When I got back that evening I wrote two letters, one to Ann Taylor, the other to Alison’s mother. I thanked Ann and true to my new resolve took as much blame as I could; to the mother (Goulburn, N.S.W.—I remembered Alison screwing up her face: Goulburn, the first half’s all it’s fit for, the second’s what they ought to do with it), to the mother, a difficult, because I didn’t know how much Alison had said about me, letter of condolence.
Before I went to bed I took out England’s Helicon; turned to Marlowe.
52
I had another letter from England on Saturday. There was a small black eagle on the flap: Barclay’s Bank.
DEAR MR. URFE,
Thank you for writing to me upon the recommendation of the Misses Holmes. I have pleasure in enclosing a form which I hope you will kindly fill in and return to me and also a small booklet with details of the special services we can offer overseas customers.
Yours truly,
I looked up from reading it into the eyes of the boy who sat opposite me at table, and gave him a small smile; the unsuppressed smile of the bad poker player.
Half an hour later I was climbing through the windless forest to the central ridge. The mountains were reduced to a pale insubstantiality by the heat, and the islands to the east rose and trembled shimmeringly over the sea, a strange optical illusion, like spinning tops. On the central ridge I moved along to a place where there was shade and a view down over Bourani; and sat there for an hour, in limbo, with the death of Alison still dark inside me and the hope of Julie, Julie now confirmed as Julie, there below me in the south. Gradually, those last two days, I had begun to absorb the fact of Alison’s death; that is, had begun to edge it out of the moral world into the aesthetic, where it was easier to live with.
By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockeyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked likely to be high.
Before I moved off I took out the headed Barclay’s letter and read it again. It had the effect of making me feel more indulgent towards Conchis than I had intended to be. I saw no objection now to a few small last dissimulations—on both sides.
It was like the first day. The being uninvited, unsure; the going through the gate, approaching the house in its silent sunlit mystery, going round the colonnade; and there too it was the same, the tea table covered in muslin. No one present. The sea and the heat through the arches, the tiled floor, the silence, the waiting.
And although I was nervous for different reasons, even that was the same. I put my duffle-bag on the cane settee and went into the music room. A figure stood up from behind the harpsichord. He had evidently been sitting on the music stool, reading a book, which he put down as soon as I appeared.
“Nicholas.”
“Hello, Mr. Conchis.” My voice was neutral.
He came and shook my hand, gave me a scrutiny; the characteristic rapid movement of his head.
“I am invited?”
“Of course. Did I not say?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“You are well?”
“Slightly bruised.” I raised my hand, which was scarred and still red from the daubings of Mercurochrome the school nurse had put on it.
“How did you do that?” He asked the question with a perfect effrontery.
“I tripped over something as I was running.”
He took me to the door, insisted on examining the hand.
“You must be careful. There is always the danger of tetanus.”
“I intend to be.”
He examined my bleak smile rather as he had looked at the hand. With the minutest of shrugs, which might or might not have been apologetic, he took my arm and led me out towards the tea table; then went to the corner.
“Maria!”
He came back to the table, and whisked the muslin away. We sat down.
“How was Geneva?”
“Dull.” He offered me a sandwich. “I foolishly entered a financing consortium two years ago. Can you imagine Versailles with not one Roi Soleil, but seven of them?”
“Financing what?”
“Many things.” Marie appeared with the tray. “But tell me what you have been doing.”
“Nothing.” I returned his oblique smile. “Waiting.”
He took the compliment with a little bow; and turned to the tea things.
I said, “I met Barba Dimitraki the other day. By chance.” He poured the tea into the cups, so unsurprised that I suspected he already knew. But the keen, bright look he gave me as he handed me my cup appeared to convey a certain admiration; as if he might have underestimated me.
“And what did he tell you?”
“Very little. But I understand that I have more fellow victims than I thought.”
“Victims?”
“A victim is someone who has something inflicted on him without being given any real choice.”
He sipped his tea. “That sounds an excellent definition of man.”
“I should like an excellent definition of God.”
“Yes. Of course.” He put his cup down and folded his arms; he seemed in an excellent humor, at his most Picasso-like and dangerous. “I was going to wait until tomorrow. But no matter.” He glanced at my hand but he seemed to hint at something other. At Julie? The smile lingered in his face, lingered and threatened, and then he said, “Well. What do you think I am doing?”
“Preparing to make a fool of me again?”
He smiled almost benignly at me, as if that afternoon I was constantly surprising him, and shook his head. “Now you have met Barba Dimitraki…” He left one of his characteristic long pauses, then went on. “Before the war we used to amuse ourselves with my private theatre here. And during the war, when I had a great deal of time to think, and no friends to amuse me, no theatre, I conceived a new kind of drama. One in which the conventional relations between audience and actors were forgotten. In which the conventional scenic geography, the notions of proscenium, stage, auditorium, were completely discarded. In which continuity of performance, either in time or place, was ignored. And in which the action, the narrative was fluid, with only a point of departure and a fixed point of conclusion.” His mesmeric eyes pinned mine. “You will find that Artaud and Pirandello and Brecht were all thinking, in their different ways, along similar lines. But they had neither the money nor the will—and perhaps not the time—to think as far as I did. The element that they could never bring themselves to discard was the audience.” He spread his arms. “Here we are all actors. None of us are as we really are.” He raised his hand quickly. “Yes, I know. You think you are not acting. Just pretending a little. But you have much to learn about yourself. You are as far from your true self as that Egyptian mask our American friend wears is from his true face.”