“I’d love you to come running to me.” But she continued staring up, forcing me to answer. “I suppose not.”
“Do you remember that speech he gave me—he did give it to me, as a sort of emergency speech—I said it down on the shingle that Sunday—about your having no poetry? No humor, and all the rest? I’m sure it was just as much for me as for you.”
I sat down by her again.
“This hypnosis?”
“We wouldn’t have let him. But he’s never even asked us. That was the script again.” She wanted to know what it had been like for me. But as soon as I could I lied us back to the present.
“Have you seen that cabinet of pottery in the music room?”
“He begged us not to look at it. Which of course made sure that we did.”
“Sometimes I feel it’s all a kind of teasing.”
She turned quickly. “So do I! It’s exactly the word. I think you have to take certain things on trust about people. And I can’t believe Maurice is an evil man. Even perverted. But I don’t know.” She ran her hands through her hair. “There’s that beastly Negro.”
“Yes, what about him?”
“His real name’s Joe—we think. Only we’re supposed to call him Anubis in front of you. He’s a mute.”
“A mute!” I began to understand why he had spat in my face. “You know what he did last night?” I told her. Her eyes dilated a little; at first not believing, then believing me.
“But that’s horrible.”
“Hardly teasing.”
She looked back over her shoulder. “He’s always close to us. Maurice insists that it’s for our protection. But June and I discovered last week that he smokes marijuana. That’s yet another thing.”
“You’ve told Maurice?”
“He says it isn’t an addictive drug. Joe is a blind spot with him.”
“You haven’t told me where you live here.”
She turned on the rug and knelt. “Nicholas, now you know our side—do you want to go on? Do you think we ought to go on?” Her eyes searched mine, looking for a decision.
“What do you feel?”
“I feel braver now.”
“We could go on just for a bit. Wait and see.”
She leant schoolgirlishly forward on her hands for a moment. “If we do I don’t want to tell you where we disappear to.”
“Why?”
“In case you gave it away.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Please. Nothing else. Just that.” She sat back on her heels.
“But supposing you were—”
“It’s not as if we were prisoners. If we had to run, we could. One of us could.”
I watched her eyes. “As you’re not in fact emotionally involved, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” I lay back on my elbow and still kneeling, she looked down at me; then gave a little smile.
“Fronti nulla fides.”
“Gloss, please.”
“It hasn’t been the hardest role to play.”
I began to think that the real girl she was excited me far more than her Lily self; was more tangible, and yet also retained more than a little of the part she had played. The shape of her breasts, her stockinged feet; a girl too intelligent to abuse her prettiness; and then too intelligent again not to admit it.
“How did you get your scar?”
She raised her left hand and looked at it. “When I was ten. Playing hide-and-seek.” Her eyes glanced from it at me. “I should have learnt my lesson. I was in a garden shed, and I knocked this long—what looked like a stick off a peg and put up my arm to shield myself.” She mimed it. “It was a scythe. I’m lucky not to be one-handed.”
I took the wrist and kissed it. There was a silence between us; an infinitesimal pulling of the hand on my part, a resistance from hers. I let her have it back.
She said, “What’s the time?”
“Just before one.”
“I’ve got to leave you for an hour. I’ll come back.”
“Why?”
“The script.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the place.”
“But Maurice has gone to Geneva.”
She shook her head. “He’s waiting. I always have to tell him everything.”
“Have to?”
She smiled, remembering that old dialogue. “Supposed to.” She reached out her hands and I stood. “I’ll be back soon after two.”
“Promise?”
Her eyes said yes. “Did you like the poems I picked for you?”
“That was you?”
“Maurice’s idea. My choice.”
“‘Where love was innocent, being far from cities.’”
She looked down, then up, and then down again. I still had hold of her hands. She murmured, “Please.”
“As long as you know how much I want to.”
She stared into my eyes for a moment, a look that was almost like the kiss she would not suffer, and that also managed to convey the reason she would not—a refusal to give anything until a fuller trust lay between us—and then almost roughly she pulled away, picked up her raffia bag, and was gone. She walked a few steps, then raising her skirt began to run; after a few yards, broke into a fast walk again. She went up the hill, towards the carob. I moved up the slope a little, to keep her in sight. Almost at once something in the heavy shade under the carob moved; as if a piece of the black trunk had detached itself. It was the Negro, Joe. He was in the same clothes I had seen the night before; in black from head to foot, the hideously sinister mask. He came lithely and stood in the sunlight at the edge of the carob, his arms folded, forbidding the way. I stared at him through the trees, then went back to where the rug was.
I let a minute pass, jotting down the addresses she had shown me. The Negro had gone from the carob. But when I reached the statue I saw him standing beyond it among the trees, still watching to make sure that I returned to the house. It seemed clear that that was the real direction in which they had to go to reach their hiding place; and that it must be to the east, beyond the cottages. With a sarcastic wave I turned to the left over the gulley; and soon I was sitting down under the colonnade.
47
I had a quick, abstemious lunch, pouring the retsina into a pot with a tired-looking pelargonium in it; went upstairs, put my things in the duffle-bag and brought it down. The beady-eyed Modigliani stared; but I went to the curiosa cabinet and examined Lily’s photo, held it to the light, and now I looked at it very closely again I thought I could see that it had been faked—some subtly smudged outlines, an overdarkening of the shadows.
I came to the statue. Once again the wretched Negro stood in my path. This time he was on the other side of the gulley, maskless, and when I came to the edge of it, on the house side, he waved his hand forbiddingly backwards and forwards a couple of times. He was some twenty yards away, and for the first time I realized he had a small moustache; and that he was younger and less brutish than I had thought before. I stood staring sulkily at him, the duffle-bag hanging by my side. He put up both hands, fingers outstretched.
I gave him the coldest look I could, then shrugged and sat down against a tree, where I could watch him. He folded his arms again over his chest as if he really were a scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem; slapped the side of his face when a fly landed on it. Occasionally he looked at me, expressionlessly, but most of the time he watched down the hill.
Suddenly there was a whistle, a blown whistle, from the direction of the cliffs. The Negro waited a minute more, then walked away up past the statue and out of sight.
I crossed the gulley and went fast down the hill to the place where we had sat. I had been reduced to the state when it was no longer a question of whether any story at Bourani could be absolutely believed, but of whether it could be absolutely disbelieved. I knew I wanted this one to be true, and that was dangerous. I still had some questions, and I was going to still watch her like a lynx. But my instinct told me I was a lynx moving into a landscape where the mists were rapidly thinning.