting against in the war? It’s just that… well, take your Spain. Look what Franco’s done for Spain.”

“I thought all he’d done was build a lot of dungeons in Barcelona.”

“Ever been to Spain, old man?”

“No, I haven’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, till you have I’d keep quiet about what Franco has and hasn’t done.”

I silently counted five, and shrugged.

“Sorry. Forget it. Do go on.”

“As it happens I’ve read some of Mosley’s stuff, and a lot of it makes sense.” He articulated the words with curt clarity. “Quite a lot of sense.”

“I’m sure.”

He metaphorically preened his ruffled feathers and went on.

“My twin came back, old boy left us for a few minutes and actually she was, seemed, damn sweet. Course I played up the hurt line and sort of indicated that a little stroll in the moonlight later would help me get back to normal. And then, she said wham—Stroll? How about a swim? And believe me, old boy, you only had to hear her say it to see swimming might lead to very interesting other activities. Midnight on the dot, at the gate. Okay, we go to bed at eleven, I sit round waiting for zero hour. Slip out of the house. No problems. Get to the gate. Five minutes later, along she comes. And old man, I can tell you, I’ve been in some clinches in my time, but that girl lit up like a bomb. Lit me up like a bomb, too. Began to think Operation Midnight Swim was going to be canceled for a more important exercise. But she said she wanted to cool off for a while.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell me about this before I went. The disappointment would have killed me.”

He grinned condescendingly. “We get down to the beach. She says, I haven’t got a costume, do you mind going in first. I think, well maybe she’s shy, maybe she wants to do the necessary. Fine. Operation undress. She retires into the trees. Charley does exactly what he’s told, swims out fifty yards, treads water, waits two minutes, three, four, actually in the end about ten, begins to feel damn cold. Still no girl.”

“And your clothes had gone.”

“You’ve got it, old boy. Stark naked. Standing on that bloody beach hissing the damn girl’s name.” I laughed, but his smile was very thin. “So. Big joke. Message received. You can imagine how damned angry I was by then. I gave her half an hour to come back. Searched round. No go. So I marched off to the house. Didn’t do my feet much good. Tore a bit of pine branch off to cover the old privates if necessary.”

“Fantastic.” I was beginning to find it difficult not to grin all over my face; but I was clearly meant to share the outrage. “Through the gate, up the drive thing, towards the house. Go round the front. What do you think I see there?” I shook my head. “A man hanging.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, old boy. They were doing the joking. Actually it was a dummy. Like one of those things you use in bayonet practice, yes? Filled with straw. Strung up with a rope round its neck. And my clothes on. Head painted to look like Hitler.”

“Good God. What did you do?”

“What could I do? Pulled the bloody stupid thing down and got my clothes off it.”

“And then?”

“Nix. They’d gone. Hooked it.”

“Gone?”

“Caïque. Heard it down at Moutsa. Thought it was a fisherman. Left my bag out for me. Nothing pinched. Just that bloody four-mile walk back to the school.”

“You must have been furious.”

“Was slightly chokka. Yes.”

“But you didn’t let them get away with it.”

He smiled to himself.

“Right. Quite simple. I composed a little report. First about the thing during the war. Then a few little facts about where our friend Mr. Conchis’s present political sympathies lay. Sent it to the appropriate quarters.”

“Communist?” Since the civil war ended in 1950, Communists had been hounded relentlessly in Greece.

“Knew some in Crete. Just said I’d seen a couple on Phraxos and followed them to his house. That’s enough, that’s all they want. A little bit goes a long way. Now you know why you never had the pleasure.”

I fingered the stem of my glass.

“And so you had the last laugh.”

“Habit of mine, old boy. Suits my complexion.”

“Why on earth did they do it in the first place? I mean, all right, they didn’t like you… but they could have given you the brush-off from the beginning.”

“All that stuff about their being the old boy’s godchildren. All my eye. Course they weren’t. They were a pair of high-class tarts. Language the Julie one used gave the game away. Damn funny way of looking at you. Suggestive.” He glanced at me. “It was the sort of setup you run across in the Mediterranean—especially your Eastern Mediterranean. I’ve met it before.”

“You mean…”

“I mean, quite crudely, old boy, that the rich Mr. Conchis wasn’t quite up to the job, but he… shall we say… still got pleasure from seeing the job performed?”

Again I surreptitiously eyed him; knew myself lost in the interminable maze of echoes. Was he, or wasn’t he?

“But they didn’t actually suggest anything?”

“There were hints, old boy. I worked them out afterwards. There were hints.”

He went away and got two more gins.

“You might have warned me.”

“I did, old boy.”

“Not very clearly.”

“You know what Xan—Xan Fielding—used to do to any new chaps who were chuted in when we were up in the Levka Ore? Send ‘em wham straight out on a Job. No warnings, no sermons. Just—’Watch it.’ Okay?”

I disliked Mitford because he was crass and mean, but even more because he was a caricature, an extension, of certain qualities in myself; he had on his skin, visible, the carcinoma I nursed inside me. I had to suspect, the old paranoia, that he might be another ‘plant’—a test for me, a lesson; but yet there was something so ineffably impervious about the man that I could not believe he was so consummate an actor. I thought of Lily de Seitas; how to her I must seem as Mitford did to myself. A barbarian.

We moved out of the Mandrake onto the pavement.

“I’m off to Greece next month,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Firm’s going to start tours there next summer.”

“Oh God. No.”

“Do the place good. Shake their ideas up.”

I looked down the crowded Soho Street. “I hope Zeus strikes you with lightning the moment you get there.”

He took it as a joke.

“Age of the common man, old boy. Age of the common man.”

He held out his hand. I would have dearly loved to have known how to twist it and send him wham straight over my shoulder. The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.

Years later I discovered that he had been acting that day, though not in the way that I feared. His name caught my eye in a newspaper. He had been arrested in Torquay on charges of issuing checks under false pretenses. He’d been doing it all over England, using the persona of Captain Alexander Mitford, D.S.O., M.C.

In fact, said prosecuting counsel, although the accused went to Greece in the occupying forces after the German collapse, he played no part whatever in the Resistance. Later there was another bit: Sometime after demobilization Mitford returned to Greece, where he obtained a teaching post by forging false references. He was subsequently dismissed from this post.

Late that afternoon I dialed the Much Hadham number. It rang a long time but then someone answered. I heard Lily de Seitas’s voice. She was out of breath.

“Sorry. I was in the garden. Dinsford House.”

“It’s me. Nicholas Urfe.”

“Oh hello.” She said it with a bright indifference.

“I’d like to see you again.”

There was a small pause. “I have no news.”

“I’d still like to see you.”

I knew she was smiling, in the silence that followed.

She said, “When?”

74

I was out the next morning. When I got back, about two, I found Kemp had slipped a note under my door: A Yank called. Says its urgent. Will come again four. I went down to see her. She was splaying great worms of viridian green with her thumb across murky black and umber explosions of Ripolin. She did not like to be interrupted when she was “making a painting.”

“This man.”

“Said he must see you.”

“What about?”

“Going to Greece.” She stood stockily back, fag in mouth. “Your old job or something.”

“But how did he find where I live?”

“Don’t ask me.”

I stood staring at the note. “What sort of man was he?”

“Christ, can’t you wait a couple of hours?” She turned. “Buzz.”

He came at five to four, a tallish young man with a lean body and the unmistakable cropped head of an American. He wore glasses, was a year or two younger than I; pleasant face, pleasant smile, pleasant everything; as wholesome, and as green, as a lettuce. He thrust out a hand.

“John Briggs.”

“Hello.”

“You’re Nicholas Urfe? Is that how I pronounce it? The lady…”

I made him come in. “Not much of a place, I’m afraid.”

“It’s nice.” He looked around for a better word. “Atmosphere.” We clambered up the stairs.

“I wasn’t expecting an American.”

“No. Well, I guess it’s the Cyprus situation.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been over here this last year at London University. All along I’ve been trying to figure how I could get myself a year in Greece before I return home. You don’t know how excited I am.” We came to a landing. He saw some of the sewing girls at work through an open door. Two or three of them whistled. He waved to them. “Isn’t that nice? Reminds me of Thomas Hood.”

“Where did you hear about the job?”

“In the Times Educational Supplement.” He gave even the most familiar English institutions an interrogative intonation, as if I might not have heard of them.

We came to my flat. I closed the door.

“I thought the British Council had stopped doing the recruiting.”

“Is that so? I suppose the school committee decided that as Mr. Conchis was over here he might as well do the interviewing.”

He had gone into the sitting room and was looking at the view down grimy old Charlotte Street. “This is charming. You know, I love this city.” I indicated the least greasy of the armchairs.

“And… Mr. Conchis gave you my address?”

“Sure. Was that wrong?”

“No. Not at all.” I sat on the window seat. “Did he tell you anything about me?”

He raised his hand, as if I might need quietening down. “Well yes, he—I do know, I mean… he warned me how dangerous these school intrigues can get. As I understand you had the misfortune…” he gave up. “You still feel sore about it?”

