What did Mr. Conchis do? He lived alone—yes, alone—with a housekeeper, and he cultivated his garden, quite literally, it seemed. He read. He had many books. He had a piano. He spoke many languages. The agoyatis did not know which—all, he thought. Where did he go in winter? Sometimes he went to Athens, and to other countries. Which? The man did not know. He knew nothing about Mitford visiting Bourani. No one ever visited.
“Ask him if he thinks I might visit Mr. Conchis.”
No; it was impossible.
Our curiosity was perfectly natural, in Greece—it was his reserve that was strange. He might have been picked for his sullenness. He stood up to go.
“Are you sure he hasn’t got a harem of pretty girls hidden there?” said Méli. The agoyatis raised his blue chin and eyebrows in a silent no, then turned contemptuously away.
“What a villager!” Having muttered the worst insult in the Greek language at his back, Méli touched my wrist moistly. “My dear fellow, did I ever tell you about the way two men and two ladies I once met on Mykonos made love?”
“Yes. But never mind.”
I felt oddly disappointed. And it was not only because it was the third time I had heard precisely how that acrobatic quartet achieved congress.
Back at the school I picked up, during the rest of the week, a little more. Only two of the masters had been at the school before the war. They had both met Conchis once or twice then, but not since the school had restarted in 1949. One said he was a retired musician. The other had found him a very cynical man, an atheist. But they both agreed that Conchis was a man who cherished his privacy. In the war the Germans had forced him to live in the village. They had one day captured some andarte—resistance fighters—from the mainland and ordered him to execute them. He had refused and had been put before a firing squad with a number of the villagers. But by a miracle he had not been killed outright, and was saved. This was evidently the story Sarantopoulos had told us. In the opinion of many of the villagers, and naturally of all those who’d had relatives massacred in the German reprisal, he should have done what they ordered. But that was all past. He had been wrong, but to the honor of Greece. However, he had never set foot in the village again.
Then I discovered something small, but anomalous. I asked several people besides Demetriades, who had been at the school only a year, whether Leverrier, Mitford’s predecessor, or Mitford himself had ever spoken about meeting Conchis. The answer was always no—understandably enough, it seemed, in Leverrier’s case, because he was very reserved, “too serious” as one master put it, tapping his head. It so happened that the last person I asked, over coffee in his room, was the biology master. Karazoglou said in his aromatic broken French that he was sure Leverrier had never been there, as he would have told him. He’d known Leverrier rather better than the other masters; they had shared a common interest in botany. He rummaged about in a chest of drawers, and then produced a box of sheets of paper with dried flowers that Leverrier had collected and mounted. There were lengthy notes in an admirably clear handwriting and a highly technical vocabulary, and here and there professional-looking sketches in India ink and watercolor. As I sorted uninterestedly through the box I dropped one of the pages of dried flowers, to which was attached a sheet of paper with additional notes. This sheet slipped from the clip that was holding it. On the back was the beginning of a letter, which had been crossed out, but was still legible. It was dated June 6, 1951, two years before. Dear Mr. Conchis, I am much afraid that since the extraordinary… and then it stopped.
I didn’t say anything to Karazoglou, who had noticed nothing; but I then and there decided to visit Mr. Conchis.
I cannot say why I became so suddenly so curious about him. Partly it was for lack of anything else to be curious about, the usual island obsession with trivialities; partly it was that one cryptic phrase from Mitford and the discovery about Leverrier; partly, perhaps mostly, a peculiar feeling that I had a sort of right to visit. My two predecessors had both met this unmeetable man, and not wanted to talk about it; in some way I felt I had a turn coming, too.
I did one other thing that week. I wrote a letter to Alison. I sent it inside an envelope addressed to Ann in the flat below in Russell Square, asking her to post it on to wherever Alison was living. I said almost nothing in the letter; only that I’d thought about her once or twice, that I had discovered what the “waiting room” meant; and that she was to write back only if she really wanted to, I’d quite understand if she didn’t.
I knew that on the island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was. It was likely that Alison hadn’t given me a thought for weeks, and that she had had half a dozen more affaires. So I posted the letter rather as one throws a message in a bottle into the sea. Not as a joke, perhaps, but almost; yet with a kind of ashamed hope.
12
The absence of the usually unfailing sun-wind made the next Saturday oppressively hot. The cicadas had begun. They racketed in a ragged chorus, never quite finding a common beat, rasping one’s nerves, but finally so familiar that when one day they stopped in a rare shower of rain, the silence was like an explosion. They completely changed the character of the pine forest. Now it was live and multitudinous, an audible, invisible hive of energy, with all its pure solitude gone, for besides the tzitzikia the air throbbed, whined, hummed with carmine-winged grasshoppers, locusts, huge hornets, bees, midges, bots and ten thousand other anonymous insects. In some places there were nagging clouds of black flies, so that I climbed through the trees like a new Orestes, cursing and slapping.
I came to the ridge again. The sea was a pearly turquoise, the far mountains ash-blue in the windless heat. I could see the shimmering green crown of pine trees around Bourani. It was about noon when I came through the trees out onto the shingle of the beach with the chapel. It was deserted. I searched among the rocks, but there was nothing, and I didn’t feel watched. I had a swim, then lunch, black bread and ochra and fried squid. A long way south a plump caïque thudded past towing a line of six little lamp-boats, like a mallard with ducklings. Its bow wave made a thin dark miraging ripple on the creamy blue surface of the sea, and that was all that remained of civilization when the boats had disappeared behind the western headland. There was the infinitesimal lap of the transparent blue water on the stones, the waiting trees, the myriad dynamos of the insects, and the enormous landscape of silence. I dozed under the thin shade of a pine, in the agelessness, the absolute dissociation of wild Greece.
The sun moved, came on me, and made me erotic. I thought of Alison, of sex things we had done together. I wished she was beside me, naked. We would have made love against the pine needles, then swum, then made love again. I was filled with a dry sadness, a mixture of remembering and knowing; remembering what was and what might have been and knowing it was all past, at the same time knowing, or beginning to know, that other things were happily past—at least some of my illusions about myself, and then the syphilis, for there were no signs that it was going to come back. I felt physically very well. What was going to become of my life I didn’t know; but lying there that day by the sea it didn’t seem to matter much. To be was enough. I felt myself in suspension, waiting without fear for some impulse to drive me on. I turned on my stomach and made love to the memory of Alison, like an animal, without guilt or shame, a mere machine for sensation spread-eagled on the earth. Then I ran across the burning stones into the sea.