He crossed himself. “I am as silent as the… the what is it?”
“Where you ought to be, Méli. The bloody grave.”
I went to the village several times that week, to see if there were any strange faces about. There was no sign of the three people I was looking for, although there were a few strange faces: three or four wives with young children sent out to grass from Athens, and one or two old couples, dehydrated rentiers, who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia.
One evening I felt restless and walked down to the harbor. It was about eleven at night and the place, with its catalpas and its old black cannons of 1881, was almost deserted. After a Turkish coffee and a nip of brandy in a kapheneion I started to walk back. Some way past the hotel, still on the few hundred yards of concrete “promenade,” I saw a very tall elderly man standing and bending in the middle of the road, apparently looking for something. He looked up as I approached—he was really remarkably tall and strikingly well dressed for Phraxos; evidently one of the summer visitors. He wore a pale fawn suit, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, an old-fashioned white Panama hat with a black band, and he had a small goatee beard. He was holding by its middle a cane with a meerschaum handle, and he looked gravely distressed, as well as naturally grave.
I asked in Greek if he had lost anything.
“Ah pardon… est-ce que vous parlez français, monsieur?”
I said, yes, I spoke some French.
It seemed he had just lost the ferrule of his stick. He had heard it drop off and roll away. I struck a few matches and searched round, and after a little while found the small brass end.
“Ah, très bien. Mille mercis, monsieur.”
He produced a pocketbook and I thought for a moment he was going to tip me. His face was as gloomy as an El Greco; insufferably bored, decades of boredom, and probably, I decided, insufferably boring. He didn’t tip me, but placed the ferrule carefully inside the wallet, and then politely asked me who I was, and, fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn’t French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos pittoresque, mais mains belle que Délos.
After a few moments more of this platitudinous chat we bowed and went our ways. He expressed a hope that we might meet again during the remaining two days of his stay and have a longer conversation. But I took very good care that we didn’t.
At last Saturday came. I had done the two extra duties during the week to clear my Sunday, and was thoroughly exhausted with the school. As soon as the morning lessons were over and I had snatched a quick lunch I headed towards the village with my bag. Yes I told the old man at the gate—a sure method of propagating the lie—I was off to Hydra for the weekend. As soon as I was out of sight of the school I cut up through the cottages and round the back of the school onto the path to Bourani. But I didn’t go straight there.
I had speculated endlessly during the week about Conchis, and as futilely as endlessly. I thought I could discern two elements in his “game”—one didactic, the other aesthetic. But whether his cunningly mounted fantasies hid ultimately a wisdom or a lunacy I could not decide. On the whole I suspected the latter. Mania made more sense than reason.
I had wondered more and more during the week about the little group of cottages at Agia Varvara, the bay east of Bourani. It was a wide sweep of shingle with a huge row of athanatos, or agaves, whose bizarre twelve-foot candelabra of flowers stood facing the sea. I lay on a thyme-covered slope above the bay, having come quietly through the trees, and watched the cottages below for any sign of unusual life. But a woman in black was the only person I saw. Now I examined it, it seemed an unlikely place for Conchis’s “assistants” to live. It was so open, so easy to watch. After a while I wound my way down to the cottages. A child in a doorway saw me coming through the olives and called, and then the entire population of the tiny hamlet appeared—four women and half a dozen children, unmistakably islanders. With the usual peasant hospitality they offered me a little saucer of quince jam and a thimbleful of raki as well as the glass of cistern water I requested. Their men were all away far to the south, fishing. I said I was going to see o kyrios Conchis, and their surprise seemed perfectly genuine. Did he ever visit them? Their heads all went back swiftly together, as if the idea was unheard of. I had to listen to the story of the execution again—at least the oldest woman launched out into a welter of words among which I heard “mayor” and “Germans”; and the children raised their arms like guns.
Maria, then? They saw her, of course? But no, they never saw her. She is not a Phraxiot, one of them said.
Then the music, the songs in the night? They looked at one another. What songs? I was not surprised. Very probably they went to bed and woke with the sun.
“And you,” asked the grandmother, “are you a relation of his?” They evidently thought of him as a foreigner.
I said I was a friend. He has no friends here, said the old woman, and with a faint hostility in her voice she added, bad men bring bad luck. I said he had guests—a young girl with fair hair, a tall man, a younger girl so high. They had seen them? They had not. Only the grandmother had even been inside Bourani; and that was long before the war. Then they had their way and asked me the usual series of childish but charmingly eager questions about myself, about London, about England.
I got free in the end, after being presented with a sprig of basil, and walked inland along the bluff until I could climb onto the ridge that led to Bourani. For some time three of the barefoot children accompanied me along the seldom-used path. We topped a rocky crest among the pines, and the distant flat roof of the house came into sight over the sea of trees ahead. The children stopped, as if the house was a sign that they should go no further. I turned after a while and they were still wistfully standing there. I waved, but they made no gesture in return.
27
I went with him and sat in his music room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. All through tea I had waited for some indication on his part that he knew I had seen the girl—as he must have known, for it was obvious that the nocturnal concert had been given to announce her presence. But I intended to follow the same course of action as I had over the earlier incident: to say nothing until he gave me an opening. Not the slightest chink had appeared in our conversation.
Conchis seemed to me, no expert, to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to “interpret,” to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played—I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool, shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions. It was the first time I had heard him play great music, and I was moved as I had been by the Bonnards; moved in a different way, but still moved. The mystery of the old man dwindled, and his humanity rose uppermost. It came to me as I listened that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. Conchis had spoken of meeting his future, of feeling his life balanced on a fulcrum, when he first came to Bourani. I was experiencing what he meant; a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. It was an awareness of a new kind of potentiality, one very different from my old sense of the word, which had been based on the illusions of ambition. The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. It was certainly not a moment of new moral resolve, or anything like it; I suppose our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be; for all that, it felt like a step forward—and upward.