I shrugged. “Greece is Greece.”

“I bet they’re rubbing their hands already at the thought of a real live American.”

“They probably are.” He shook his head, as if the thought that anyone could involve a real live American in a Levantine academic intrigue was almost past belief. I said, “When did you see Mr. Conchis?”

“When he was here three weeks ago. I’d have gotten in contact earlier, but he lost your address. He just sent it to me from Greece. Only this morning.”

I thought quickly. “Only this morning?”

“Yep. A cable.”

“A cable!”

“Surprised me too. I think he’d forgotten about it. You… you know him pretty well?”

“Oh I… met him a few times. I was actually never terribly clear about his position on the school committee.”

“What he told me, no official position. Just helping out. Jesus, his English is marvelous though.”

“Isn’t it?”

We sized each other up. He had a relaxed way about him that seemed inculcated by education, by reading some book on How To Be At Ease With Strangers, rather than by any intuitive gift. Nothing, one felt, had ever gone wrong in his life; but he had a sort of freshness, an enthusiasm, an energy that couldn’t be totally canceled by envy. Let him have his fall; but he made you hope to see him rise again.

I analyzed the situation. The natural coincidence of his appearing and my call to Much Hadham was so improbable that it was almost an argument in favor of his innocence. It might be simply Conchis’s sense of humor at work; to make me doubt unnecessarily; or to make it so obvious I should doubt that I wouldn’t. On the other hand Mrs. de Seitas must have deduced from my telephone call that I was undergoing a change of heart; and this was nicely timed to test my reliability, my preparedness to keep my mouth shut.

Yet telling me about the cable made him sound genuinely innocent; and though I had understood that the “subject” had to be a matter of hazard, perhaps there was some reason, some unknown result of that summer, that had made Conchis decide to choose his next guinea pig. Faced with the guileless, earnest Briggs I felt a little of what Mitford must have felt with me: a malicious amusement, bedeviled in my case by a European delight in seeing brash America being taken for a ride; and beyond that a kinder wish, which I would never have admitted to Conchis or Lily de Seitas, not to spoil his experience.

Of course they must have known (if Briggs was genuine) that I might tell him everything; and they would have some way of meeting the problem that would have caused—would make me out to be the “plant,” the liar. Perhaps they even wanted me to tell him; but I did not think so. And once again I was standing with the cat in my hand, unable to bring it down.

Briggs had pulled out a pad from the briefcase he had with him.

“May I ask questions? I’ve got quite a list.”

And again: the coincidence. He was doing exactly what I had done only a few days before, at Dinsford House. His eager, deceitless face smiled up at me. I smiled back.

“Shoot.”

He was terrifyingly methodical. Teaching methods, textbooks, clothes, climate, sports facilities, medicines to take, food, the size of the library, what to see in Greece, character sketches of the other masters—he wanted information about every conceivable aspect of life on Phraxos. Finally he looked up from his pad and the notes he had copiously penciled and took up the beer I had poured him.

“Thanks a million. This is wonderful. Covers everything.”

“Except the actual business of living there.”

He nodded. “Mr. Conchis warned me.”

“You speak Greek?”

“Little Latin, less Greek.”

“You’ll pick it up.”

“I’m taking lessons already.”

“And no women.”

He nodded. “Tough. But I’m engaged, so anyway.” He produced a wallet and handed me a photo. A prettyish black-haired girl smiled rather intensely out at me. She had too small a mouth; I thought I detected the ghostly beginnings of the mask of the bitch-goddess Ambition.

“Nice girl.” I handed it back. “Looks English.”

“She is English. Well, Welsh, actually. She’s studying drama right here in London.”

“Really.”

“I thought maybe she could come out to Phraxos next summer. If I haven’t got the sack by then.”

“Did you… mention it to Mr. Conchis?”

“I did. And he was really nice about it. Even said she might be able to stay in his house.”

“I wonder which one. He has two, you know.”

“I think he said in the village.” He grinned. “Matter of fact he said he’d make me pay for her room.”

“Oh?”

“Wants me to help him on this…” he made a kind of you-know gesture.

“On this?”

“Didn’t you…” but he obviously saw from my face that whatever it was, I didn’t. “Well, maybe…”

“Oh good lord, you can tell me.”

He hesitated, then smiled. “It’s just that he does want it kept secret. I thought you might have heard, but if you didn’t meet him much… this remarkable find on his estate?”

“Find?”

“You know the house? It’s some place on the other side of the island.”

“I know where it is.”

“Well, it seems part of a cliff fell away this summer and they’ve discovered what he believes to be the foundations of a Mycenean palace.”

“He’ll never keep that quiet.”

“I’d guess not. But he thinks he can for a while. Apparently he’s covered it up with loose dirt. Then this spring he’s going to dig. But naturally right now he doesn’t want everyone visiting all over.”

“Of course.”

“So I hope I won’t be too bored.”

I saw Lily dressed as the snake goddess of Knossos; as Electra; as Clytemnestra; Dr. Vanessa Maxwell, the brilliant young archaeologist.

“Doesn’t sound as if you will.”

He finished his beer, and looked at his watch.

“Jesus, I’ve got to run. I’m meeting Amanda at six.” He shook my hand. “You don’t know how much this has meant to me. And believe me, I’ll write and let you know how it goes.”

“Do that. I’d very much like to know.”

I followed him down the stairs and watched his crew-cut head. I began to understand why Conchis had picked him. If one had taken a million young college-educated Americans and distilled them down into one quintessential exemplar one would have arrived at something like Briggs. I did not like to think of the omnipenetrating Americans reaching to so private a European core. But I remembered his name; much more English than my own. And there was already Joe; the prosecuting Dr. Marcus.

We came out on the front step.

“No last words of wisdom?”

“I don’t think so. Just my very good wishes.”

“Well…”

We shook hands again.

“You’ll be all right.”

“You really think so?”

“Of course you’ll find some of the experiences strange.”

“Oh sure. Don’t think I’m not going with a wide-open mind. And prepared for everything. Thanks to you.”

I gave him a long smile; I wanted him to remember it was a smile that had gone on too long and hadn’t quite fitted in with the situation. He raised his hand and set off. After a few paces he looked at his watch, and began to run; and in my heart I lit a candle to Leverrier.

75

She was ten minutes late; came quickly through the turnstiles, a polite small torment of apology on her face, and straight to where I had been standing next to the postcard counter.

“Oh dear. I’m so sorry. The taxi crawled.”

I shook her outstretched hand. For a woman half a century old she was impressively good-looking; and she was dressed with an easy flair that made most of the dull afternoon visitors to the Victoria and Albert around us look even drabber than they really were; defiantly bareheaded, and in a pale gray-white Chanel suit that set off her tan and her clear eyes.

“It’s a mad place to meet. Do you mind?”

“Not in the least.”

“I bought an eighteenth-century plate the other day. They’re so good at identifying here.” I took the basket she was carrying. “It won’t take a moment.”

She evidently knew the museum well and led the way to the lifts. We had to wait. She smiled at me; the family smile; soliciting, I suspected, what I was still not prepared to give. Determined to tread delicately between her approval and my own dignity, I had a dozen things ready to say, but her breathless arrival, the sudden feeling I had that I was being fitted, inconveniently, into a busy day, made them all seem wrong.

I said, “I saw John Briggs on Tuesday.”

“How interesting. I haven’t met him.” We might have been talking about the new curate. The lift came, and we stepped inside.

“I told him everything I knew. All about Bourani and what to expect.”

“We thought you would. That is why we sent him to you.”

We were both smiling faintly; a cramped silence.

“But I might have.”

“Yes.” The lift stopped. We emerged into a gallery of furniture. “Yes. You might.”

“Perhaps he was just a test.”

“A test wasn’t necessary.”

“You’re very sure.”

She gave me that same wide-eyed look she had had when she handed me the copy of Nevinson’s letter. At the end of the gallery we came to a door: Department of Ceramics. She pressed the bell beside it.

I said, “I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot.”

She looked down.

“Well yes. Shall we try again in a minute? If you wouldn’t mind waiting?”

The door opened and she was let inside. It was all too rushed, too broken, she gave me no chance, though her last quick look back before the door closed seemed apologetic; almost as if she was afraid I might run away.

Two minutes later she came back.

“Any luck?”

“Yes, it’s what I thought it was. Bow.”

“You don’t trust your intuition in everything then.”

She gave me a severe look, and then lightly took my arm as she led me on. “If there was a Department of Young Men I should certainly take you to it. I would like to have you identified.”

“And then keep me labeled on a shelf?”

“I might give you as a present to someone.”

“Am I yours to give?”

She looked through the windows at the gallery’s end.

“I should like the whole world. I could give it to something so much better than what possesses it now.”

A wistful smile at me, both self-mocking and self-revealing. She was defining possession, and giving. Was that why we had met in a museum? Could anyone possess anything? Tallboys, tables, Chippendale mirrors—we were walking in a world of objects possessed by nothing but themselves. Giving and possessing seemed infinitely superficial and transitory; the decor was chosen.

