“He says. Or you?”
“Both of us. It is very relaxing.”
“Last time you seemed to think it was frightening.”
She smiled. “And frightening.” I looked at her mouth, that long, mobile, smiling mouth; the ambiguous gray-hyacinth eyes. It was the way their corners cocked obliquely; it made it difficult to believe that she meant a word of what she was saying.
“He obviously still wants you to vamp me.”
She looked down then, and the smile disappeared. After a moment she stood up and went to the far edge of the colonnade, by the house wall, where the steps led down to the vegetable terrace. I followed her, thinking she was going to stroll there. But she turned with her back against the wall. I stood in front of her; after a moment I put my hand on the wall behind her head, barring her in. There grew in me an intuition that she had, right from the beginning, found me physically more attractive than she wanted to admit. Narcissus-like I saw my own face reflected deep in her indecision, her restlessness. She was not smiling; and in the silence she let my eyes explore her own. I let my hand slip very lightly onto her shoulder. She did not move. I shifted it down onto her bare arm, to cool white skin. And suddenly I was sure that she wanted me, or would allow me, to kiss her.
I took her other arm and drew her towards me. Her eyes closed, our mouths met; and hers was warm, moved convulsively under mine for four or five seconds. I had just time to get my hand to the small of her back, to press her body against mine, know its weight, slenderness, the flesh reality. But then she pushed me away.
“We mustn’t. Not here.”
“Lily.”
She gave me an almost frighteningly intense out-of-role look; as if I had forced her to do something she was ashamed of; and its sincerity was very nearly as exciting as the touch of her mouth. I tried to pull her back to me again.
“No. Because of Maurice.”
She pressed my hand with sudden firmness, a kind of promise of the emotion she had to hide, and went back to the table. But she stood by it, as if she was at a loss to know what to do now. I went behind her.
“Why did you do that?” She stood staring down at the table, keeping her face half averted from me. “Because he told you to?”
She turned then, a swift, frank look of denial; and as quickly turned away again. She moved out into the sun at the front of the colonnade.
I went after her. “You must let me see you alone again. Tonight.”
“No.” She swayed round, flaring her stole, like a figure from Beardsley, so that we walked back to the terrace end of the colonnade.
“At midnight. By the statue.”
“I daren’t.”
“Because of him?”
“Because of everything.” She gave me a side look. As if she would like to say more. We walked another step or two. She came to a decision. “It’s so complicated. I don’t know what to do any more.” She murmured, “If I think I can…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. I put my arm round her shoulder and kissed the side of her head. She twisted lightly away. A small lizard scuttered along the bottom of the wall in front, and she leaned out to look at it.
“I may not… I can’t promise.” She said it casually; like a heroine in Chekhov, unpredictable, shifting, always prey to something beyond the words and moods of the apparent situation.
There were footsteps on the gravel, round the corner of the house; and then she looked at me, once again completely out of role, a practical, alert, very un-Chekhovian insistence in her low voice.
“You mustn’t say a word.”
“Of course.”
“I think he’ll take you away now. I’m supposed to disappear.” She said very quickly, in a whisper, “I so wanted you to come back.” Then she was smiling into distance, past my shoulder.
I turned. Conchis had come silently round the corner. In his hands he held poised a four-foot axe. With a formal bow to me Lily moved quickly, almost too punctiliously on cue, across the tiles and into the house.
There was a strange moment of hiatus; of a new madness.
“Have you had your tea?”
“Yes.”
He lowered the axe.
“I have found a dead pine. Will you help me cut it down?”
“Of course.”
“It will make good firewood.”
The dialogue bore no relation to what either of us was thinking or wanted to say. His first appearance had been another coup de théatre, intentionally ominous, as if he was going to run at us with the axe raised and split our heads open; and he still stared at me as if something about Lily’s quick exit had made him newly suspicious.
“Come.”
He silently offered me the axe to carry. We set off towards the gate. He walked fast, with a grim, purposeful expression. At last I made an effort and asked him where he had learnt to hypnotize. He dismissed it—”a very simple discipline”; there was nothing mysterious or magical about it, it was a matter of training and experience.
“Have you ever failed?”
“Of course. Any hypnotist who maintains the contrary is a charlatan.” Something had annoyed him, though it was apparently not myself.
I hefted the axe to the other shoulder.
“Did you ask me any questions?”
He looked quite shocked. “I am a doctor, therefore under the Hippocratic oath. If ever I wished to ask you questions under hypnosis, I should certainly ask your permission first.” We walked twenty paces before he went on. “It is a very unsatisfactory method. It has been demonstrated again and again that patients are quite capable of lying under hypnosis.”
“All those stories about sinister hypnotists forcing—?”
“A hypnotist can make you do foolish and incongruous things. But he is powerless against the superego.”
We went through the gate. I let a few moments pass.
“You hypnotize Lily?”
“From time to time. For therapeutic reasons.”
He indicated the line we should take through the trees.
“It reduces her schizophrenia?”
“Precisely. It reduces her schizophrenia.” Again we walked some way before he spoke again; but this time it was with less asperity, as if the leaving Bourani had allowed him to recover his equanimity. “How did you find her just now?”
“Enigmatic.”
“Not to me.” He gave me a quick, burning look. “She is assuming her persecution role. I saw that at once.”
I grinned; he studiously avoided looking at me.
“I didn’t notice it.”
“She is deceitful.” Then he said, as if it followed, “She has spoken of you a great deal in our absence.”
“May I ask where you were?”
“We were in Beirut, Nicholas. And she talked about you in terms that suggested the possibility of a certain physical attraction. I say this merely to warn you. You must resist all her advances in that line. This will be difficult for you. She is a pretty girl. And very clever at getting what she wants.”
“I’ll do my best.”
I smiled at him again, to insure myself against seeming his fool. But once more he had neatly slashed off the cautious belief I was beginning to grow in Lily as a totally independent person, with independent motives. It was as if he could never let me rest too long on the pleasant side of the masque; always the black side had to be evoked. Always he had to suggest that Lily was simply the personification of his irony, his partner in making all declarations ambivalent. Every truth at Bourani was a sort of lie; and every lie there, a sort of truth.
I asked him what they had been doing in Beirut, and as we went down through the trees, he talked about the Lebanon, which had not been the subject of my question, but which I guessed was all the answer I should get to it. Later, when he pressed me to tell him about Alison, I paid him back in his own coin.