She turned down the pale blue flame of the spirit-stove; with a moue surrendered.
“Maurice had to go out.”
“Oh. why?”
She poured two cups and handed one towards me, then looked me in the eyes.
“So that we could have tea alone.” She smiled.
“You look like a dream.”
“Won’t you have a sandwich?”
I grinned, gave up, took one. “Where’ve you been this last fortnight?”
“Here.”
“No you haven’t. I’ve been over several times. The house has been locked up.” She nibbled a sandwich, risked a demure look at me. “Come on, be a sport. Athens?” She shook her head. Her hair was up and drawn back from her face. She sat sideways, in profile, long neck, beautifully poised Grecian head. “I saw Maurice just now. He said you were going to tell me the truth. Over tea. Who you really are, where you’ve been—everything.”
She looked at me under severe eyebrows; reverting. “That is a fib.”
“He might have done. You don’t know.”
“But I do.”
I stared down at the ground. “Lily.”
“Why do you say my name like that?”
“You know why.” She shook her head. I let the silence come. She sipped her tea, watched it, sipped it again. Always that secret inner smile; I looked round into the trees, to see if I could see the “nurse"; and hoping that she might ask me what I was looking for.
“Was your friend glad to see you in Athens?”
“She didn’t see me in Athens. We called it off. By letter.”
“Oh.”
“For good.” She nursed the cup, refusing to look at me, to be interested. “Are you glad?”
“Why should I be glad?”
“I was asking whether. Not why.” She gave a tiny shrug, as if I had no right to ask; raised one of her black shoes and contemplated it; waited for my next move. “You know I’ve been hypnotized since I saw you last?” She nodded. “Were you there?” She shook her head, quite vehemently. “He’s hypnotized you?” She nodded again. “Often?”
She turned and put her elbows on the table and stared at me.
“Yes. Many times.”
And I was caught; still not quite able to be sure that the schizophrenia was another invention; still not all clear to what extent she was playing to his cues.
“This is why you can’t lie to him?”
She seemed to be more interested in looking at my face than in answering, but in the end she said, “It’s good for me.”
“He says. Or you?”
“Both of us. It is very relaxing.”
“Last time you seemed to think it was frightening.”
She smiled. “And frightening.” I looked at her mouth, that long, mobile, smiling mouth; the ambiguous gray-hyacinth eyes. It was the way their corners cocked obliquely; it made it difficult to believe that she meant a word of what she was saying.
“He obviously still wants you to vamp me.”
She looked down then, and the smile disappeared. After a moment she stood up and went to the far edge of the colonnade, by the house wall, where the steps led down to the vegetable terrace. I followed her, thinking she was going to stroll there. But she turned with her back against the wall. I stood in front of her; after a moment I put my hand on the wall behind her head, barring her in. There grew in me an intuition that she had, right from the beginning, found me physically more attractive than she wanted to admit. Narcissus-like I saw my own face reflected deep in her indecision, her restlessness. She was not smiling; and in the silence she let my eyes explore her own. I let my hand slip very lightly onto her shoulder. She did not move. I shifted it down onto her bare arm, to cool white skin. And suddenly I was sure that she wanted me, or would allow me, to kiss her.
I took her other arm and drew her towards me. Her eyes closed, our mouths met; and hers was warm, moved convulsively under mine for four or five seconds. I had just time to get my hand to the small of her back, to press her body against mine, know its weight, slenderness, the flesh reality. But then she pushed me away.
“We mustn’t. Not here.”
“Lily.”
She gave me an almost frighteningly intense out-of-role look; as if I had forced her to do something she was ashamed of; and its sincerity was very nearly as exciting as the touch of her mouth. I tried to pull her back to me again.
“No. Because of Maurice.”
She pressed my hand with sudden firmness, a kind of promise of the emotion she had to hide, and went back to the table. But she stood by it, as if she was at a loss to know what to do now. I went behind her.
“Why did you do that?” She stood staring down at the table, keeping her face half averted from me. “Because he told you to?”
She turned then, a swift, frank look of denial; and as quickly turned away again. She moved out into the sun at the front of the colonnade.
I went after her. “You must let me see you alone again. Tonight.”
“No.” She swayed round, flaring her stole, like a figure from Beardsley, so that we walked back to the terrace end of the colonnade.
“At midnight. By the statue.”
“I daren’t.”
“Because of him?”
“Because of everything.” She gave me a side look. As if she would like to say more. We walked another step or two. She came to a decision. “It’s so complicated. I don’t know what to do any more.” She murmured, “If I think I can…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. I put my arm round her shoulder and kissed the side of her head. She twisted lightly away. A small lizard scuttered along the bottom of the wall in front, and she leaned out to look at it.
“I may not… I can’t promise.” She said it casually; like a heroine in Chekhov, unpredictable, shifting, always prey to something beyond the words and moods of the apparent situation.
There were footsteps on the gravel, round the corner of the house; and then she looked at me, once again completely out of role, a practical, alert, very un-Chekhovian insistence in her low voice.
“You mustn’t say a word.”
“Of course.”
“I think he’ll take you away now. I’m supposed to disappear.” She said very quickly, in a whisper, “I so wanted you to come back.” Then she was smiling into distance, past my shoulder.
I turned. Conchis had come silently round the corner. In his hands he held poised a four-foot axe. With a formal bow to me Lily moved quickly, almost too punctiliously on cue, across the tiles and into the house.
There was a strange moment of hiatus; of a new madness.
“Have you had your tea?”
“Yes.”
He lowered the axe.
“I have found a dead pine. Will you help me cut it down?”
“Of course.”
“It will make good firewood.”
The dialogue bore no relation to what either of us was thinking or wanted to say. His first appearance had been another coup de théatre, intentionally ominous, as if he was going to run at us with the axe raised and split our heads open; and he still stared at me as if something about Lily’s quick exit had made him newly suspicious.
“Come.”
He silently offered me the axe to carry. We set off towards the gate. He walked fast, with a grim, purposeful expression. At last I made an effort and asked him where he had learnt to hypnotize. He dismissed it—"a very simple discipline"; there was nothing mysterious or magical about it, it was a matter of training and experience.
“Have you ever failed?”
“Of course. Any hypnotist who maintains the contrary is a charlatan.” Something had annoyed him, though it was apparently not myself.
I hefted the axe to the other shoulder.
“Did you ask me any questions?”
He looked quite shocked. “I am a doctor, therefore under the Hippocratic oath. If ever I wished to ask you questions under hypnosis, I should certainly ask your permission first.” We walked twenty paces before he went on. “It is a very unsatisfactory method. It has been demonstrated again and again that patients are quite capable of lying under hypnosis.”