She pressed my arm after a long moment, then let go of it. “They say there’s a plate like mine on display. Just through here.”

We went into a long deserted gallery of china. Once again she seemed to know her way about—had rehearsed?—because she went straight to one of the wall-cases. She took the plate out of her basket and held it up, walking along, until from the back of a group of cups and jugs an almost identical blue-and-white plate was staring at her. I went beside her.

“That’s it.”

She compared them; wrapped her own loosely in its tissue paper again; and then, taking me completely by surprise, presented it.

“It’s for you.”

“But—”

“Please.” She was smiling at my ginger look.

“But really… I mean…”

“I bought it with Alison.” She corrected herself. “Alison was with me when I bought it.”

She pushed it into my hands. I unwrapped it. In the middle of the plate there was a naïvely drawn Chinaman and his wife; two children between them. A remote echo; peasants traveling steerage, the swell, the night wind.

“Supposing I break it.”

“I think you should get used to handling fragile objects.”

She made the double-meaning very plain. I looked down at the plate again, the small inky-blue figures.

“That’s really why I asked to meet you.”

Our eyes met; she gently mocked by embarrassment.

“Shall we go and have our tea?”

“Well,” she said, “why you really asked to meet me.”

We had found a table in the corner.

“Alison.”

The waitress brought the tea things. Those teas at Bourani; I wonder if she had chosen that on purpose as well.

“I told you.” Her eyes rose to meet mine. “It depends on her.”

“And on you.”

“No. Not in the least on me.”

“Is she in London?”

“I have promised her not to tell you where she is.”

“Look, Mrs. Seitas, I think—” but I swallowed what I was going to say. I watched her pour the tea; not otherwise helping me. “What the hell does she want? What am I supposed to do?”

“Is that too strong?” I shook my head impatiently at the cup she passed.

Her eyes weighed mine. She seemed to decide to say nothing; then changed her mind. “My dear, I never take anger at its face value.”

I wanted to shrug off that “my dear” as I had wanted to shake off her hands the week before; but she placed it with a faultless precision of tone. It was condescending, but its condescension was justified, a statement of the difference between our two experiences of life; and there was something discreetly maternal in it, a reminder to me that if I rebelled against her judgment, I rebelled against my own immaturity; if against her urbanity, against my own lack of it.

I looked down.

“I’m not prepared to wait much longer.”

“Then she will be well rid of you.”

I drank some of the tea. She began calmly to spread honey over her toast.

I said, “My name is Nicholas.” Her hands were arrested, her eyes probed mine. I went on, “Is that the right votive offering?”

“If it is made sincerely.”

“As sincerely as your offer of help was the other day.”

She went on with her toast. “Did you go to Somerset House?”

“Yes.”

She put down her knife.

“Wait as long as Alison makes you wait. I do not think it will be very long. But I can’t do anything to bring her to you. Now it is simply between you and her. I hope, I hope very much that she will forgive you. But I shouldn’t be too sure that she will. You still have to gain her back.”

“There’s gaining back to be done on both sides.”

“Perhaps. That is for the two of you to settle.” She stared a moment longer at me, then looked down with a smile. “The god-game is ended.”

“The what?”

“The god-game.” Her eyes were on mine again; at their gentlest.

“The god-game.”

“Because there are no gods. And it is not a game.”

She began to eat her toast, as if to bring us back to normal. I looked past her at the busy, banal tearoom. The discreet chink of cutlery on china; sounds as commonplace as sparrows’ voices.

“Is that what you call it?”

She said, “I’m not going to talk about it, but yes… that is, well, a kind of nickname we use.”

She went on demurely eating.

I said, “If I had any self-respect left, I’d get up and walk out.”

Her eyes crinkled. “Please don’t. I’m counting on you to get me a taxi in a minute. We’ve been doing Benjie’s school shopping today.”

“I can’t see Demeter in a department store.”

“No? I think she would have liked them. Even the gaberdine mackintoshes and gym shoes.”

“And does she like questions? About the past?”

“That depends on the questions.”

“The things Maurice told me—the First World War, the count with the château, Norway—were they in any way true?”

“What is truth?”

“Did they happen?”

“Does it matter if they did not?”

“Yes. To me.”

“Then it would be unkind of me to tell you.”

She looked down at her hands, aware of my impatience. “Maurice once said to me—when I had just asked him a question rather like yours—he said, An answer is always a form of death.”

There was something in her face. It was not implacable; but in some way impermeable.

“I think questions are a form of life.”

“You’ve heard of John Leverrier?”

I said cautiously, “Yes. Of course.”

“I think he must know far more about Maurice than you do. Do you know why?” I shook my head. “Because he never tried to know more.”

I traced patterns with the cake fork on the tablecloth; determined to seem guarded, unconvinced.

“What happened to you that first year?”

“The desire to help him through following years.” She was smiling again, but she went on. “I will tell you that it all began one weekend, not even that, one long night of talking… perhaps it was no more than that we were bored. I think historically bored—as one was in the entre-deux-guerres. Certain leaps were taken. Certain gaps bridged. I imagine—don’t you?—all new discoveries happen like that. Very suddenly. And then you spend years trying to work them out to their limits.”

For a time we sat in silence. Then she spoke again.

“For us, Nicholas, our success is never certain. You have entered our secret. And now you are a radioactive substance. We hope to keep you stable. But we are not sure.” She smiled. “Someone… rather in your position… once said to me that I was like a pool. He wanted to throw a stone into me. But I am not so calm in these situations as I may look.”

“I think you handle them very intelligently.”

“Touché.” She bowed her head. Then she said, “Next week I’m going away—as I do every autumn when the children are off my hands. I shan’t be hiding, but just doing what I do every September.”

“You’ll be with Maurice?”

“Yes.”

Something curiously like an apology lingered in the air; as if she knew the strange twinge of jealousy I felt and could not pretend that it was not justified; that whatever richness of relationship and shared experience I suspected, existed.

She looked at her watch. “Oh dear. I’m so sorry. But Gunnel and Benjie will be waiting for me at King’s Cross. Those lovely cakes…”

They lay in their repulsive polychrome splendor, untouched.

“I think one pays for the pleasure of not eating them.”

She grimaced agreement, and I beckoned to the waitress for the bill. While we were waiting she said, “One thing I wanted to tell you is that in the last three years Maurice has had two serious heart attacks. So there may not even be… a next year.”

“Yes. He told me.”

“And you did not believe him?”

“No.”

“Do you believe me?”

I answered obliquely. “Nothing you said could make me believe that if he died there would not be another year.”

She took her gloves. “Why do you say that?”

I smiled at her; her own smile. No other answer.

She nearly spoke, then chose silence. I remembered that phrase I had had to use of Lily: out of role. Her mother’s eyes, and Lily’s through them; the labyrinth; privileges bestowed and privileges rejected; a truce.

A minute later we were going down the corridor towards the entrance. Two men came down it towards us. They were about to pass when the one on the left gave a kind of gasp. Lily de Seitas stopped and threw her arms back; she too was caught completely by surprise. He was in a dark-blue suit with a bow tie, a mane of prematurely white hair, a voluble, fleshy mouth in a florid face. She turned quickly.

“Nicholas—would you excuse me—and get me that taxi?”

He had the face of a man, a distinguished man, suddenly become a boy again, rather comically melted by this evidently unexpected meeting into a green remembering. I made a convenient show of excessive politeness to some other people heading for the tearoom, which allowed me to hang back a moment to hear what the two might say. Lily de Seitas said nothing, but he spoke.

“My dear Lily… my dearest girl…” and he couldn’t say any more. He was holding both her hands, drawing her aside, and she was smiling, that strange smile of hers, like Ceres returned to the barren land. I had to go on, but I turned again at the end of the corridor. The man he was with, a department curator or something, had walked on and was waiting by the tearoom door. The two of them stood there. I could see the tender creases round his eyes; and still she smiled, accepting homage.

There were no taxis about and I waited by the curb. I wondered if it had been the “someone quite famous” in the sedan; but I did not recognize him. Or some last trick, a professional adoration. His eyes had been for her only, as if the business he had been on shriveled into nothingness at the sight of that face.

She came out hurriedly a minute or two later.

“Can I give you a lift?”

She was not going to make any comment. Either it was arranged, or it had been by chance but was now being used by her, as her daughters used clouds that crossed the sun and casual strollers down a road; and something about her hermetic expression made it, yet once again, infuriatingly, seem vulgar to be curious. She was not good-mannered, but expert with good manners; used them like an engineer, to shift the coarse bulk of me where she wanted.

“No thanks, I’m going to Chelsea.” I wasn’t; but I wanted to be free of her.

I watched her covertly for a moment, then I said, “I used to think of a story with your daughter, and I think of it even more with you.” She smiled, a little uncertainly. “It’s probably not true, but it’s about Marie Antoinette and a butcher. The butcher led a mob into the palace at Versailles. He had a cleaver in his hand and he was shouting that he was going to cut Marie Antoinette’s throat. The mob killed the guards and the butcher forced the door of the royal apartments. At last he rushed into her bedroom. She was alone. Standing by a window. There was no one else there. The butcher with a cleaver in his hand and the queen.”

