“Why did you do that?”
She gave me a racked look, mixed reproach and asking for forgiveness.
“You make me wild.”
It seemed torn out of her, a kind of self-horror. Then she was in my arms again, being gripped frantically to me and wanting to be gripped, a brutally fierce kiss. But we both heard the quick pad of the running feet. She twisted round and free. Said in a low voice to him, “Stop there.” He rocked on his feet, as if in two minds, then stood twenty yards away.
I whispered, “I love you. I’m mad about you.”
She turned back to me; her hair had fallen loose and she looked strange, struck silent, her eyes so intense; as if she had begun to suspect me all over again. I took her face in my hands and drew her a little towards me, then whispered the words again; begging her to believe.
“I love you.”
She bowed her head, then pulled on her cardigan, saying nothing, but standing so close that it said everything. I pulled her against me for a moment, and then she answered, in a voice so low I hardly heard.
“I want you to love me.”
A last moment; then she ran past the Negro and down through the trees towards the shingle of the beach. For an instant the mothlike whiteness of her skirt showed; was swallowed up in darkness.
The Negro leaned against a pine. He was without his mask and I felt more relaxed with him than before; sure that I was the tricker this time, he the tricked.
“Would you like a cigarette?”
No answer.
“Just to show there are no hard feelings.”
Suddenly he switched a torch on; only for a second, but it dazzled me; and it was plainly to silence my tongue.
“Thanks.”
For two or three minutes we stood in dense darkness and silence. I smoked, he watched.
Then the torch went on again, but this time it pointed at a place in front of my feet, then moved towards the north. He was telling me to go home.
“I am dismissed?”
Again the torch pointed, swept sideways.
I began to walk in the direction that would bring me to the path to the central ridge. He followed me, some thirty or forty yards behind. I halted and turned.
“Is this really necessary?”
But the torch flicked on again, and the beam pushed me away. I shrugged; continued. She loved me, she wanted me; and I carried the certainty of it inside me like alcohol. When we got to the path, and I turned up to the north, he stopped. Some forty yards later I looked back and he was still standing there.
I went on without stopping for two hundred yards or so. It was a night with the thinnest of new moons; too dark to encourage a roundabout return to Bourani. I waited for the sound of a boat engine. And this time, in a few minutes, it came from the direction of the private beach; then headed east towards Nauplia.
As I climbed the long path through the trees I thought of Julie; of her body, her mouth, a feeling that in another few minutes she would have given way… and my mind wandered lubriciously off to a Julie trained by familiarity, by love of me to do all those things that Alison did; all Alison’s semi-professional skill with Julie’s elegance, taste and intelligence. I was torn between wanting her and not wanting her; between doing things at my tempo and doing them at hers; happily torn.
Walking on I began to think over the old center to the whole enigma—Conchis, and his purposes. If you have a private menagerie your concern is to keep the animals in, not to dictate exactly what they do inside the cage. He constructed bars around us, subtle psychosexual bars that kept us chained to Bourani. He was like some Elizabethan nobleman. We were his Earl of Leicester’s troupe, his very private company; but he might well have incorporated the Heisenberg principle into his masque, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. One thing was certain: to use us so he must despise us. In spite of Julie’s theory, it rankled in me that he called me unimaginative. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a naïve England. In spite of all his gnomic cant he was like so many other Europeans, quite unable to understand the emotional depths and subtleties of the English attitude to life. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperifidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.
I came towards the main ridge. As I walked I overturned a loose stone here and there, but otherwise the landscape was totally silent. Far below, over the crumpled gray velvet of the outstretched pinetops, the sea glistened obscurely under the spangled sky. The world belonged to night.
The trees thinned out where the ground rose steeply to-the small bluff that marked the south side of the main ridge. I paused a moment for breath and turned to look back down towards Bourani; glanced at my watch. It was just after midnight. The whole island was asleep. Somewhere Lily was, like me, staring at the silver nailparing of a moon, perhaps feeling that same sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.
Then from behind me, from somewhere up on the ridge, I heard a sound. A very small sound, but enough to make me step swiftly off the path into the cover of a pine. Someone or something up there had overturned a stone. A pause of fifteen seconds or more. Then I froze; both with shock and as a precaution.
A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky. Then a second man, and a third. I could hear the faint noise of their feet on the rock, the muffled clink of something metallic. Then, like magic, there were six. Six gray shadows standing along the skyline. One of them raised an arm and pointed; but I heard no sound of voices. Islanders? But they hardly ever used the central ridge in summer; and never at that time of night. In any case I suddenly realized what they were. They were soldiers. I could just see the indistinct outlines of guns, the dull sheen of a helmet.
There had been Greek army maneuvers on the mainland a month before, and a coming and going of landing craft in the strait. These men must be on some similar commando-type exercise. But I didn’t move.
One of the men turned back, and the others followed. I thought I knew what had happened. They had come along the central ridge and overshot the transverse path that led down to Bourani and Moutsa. As if to confirm my guess there was a distant pop, like a flrework. I saw, from somewhere west of Bourani, a shimmering Very light hanging in the sky. It was one of the starshell variety and fell in a slow parabola. I had fired dozens myself, on night exercises. The six were evidently on their way to “attack” some point on the other side of Moutsa.
For all that, I looked round. Twenty yards away there was a group of rocks with enough small shrubs to give cover. I ran silently under the trees and, forgetting my clean trousers and shirt, dropped down in a natural trough between two of the rocks. They were still warm from the sun. I watched the, cleft in the skyline down which the path lay.
In a few seconds a pale movement told me I was right. The men were coming down. They were probably just a group of friendly lads from the Epirus or somewhere. But I pressed myself as flat as I could. When I could hear that they had come abreast, about thirty yards away, I sneaked a facedown look through the twigs that shielded me.
My heart jumped. They were in German uniforms. For a moment I thought that perhaps they were dressed up to be the “enemy” on the maneuvers; but it was unthinkable, after the atrocities of the Occupation, that any Greek soldier would put on German uniform, even for an exercise; and from then on I knew. The masque had moved outside the domaine.