I started walking fast down the track to the gate. And there, just as on that very first visit, I found that I had been left a clue.
57
Or rather, two clues.
They were hanging from the branch of a pine tree near the gate down into the center of the path, some six feet from the ground, swinging a little in the wind, innocent and idle, touched by sunlight. One was a doll. The other was a human skull.
The skull hung from a black cord, which passed through a neat hole drilled in the top, and the doll from a white one. Its neck was in a noose. It was hanging in both senses. About eighteen inches high, clumsily carved in wood and painted black, with a smiling mouth and eyes naïvely whitened in. Around its ankles were its only “clothes”—two wisps of rag, one ivory, the other indigo. I recognized them as the fabrics “Lily” had worn the second weekend. The doll was her, and said that she was evil, she was black, under the white she so often wore.
I twisted the skull and made it spin. Shadows haunted the sockets, the mouth grinned grimly.
Alas, poor Yorick.
Disemboweled corpses?
Or Frazer… The Golden Bough? I tried to remember. What was it? Hanging dolls in sacred woods.
I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved, the dry trees lay in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical.
In the light, in the alley between the trees. And everywhere, a darkness beneath.
What it is, has no name.
The skull and his wife swayed in a rift of the wind from the sea. Leaving them there, in their mysterious communion, I walked fast away.
Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians. All I knew was that I ached for Julie, I was mad for her, the world that day had no other meaning; so I strode down to the school like some vengeance-brewing chieftain in an Icelandic saga, though with always the small chance in mind that I should find Julie waiting for me. But when I flung my door open, I flung it open onto an empty room. Then I felt like going to Demetriades and trying to wring the truth out of him; forcing him to come with me to the science master. I half decided to go to Athens, and even got a suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe; then changed my mind. Probably the fact that there were another two weeks of term to run was the only significant one; two weeks more in which to torment us.
Finally I went down to the village, straight to the house behind the church. The gate was open; a garden green with lemon and orange trees, through which a cobbled path led to the door of the house. Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed facade was in shadow, a palest blue against the evening sky’s pale blue. As I walked between the cool, dark walls of the trees Hermes came out of the door. He did not seem in the least surprised.
I said in Greek, “Is the young lady here?”
Then he did look surprised, glanced past me, as if expecting her to appear. After a moment he said, “Why?”
“Is she here?”
He raised his head. No. I gave him a close scrutiny. He said, “Where is she?”
“You have her suitcase?”
“Inside.”
“I want to see it.”
He hesitated, then led the way in. An airy, bare hall, a fine Turkish carpet on one wall; an obscure coat of arms, rather like an English funeral hatchment, on another. I saw through an open door the crates Hermes had brought from Bourani. It was apparently his own room. A small boy came to the door. Hermes said something to him, and the boy gave me a solemn brown stare, then retreated. Hermes walked up the stairs, where doors led to left and right from a transverse landing. He opened the left-hand one. I found myself in an island room. A bed with a folk-weave bedspread, a floor of polished planks, a chest of drawers, a fine cassone, some pleasant watercolors of island houses. They had the clean, stylish, shallow look of architectural perspectives, and though they were unsigned I guessed that they were Anton’s. Hermes threw open the shutters of the west-facing window.
Julie’s suitcase stood at the foot of the bed. On top of the chest of drawers was a small bowl of flowers; on the windowsill a wet kanati, the porous water jug Greeks put in their windows to cool both air and water. A nice, simple, welcoming little room.
Without looking at Hermes I picked up the case and put it on the bed, then without much hope tried the catches. But they opened. Clothes, underclothes, a blue sundress, two pairs of shoes, a bikini, toilet things.
“What are you looking for?”
I said, “Nothing.” I ruffled through the contents of the case, and became embarrassed. I couldn’t turn it out and examine each thing separately, as I felt tempted. There were two or three books at one corner. A text of the Palatine Anthology. I flicked it open. Julie Holmes, Girton. Some of the poems had little marginal notes, English equivalents, written in her neat handwriting. A Greene novel. Underneath that, an American paperback on witchcraft. A place had been marked by a letter. I slipped it halfway out of the envelope. It was the one from her mother I had read before.
I looked at Hermes. Almost certainly he was genuinely ignorant. There was no reason why he should have been told she wasn’t coming. He also had been deceived.
Ten minutes later I was in the radio office on the ground floor of the customs house, and handing in my form.
I went the next day, Monday, to meet the noon boat. There was no sign of June. But an hour later, at lunch, I found there had been something for me on it; a letter from Mrs. Holmes. It was on the same headed paper I had seen only the day before; posted in Cerne Abbas on the previous Tuesday.
DEAR MR. URFE,
Of course I don’t mind you writing, I’ve passed your letter on to Mr. Vulliamy, who is headmaster of our primary, such a nice man, and he was very excited by the idea, I think having pen pals in France and America is getting rather old hat anyway, don’t you. I’m sure he will be getting in touch with you.
I’m so glad you’ve met Julie and June and that there’s someone else English on the island. It does sound so lovely. Do remind to write. They are awful about it.
Yours most sincerely,
Tuesday came; again I went down to meet the boat; and again June was not on it. I felt restless, futile, unable to decide what to do. In the evening I strolled up from the quay to the square of the execution. There was a plaque there against the wall of the village school. The walnut tree still stood on the right; but on the left the iron grilles had been replaced by wooden gates. Two or three small boys played football against the high wall beside it; and it was like the room, that torture room, which I had gone to see when I came back from the village on the Sunday evening—locked, but I went round outside and peered in. It was now used as a storeroom, and had easels and blackboards, spare desks and other furniture; completely exorcized by circumstance. It should have been left as it had been, with the blood and the electric fire and the one terrible table in the center.
Perhaps I was overbitter about the school during those days. The examinations had taken place; and it promised in the prospectus that “each student is examined personally in written English by the native English professor.” This meant that I had two hundred papers or so to correct. In a way I didn’t mind. It kept other anxieties and suspenses at bay.