“What happened?”

I caught sight of a taxi going in the wrong direction and waved to the driver to turn.

“He fell on his knees and burst into tears.”

She was silent a moment.

“Poor butcher.”

“I believe that’s exactly what Marie Antoinette said.”

She watched the taxi turn.

“Doesn’t everything depend on the tone of voice? And who was the butcher crying for?”

I looked away from her intelligent eyes. “No. I don’t think so.”

The taxi drew up beside the curb. She hesitated as I opened the door.

“Are you sure?”

“I was born on the butcher’s side.”

She watched me for a moment, then gave up, or remembered.

“Your plate.” She handed it to me from her basket.

“I’ll try not to break it.”

“It carries my good wishes.”

“Thank you for both.” We sounded formal; she had set herself on the queen’s side; or perhaps, truer to her role, and sunt lacrimae rerum, on no side.

“And remember. Alison is not a present. She has to be paid for. And convinced that you have the money to pay.”

I acquiesced, to make her go. She took my hand, but kept it and made me lean forward, first to my surprise to kiss me on the cheek, then to whisper something in my ear. I saw a passing workman look disapprovingly at us: the bloody enemy, striking our effete poses inside the Petit Trianon of the English class system. She stood back a moment, pressed my arm as if to drive home what she had whispered, then stepped quickly inside the taxi. She gave me one look through the window, still the look of the whispered words. Our eyes met through the glass. The taxi moved, the head receded.

I gazed after it until it disappeared out of sight past Brompton Oratory; without tears, but just, I imagined, as that poor devil of a butcher must have stared down at the Aubusson carpet.

76

And so I waited.

It seemed sadistic, this last wasteland of days. It was as if Conchis, with Alison’s connivance, proceeded by some outmoded Victorian dietetic morality—one couldn’t have more jam, the sweetness of events, until one ate a lot more bread, the dry stodge of time. But I was long past philosophizing. The next weeks consisted of a long struggle between my growing—not diminishing—impatience and the manner of life I took up to dull it. Almost every night I contrived to pass through Russell Square, rather in the way, I suppose, that the sailors’ wives and black-eyed Susans would, more out of boredom than hope, haunt the quays in sailing days. But my ship never showed a light. Two or three times I went out to Much Hadham, at night, but the darkness of Dinsford House was as complete as the darkness in Russell Square. For the rest, I spent hours in cinemas, hours reading books, mainly rubbish, because all I required of a book during that period was that it kept my mind drugged. I used to drive all through the night to places I did not want to go to—to Oxford, to Brighton, to Bath. These long drives calmed me, as if I was doing something constructive by racing hard through the night; scorching through sleeping towns, always turning back in the small hours and driving exhausted into London in the dawn; then sleeping till four or five in the afternoon.

It was not only my boredom that needed calming; well before my meetings with Lily de Seitas I had had another problem.

I spent many of my waking hours in Soho or Chelsea; and they are not the areas where the chaste fiancé goes—unless he is burning to test his chastity. There were dragons enough in the forest, from the larded old bags in the doorways of Creek Street to the equally pickupable but more appetizing “models” and demi-debs of the King’s Road. Every so often I would see a girl who would excite me sexually. I began by repressing the very idea; then frankly admitted it. If I resolutely backed out of, or looked away from, promising situations, it was for a variety of reasons; and reasons generally more selfish than noble. I wanted to show them—if they had eyes present to be shown, and I could never be sure that they hadn’t—that I could live without affaires; and less consciously I wanted to show myself the same thing. I also wanted to be able to face Alison with the knowledge that I had been faithful to her, though I partly wanted this knowledge as a weapon, an added lash to the cat—if the cat had to be used.

The truth was that the recurrent new feeling I had for Alison had nothing to do with sex. Perhaps it had something to do with my alienation from England and the English, my specieslessness, my sense of exile; but it seemed to me that I could have slept with a different girl every night, and still have gone on wanting to see Alison just as much. I wanted something else from her now—and what it was only she could give me. That was the distinction. Anyone could give me sex. But only she could give me this other situation.

I couldn’t call it love, because I saw it as something experimental, depending, even before the experiment proper began, on factors like the degree of her contrition, the fullness of her confession, the extent to which she could convince me that she still loved me; that her love had caused her betrayal. And then I felt towards the experiment proper some of the mixed fascination and repulsion one feels for an intelligent religion; I knew there “must be something” in it, but I as surely knew that I was not the religious type. Besides, the logical conclusion of this more clearly seen distinction between love and sex was certainly not an invitation to enter a world of fidelity; and in one sense Mrs. de Seitas had been preaching to the converted in all that she had said—about a clean surgical abscission of what went on in the loins from what went on in the heart.

Yet something very deep in me revolted. I could swallow her theory, but it lay queasily on my stomach. It flouted something deeper than convention and received ideas.

It flouted an innate sense that I ought to find all I needed in Alison and that if I failed to do so, then something more than morality or sensuality was involved; something I couldn’t define, but which was both biological and metaphysical; to do with evolution and with death. Perhaps Lily de Seitas looked forward to a sexual morality for the twenty-first century; but something was missing, some vital safeguard; and I suspected I saw to the twenty-second.

Easy to think such things; but harder to live them, in the meanwhile still twentieth century. Our instincts emerge so much more nakedly, our emotions and wills veer so much more quickly, than ever before. A young Victorian of my age would have thought nothing of waiting fifty months, let alone fifty days, for his beloved; and of never permitting a single unchaste thought to sully his mind, let alone an act his body. I could get up in a young Victorian mood; but by midday, with a pretty girl standing beside me in a bookshop, I might easily find myself praying to the God I did not believe in that she wouldn’t turn and smile at me.

Then one evening in Bayswater a girl did smile; she didn’t have to turn. It was in an espresso bar, and I had spent most of my meal watching her talking opposite with a friend; her bare arms, her promising breasts. She looked Italian; black-haired, doe-eyed. Her friend went off, and the girl sat back and gave me a very direct, though perfectly nice, smile. She wasn’t a tart; she was just saying, If you want to start talking, come on.

I got clumsily to my feet, and spent an embarrassing minute waiting at the entrance for the waitress to come and take my money. My shameful retreat was partly inspired by paranoia. The girl and her friend had come in after me, and had sat at a table where I couldn’t help watching them. It was absurd. I began to feel that every girl who crossed my path was hired to torment and test me; I started checking through the window before I went in to coffee bars and restaurants, to see if I could get a corner free of sight and sound of the dreadful creatures. My behavior became increasingly clownish; and I grew angrier and angrier with the circumstances that made it so. Then Jojo came.

It was during the last week of September, a fortnight after my last meeting with Lily de Seitas. Bored to death with myself, I went late one afternoon to see an old René Clair. I sat without thinking next to a humped-up shape and watched the film—the immortal Italian Straw Hat. By various hoarse snuffling noises I deduced that the Beckett-like thing next to me was female. After half an hour she turned to me for a light. I saw a round-cheeked face, no makeup, a fringe of brown hair pigtailed at the back, thick eyebrows, very dirty fingernails holding a fag end. When the lights went on and we waited for the next feature she tried, with a really pitiable amateurishness, to pick me up. She was dressed in jeans, a grubby gray polo-necked sweater, a very ancient man’s duffle-coat; but she had three queer asexual charms—a face-splitting grin, a hoarse Scots accent and an air of such solitary sloppiness that I saw in her at once both a kindred spirit and someone worthy of a modern Mayhew. Somehow the grin didn’t seem quite real, but the result of pulling strings. She sat puppy-slumped like a dejected fat boy, and tried very unsuccessfully to dig out of me what I did, where I lived; and then, perhaps because of the froglike grin, perhaps because it was a lapse so patently unlikely to lead to danger, so patently not a test, I asked her if she wanted a coffee.

So we went to a coffee bar. I was hungry, I said I was going to have some spaghetti. At first she wouldn’t have any; then she admitted she had spent the last of her money on getting into the cinema; then she ate like a wolf. I grew full of kindness to dumb animals.

We went on to a pub. She had come from Glasgow, it seemed, two months before, to be an art student. In Glasgow she had belonged to some bizarre Celtic-Bohemian fringe; and now she lived in coffee bars and cinemas, “with a wee bitta help from ma friends.” She had packed art in; the eternal provincial tramp.

I felt increasingly sure of my chastity with her; and perhaps that was why I liked her so much so fast. She amused me, she had character, with her husky voice and her grotesque lack of normal visual femininity. She also had a total absence of pity about herself; and therefore all the attraction of an opposite. I drove her to her door, a rooming house in Notting Hill, and she evidently thought I would be expecting to “kip” with her. I quickly disillusioned her.

“Then we’ll no see each other again.”

“We could.” I looked at her dumpy figure beside me. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Rubbish.”

