“It must have been a marvelous site to find.”
“Of course. But I am not talking of architecture.” He sat staring out to sea, his face like a death mask, emotionless. “I came to Phraxos looking for a house to rent. A house for a summer. I did not like the village. I do not like coasts that face north. On my last day I had a boatman take me round the island. For pleasure. By chance he landed me for a swim at Moutsa down there. By chance he said there was an old cottage up here. By chance I came up. The cottage was crumbled walls. A litter of stones choked with thorn-ivy. It was very hot. About four o’clock on the afternoon of April the eighteenth, 1929.”
He paused, as if the memory of that year had stopped him; and to prepare me for a new facet of himself; a new shift.
“There were many more trees then. One could not see the sea. I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction, the future. I speak in analogies. You understand?”
I nodded, cautious, not concerned with understanding; because underlying everything he did I had come to detect an air of stage management, of the planned and rehearsed. He did not tell me of his coming to Bourani as a man tells something that chances to occur to him, but far more as a dramatist tells an anecdote where the play requires. He went on.
“I knew at once that I must live here. I could not go beyond. It was only here that my past would merge into my future. So I stayed. I am here tonight. And you are here tonight.”
In the darkness he was looking sideways at me. I said nothing for a moment; there had seemed to be some special emphasis on the last sentence.
“Is this also what you meant by being psychic?”
“It is what I mean by being fortunate. There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”
“Perhaps.”
“Not perhaps. For certain.”
“What happens if one doesn’t recognize the… point of fulcrum?” But I was thinking, I have had it already—the silence in the trees, the siren of the Athens boat, the black mouth of the shotgun barrels.
“You will be like the many. Only the few recognize this moment. And act on it.”
“The elect?”
“The elect. The chosen by hazard.” I heard his chair creak. “Look over there. The lamp fishermen.” Away at the far feet of the mountains there was a thin dust of ruby lights in the deepest shadows. I didn’t know whether he meant simply, look; or that the lamps were in some way symbolic of the elect.
“You’re very tantalizing sometimes, Mr. Conchis.”
“I am prepared to be less so.”
“I wish you would be.”
He was silent again.
“Suppose that what I might tell you should mean more to your life than the mere listening?”
“I hope it would.”
Another pause.
“I do not want politeness. Politeness always conceals a refusal to face other kinds of reality. I am going to say something about you that may shock you. I know something about you that you do not know yourself.” He paused, again as if to let me prepare myself. “You too are psychic, Nicholas. You are sure you are not. I know that.”
“Well, I’m not. Really.” I waited, then said, “But I’d certainly like to know what makes you think I am.”
“I have been shown.”
“When?”
“I prefer not to say.”
“But you must. I don’t even know what you really mean by the word. If you merely mean some sort of intuitive intelligence, then I hope I am psychic. But I thought you meant something else.”
Again silence, as if he wanted me to hear the sharpness in my own voice. “You are treating this as if I have accused you of some crime. Of some weakness.”
“I’m sorry. Look, Mr. Conchis, I just know that I am not psychic. I’ve never had a psychical experience in my life.” I added, naïvely, “Anyway, I’m an atheist.”
His voice was gentle and dry. “If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence. But I am not talking about God. I am talking about science.” I said nothing. His voice became much drier. “Very well. I accept that you believe that you are…” he mimicked my emphasis “…not psychic.”
“You can’t refuse to tell me what you promised now.”
“I wanted only to warn you.”
“You have.”
“Excuse me for one minute.”
He disappeared into his bedroom. I got up and went to the corner of the parapet, from where I could see in three directions. All around the house lay the silent pine trees, dim in the starlight. Absolute peace. High and very far to the north I could just hear a plane, only the third or fourth I had heard at night since coming to the island. I thought of an Alison on it, moving down the aisle with a trolley of drinks. Like the ship the faint drone accentuated, rather than diminished, the remoteness of Bourani. I had an acute sense of the absence of Alison, of the probably permanent loss of her; I could imagine her beside me, her hand in mine; and she was human warmth, normality, standard to go by. I had always seen myself as potentially a sort of protector of her; and for the first time, that evening at Bourani, I saw that perhaps she had been, or could have been, a protector of me.
A few seconds later Conchis returned. He went to the parapet, and breathed deeply. The sky and the sea and the stars, half the universe, stretched out before us. I could still just hear the plane. I lit a cigarette, as Alison, at such a moment, would have lit a cigarette.
18
“I think we should be more comfortable in the lounging chairs.”
I helped him pull the two long wicker chairs from the far end of the terrace. Then we both put our feet up and lay back, so that we looked into the stars. And at once I could smell it on the tied-on head-cushion—that same elusive, old-fashioned perfume of the towel, of the glove. I was sure it did not belong to Conchis or old Maria. I should have smelt it by then. There was a woman, and she often used this chair.
“It will take me a long time to define what I mean. It will take me the story of my life.”
“I’ve spent the last seven months among people who can speak only the most rudimentary English.”
“My French is better than my English now. But no matter. Comprendre, c’est tout.”
“‘Only connect.’”
“Who said that?”
“An English novelist.”
“He should not have said it. Fiction is the worst form of connection.”
I smiled in the darkness. There was silence. The stars gave signals. He began.
“I told you my father was English. But his business, importing tobacco and currants, lay mainly in the Levant. One of his competitors was a Greek living in London. In 1892 this Greek had tragic news. His eldest brother and his wife had been killed in an earthquake over the mountains there on the other side of the Peloponnesus. Three children survived. The two youngest, two boys, were sent out to South America, to a third brother. And the eldest child, a girl of seventeen, was brought to London to keep house for her uncle, my father’s competitor. He had long been a widower. She had the prettiness that is characteristic of Greek women who have some Italian blood. My father met her. He was much older, but quite good-looking, I suppose, and he spoke some demotic Greek. There were business interests which could be profitably merged. In short, they married, and I exist.