Well, I may send a telegram if I can work a few days off at Atheus. If I go on like this you won’t want to meet me. You probably don’t now as it is. When I got your letter I knew you’d just written it because you were bored out there. lsn’t it awful I still have to get boozed to write to you. It’s raining, I’ve got the fire on it’s so bloody cold. It’s dusk, it’s gray it’s so bloody miserable. The wallpaper’s muave or is it mauve hell with green plums. You’d be sick all down it.
A.
Write care of Ann.
Her letter came at the wrongest time. I realized that I didn’t want to share Bourani with anyone. After the first knowledge of the place, and still after the first meeting with Conchis, even as late as the Foulkes incident, I had wanted to talk about it—and to Alison. Now it seemed fortunate that I hadn’t, just as it seemed, though still obscurely, fortunate that I hadn’t lost my head in other ways when I wrote to her.
One doesn’t fall in love in five seconds; but five seconds can set one dreaming of falling in love, especially in a community as unrelievedly masculine as that of the Lord Byron School. The more I thought of that midnight face, the more intelligent and charming it became; and it seemed too to have had a breeding, a fastidiousness, a delicacy, that attracted me as fatally as the local fishermen’s lamps attracted fish on moonless nights. I reminded myself that if Conchs was rich enough to own Modiglianis and Bonnards, he was rich enough to pick the very best in mistresses. I had to presume some sort of sexual relationship between the girl and him—to do otherwise would have been naïve; but for all that there had been something much more daughterly, affectionately protective, than sexual in her glance back at him.
I must have read Alison’s letter a dozen times that Monday, trying to decide what to do about it. I knew it had to be answered, but I came to the conclusion that the longer I left it, the better. To stop its silent nagging I pushed it away in the bottom drawer of my desk; went to bed, thought about Bourani, drifted into various romanticsexual fantasies with that enigmatic figure; and failed entirely, in spite of my tiredness, to go to sleep. The crime of syphilis had made me ban sex from my mind for weeks; now I was not guilty—half an hour with a textbook Conchis had given me to look at had convinced me his diagnosis was right—the libido rose strong. I began to think erotically of Alison again; of the dirty-weekend pleasures of having her in some Athens hotel bedroom; of birds in the hand being worth more than birds in the bush; and with better motives, of her loneliness, her perpetual mixed-up loneliness. The one sentence that had pleased me in her unfastidious and not very delicate letter was the last of all—that simple Write care of Ann. Which denied the gaucheness, the lingering resentment, in all the rest.
I got out of bed and sat in my pajama trousers and wrote a letter, quite a long letter, which I tore up at the first rereading. The second attempt was much shorter and hit off, I thought, the right balance between regretful practicality and yet sufficient affection and desire for her still to want to climb into bed if I got half a chance.
I said I was rather tied up at the school over most weekends; though the half-term holiday was the weekend after next and I might just be in Athens then—but I couldn’t be sure. But if I was, it would be fun to see her.
As soon as I could I got Méli on his own. I had decided that I had to have a confidant at the school. One did not have to attend school meals with the boys over the weekend if one was off duty, and the only master who might have noticed I had been away was Méli himself, but as it happened he’d been in Athens. We sat after lunch on Monday in his room; or rather he sat chubbily at his desk, living up to his nickname, spooning Hymettus honey out of a jar and telling me of the flesh and fleshpots he had bought himself in Athens; and I lay on his bed, only half listening.
“And you, Nicholas, you had a nice weekend?”
“I met Mr. Conchs.”
“You… no, you are joking.”
“You are not to tell the others.”
He raised his hands in protest. “Of course, but how… I can’t believe it.”
I gave him a very expurgated version of the visit the week before, and made Conchis and Bourani as dull as possible.
“He sounds as stupid as I thought. No girls?”
“Not a sign. Not even little boys.”
“Nor even a goat?”
I threw a box of matches at him. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.
“He’s asked me over next week again. As a matter of fact, Méli, I wondered, if I do two preps for you… would you do my noon to six on Sunday?” Sunday duty was easy work. It meant only that one had to stay inside the school and stroll through the grounds a couple of times.
“Well. Yes. I will see.” He sucked the spoon.
“And tell me what to tell the others, if they ask. I want them to think I’m going somewhere else.”
He thought a minute, waved the spoon, then said, “Tell them you are going to Hydra.”
Hydra was a stop on the way to Athens, though one didn’t have to catch the Athens boat to go there, as there were often caiques doing the run. It had an embryonic artistic colony of sorts; the kind of place I might plausibly choose to go to. “Okay. And you won’t tell anyone?”
He crossed himself. “I am as silent as the… the what is it?”
“Where you ought to be, Méli. The bloody grave.”
I went to the village several times that week, to see if there were any strange faces about. There was no sign of the three people I was looking for, although there were a few strange faces: three or four wives with young children sent out to grass from Athens, and one or two old couples, dehydrated rentiers, who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia.
One evening I felt restless and walked down to the harbor. It was about eleven at night and the place, with its catalpas and its old black cannons of i8zi, was almost deserted. After a Turkish coffee and a nip of brandy in a kapheneion I started to walk back. Some way past the hotel, still on the few hundred yards of concrete “promenade,” I saw a very tall elderly man standing and bending in the middle of the road, apparently looking for something. He looked up as I approached—he was really remarkably tall and strikingly well dressed for Phraxos; evidently one of the summer visitors. He wore a pale fawn suit, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, an oldfashioned white Panama hat with a black band, and he had a small goatee beard. He was holding by its middle a cane with a meerschaum handle, and he looked gravely distressed, as well as naturally grave.
I asked in Greek if he had lost anything.
“Ah pardon… est-ce que vous parlez francais, monsieur?”
I said, yes, I spoke some French.
It seemed he had just lost the ferrule of his stick. He had heard it drop off and roll away. I struck a few matches and searched round, and after a little while found the small brass end.
“Ah, très bien. Mille mercis, monsieur.”
He produced a pocketbook and I thought for a moment he was going to tip me. His face was as gloomy as an El Greco; insufferably bored, decades of boredom, and probably, I decided, insufferably boring. He didn’t tip me, but placed the ferrule carefully inside the wallet, and then politely asked me who I was, and, fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn’t French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos pittoresque, mais mains belle que Délos.