“Twenty.”

“Eighteen?”

“Ge’ away wi’ you. I’m all of twenty.”

“I’ve got a proposition to make.” She sniffed. “Sorry. A proposal. Actually, I’m waiting around for someone… a girl… to come back from Australia. And what I’d very much like for two or three weeks is a companion.” Her grin split her face from ear to ear. “I’m offering you a job. There are agencies in London that do this sort of thing. Provide escorts and partners.”

She still grinned. “I’d awfla like you juist to come up.”

“No—I meant exactly what I offered. You’re temporarily drifting. So am I. So let’s drift together… and I’ll take care of the finances. No sex. Just companionship.”

She rubbed the inside of her wrists together; grinned again and shrugged, as if one madness more was immaterial.

So I took up with her. If they had their eyes on me, it would be up to them to make a move. I thought it might even help to precipitate matters.

Jojo was a strange creature, as douce as rain—London rain, because she was seldom very clean—and utterly without ambition or meanness. She slipped perfectly into the role I cast her for. We slopped round the cinemas, slopped round the pubs, slopped round exhibitions. Sometimes we slopped round all day up in my flat. But always, at some point in the night, I sent her slopping back to her cubbyhole. Often we sat for hours at the same table reading magazines and newspapers and never exchanging a word. After seven days I felt I had known her for seven years. I gave her four pounds a week and offered to buy her some clothes and pay her tiny rent. She accepted a dark-blue jersey from Marks and Spencers, but nothing else. She fulfilled her function very well; she put off every other girl who looked at us and on my side I cultivated a sort of lunatic transferred fidelity towards her.

She was always equable, grateful for the smallest bone, like an old mongrel; patient, unoffended, casual. I refused to talk about Alison, and probably Jojo ceased to believe in her; accepted, in her accept-all way, that I was just “a wee bit cracked.”

Then one October evening I knew I wouldn’t sleep and I offered to drive her anywhere she wanted within a night’s range. She thought a moment and said, goodness knows why, Stonehenge. So we drove down to Stonehenge and walked around the looming menhirs at three o’clock with a cold wind blowing and the sound of peewits in the moon-drenched wrack above our heads. Later we sat in the car and ate chocolate. I could just see her face; the dark smudges of her eyes and the innocent puppy-grin.

“Why you grinning, Jojo?”

“‘Cause I’m happy.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“No.”

I leant forward and kissed the side of her head. It was the first time I’d ever kissed her, and I started the engine immediately. After a while she went to sleep and slowly slumped against my shoulder. When she slept she looked very young, fifteen or sixteen. I got occasional whiffs of her hair, which she hardly ever washed. I felt for her almost exactly what I felt for Kemp; great affection, and not the least desire.

One night soon after that we went to the cinema. Kemp, who thought I was mad to be sleeping with such an ugly layabout—I didn’t attempt to explain the true situation—but was glad I was showing at least one sign of normality, came with us, and afterwards we all went back to her “studio” and sat boozing cocoa and the remains of a bottle of rum. About one Kemp kicked us out; she wanted to go to sleep, as indeed I did myself. I went with Jojo and stood by the front door. It was the first really cold night of the autumn, and raining hard into the bargain. We stood at the door and looked out.

“I’ll sleep upstairs in your chair, Nick.”

“No. It’ll be all right. Stay here. I’ll get the car.” I used to park it up a side street. I got in, coaxed the engine into life, moved forward; but not far. The front wheel was flat as a pancake. I got out in the rain and looked, cursed, and went to the boot for the pump. It was not there. I hadn’t used it for a week or more, so I didn’t know when it had been pinched. I slammed the lid down and ran back to the door.

“I’ve got a bloody flat.”

“Gude.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t be such a loon. I’ll sleep in your auld armchair.”

I considered waking Kemp, but the thought of all the obscenities she would hurl round the studio soon killed that idea. We climbed up the stairs past the silent sewing rooms and into the flat.

“Look, you kip in the bed. I’ll sleep here.”

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and nodded; went to the bathroom, then marched into the bedroom, lay on the bed and pulled her wretched old duffle-coat over her. I was secretly angry with her, I was tired, but I pulled two chairs together and stretched out. Five minutes passed. Then she was in the door between the rooms.

“Nick?”

“Mm.”

“Come on.”

“Come on where.”

“You know.”

“No.”

She stood there in the door for a silent minute. She liked to mull over her gambits.

“I want you to.” It struck me that I’d never heard her use the verb “to want” in the first person before.

“Jojo, we’re chums. We’re not going to bed together.”

“It’s only kipping together.”

“No.”

“Just once.”

“No.”

She stood plumply in the door, in her blue jumper and jeans, a dark stain of silent accusation. Light from outside distorted the shadows round her figure, isolated her face, so that she looked like a Munch lithograph. Jealousy; or Envy; or Innocence.

“I’m so cold.”

“Get under the blankets then.”

She gave it a minute more and then I heard her creep back to bed. Five minutes passed. I felt my neck get stiff.

“I’m in the bed. Nick, you could easy sleep on top.” I took a deep breath. “Can you hear?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I thought you were asleep.”

Rain pounded down, dripped in the gutters; wet London night air pervaded the room. Solitude. Winter.

“Could I come in a wee sec and put the fire on?”

“Oh God.”

“I won’t wake you at all.”

“Thanks.”

She slopped into the room and I heard her strike a match. The gas phutted and began to hiss. A pinkish glow filled the room. She was very quiet, but after a while I gave in and began to sit up.

“Don’t look. I havna any clothes on.”

I looked. She was standing by the fire pulling down an outsize man’s singlet. I saw, with an unpleasant little shock, that she was almost pretty by gaslight. I turned my back and reached for a cigarette.

“Now look, Jojo, I’m just not going to have this. I will not have sex with you.”

“I didn’t fancy to get into your clean bed with all m’ clothes on.”

“Get warm. Then hop straight back.”

I got halfway through my cigarette.

“It’s only ‘cause you been so awfla nice to me.” I refused to answer. “I only want to be nice back.”

“If it’s only that, don’t worry. You owe me nothing.”

I slid a look round. She was sitting on the floor with her plump little back to me, hugging her knees and staring into the fire. More silence.

She said, “It isn’t only that.”

“Go and put your clothes on. Or get into bed. And then we’ll talk.”

The gas hissed away. I lit another cigarette from the end of the last.

“I know why.”

“Tell me.”

“You think I’ve got one of your nasty London diseases.”

“Jojo.”

“I mebbe have. You don’t have to be ill at all. You can still carry all the microbes round with you.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m only sayin’ what you’re thinkin’.”

“I’ve never thought that.”

“I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you at all.”

“Jojo, shut up. Just shut up.”

Silence.

“You juist want to keep your beautiful Sassenach coddies clean.”

Then her bare feet padded across the floor and the bedroom door was slammed—and sprung open again. After a moment I heard her sobbing. I cursed my stupidity; I cursed myself for not having paid more attention to various signs during the evening—washed hair done into a ponytail, one or two looks. I had a dreadful vision of a stern knock on the door, of Alison standing there. I was also shocked. Jojo never swore and used as many euphemisms as a girl of fifty times her respectability. Her last line had cut.

I lay a minute, then went into the bedroom. The gas-fire cast warm light through. I pulled the bedclothes up round her shoulders.

“Oh Jojo. You clown.”

I stroked her head, keeping a firm grip on the bedclothes with the other hand, in case she made a spring for me. She began to snuff. I passed her a handkerchief.

“Can I tell you somethin’?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve never done it. I’ve never been to bed with a man.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m clean as the day I was born.”

“Thank God for that.”

She turned on her back and stared up at me.

“Do you not want me now?”

That sentence somewhat tarnished the two before. I touched her cheek and shook my head.

“I love you, Nick.”

“Jojo, you don’t. You can’t.”

She began to cry again; my exasperation.

“Look, did you plan this? That flat tire?” I remembered she had slipped out, allegedly to go upstairs, while Kemp was making the cocoa.

“I couldna help it. That night we went to Stonehenge. I didna sleep a wink all the wa’ back. I juist sat there pretendin’.” Tears in her eyes again.

“Jojo. Can I tell you a long story I’ve never told anyone else? Can I?”

I dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief and then I began to talk, sitting with my back to her on the edge of the bed. I told her everything about Alison, about the way I had left her, and I spared myself nothing. I told her about Greece, I told her, if not the real incidents of my relationship with Lily, the emotional truth of it. I told her about Parnassus, all my guilt. I brought it right up to date, to Jojo herself and why I had cultivated her. She was the strangest priest to confess before; but not the worst. For she absolved me.

If only I had told her at the beginning; she would not have been so stupid then.

“I’ve been blind. I’m sorry.”

“I couldna help it.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Och. I’m only a teenage moron from Glasgow.” She looked at me solemnly. “I’m only seventeen, Nick. It was all a fib.”

“If I gave you your fare, would you—”

But she was shaking her head at once.

