I gave him a warning look. “He’s not my American friend.”
“If you had seen him play Othello, you would not say that. He is a very fine young actor.”
“He must be. I thought he was meant to be a mute.”
His smile was almost mischievous. “Then I have proved my praise.”
“Rather a waste of a very fine young actor.”
“His part is not ended yet.”
He sat watching me; the old humorlessly amused look.
“And you are the producer?”
“No. This year the director is a very old friend of mine. He used to come here before the war.”
“Shall I meet him?”
“That depends on him. But I think not.”
“Why on him?”
“Because I am an actor too, Nicholas, in this strange new metatheatre. That is why I say things both of us know cannot be true. Why I am permitted to lie. And why I do not want to know everything. I also wish to be surprised.”
I remembered something Julie had said: He wants us to be mysteries to him as well. But it was obviously a very limited freedom and mystery he wanted in us; however large an aviary the fancier builds, the aviary’s purpose is still to imprison.
“Your bank balance must get some surprises, too.”
“My dear Nicholas, the tragedy of being very rich is that one’s bank balance is incapable of giving one surprises. Pleasant or otherwise. But I confess that this is the most ambitious of our creations. That is partly because you have played your part so well.”
I smiled; lit a cigarette. “I feel I should ask for a salary.”
“You will receive the highest salary of all.”
Julie: a present, a surprise for you. An unexpected possibility shot through me, which I smothered; but I heard an unintended note of deference in my voice.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Perhaps you will never know it.” He added drily, “I am not talking of money. And it is also the most ambitious of our creations for the very simple reason that for me there may never be another year.”
“Your heart?”
“My heart.”
But he looked immortally tanned and fit; in any case, distanced any sympathy.
A silence came between us. I said, “Lily?”
“You will see Lily later.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Before you tell me what you do mean, let me assure you that after this weekend you will never see her again. In your life. That is the fixed point of conclusion this summer.”
This was the “last trick” of Julie’s letter. I guessed it; to make me think I had lost everything, then to give it to me. I gave him a cool look.
“‘In my life’ is a long time.”
“Nevertheless, the comedy is nearly over.”
“But I intend to see the actress home afterwards.”
“She has promised that, no doubt.”
“No doubt.”
He stood up. “Her promises are worth nothing. When you see her tomorrow to say goodbye, ask her to repeat to you the poem of Catullus that begins Nulli se dicit mulier mea.”
“Which you’ve taught her?”
“No. Lily is an excellent classical scholar, and she has an excellent memory.”
He remained staring rather fiercely down at me. I stood as well; but I was enjoying it, the bluffing.
“Of course you can prevent me seeing her again here. But what happens when we leave the island is really… with respect… our business. Not yours.”
“I am trying to warn you. As you say, I cannot stop you meeting away from the island. So you must draw your own conclusions. You may think you arrived here for our first tea together by pure hazard. You did not. If you had not come here that day, partly of your own free will, we should have ensured that you were definitely here by the next weekend. Similarly we have our fixed point of conclusion. You will be foolish to fight it.”
“Can you command people’s emotions so easily?”
He smiled. “When you know the plot.”
I felt myself getting irritated then. That was probably his intention. A little bat’s wing of fear flickered through my mind. There were so many things he could do at Bourani, so many surprises he could spring besides whatever Julie believed was to come.
He reached out his hand for me to come round the table. “Nicholas. Go back to England and make it up with this girl you spoke of. Marry her and have a family and learn to be what you really are.” I had my eyes on the ground. I wanted to shout at him that Alison was dead; and largely because he had woven Julie’s life through mine. I trembled on the brink of telling him I wanted no more deceptions, no more comedy, rose ou noir. Perhaps I really wanted to squeeze some sympathy out of that dry heart.
“Is that how you learn what you are? Marrying and having a family?”
“Why not?”
“A steady job and a house in the suburbs?”
“Excellent.”
“I’d rather die.”
He gave a shrug of regret, but as if he didn’t really care.
“Come. You have never heard me play my clavichord.”
I followed him indoors and upstairs. He went to the little table and lifted the lid revealing the keyboard underneath. I sat by his closed desk, watching the Bonnards. He began to play.
Those Bonnards, their eternal outpouring of a golden happiness, haunted me; they were like windows on a world I had tried to reach all my life, and failed; they had reminded me of Alison, or rather of the best of my relationship with Alison, before; and now they bred a kind of Watteau-like melancholy in me, the forevergoneness of pictures like L’Embarcation pour Cythere. As if Bonnard had captured a reality so real that it could not exist; or only as a dream, a looking back and seeing where the way was lost and if it had not been lost but it had been lost… then I thought of Julie. One day I should see her so, naked at a sunlit window; my naked wife.
I turned to glance at her photo by the window, and realized that it wasn’t there; or anywhere else in the room. It hadn’t just been moved, but removed.
The small muted notes of the clavichord barely filled the room. It was clipped, fluttering, with whimpering vibratos, remotely plangent. He played a series of little Elizabethan almans and voltas. Then a Bach-like gigue. Finally, a small set of variations; each variation ended in the same chanting silvery chorus. He came to an end and looked round at me.
“I liked that last one.”
Without a word he played the chorus again.
“Byrd. But the tune is much older. It is called Rosasolis. The English archers sang it at Agincourt.” He shut the clavichord, and turned with a smile that was of dismissal; once again manipulating my exits and entries.
“Nicholas, I have much to attend to. I must ask you to leave me in peace for an hour or so.”
I stood up. “No work?”
“You wish to work?”
“No.”
“Then we will meet for ouzo.”
I thought that perhaps he wanted me to go out of doors, that Julie would be waiting there. So I went down. In the music room I saw that the other photo of Lily had also disappeared.
I strolled idly all round the domaine, in the windless air; I waited in all the likely places; I kept on turning, looking backwards, sideways, listening. But the landscape seemed dead. Nothing and no one appeared. The theatre was empty; and, like all empty theatres, it became in the end frightening.
We silently toasted each other, across the lamp-lit table with the ouzo and the olives, under the colonnade. Apparently we were to have dinner there that night, for the other table, laid for two, had been placed at the western end of the colonnade, looking out over the trees. I stood beside Conchis at the front steps. A breath of dead air washed over us.