Finding her at the rug again seemed a test of her truth. I came over the small rise, and there she was. She made a little concealed praying movement, gladness that I had come. She hadn’t changed her clothes, but her hair was tied loosely back at the nape with a blue ribbon.
“What was the whistle?”
She whispered. “Maurice. He is here. He’s gone now.” She jumped up. “Come and look.”
She led me through the trees to the cliff-top. I thought for a mad moment that she was going to show me Conchis’s retreating back. But she stopped under the branches of the last pine and pointed. Right in the south, almost hull down, a line of ships steamed east across the Aegean between Malea and Skyli: a carrier, a cruiser, four destroyers, another ship, intent on some new Troy.
I glanced down at her long pink skirt, her ridiculously old-fashioned shoes, and then back at those pale gray shapes on the world’s blue rim. Thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men, more thirty or forty years away than thirty or forty miles, as if we were looking into the future, not into the south.
She said, “Our being here. Their being there.”
I looked again at her profile; then to the distant fleet, and weighed them in the balance; made her the victress.
“Tell me what’s happened.”
We walked back through the trees. “I’ve told him that you’re almost convinced now that I am in some way in his sinister power… that you don’t really know whether it’s hypnosis or schizophrenia or what. And that you’re falling in love with me. All according to the script.”
“What did he say?”
She sat down on the rug and looked up.
“He wants us to meet during the week. Secretly. As if secretly.” But she seemed worried. “The only thing is—he assured me that it was the last time I’d have to play a ‘love’ scene with you.” A moment of silence. “The end of act one. His words.”
“And act two?”
“I think next weekend he will want me to turn against you.”
“This meeting?”
“He told me to try Wednesday. Do you know Moutsa? The little chapel?”
“What time?”
“Dusk. Half-past eight?” I nodded. She turned, a sudden vivacity. “I forgot to tell you. I think there’s someone at your school who spies on you for Maurice. Another master?”
“Oh?”
“Maurice told us one day you were very standoffish with the other masters. That they didn’t like you.”
I thought at once of Demetriades; of how, when I reflected, it was peculiar that such a gossip should have kept my trips to Bourani so secret. Besides, I was standoffish, and he was the only other master I was ever frequently with, or spoke to.
I began my supplementary cross-examination. What did the sisters do during the week? They went to Athens or to Nauplia, to the yacht. Maurice left them very much to their own devices. What about Foulkes and the girl? But I found that she knew nothing about them, though she had guessed from my face that evening that I had seen de Deukans. I asked what would have happened if I had gone into the music room that first Sunday. They had expected I would; she had had all her speeches, variations of those she had used the next weekend, ready. Where had June worked in England? At a publisher’s. Had they discovered anything from “Apollo” and the other actor? Only that “they must not be frightened”—the man had left her as soon as they entered the trees. Who had held the torches? She thought Maria and Hermes. Maria? As ungiving as a stone. What did she think of the story of Conchis’s life? Like me, she could only half believe it. What did her mother think? They’d told her they were still rehearsing… “she’d only get into a useless tizzy.” How long did the contracts last? Till the end of October. I suddenly saw a new possibility—that when term ended Conchis might invite me to spend my holidays at Bourani, a limitless black-and-gold stretch of masque.
“Mitford. You know he’s a mess, you said so. But you never met him.”
“Maurice. He described him to us.” All through the questions she kept her eyes solemnly on mine.
“And what happened last year?”
“No. Except that it was a failure of some kind.” I produced my last and key question.
“That theatre at Canonbury.”
“The Tower?”
“Yes. Isn’t there a little pub round the corner where people go afterwards? I’ve forgotten its name.” I had; but I knew if she told it to me, I would remember.
“The Beggar’s Broom?” She seemed delighted. “Do you know it?” I thought of a warm-armed Danish girl called Kirsten; a brown bar with people’s signatures scrawled on the ceiling.
“Not really. But I’m so glad you do.”
Our eyes met, amused and relieved that the test was passed.
“You were beginning to frighten me as much as Maurice.”
I lay back. The hot wind fretted the branches.
“Don’t you want to frighten me now?”
She shook her head; lay back as well, and we stared up at the sky through a long silence. Then she said, “Tell me about Nicholas.”
So we talked about Nicholas: his family, his ambitions and his failings. The third person was right, because I presented a sort of ideal self to her, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner decency. I wanted to kill Alison off in her mind, and confessed to a “rather messy affaire” that had made me leave England.
“The girl you were going to meet?”
“It was cowardice. You know, letters… being lonely here. I told you. I ought never to have let it drag on so long. It could never have come to anything.”
I gave her an edited version of the relationship; one in which Alison got less than her due and I got a good deal more; but in which the main blame was put on hazard, on fate, on elective affinity, the feeling one had that one liked some people and loved others.
“If I hadn’t been here… would you have gone and met her?”
“Probably.” She looked pensive. “Shouldn’t I have said that?”
She nodded. “It’s just that I can’t stand dishonesty in personal relationships.”
“Nor can I. That’s why I’ve broken off this other thing.”
She sat up and smoothed down her skirt. “I think I shall go wild sometimes. All this sun and sea and never being able to really enjoy it. How women lived fifty years ago in these miserable…” But she looked at me, saw by my eyes I wasn’t listening, and stopped.
I said, “How long have we got?”
“Till four.”
“What happens then?”
“You must go.”
“I want to kiss you.”
She was silent. Then she said quietly, “Don’t you want to know about the real me?”
“If you lie back.”
So she turned and lay flat on her stomach again, with her head pillowed on her arms. She talked about her mother, their life in Dorset, her own boredom with it; about her scholarship to Cambridge, acting, and finally, about the man in the photograph. He had been a don, a mathematician, at Sidney Sussex. Fifteen years older than Julie; married and separated; and they had had not an affaire, but a relationship “too peculiar and too sad to talk about.”
I asked what made it so sad.
“Physical things.” She stared into the ground, chin on arms. “Being too similar. One day I realized we were driving each other mad. Torturing each other instead of helping each other.”
“Was he cut up?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“Of course.” She looked sideways. “I loved him.” Her tone made me feel crass, and I let the silence come before I spoke again.
“No one else?”
“No one who matters.” After a moment or two she turned round on her back, and spoke at the sky. “I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one’s faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple.”