There were minutes of silence then and in it I thought about pain, about hurting people. It was the only truth that mattered, it was the only morality that mattered, the only sin, the only crime. Once again I had committed the one unforgivable: I had hurt an innocent person. It needed clearer definition than that, because no one was innocent. But there was a capacity in everyone to be innocent, to offer that something innocent in them, perhaps to offer it as clumsily as Jojo had, even not to offer it innocently, but with darker motives. But there remained a core of innocence, a purely innocent will to give something good; and this was the unforgivable crime—to have provoked that giving and then to smash, as I had just had to smash, the gift to pieces.

History had in a sense smashed the ten commandments of the Bible; for me they had never had any real meaning, that is any other than a conformitant influence. But sitting in that bedroom, staring at the glow of the fire on the threshold of the door through to the sitting room, I thought that at last I began to see a commandment. The missing link; though no link was ever missing, but simply unseen. And after all, not unseen by Lily de Seitas. I had had it whispered in my ear only a few weeks before; I had had it demonstrated to me in a way at my “trial”; for that matter I had even paid lip-service to it long before I went to Greece. But now I felt it; and by “feel” I mean that I knew I had to choose it, every day, even though I went on failing to keep it, had every day to choose it, every day to try to live by it. And I knew that it was all bound up with Alison; with choosing Alison, and having to go on choosing her every day. When Lily de Seitas had whispered it in my ear I had taken it as a retrospective thing, a comment on my past; and on my anecdote. But it had been a signpost to my future. Adulthood was like a mountain, and I stood at the foot of this cliff of ice, this impossible and unclimbable: Thou shalt not commit pain.

“Could I have a fag, Nick?”

I went and got her a cigarette. She lay puffing it; intermittently red-apple-checked, watching me. I held her hand.

“What are you thinking, Jojo?”

“Sposin’ she…”

“Doesn’t come?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll marry you.”

“That’s a fib.”

“Give you lots of fat babies with fat cheeks and grins like monkeys.”

“Och you cruel monster.”

She stared at me; silence; darkness; frustrated tenderness. I remembered having sat the same way with Alison, in the room off Baker Street, the October before. And the memory told me, in the simplest and most revealing way, how much I had changed.

“Someone much nicer than I am will one day.”

“Is she like me at all?”

“Yes.”

“Oh aye. I’ll bet. Puir girl.”

“Because you’re both… not like everybody else.”

“There’s only one of everyone.”

I went out and put a shilling in the meter; then stood in the doorway between the two rooms. “You ought to live in the suburbs, Jojo. Or work in a factory. Or go to a public school. Or have dinner in an embassy.”

A train screamed to the north, from Euston way. She turned and stubbed the cigarette out.

“I wish I was real pretty.”

She pulled the bedclothes up round her neck, as if to hide her ugliness.

“Being pretty is just something that’s thrown in. Like the paper round the present. Not the present.”

A long silence. Pious lies. But what breaks the fall?

“You’ll forget me.”

“No I won’t. I’ll remember you. Always.”

“Not always. Mebbe a wee once in a while.” She yawned. “I’ll remember you.” Then she said, minutes later, as if the present was no longer quite real, a childhood dream, “In stinkin’ auld England.”

77

It was six o’clock before I got to sleep, and even then I woke up several times. At last, at eleven, I decided to face the day. I went to the bedroom door. Jojo had gone. I looked in the kitchen that was also a bathroom. There, scrawled on the mirror with a bit of soap were three Xs, a Goodbye, and her name. As casually as she had slipped into my life, she had slipped out of it. On the kitchen table lay my car pump.

The sewing machines hummed dimly up from the floor below; women’s voices, the sound of stale music from a radio. I was the solitary man upstairs.

Waiting. Always waiting.

I leant against the old wooden draining-board drinking Nescafé and eating damp biscuits. As usual, I had forgotten to buy any bread. I stared at the side of an empty cereal packet. On it a nauseatingly happy “average” family were shown round a breakfast table; breezy tanned father, attractive girlish mother, small boy, small girl; dreamland. Metaphorically I spat. Yet there must be some reality behind it all, some craving for order, harmony, beyond all the shabby cowardice of wanting to be like everyone else, the selfish need to have one’s laundry looked after, buttons sewn on, ruts served, name propagated, meals decently cooked.

I made another cup of coffee. Cursed Alison, the bloody bitch. Why should I wait for her? Why of all places in London, a city with more eager girls per acre than any other in Europe, prettier girls, droves of restless girls who came to London to be stolen, stripped, to wake up one morning in a stranger’s bed.

Then Jojo. The last person in the world I had wanted to hurt. As if I had kicked an emotionally starving mongrel in its poor, thin ribs.

A violent reaction set on me, born of self-disgust and resentment. All my life I had been a sturdy contra-suggestible. Now I was soft; remoter from freedom than I had ever been. I thought with a leap of excitement of life without Alison, of setting out into the blue again… alone, but free. Even noble, since I was condemned to inflict pain, whatever I did. To America, perhaps; to South America.

Freedom was making some abrupt choice and acting on it; was as it had been at Oxford, allowing one’s instinct-cum-will to fling one off at a tangent, solitary into a new situation.

Hazard, I had to have hazard. I had to break out of this waiting room I was in.

I walked through the uninspiring rooms. The Bow chinoiserie plate hung over the mantelpiece. The family again; order and involvement. Imprisonment. Outside, rain; a gray scudding sky. I stared down Charlotte Street and decided to leave Kemp’s, at once, that day. To prove to myself that I could move, I could cope, I was free.

I went down to see Kemp. She took my announcement coldly. I wondered if she knew about Jojo, because I could see a stony glint of contempt in her eyes as she shrugged off my excuse—that I had decided to rent a cottage in the country.

“You taking Jojo, are you?”

“No. We’re bringing it to an end.”

“You’re bringing it to an end.”

She knew about Jojo.

“All right. I’m bringing it to an end.”

“Tired of slumming. Thought you would be.”

“Think again.”

“You pick up a poor little scob like that, God only knows why, then when you’re sure she’s head over fucking heels in love with you, you act like a real gentlemen. You kick her out.”

“Look—”

“Don’t kid me, laddie.” She sat square and inexorable. “Go on. Run back home.”

“I haven’t got a bloody home, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh yes you have. They call it the bourgeoisie.”

“Spare me that.”

“Seen it a thousand times. You discover we’re human beings. Makes you shit with fright.” With an insufferable dismissiveness she added, “It’s not your fault. You’re a victim of the dialectical process.”

“And you’re the most impossible old—”

“Dah!” She turned away as if she didn’t care a damn, anyway; as if life was like her studio, full of failures, full of mess and disorder, and it took her all her energy to survive in it herself. A Mother Courage gone sour. She went to her paints table and started fiddling.

I went out. But I had hardly got to the top of the stairs to the ground floor when she came out and bawled up at me.

“Let me tell you something, you smug bastard.” I turned. “You know what will happen to that poor damn kid? She’ll go on the game. And you know who’ll have put her there?” Her outstretched finger seared its accusation at me. “Mister Saint Nicholas Urfe. Esquire.” That last word seemed the worst obscenity I had ever heard pass her lips. Her eyes scalded me, then she went back and slammed the studio door. So there I was, between the Scylla of Lily de Seitas and the Charybdis of Kemp; bound to be sucked down.

I packed in a cold rage; and lost in a fantasy row with Kemp, in which I scored all the points, I lifted the Bow plate carelessly off its nail. It slipped; struck the edge of the gas-fire; and a moment later I was staring down at it on the hearth, broken in two across the middle.

I knelt. I was so near tears that I had to bite my lips savagely hard. I knelt there holding the two pieces. Not even trying to fit them together. Not even moving when I heard Kemp’s footsteps on the stairs. She came in and I was kneeling there. I don’t know what she had come up to say, but when she saw my face she did not say it.

I raised the two pieces a little to show her what had happened. My life, my past, my future. Not all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.

She was silent a long moment, taking it in, the half-packed case, the mess of books and papers on the table; the smug bastard, the broken butcher, on his knees by the hearth.

She said, “Jesus Christ. At your age.”

So I stayed with Kemp.

78

The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for the antihero’s future; leave him, says our age, leave him where mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in a dilemma, with all to lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give him no direction, no reward; because we too are waiting, in our solitary rooms where the telephone never rings, waiting for this girl, this truth, this crystal of humanity, this reality lost through imagination, to return; and to say she returns is a lie.

But the maze has no center. An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip of the cutting shears. Benedick kissed Beatrice at last; but ten years later? And Elsinore, that following spring?

So ten more days. But what happened in the following years is silence; is another mystery.

Ten more days, in which the telephone never rang.

Instead, on the last day of October, All Hallows Eve, Kemp took me for a Saturday-afternoon walk. I should have suspected such an uncharacteristic procedure; but it happened that it was a magnificent day, with a sky from another world’s spring, as blue as a delphinium petal, the trees russet and amber and yellow, the air as still as in a dream.

