“You know that girl I was with last night—has she gone out this morning?”
“Oh yeah. She wen' out.”
“When?”
He looked up at the clock. “About one hour since. She lef' this. She said give it you when you came down.”
An envelope. My scrawled name: N. Urfe.
“She didn’t say where she was going?”
“Just paid her check and went.” I knew by the way he was watching me that he had heard, or heard about, the screaming the evening before.
“But I said I’d pay.”
“I said. I told her.”
“Damn.”
As I turned to go he said, “Hey, you know what they say in the States? Always plenny more fish in the sea. Know that one? Plenny more fish in the sea.”
I went back to my room and opened her letter. It was a scrawl, a last-moment decision not to go in silence.
Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole placed locked up forever.
It’s finished finished finished.
About ten I rang up the airport. Alison had not returned, and was not due to return until her flight to London at five that afternoon. I tried again at eleven thirty, just before the boat sailed; the same answer. As the ship, which was filled with returning boys, drew out from the quay I scanned the crowds of parents and relations and idlers. I had some idea that she was there among them, watching; but if she was, she was invisible.
The ugly industrial seafront of the Piraeus receded and the boat headed south for the svelte blue peak of Aegina. I went to the bar and ordered a large ouzo; it was the only place the boys were not allowed. I drank a mouthful neat, and made a sort of bitter inner toast. I had chosen my own way; the difficult, hazardous, poetic way; all on one number.
Someone slipped onto the stool beside me. It was Demetriades. He clapped his hands for the barman.
“Buy me a drink, you perverted Englishman. And I will tell you how I spent a most amusing weekend.”
43
Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and… I had all Tuesday to think nothing but that; to see myself as Alison saw me. I took the envelope out, and looked at the thread, and waited. It was a relief to teach hard, conscientiously, to get through the suspense. On Wednesday evening, when I gut back from post-siesta school to my room, I found a note on my desk. I recognized Conchis’s almost copperplate writing; and I recognized something else in the elaborate star the note had been folded into. I couldn’t imagine Conchis wasting time on such a business; but I could see Lily doing so. I thought, as I was no doubt meant to, of idle convoluted women in Edwardian country houses.
The note said: We look forward to seeing you on Saturday. I hope you had a most enjoyable reconciliation with your friend. If I do not hear I shall know you are coming. Maurice Conchis. It was dated above Wednesday morning. My heart leapt. Everything during that last weekend seemed, if not justified, necessary.
I had a lot of marking to do, but I couldn’t stay in. I walked up to the main ridge, to the inland cliff. I had to see the roof of Bourani, the south of the island, the sea, the mountains, all the reality of the unreality. There was none of the burning need to go down and spy that had possessed me the week before, but a balancing mixture of excitement and reassurance, a certainty of the health of the symbiosis. I was theirs still; they were mine.
I wrote a note to Alison as soon as I got back.
Allie darling, you can’t say to someone “I’ve decided I ought to love you.” I can see a million reasons why I ought to love you, because (as I tried to explain) in my fashion, my perfect-bastard fashion, I do love you. Parnassus was beautiful, please don’t think it was nothing to me, only the body, or could ever be anything but unforgettable, always, for me. I know you’re angry, of course you’re angry, but please write back. It’s so likely that one day I shall need you terribly, I shall come crawling to you, and you can have all the revenge you want then.
I thought it a good letter; the only conscious exaggeration was in the last sentence.
At ten to four on Saturday I was at the gate of Bourani; and there, walking along the track towards me, was Conchis. FIe had on a black shirt, long khaki shorts; dark brown shoes and faded yellow-green stockings. He was walking purposefully, almost in a hurry, as if he had wanted to be out of the way before I came. But he raised his arm as soon as he saw me and appeared not put out.
“Nicholas.”
“Hello.”
He stood in front of me and gave his little headshake.
“A pleasant half-term?”
“Yes, thanks.”
He seemed to have expected more, but I was determined to say nothing; and showed so. He murmured, “Good.”
“That was an extraordinary experience. Last time. I had no idea I was so suggestible.”
He tapped his head. “Never think of your mind as a castle. It is an engine room.”
“Then you must be a very skilled engineer.” He bowed. “Am I to believe all those sensations came from other worlds?”
“It is not for me to tell you what to believe.”
I remembered, as I smiled thinly at his own thin smile, that I was back in a polysemantic world. He reached out, as if he felt sorry for me, and gripped my shoulder for a second. It was clear that he wanted to get on.
“You’re going out?”
“I have been writing letters all day. I must walk.”
“Can’t I come with you?”
“You could.” He smiled. “But I think Lily would be disappointed.”
I smiled back. “In that case.”
“Precisely. You will remember what we said?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I have great confidence in you. Sto kalo.”
He raised his hand, and we parted.
I walked on, but looked back after a moment to see which way he had gone. It was apparently to Moutsa or beyond it to the totally deserted western end of the island. I did not believe for a moment that he was going for a constitutional. He walked far too much like a man with something to arrange, someone to see.
No one was visible as I approached the house, as I crossed the gravel. I leapt up the steps and walked quietly round the corner onto the wide tiling under the front colonnade.
Lily was standing there, her feet and the bottom of her dress in sunlight, the rest of her in shadow. I saw at once that the pretense was still on. She had her back to me, as if she had been looking out to sea, but her face was turned expectantly over her shoulder. As soon as I appeared she swayed lightly round. She was wearing another beautiful dress, in a charcoal-amber-indigo art nouveau fabric, with an almost ground-length pale yellow stole. As arresting as a brilliant stage costume, and yet she contrived to wear it both naturally and dramatically.
She held out her left hand with a smile, back up, for me to check her identity. We didn’t say anything. She sat down in her willowy manner and gestured to the chair opposite. And it became a sort of game inside a game inside a game: silence, to see which one of us could go longest without speaking. As she poured water from the silver kettle into the teapot I saw her slide a look at me, and then bite her lips to stop from smiling. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. All through the week there had been recurrent memories, images of Alison, doubts that involved comparing her with Lily… and now I knew I was right. It wasn’t only the stunning physical elegance of this girl, it was the intelligence, the quickness, the ability to be several things at the same time; to make every look and every remark ambiguous; to look cool and yet never cold.