I turned to the night porter.
“I want a line to London. This number.” I wrote it down. A few minutes later he pointed to a box.
I stood listening to the phone burr-burr in my old flat in Russell Square. It went on a long time. At last it was picked up.
“For goodness’ sake… who’s that?”
The operator said. “I have a long-distance call for you from Athens.”
“From where!”
I said, “Okay, operator. Hello?”
“Who is that?”
She sounded a nice girl, but she was half asleep. Though the call cost me four pounds, it was worth it. I discovered that Ann Taylor had gone back to Australia, but six weeks before. No one had killed herself. A girl the girl on the other end didn’t know, but “I think she’s a friend of Ann’s” had taken over the flat; she hadn’t seen her “for weeks.” Yes, she had blonde hair; actually she only saw her twice; yes, she thought she was Australian.
Back in my room I remembered the flower in my buttonhole. It was very wilted, but I took it out of the coat I had been wearing and stuck it in a glass of water.
I woke up late, having finally slept sounder than I expected. I lay in bed for a while, listening to the street noises down below, thinking about Alison. I tried to recall exactly what her expression had been, whether there was any humor, any sympathy, an indication of anything, good or bad, in her small standing there. I could understand the timing of her resurrection. As soon as I got back to London I should have found out; so it had to be in Athens.
And now I was to hunt for her.
I wanted to see her, I knew I wanted to see her desperately, to dig or beat the truth out of her, to let her know how vile her betrayal was. To let her know that even if she crawled round the equator on her knees I could never forgive her. That I was finished with her. Disgusted by her. As disintoxicated of her as I was of Lily. I thought, Christ, if I could only lay my hands on her. But the one thing I would not do was hunt for her.
Then, having a shower, I began to sing. Because the masque was not over. Because, though I would not consciously admit it, Alison was alive. Because I knew there must be a confrontation between us. And I would lure her on, lead her into believing that a reconciliation was possible. I thought, if I ever get a chance of making her fall in love with me again. Such a savage revenge I would have on her. On all of them. That cat. This time I would use that cat.
And I only had to wait. They would bring her to me now.
I went down to a noon breakfast; and the first thing I discovered was that I did not have to wait. For there was another letter by hand for me. This time it contained just one word: London. I remembered that order in the Earth: Termination by July for all except nucleus. Nucleus, Ashtaroth the Unseen, was Alison.
I went to the travel agency and got a seat on the evening plane; and seeing a map of Italy on the wall, as I stood waiting for the ticket to be made out, I discovered where Subiaco was; and decided that the marionette would make the manipulators of strings wait a day, for a change.
When I came out I went into the biggest bookshop in Athens, on the corner of Stadiou, and asked for a book on the identification of flowers. My belated attempt at resuscitation had not been successful, and I had had to throw the buttonhole away. The assistant had nothing in English, but there was a good French flora, she said, which gave the names in several languages. I pretended to be impressed by the pictures, then turned to the index; to Alyssum, p. 69.
And there it was, facing page 69: thin green leaves, small white flowers, Alysson maritime… parfum de miel… from the Greek a (without) and lyssa (madness). Called this in Italian, this in German.
In English: Sweet Alison.
Part Three
Le triomphe de la philosophie serait de jeter du jour sur l’obscurité des voies dont la providence se sert pour parvenir aux fins qu’elle se propose sur l’homme, et de tracer d’après cela quelque plan de conduite qui put faire connaitre a ce malheureux individu bipède, perpétuellement ballotté par les caprices de cet étre qui dit-on le dirige aussi despotiquement, to manière dont il taut qu’il interprète les décrets de cette providence sur lui.
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.”