Besides, Kemp had taken to mothering me. It was a process that needed so much compensatory bad language and general gruffness that our relationship was sergeant-majored into something outwardly the very reverse of its true self. Yet it would have been spoilt if we had declared it, if we had stopped pretending that it did not exist; and in a strange way this pretending seemed an integral part of the affection. Not declaring we liked each other showed a sort of mutual delicacy that proved we did. Perhaps it was Kemp who made me feel happier during those ten days; perhaps it was an aftermath of Jojo, least angelic of angels, but sent by hazard from a better world into mine; perhaps it was simply a feeling that I could wait longer than I had till then imagined; whatever it was, something in me changed. I was still the butt, yet in another sense; Conchis’s truths, especially the truth he had embodied in Lily, matured in me. Slowly I was learning to smile, and in the special sense that Conchis intended. Though one can accept, and still not forgive; and one can decide, and still not enact the decision.

We walked north, across the Euston Road and along the Outer Circle into Regent’s Park. Kemp wore black slacks and a filthy old cardigan and an extinguished Woodbine, the last as a sort of warning to the fresh air that it got through to her lungs only on a very temporary sufferance. The park was full of green distances; of countless scattered groups of people, lovers, families, solitaries with dogs, the colors softened by the imperceptible mist of autumn, as simple and pleasing in its way as a Boudin beachscape.

We strolled, watched the ducks with affection, the hockey players with contempt.

“Nick boy,” said Kemp, “I need a cup of the bloody national beverage.”

And that too should have warned me; her manes all drank coffee. So we went to the tea pavilion, stood in a queue, then found half a table. Kemp left me to go to the ladies’. I pulled out a paperback I had in my pocket. The couple on the other side of the table moved away. The noise, the mess, the cheap food, the queue to the counter. I guessed Kemp was having to queue also. And I became lost in the book.

Then.

In the outer seat opposite, diagonally from me.

So quietly, so simply.

She was looking down, then up, straight at me. I jerked round, searching for Kemp. But I knew where Kemp was; she was walking home.

All the time I had expected some spectacular reentry, some mysterious call, a metaphorical, perhaps even literal, descent into a modern Tartarus. Not this. And yet, as I stared at her, unable to speak, at her steady bright look, the smallest smile, I understood that this was the only possible way of return; her rising into this most banal of scenes, this most banal of London, this reality as plain and dull as wheat. Since she was cast as Reality, she had come in her own; and so she came, yet in some way heightened, stranger, still with the aura of another world. From, yet not of, the crowd behind her.

A dark-brown tweed suit. A dark-green scarf tied peasant-fashion round her head. She sat with her hands in her lap, waiting for me to speak, those clear eyes on mine. And it was impossible. Now it was here, I couldn’t change. I couldn’t look at her.

I looked down at the book, as if I wanted no more to do with her. Then angrily up past her at a moronically curious family, scene-sniffing faces at the table across the gangway. Then down at my book again.

Suddenly she stood up and walked away. I watched her move between the tables. Her smallness, that slightly sullen smallness and slimness that was a natural part of her sexuality. I saw another man’s eyes follow her out through the door.

I let a few stunned, torn moments pass. Then I went after her, pushing roughly past the people in my way.

She was walking slowly across the grass, towards the east. I came beside her. She gave the bottom of my legs the smallest glance. We said nothing. I looked round. So many people, so many too far to distinguish.

And Regent’s Park. Regent’s Park. That other meeting; the scent of lilac, and bottomless darkness.

“Where are they?”

She gave a little shrug. “I’m alone.”

“Like hell.”

We walked more silent paces. She indicated with her head an empty bench beside a tree-lined path. She seemed as strange to me as if she had come from Tartarus; so cold, so calm.

I followed her to the seat. She sat at one end and I sat halfway along, turned towards her, staring at her. Returned from the dead. Yet it infuriated me that she would not look at me, had made not the slightest sign of apology; and now would not say anything.

I said, “I’m waiting. As I’ve been waiting these last three and a half months.”

She untied her scarf and shook her hair free. It had grown longer, and she had a warm tan. She looked as she had when we had first met. From my very first glimpse of her I realized, and it seemed to aggravate my irritation, that the image, idealized by memory, of a Lily always at her best had distorted Alison into what she was only at her worst. She was wearing a pale brown man’s-collared shirt beneath the suit. A very good suit; Conchis must have given her money. She was pretty and desirable; even without… I remembered Parnassus. Her other selves. She stared down at the tip of her flat-heeled shoe.

I said, “I want to make one thing clear from the start.” She said nothing. “I forgive you that foul bloody trick you played this summer. I forgive you whatever miserable petty female vindictiveness made you decide to keep me waiting all this time.”

She shrugged. A silence. Then she said, “But?”

“But I want to know what the hell went on that day in Athens. What the hell’s been going on since. And what the hell’s going on now.”

“And then?”

Those gray eyes; her strangeness made them colder.

“We’ll see.”

She took a cigarette out of her handbag and lit it; and then without friendliness offered me the packet. I said, “No thanks.”

She stared into the distance, towards the aristocratic wall of houses that make up Cumberland Terrace and overlook the park. Cream stucco, a row of white statues along the cornices, the muted blues of the sky.

A poodle ran up to us. I waved it away with my foot, but she patted it on the head. A woman called, “Tina! Darling! Come here.” In the old days we would have exchanged grimaces of disgust. She went back to staring at the houses. I looked round. There were other seats a few yards away. Other sitters and watchers. Suddenly the whole peopled park seemed a stage, the whole landscape a landscape of masquers, spies. I lit one of my own cigarettes; willed her to look at me, but she wouldn’t. She was still punishing me; not now with absence, but with silence.

I had imagined this scene so often; and it was always in essence a melting, a running into each other’s arms.

“Alison.”

She looked at me briefly, but then down again. She sat, holding the cigarette. As if nothing would make her speak. A plane leaf lolloped down, touched her skirt. She bent and picked it up, smoothed its yellow teeth against the tweed. An Indian came and sat on the far end of the bench. A threadbare black overcoat, a white scarf; a thin face. He looked small and unhappy, timidly alien; a waiter perhaps, the slave of some cheap curryhouse kitchen. I moved a little closer to her, lowered my voice, and forced it to sound as cold as hers.

“What about Kemp?”

“We went to see her.”

“We?”

“Yes. We.”

“Have you seen them? All of them?”

“Nicko, please don’t interrogate me. Please don’t.”

My name; a tiny shift. But she was still set hard and silent.

“Are they watching? Are they here somewhere?”

An impatient sigh.

“Are they?”

“No.” But at once she qualified it. “I don’t know.”

I said, “Look at me. Look at me.”

And she couldn’t do it. Face to face she could not lie to me. She looked away and said, “It was the one last thing. One last time. It’s nothing.”

There was a long pause.

I said, “You can’t lie to me. Face to face.”

She touched her hair; the hair, her wrist, a way she had of raising her face a little as she made the gesture. A glimpse of the lobe of an ear. I had a sense of outrage, as if I was being barred from my own property.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever felt that about. That they could never lie to me. So can you imagine what it was like in the summer? When I got that letter, those flowers…”

She said, “If we start talking about the past.”

All my overtures were in some way irrelevant; she had something else on her mind. My fingers touched a smooth dry roundness in my coat-pocket: a chestnut, a talisman. Jojo had passed it to me wrapped in a toffee-paper, her pawky joke, one evening in a cinema. I thought of Jojo, somewhere only a mile or two away through the brick and the traffic, sitting with some new pick-up, drifting into her womanhood; of holding her pudgy hand in the darkness. And suddenly I had to fight not to take Alison’s.

I said, “Allie?”

But coming to a decision, determined to be untouched, she threw the yellow leaf away. “I’ve returned to London to sell the flat.” She looked briefly at me; she wasn’t lying. “I’m going back to Australia.”

Terrible; we were like total strangers.

“Long journey for such a small matter.”

“And to see you.”

“Like this?”

“To see if I…” but she cut her sentence short, as if by some previous resolution. Or advice?

“If you?”

“I didn’t want to come. They made me.”

“Made you?” I sounded unbelieving.

“Made me feel I ought to come.”

“Just to see me.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re here against your will.”

“You could call it that.”

“And now you’ve seen me.”

But she would not answer the implicit question. She threw me one quick look, a sudden flash of fierceness. But then went back to her silence. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time. As if what had once been free in her, as accessible as a pot of salt on a table, was now held in a phial, sacrosanct. But I knew Alison, I knew how she took on the color and character of the people she loved or liked, however independent she remained underneath. And I knew where that smooth impermeability came from. I was sitting with a priestess from the temple of Demeter.

I tried to be matter-of-fact. “Where have you been since Athens? At home?”

“Perhaps.”

I took a breath. “Have you thought about me at all?”

“Sometimes.”

They had told her: Be like white marble, be oblique. But why?

“Is there someone else?”

She hesitated, then said, “No.”

“You don’t sound very certain.”

“There’s always someone else—if you’re looking for it.”

“Have you been… looking for it?”

She said, “There’s no one.”

