“Here. See if you can find it.”
She stood under a pine and watched me quarter the innocent ground. I searched for a raised neck, a cap of some sort; threw a sharp look back at her. She had her hand to her mouth, in suspense. I was near.
Just in front of me there was the stump of a pine that had been cut down many years before. Around it an area of about five feet by three was bare, apparently because of the stones, or because the dead stem had poisoned the ground in some way. It seemed perfectly natural, but Julie was smiling. The stones were, on a second examination, suspiciously thick around the stump. And as soon as I actually stood on the bare patch I realized something else. The stones did not budge under my feet; they were cemented in. Julie came down through the low undergrowth to beside me. Pointed.
Beyond the stump was a stone a foot or so long, seemingly embedded in the ground—or concreted, like the rest. But it was loose, though difficult to lift till I moved it sideways. Underneath was a hinged iron ring, lying flat in a recess. Gradually I could make out the outline of a trapdoor. It was very irregular; and the tree stump had been cemented into the middle of it.
“I’ll show you.”
She stooped to grip the ring.
“Wait a minute. It must be as heavy as hell.”
“It’s counterbalanced.”
She strained for a moment and then swiftly a whole jagged section of the ground rose in the air. I looked down. An oval hole about a yard in widest diameter, descending vertically, like a huge pipe; an iron ladder against the wall. From the inside of the door hung two wire cables ending in what looked like lead weights four or five feet down the pipe—the counterbalance. I looked at the door again. It was flanged with rocks so cemented that from above they broke the line of the edge.
“What on earth…”
She smiled. “The Germans. In the war.”
I hit my head. Of course. A gun emplacement. Conchis would simply have concealed the entrance; blocked off the front slits.
“What about the stone over the ring?”
She showed me. It too had a hook that kept it in place. Then she turned at the brink, put her hands onto the ground and felt her feet onto the rungs of the iron ladder. In ten seconds she was out of sight; could have pulled the “lid” down, and anyone coming over the rise of ground from inland would have been completely at a loss.
She reached the bottom some fifteen feet below and called; a hollow subterranean timbre to her voice; pale face upturned.
I began to clamber down after her. It was unpleasantly claustrophobic. But at the bottom, opposite the ladder, was a triangular room running towards the cliff. Not very large; equilateral twelve-foot sides. On the side farthest from the ladder I could just make out two doors. Julie was standing by one of them. She came back towards me, to the foot of the ladder.
“The doors are locked.” She seemed surprised.
“Shouldn’t they be? I expect Hermes has been down.”
“Have you got a match?”
I struck one. The left wall of the triangular room was painted with a lurid mural—a beer cellar scene, foaming stems of beer, bosomy girls with winking eyes. Dim traces showed that there had once been colors, but now it was only black outlines that remained. As remote as an Etruscan wall painting; of a culture long-sunken under time. On the right-hand wall was something much more skillful—a perspective street scene that I didn’t recognize, but guessed to be of some Austrian city. Vienna perhaps. I guessed, too, that Anton had helped to execute it.
I lit a fourth match. There were two heavy doors like bulkhead doors aboard a ship. Both had massive padlocks.
She nodded. “That was our room, to the right. Joe used this one.”
“What a god-awful place. It smells.”
“I know. We used to call it the earth. Have you ever smelt a fox earth?”
“What’s behind the doors?”
“Just costumes. Beds. More murals.”
I saw the wire running in over the top left-hand door.
“And a field telephone. Where did it go?”
“To his bedroom.”
“Are there more places like this?”
“Two more. Just to hide in.”
“That day on the beach.” She nodded, smiled in the feeble light from the pipe to the surface. “You’re a brave girl. To face this sort of thing.”
“I hated it.” She looked round. “So many sour, unhappy men.”
I followed her back to the foot of ladder. I was thinking of a place under the bluff on the central ridge, a little corner shaded by pine trees, absolutely private, thickly carpeted with pine needles; to take her there, and take her, with a gentle roughness, a romantic brutality; as, and I did not shirk the parallel, I had taken Alison on Parnassus; and because I had taken her; the sad sweet poetry of echoes.
Julie began to climb the ladder; slim blue legs. The white daylight dazzled down. I waited a moment at the bottom, to keep clear of her feet, then started after her. The top of her body disappeared.
And then she screamed my name.
Someone had caught her arms and was dragging her away. Her legs kicked wildly sideways, then vanished. My name again, but cut off short. A scuffle of stones. I clawed violently up the remaining rungs. For one fraction of a second a face appeared in the opening above. Young, with crew-cut blond hair. I had an idea he was German, one of the “soldiers,” though he was wearing a black shirt. He saw I was still two rungs from the top, and immediately slammed the lid down.
I shouted in the pitch darkness. “For God’s sake! Hey. Wait a minute!”
I pressed up furiously on the underside of the lid. It gave a fraction, as if someone was standing or sitting on it. But it wouldn’t move further.
I strained to heave it up. Then listened. Silence. I tried the lid again, as unrewardingly as before. After a while I climbed down to the bottom. I struck a match and examined the two massive doors. They were impenetrable.
Snarling with rage, I remembered Conchis’s fairy-godfather smiles. The great farewell. Our revels now are ended. He must have hugged himself with joy when I called his bluff and produced my letter. I saw why he had taunted me. He wanted me to tell him I loved Julie. His plan was always to be ruined. Her false departure was always to be canceled.
And Julie? I was flooded with old doubts about her. But had she tried to delay me at the bottom of the ladder? No. And she could easily have dropped something. Had she enticed me into the place? No, I had brought the subject up myself, both times.
He had tricked her as well.
Perhaps he was jealous of us—not only sexually jealous, but jealous of us as rebellious puppets. I thought of how near I had been to having her. To teaching her that there were things in which I was skilled, wise, both passionate and patient.
I swore aloud with frustrated rage and went up the ladder again to bang on the lid with one of the counterweights. But it was a waste of time. So I sat at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to plumb Conchis’s duplicities; to read his palimpsest. His “theatre without an audience” made no sense, it couldn’t be the explanation. The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he was doing sprang from some theory about the theatre—he had said it himself: The masque is only a metaphor. A strange and incomprehensible new philosophy? Metaphorism? Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. I thought and thought, and thought again, and arrived at nothing.
Half an hour and five attempts later the lid smoothly gave. I ran up into the trees to where I could see inland, but the landscape was empty. Behind the lid stood my duffle-bag, where I had left it, untouched.
The house too was as we had left it, shuttered blind. And then, standing under the colonnade, I recalled that first plan: how Julie would have been waiting in my room while I raged as I was raging then over at Bourani. I began to suspect her again, but only of having played this last trick, this doubly false coda, for Conchis.