I sat in the darkness, half hoping that someone, I hoped “Lily,” would appear and explain. I felt once again like a child, like a child who walks into a room and is aware that everyone there knows something about him that he does not. I also felt deceived by Conchis’s sadness. The dead live by love; and they could evidently also live by impersonation.
But I waited most for whoever had acted Lily. I had to know the owner of that young, intelligent, amused, dazzlingly pretty North European face. I wanted to know what she was doing on Phraxos, where she came from, the reality behind all the mystery.
I waited nearly an hour, and nothing happened. No one came, I heard no sounds. In the end I crept back up to my room. But I had a poor night’s sleep. When Maria knocked on the door at half-past five I woke as if I had a hangover.
Yet I enjoyed the walk back to the school. I enjoyed the cool air, the delicate pink sky that turned primrose, then blue, the still-sleeping gray and incorporeal sea, the long slopes of silent pines. In a sense I reentered reality as I walked. The events of the weekend seemed to recede, to become locked away, as if I had dreamt them; and yet as I walked I had the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth; a knowledge of what it was like physically, moment by moment, to have been young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny. I could not describe it. It was not in the least a literary feeling, but an intensely mysterious present and concrete feeling of excitement, of being in a situation where anything still might happen. As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, changed from being the discovered to the still undiscovered.
26
There was a letter for me. The Sunday boat had brought it.
DEAR NICHOLAS,
I thought you were dead. I’m on my own again. More or less. I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to see you again—the point is, I could. I come through Athens now. I mean I haven’t decided whether you aren’t such a pig that it’s crazy to get involved with you again. I can’t forget you, even when I’m with much nicer boys than you’ll ever be. Nicko, I’m a little bit drunk and I shall probably tear this up anyway.
Well, I may send a telegram if I can work a few days off at Athens. If I go on like this you won’t want to meet me. You probably don’t now as it is. When I got your letter I knew you’d just written it because you were bored out there. Isn’t it awful I still have to get boozed to write to you. It’s raining, I’ve got the fire on it’s so bloody cold. It’s dusk, it’s gray it’s so bloody miserable. The wallpaper’s muave or is it mauve hell with green plums. You’d be sick all down it.
Write care of Ann.
Her letter came at the wrongest time. I realized that I didn’t want to share Bourani with anyone. After the first knowledge of the place, and still after the first meeting with Conchis, even as late as the Foulkes incident, I had wanted to talk about it—and to Alison. Now it seemed fortunate that I hadn’t, just as it seemed, though still obscurely, fortunate that I hadn’t lost my head in other ways when I wrote to her.
One doesn’t fall in love in five seconds; but five seconds can set one dreaming of falling in love, especially in a community as unrelievedly masculine as that of the Lord Byron School. The more I thought of that midnight face, the more intelligent and charming it became; and it seemed too to have had a breeding, a fastidiousness, a delicacy, that attracted me as fatally as the local fishermen’s lamps attracted fish on moonless nights. I reminded myself that if Conchis was rich enough to own Modiglianis and Bonnards, he was rich enough to pick the very best in mistresses. I had to presume some sort of sexual relationship between the girl and him—to do otherwise would have been naïve; but for all that there had been something much more daughterly, affectionately protective, than sexual in her glance back at him.
I must have read Alison’s letter a dozen times that Monday, trying to decide what to do about it. I knew it had to be answered, but I came to the conclusion that the longer I left it, the better. To stop its silent nagging I pushed it away in the bottom drawer of my desk; went to bed, thought about Bourani, drifted into various romantic-sexual fantasies with that enigmatic figure; and failed entirely, in spite of my tiredness, to go to sleep. The crime of syphilis had made me ban sex from my mind for weeks; now I was not guilty—half an hour with a textbook Conchis had given me to look at had convinced me his diagnosis was right—the libido rose strong. I began to think erotically of Alison again; of the dirty-weekend pleasures of having her in some Athens hotel bedroom; of birds in the hand being worth more than birds in the bush; and with better motives, of her loneliness, her perpetual mixed-up loneliness. The one sentence that had pleased me in her unfastidious and not very delicate letter was the last of all—that simple Write care of Ann. Which denied the gaucheness, the lingering resentment, in all the rest.
I got out of bed and sat in my pajama trousers and wrote a letter, quite a long letter, which I tore up at the first rereading. The second attempt was much shorter and hit off, I thought, the right balance between regretful practicality and yet sufficient affection and desire for her still to want to climb into bed if I got half a chance.
I said I was rather tied up at the school over most weekends; though the half-term holiday was the weekend after next and I might just be in Athens then—but I couldn’t be sure. But if I was, it would be fun to see her.
As soon as I could I got Méli on his own. I had decided that I had to have a confidant at the school. One did not have to attend school meals with the boys over the weekend if one was off duty, and the only master who might have noticed I had been away was Méli himself, but as it happened he’d been in Athens. We sat after lunch on Monday in his room; or rather he sat chubbily at his desk, living up to his nickname, spooning Hymettus honey out of a jar and telling me of the flesh and fleshpots he had bought himself in Athens; and I lay on his bed, only half listening.
“And you, Nicholas, you had a nice weekend?”
“I met Mr. Conchis.”
“You… no, you are joking.”
“You are not to tell the others.”
He raised his hands in protest. “Of course, but how… I can’t believe it.”
I gave him a very expurgated version of the visit the week before, and made Conchis and Bourani as dull as possible.
“He sounds as stupid as I thought. No girls?”
“Not a sign. Not even little boys.”
“Nor even a goat?”
I threw a box of matches at him. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.
“He’s asked me over next week again. As a matter of fact, Méli, I wondered, if I do two preps for you… would you do my noon to six on Sunday?” Sunday duty was easy work. It meant only that one had to stay inside the school and stroll through the grounds a couple of times.
“Well. Yes. I will see.” He sucked the spoon.
“And tell me what to tell the others, if they ask. I want them to think I’m going somewhere else.”
He thought a minute, waved the spoon, then said, “Tell them you are going to Hydra.”
Hydra was a stop on the way to Athens, though one didn’t have to catch the Athens boat to go there, as there were often caïques doing the run. It had an embryonic artistic colony of sorts; the kind of place I might plausibly choose to go to. “Okay. And you won’t tell anyone?”