“How did you first come to this place, Mr. Conchis?”
“Will you forgive me if I ask you not to ask me questions?”
“Of course.”
“Good.”
And that was that; I bit my lip. If anyone else had been there I should have had to laugh.
Shadows began to fall across the water from the pines on the bluff to our right, and there was peace, absolute peace over the world, the insects stilled, and the water like a mirror. He sat in silence, sitting with his hands on his knees, apparently engaged in deep-breathing exercises. Not only his age but everything about him was difficult to tell. Outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet he watched me; even when he was looking away, he watched me; and he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to me, yet he watched and he waited. So we sat there in the silence as if we knew each other well and had no need merely to talk; and as a matter of fact it seemed in a way to suit the stillness of the day. It was an unnatural, but not an embarrassing, silence.
Suddenly he moved. His eyes had flicked up to the top of the small cliff to our left. I looked around. There was nothing. I glanced back at him.
“Something there?”
“Nothing.”
Silence.
I watched his profiled face. Was he mad? Was he making fun of me? But he stared expressionlessly out to sea. I tried to make conversation again.
“I gather you’ve met both my predecessors.”
His head turned on me with a snakelike swiftness, accusingly, but he said nothing. I prompted. “Leverrier?”
“Who told you this?”
For some reason he was terrified about what we might have said of him behind his back. I explained about the sheet of notepaper, and he relaxed a little.
“He was not happy here. On Phraxos.”
“So Mitford told me.”
“Mitford?” Again the accusing stare.
“I suppose he heard gossip at the school.”
He searched my eyes, then nodded, but not very convincedly. I smiled at him, and he gave me the trace of a wary smile back. We were playing obscure psychological chess again. I apparently had the advantage, but I didn’t know why.
Unexpectedly, from the invisible house above, came the sound of the bell. It rang twice; then after a moment, three times; then twice again. It clearly had a meaning, and it gave a voice to the peculiar state of tension that seemed to pervade both the place and its owner, and which clashed so oddly with the enormous peace of the landscape. Conchis stood at once.
“I must go. And you have a long walk.”
We set off back up the cliff hill. Halfway up, where the steep path broadened, there was a small cast-iron seat. Conchis, who had set a quickish pace, sat down gratefully on it. He was breathing hard; so was I. He patted his heart. I put on a look of concern, but he shrugged.
“When you grow old. The annunciation in reverse.” He grimaced. “Not to be.”
We sat in silence and got our breaths back. I watched the yellowing sky through the delicate fenestrations in the pines. The sky in the west was hazy. A few evening wisps of cloud were curled high, tranced over the stillness of the world.
Then out of the blue he said quietly, “Are you elect?”
“Elect?”
“Do you feel chosen by anything?”
“Chosen?”
“John Leverrier felt chosen by God.”
“I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.”
“I think you may be.”
I smiled dubiously. “Thank you.”
“It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.”
“I’m afraid you have me out of my depth.”
He put his hand momentarily on my shoulder, as if to reassure me; to say it did not matter. Then he stood and climbed the rest of the hill. At last we were on the gravel by the side colonnade. He stopped.
“So.”
“Thank you very much indeed.” I tried to get him to return my smile, to confess that he had been pulling my leg; but his mask-like face was drained of humor.
“I make two requests of you. One is that you tell no one over there that you have met me. This is because of certain events that happened during the war.”
“I’ve heard about that.”
“What have you heard?”
“The story.”
“There are many versions of the story. But never mind now. For them I am a recluse. No one ever sees me. You understand?”
“Of course. I shan’t tell anyone.”
I knew what the next request would be: not to visit him again.
“My second request is that you come here next weekend. And stay Saturday and Sunday nights. That is, if you do not mind the walking back early on Monday morning.”
“Thank you. Thank you very much. I’d love to.”
“I think we have many things to discover.”
“‘We shall not cease from exploration’?”
“You read that in the book on the beach?”
“Didn’t you leave it for me to read?”
He looked down. “Well. Yes. It was left. And you read it.”
“I had a feeling someone was watching me. It was you?”
His dark brown eyes burnt up into mine; he took a long moment to reply. The faintest ghost of a smile.
“Do you feel that you are being watched now?”
And once again his eyes flicked past my shoulders, as if he could see something some way inside the trees. I looked round. The pines were empty. I looked back at him; a joke? He was still smiling, a small dry smile.
“Am I?”
“I merely wondered, Mr. Urfe.” He held out his hand. “If for some reason you cannot come, leave a message at Sarantopoulos’s for Hermes. It will get here the next day.”
“I’ve enjoyed meeting you very much.”
“Good. I am delighted. Till Saturday.”
After fifty yards I turned and looked back. He was still standing there, master of his domaine. I waved and he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture, one foot slightly advanced, as if in some kind of primitive blessing. When I looked back again, just before the trees hid the house, he had disappeared.
Whatever else he was he was not like anyone else I had ever met. Something more than mere loneliness, mere senile fantasies and quirks, burnt in his striking eyes, in that abrupt, probing then dropping conversation, in those sudden oblique looks at nothing. But I certainly didn’t think, as I went into the trees, that I should have the apparent answer within another hundred yards.
14
Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-colored glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman’s glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label, with the words Mireille, gantiêre embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before—musky, old-fashioned like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he’d been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me.
Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn’t imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn’t imagine; and who she was, I couldn’t imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister—perhaps someone weak-minded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me—that explained the old man’s quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nervous strangeness. He knew she was “out”; it explained the second place at the tea table, and the mysterious bell.