“And I’m included in that ‘no one’?”

“You’ve been included in it ever since that… day.”

What Lily de Seitas had said: she is not a present being given to you; you must convince her you have the money to pay for her. I looked at Alison’s sullen profile, that perverse stare into the distance. She was aware of my look, and her eyes followed someone who was passing, as if she found him more interesting than me.

I said, “What is it?”

“What’s what?”

“What am I meant to do? Take you in my arms? Fall on my knees? What do they want?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes you damn well do.”

Her eyes flicked sideways at me, and she looked down. She said, “I saw through you that day. That’s all. For ever.”

There was a long pause.

I said quietly, “I made love to you that day. Also… in a sense… for ever.”

She shrugged, but a moment later she half turned her back and averted her face, her arm on the back of the seat. I spoke to the ground.

“There was a moment on that mountain when I loved you. I don’t think you know, I know you know, I know you saw it, I know you too well not to be sure you saw it. And remember it.” She said nothing. “You’re meant to answer.”

“Why should I remember it? Why shouldn’t I do everything I can to forget it?”

“You know the answer to that, too.”

“Do I?” So cold, so small, so quiet.

I said, “Alison…”

“Don’t come closer. Please don’t come closer.”

She would not look at me. But it was in her voice. I had a feeling of trembling too deep to show; as if the brain cells trembled. She spoke with her head turned away. “All right, I know what it means.” Her face still averted, she took out another cigarette and lit it. “Or it meant. When I loved you. It meant everything you said or did to me had meaning. Emotional meaning. It moved me, excited me. It depressed me, it made me…” she took a deep breath. “Like the way after all that’s happened you can sit there in that tea place and look at me as if I’m a prostitute or something and—”

I touched her then, my hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. I had to move closer, to hear what she said.

“Whenever I’m with you it’s like going to someone and saying, torture me, abuse me. Give me hell. Because—”

“Alison.”

“Oh you’re nice now. You’re nice now. So bloody nice. For a week, for a month. And then we’d start again.”

She was not crying, I leant forward and looked. In some way I knew she was acting, and yet not acting. Perhaps she had rehearsed the saying this; but still meant it. And I thought, supposing they wanted to precipitate what I began to suspect both they and Alison wanted to precipitate: to bringing about in an hour what might take weeks… and I remembered that love of paradox, and how well they knew me. To fuse, to weld. And a last lesson, a last warning? A small wave of anger burnt up in me; but one I knew I could use.

I said, “As you’re going back to Australia, I don’t see the point of all this.”

I spoke lightly, without sarcasm, but she twisted a look back at me then; almost a look of hate, as if my crassness was monstrous. I made the mistake of beginning to smile; to call her hand. Suddenly she was on her feet and crossing the path. She walked out under the trees onto the grassy open space, and stood with her back to me.

Something about the way she stood, the direction she faced; it nagged me.

And then in a flash I knew for certain.

Beyond her stretched the grass, a quarter of a mile of turf to the edge of the park. Beyond that rose the Regency facade, bestatued, many and elegantly windowed, of Cumberland Terrace.

A wall of windows.

A row of statues. Gods. Classical gods.

Not the Outer Circle. The dress circle.

Polymus.

But once too often.

I looked at the Indian. He too was staring at Alison; then at me. Even if he had overheard he wouldn’t have understood what we were saying; and yet he knew what had happened. I could see it in his mild brown eyes. Dark men, pale men; but only one sort of woman. A ghost of sympathy passed between us.

I went up behind her; roughly took her arm. She made no move. The air was as mellow as at a harvest festival, the innocent park bred innocent people.

“Now listen.” I stood there at her shoulder, with my meanest expression. It was not a difficult part to play. That bruised face, very near tears, but not in tears. I thought, I will get her on a bed and I will ram her. I will ram her and ram her, the cat will fall and fall, till she is full of me, possessed by me. And I thought, Christ help her if she tries to shield herself with the accursed wall of rubber. If she tries to put anything between my vengeance and her punishment. Christ help her.

“Now listen. I know who is watching us, I know where he is watching, I know why we are here. So first. I’m nearly broke. I haven’t got a job, and I’m never going to have a job that means anything. So remember that you’re standing with the worst prospect in London. Now second. If Lily walked down that path behind us and beckoned to me, I would follow. I think I would follow. The fact that I don’t know is what I want you to remember. And while you’re about it, remember that she isn’t one girl, but a type of encounter. And the world’s full of that sort of encounter.” I let go of her arm. “Third. As you kindly told me in Athens, I’m not much good in bed.”

“I didn’t mean that!” Her face flashed round; I was too unfair.

I said, “Keep looking at them and keep your mouth shut.” We both stared at the blank upper windows of Cumberland Terrace; those white stone divinities. “Fourth. He said something to me one day. About males and females. How we judge things as objects, and you judge them by their relationships. All right. You’ve always been able to see this… whatever it is… between us. Joining us. I haven’t. That’s all I can offer you. The possibility that I’m beginning to see it. That’s all.” I could see her face obliquely in profile; impossible to tell what she was thinking.

“Can I speak?”

“No. You now have a choice. You do as I say. Or you don’t. This. In a few seconds I am going to walk away from you. You will look after me, then call my name. I shall stop, turn round. You will come up to me. I shall turn and start walking away again. You will come after me again, and catch my arm. I shall shake myself free. Then. Then I shall slap you as hard as I can over the side of the face. And believe me, it won’t hurt me half as much as it hurts you. I shall walk towards the gate over there on our right. You will stand for a few moments, covering your face with your hands. Then you will begin walking in the opposite direction to me, over to the north gate. To our left. It’s about half a mile away.” I paused. She swallowed, I knew she was frightened. “When you get there you will take a taxi. You will communicate with no one. You will take a taxi.” I hesitated, losing impetus, then found the right echo; and the right exit. “You will take a taxi and go straight to Paddington Station. The waiting room.” I jerked the back of her coat down. “And there you will wait. If I find out, if I ever find out that you got in touch with anyone after leaving me I shall…”

“You will… ?”

“You know. You know damn well what this is. But you don’t say yes or no. You do yes or no. I am now going to wait five seconds. Then I shall start walking.” I jerked her coat again. “So get it clear. You have five seconds. In those five seconds you are going to choose, and choose for ever, whose side you are on.”

She stared at the houses. The afternoon sun made them gleam with light, that light one sees in summer clouds; a serene, Olympian elixir of solid light.

She said, “I’m going back to Australia.”

A moment. The abysses and milestones. Her psychologically contused face, her obstinacy, her unmaneuverability. There was a smell of a bonfire. A hundred yards away a blind man was walking, freely, not like a blind man; only the white stick showed he had no eyes.

I said, “The waiting room.”

I walked towards the southeast gate. Two steps, four, six. Then ten.

“Nicko.”

I stopped; turned with a granite-hard face. She came towards me, stopped two or three yards away. She wasn’t acting; she was going back to Australia; or to some Australia of the mind, the emotions, to live, without me. Yet she could not let me go.

Eleutheria. Her turn to know.

Then I went on. Fifteen, twenty yards. I closed my eyes. Prayed.

Her hand on my arm. I turned again. Her eyes were wounded, outraged; I was more than ever impossible. But also some delay she was trying to make. Some compromise. I snatched myself free, of both hand and eyes.

I hit her before she could speak. I flicked my arm out, held it the smallest fraction of a second, then brought it down sideways as hard as I could; so sure that she would twist her head aside. But in that smallest fraction of a warning second she finally decided; and decision was the savage but unavoided slap knocking her sideways. Even so her hand flashed up instinctively, and her eyes blinked with shock.

Pain.

We stared wildly at each other for a moment. Not in love. No name, no name, but unable to wear masks. She recovered first. Behind her I could see people stopped on the path. A man stood up from his seat. The Indian sat and watched. Her hand was over the side of her face, shielding it as well as soothing it. Her eyes were wet, perhaps with the pain. But she was slowly smiling. That archaic smile, her variant of theirs, steadier, braver, far less implacable, without malice or arrogance, yet still that smile.

Mocking love, yet making it.

And suddenly the truth came to me, as we stood there, trembling, searching, at our point of fulcrum. There were no watching eyes. The windows were as blank as they looked. The theatre was empty. It was not a theatre. They had told her it was a theatre, and she had believed them, and I had believed her. To bring us to this—not for themselves, but for us. I turned and looked at the windows, the facade, the pompous white pedimental figures.

Then she buried her face in her hands, as if some inexorable mechanism had started.

I was so sure. It was logical, the characteristic and perfect final touch to the god-game. They had absconded. I was so sure, and yet… after so much, how could I be perfectly sure? How could they be so cold? So inhuman? So incurious? So load the dice and yet leave the game? And if I wasn’t sure?

I gave her bowed head one last stare, then I was walking. Firmer than Orpheus, as firm as Alison herself, that other day of parting, not once looking back. The autumn grass, the autumn sky. People. A blackbird, poor fool, singing out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of gray pigeons over the houses. Fragments of freedom, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves.