I told no one, not even Méli, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about the mysterious third person in the house. I decided that a weakminded wife was the most likely answer; it would explain the seclusion, the taciturn servants.
I tried to make up my mind about Conchis too. I was far from sure that he was not just a homosexual; that would explain Mitford’s inadequate warning, though not very flatteringly to me. The old man’s nervous intensity, that jerking from one place to another, one subject to another, his jaunty walk, the gnomic answers and mystifications, the weird ffinging-up of his arms when I left—all his mannerisms suggested, were calculated to suggest, that he wanted to seem younger and more vital than he was.
There remained the peculiar business of the poetry book, which he must have had ready to puzzle me. I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday, far out in the bay, and he could easily have slipped the things onto the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water. But it seemed an oddly devious means of introduction. Then what did my “being elect” mean—our “having much to discover"? In itself it could mean nothing; in regard to him it could mean only that he was mad. And Some would say I lived alone: I remembered the scarcely concealed contempt with which he had said that.
I found a large-scale map of the island in the school library. The boundaries of the Bourani estate were marked. I saw it was bigger, especially to the east, than I had realized: six or seven hectares, some fifteen acres. Again and again I thought of it, perched on its lonely promontory, during the weary hours of plodding through Eckersley’s purgatorial English Course. I enjoyed conversation classes, I enjoyed doing more advanced work with what was known as the Philologic Sixth, a small group of eighteen-year-old duds who were doing languages only because they were hopeless at science, but the endless business of “drilling” the beginners bored me into stone. What am I doing? I am raising my arm. What is he doing? He is raising his arm. What are they doing? They are raising their arms. Have they raised their arms? They have raised their arms.
It was like being a champion at tennis, and condemned to play with rabbits, as well as having always to get their wretched balls out of the net for them. I would look out of the window at the blue sky and the cypresses and the sea, and pray for the day’s end, when I could retire to the masters’ wing, lie back on my bed and sip an ouzo. Bourani seemed greenly remote from all that; so far, and yet so near; its small mysteries, which grew smaller as the week passed, no more than an added tang in its other promise of civilized pleasure.
15
This time he was waiting for me at the table. I dumped my dufflebag by the wall and he called for Maria to bring the tea. He was much less eccentric, perhaps because he had transparently determined to pump me. We talked about the school, about Oxford, my family, about teaching English to foreigners, about why I had come to Greece. Though he kept asking questions, I still felt that he had no real interest in what I was saying. What interested him was something else, some specificness I exhibited, some category I filled. I was not interesting in myself, but only as an example. I tried once or twice to reverse our roles, but he again made it clear that he did not want to talk about himself. I said nothing about the glove.
Only once did he seem really surprised. He had asked me about my unusual name.
“French. My ancestors were Huguenots.”
“Ah.”
“There’s a writer called Honoré d'Urfé—”
He gave me a swift look. “He is an ancestor of yours?”
“It’s just a family tradition. No one’s ever traced it. As far as I know.” Poor old d'Urfé; I had used him before to suggest centuries of high culture lay in my blood. Conchis’s smile was genuinely warm, almost radiant, and I smiled back. “That makes a difference?”
“It is amusing.”
“It’s probably all rubbish.”
“No, no, I believe it. And have you read L'Astree?”
“For my pains. Terrible bore.”
“Oui, un peu fade. Mais pa.s tout a fait sans charmes.” Impeccable accent; he could not stop smiling. “So you speak French.”
“Not very well.”
“I have a direct link with le grand siècle at my table.”
“Hardly direct.”
But I didn’t mind his thinking it; his sudden flattering benignity. He stood up.
“Now. In your honor. Today I will play Rameau.”
He led the way into the room, which ran the whole width of the house. Books lined three walls. At one end there was a green-glazed tile stove under a mantelpiece on which stood two bronzes, one a modern one. Above them was a life-size reproduction of a Modigliani, a fine portrait of a somber woman in black against a glaucous green background.
He sat me in an armchair, sorted through some scores, found the one he wanted; began to play, short, chirrupy little pieces, then some elaborately ornamented courantes and passacaglias. I didn’t much like them, but I realized he played with some mastery. He might be pretentious in other ways, but he was not posing at the keyboard. He stopped abruptly, in midpiece, as if a light had fused; pretention began again.
“Voilà.”
“Very nice.” I determined to stamp out the French flu before it spread. “I’ve been admiring that.” I nodded at the reproduction.
“Yes?” We went and stood in front of it. “My mother.”
For a moment I thought he was joking.
“Your mother?”
“In name. In reality, it is his mother. It was always his mother.” I looked at the woman’s eyes; they hadn’t the usual fishlike pallor of Modigliani eyes. They stared, they watched, they were simian. I also looked at the painted surface. With a delayed shock I realized I was not looking at a reproduction.
“Good Lord. It must be worth a fortune.”
“No doubt.” He spoke without looking at me. “You must not think that because I live simply here I am poor. I am very rich.” He said it as if “very rich” was a nationality; as perhaps it is. I stared at the picture again. I think it was the first time I had seen a really valuable modern picture hanging in a private house. “It cost me… nothing. And that was charity. I should like to say that I recognized his genius. But I did not. No one did. Not even the clever Mr. Zborowski.”
“You knew him?”
“Modigliani? I met him. Many times. I knew Max Jacob, who was a friend of his. That was in the last year of his life. He was quite famous by then. One of the sights of Montparnasse.”
I stole a look at Conchis as he gazed up at the picture; he had, by no other logic than that of cultural snobbery, gained a whole new dimension of social respectability for me, and I began to feel much less sure of his eccentricity and his phoniness, of my own superiority in the matter of what life was really about.
“You must wish you bought more from him.”
“I did.”
“You still own them?”
“Of course. Only a bankrupt would sell beautiful paintings. They are in my other houses.” I stored away that plural; one day I would mimic it to someone.
“Where are your… other houses?”
“Do you like this?” He touched the bronze of a young man beneath the Modigliani. “This is a maquette by Rodin. My other houses. Well. In France. In the Lebanon. In America. I have business interests all over the world.” He turned to the other characteristically skeletal bronze. “And this is by the Italian sculptor Giacometti.”
I looked at it, then at him. “I’m staggered. Here on Phraxos.”
“Why not?”
“Thieves?”