“Never.” He jumped swiftly on. “Do you like my house? I designed and built it myself.”
I looked around. “I envy you.”
“And I envy you.”
“Not much to envy.”
“You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.” His face was without the offensively avuncular smile that usually accompanies such trite statements; and something intent about the look he gave me made it clear he did not think it trite; that it did not carry its usual meaning. He stood up. “Well. Now I will leave you for a few minutes. Then we shall have a look round.” I stood up with him, but he gestured me down again. “Finish the cakes. Maria will be honored. Please.”
He walked into the sunlight at the edge of the colonnade, stretched his arms and fingers, and with another gesture to me to help myself passed back inside the room. From where I was sitting I could see one end of a cretonne-covered sofa, a table with a bowl of milky flowers on it. The wall behind was covered by bookshelves, from the ceiling to the floor. I stole another kourabiè. The sun was beginning to float down on the mountains, and the sea glittered lazily at the foot of their ashy, opaque shadows. Then there was an unannounced shock of antique sound, a rapid arpeggio, far too real to come from a radio or record. I stood up, wondering what new surprise I was being presented with.
There was a moment’s silence, perhaps to leave me guessing. Then came the quiet plangent sound of a harpsichord. I hesitated, then decided that two could play the independence game, and sat down again. He played quickly, and then tranquilly; once or twice he stopped and retook a phrase. The old woman came and silently cleared away, without once looking at me, even when I pointed at the few cakes left and praised them in my stilted Greek; the hermit master evidently liked silent servants. The music came clearly out of the room, and flowed around me and out through the colonnade into the light. He broke off, repeated a passage, and then stopped as abruptly as he had begun. A door closed, there was a silence. Five minutes passed, then ten. The sun crept towards me over the red tiles.
I felt I ought to have gone in earlier; that now I had put him in a huff. But he appeared in the doorway, speaking.
“I have not driven you away.”
“Not at all. It was Bach?”
“Telemann.”
“You play very well.”
“Once, I could play. Never mind. Come.” His jerkiness was pathological; as if he wanted to get rid not only of me, but of time itself.
I stood up. “I hope I shall hear you play again.”
He made a little bow, refusing the invitation to invite. “I hope you will.”
“One gets so starved of music here.”
“Only of music?” He went on before I could answer. “Come now. Prospero will show you his domaine.”
As we went down the steps to the gravel I said, “Prospero had a daughter.”
“Prospero had many things.” He turned a look on me. “And not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe.”
“You live alone here?”
“What some would call alone. What others would not.”
He stared ahead as he said it; whether to mystify me once more or because there was no more to be said to a stranger, I couldn’t tell.
He walked rapidly on, alertly, incessantly pointing things out. He showed me around his little vegetable-garden terrace: his cucumbers, his almonds, his loquats, his pistachios. From the far edge of the terrace I could see down to where I had been lying only an hour or two before.
“Moutsa.”
“I haven’t heard it called that before.”
“Albanian.” He tapped his nose. “Snout. Because of the cliff over there.”
“Not very poetic for such a lovely beach.”
“The Albanians were pirates. Not poets. Their word for this cape was Bourani. Two hundred years ago it was their slang word for gourd. Also for skull.” He moved away. “Death and water.”
As I walked behind him, I said, “I wondered about the sign by the gate. Salle d'attente.”
“The German soldiers put it there. They requisitioned Bourani during the war.”
“But why that?”
“I think they had been stationed in Paris. They found it dull being garrisoned here.” He turned and saw me smile. “Precisely. One must be grateful for the smallest grain of humor from the Germans. I should not like the responsibility of destroying such a rare plant.”
“Do you know Germany?”
“It is not possible to know Germany. Only to endure it.”
“Bach? Isn’t he reasonably endurable?”
He stopped. “I do not judge countries by their geniuses. I judge them by their racial characteristics. The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not. That is why I forgive the Jews and the Anglo-Saxons their countless vices. And why I should thank God, if I believed in God, that I have no German blood.”
It seemed odd that a man so penetrated by dryness should hold such views. But we had come to an arbor of bougainvillea and morning-glory at the end of the kitchen-garden terrace, set back and obliquely. He gestured me in. In the shadows, in front of an outcrop of rock, stood a pedestal. On it was a bronze manikin with a grotesquely enormous erect phallus. Its hands were flung up as well, as if to frighten children; and on its face it had a manic-satyric grin. It was only eighteen inches or so high, yet it emitted a distinct primitive terror.
“You know what it is?” He was standing close behind me.
“Pan?”
“A Priapus. In classical times every garden and orchard had one. To frighten away thieves and bring fertility. It should be made of pear wood.”
“Where did you find it?”
“I had it made. Come.” He said “come” as Greeks prod their donkeys; as if, it later struck me, I was a potential employee who had to be shown briefly around the works.
We went back towards the house. A narrow path zigzagged steeply down from in front of the colonnade to the shore. There was a small cove there, not fifty yards across at its cuffed mouth. He had built a miniature jetty, and a small green and rose-pink boat, an open island boat with an engine fitted, was tied up alongside. At one end of the beach I could see a small cave, drums of kerosene. And there was a little pump-house, with a pipe running back up the cliff.
“Would you like to swim?”
We were standing on the jetty.
“I left my trunks at the house.”
“A costume is not necessary.” His eyes were those of a chess-player who has made a good move. I remembered a joke of Demetriades’s about English bottoms; and the Priapus. Perhaps this was the explanation; Conchis was simply an old queer.
“I don’t think I will.”
“As you please.”
We moved back to the strip of shingle and sat on a large balk of timber that had been dragged up away from the water.
I lit a cigarette and looked at him; tried to determine him. I was in something not unlike a mild state of shock. It was not only the fact that this man who spoke English so fluently, who was seemingly cultured, cosmopolitan, had come to “my” desert island, had sprung almost overnight from the barren earth, like some weird plant. It was not even that his manner was so strange. But I knew that there must really be some mystery about the previous year, some deliberate and inexplicable suppression on Mitford’s part. Second meanings hung in the air; ambiguities, unexpectednesses.
“How did you first come to this place, Mr. Conchis?”
“Will you forgive me if I ask you not to ask me questions?”
“Of course.”
“Good.”
And that was that; I bit my lip. If anyone else had been there I should have had to laugh.
Shadows began to fall across the water from the pines on the bluff to our right, and there was peace, absolute peace over the world, the insects stilled, and the water like a mirror. He sat in silence, sitting with his hands on his knees, apparently engaged in deep-breathing exercises. Not only his age but everything about him was difficult to tell. Outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet he watched me; even when he was looking away, he watched me; and he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to me, yet he watched and he waited. So we sat there in the silence as if we knew each other well and had no need merely to talk; and as a matter of fact it seemed in a way to suit the stillness of the day. It was an unnatural, but not an embarrassing, silence.