At the same time a parabola, a fall, an ejaculation; but the transience, the passage, had become an integral part of the knowledge of the experience. The becoming and the being were one.
I think I saw the star again for a while, the star as it simply was, hanging in the sky above, but now in all its being-and-becoming. It was like walking through a door, going all round the world, and then walking through the same door but a different door.
Then darkness. I remember nothing.
Then light.
37
Someone had knocked on the door. I was staring at a wall. I was in bed, I was wearing pyjamas, my clothes were folded on the chair. It was daylight, very early, the first thin sunlight on the tops of the pines outside. I looked at my watch. Just before six o’clock.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I had a black plunge of shame, of humiliation; of having been naked in front of Conchis, of having been in his power; even worse, others could have seen. Julie. I saw myself lying there and all of them sitting and grinning while Conchis asked me questions and I gave naked answers. But Julie – he must also hypnotize her; this was why she could not lie.
Svengali and Trilby.
Then the mystical experience itself, still so vivid, as clear as a learnt lesson, as the details of a drive in new country, hit me. I saw how it had been done. There would have been some drug, some hallucinogene in the
raki –
perhaps the Stramonium of his paper. Then he had suggested these things, these stages of knowledge, he had induced them as I lay there helpless. I looked round for the green-bound volume of his medical papers. But it was not in the room. I was to be denied even that clue.
The richness of what I remembered; the potential embarrassment of what I could not; the good of it and the evil of it; these two things made me sit for minutes with my head in my hands, torn between resentment and gratitude.
I went and washed, stared at myself in the mirror, went down to the coffee the silent Maria had waiting for me. I knew Conchis would not appear. Maria would say nothing. Nothing was to be explained, everything was planned to keep me in suspense until I came again.
As I walked back to the school, I tried to assess the experience; why, though it was so beautiful, so intensely real, it seemed also so sinister. It was difficult in that early-morning light and landscape to believe that anything on earth was sinister, yet the feeling persisted with me and it was not only one of humiliation. It was one of new danger, of meddling in darker, stranger things that needed to be meddled with. It also made Julie’s fear of Conchis much more convincing than his pseudo-medical pity for her; she might just be schizophrenic, but he was proven a hypnotist. But this was to assume that they were not working together to trick me; and then I began clawing, in a panic of memory, through all my meetings with Conchis, trying to see if he could ever have hypnotized me before, without my being aware of it …
I remembered bitterly that only the afternoon before I had said to Julie that my sense of reality was like gravity. For a while I was like a man in space, whirling through madness. I remembered Conchis’s trance-like state during the Apollo scene. Had he hypnotized me into imagining it all? Had he willed me to go to sleep when I did that afternoon, so conveniently placed for the Foulkes apparition? Had there ever been a man and a girl standing there? Now Julie even … but I recalled the feel of her skin, of those ungiving lips. I got back to earth. But I was badly shaken.
It was not only the being hypnotized by Conchis that unanchored me; in a subtler but similar way I knew I had been equally hypnotized by the girl. I had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive. It wasn’t only that I foresaw a very steep bill with Julie; she shook my whole theory. She had a certain exhalation of surrender about her, as if she was a door waiting to be pushed open; but it was the darkness beyond that held me. Perhaps it was partly a nostalgia for that extinct Lawrentian woman of the past, the woman inferior to man in everything but that one great power of female dark mystery and beauty; the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female. The essences of the two sexes had become so confused in my androgynous twentieth-century mind that this reversion to a situation where a woman was a woman and I was obliged to be fully a man had all the fascination of an old house after a cramped, anonymous modern flat. I had been enchanted into wanting sex often enough before; but never into wanting love.
All that morning I sat in classes, teaching as if I was still hypnotized, in a dream of hypotheses. Now I saw Conchis as a sort of psychiatric novelist sans novel, creating with people, not words; now I saw him as a complicated but still very perverse old man; now as a Svengali; now as a genius among practical jokers. But whichever way I saw him I was fascinated, and Julie, as Lily with her hair blown sideways, with her tear-stained face, at that first moment, in the lamplight, cool ivory … I didn’t try to pretend that I was anything else than quite literally bewitched by Bourani. It was almost a force, like a magnet, drawing me out of the classroom windows, through the blue air to the central ridge, and down there where I so wanted to be. The rows of olive-skinned faces, bent black heads, the smell of chalk-dust, an old inkstain that rorschached my desk – they were like things in a mist, real yet unreal; obstacles in limbo.
After lunch Demetriades came into my room and wanted to know who Alison was; and began being obscene, dreadful stock Greek
facetiae
about tomatoes and cucumbers, when I refused to tell him anything. I shouted at him to fuck off; had to push him out by force. He was offended and spent the rest of that week avoiding me. I didn’t mind. It kept him out of my way.
After my last lesson I couldn’t resist it. I had to go back to Bourani. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had to re-enter the domaine. As soon as I saw it, the hive of secrets lying in the last sunshine over the seething pine-tops, far below, I was profoundly relieved, as if it might not have been still there. The closer I got, the more nefarious I felt, and the more nefarious I became. I simply wanted to see them; to know they were there, waiting for me.
I approached at dusk from the east, slipped between the wire, and walked down cautiously past the statue of Poseidon, over the gulley, and through the trees to where I could see the house. Every window at the side was shuttered up. There was no smoke from Maria’s cottage. I worked round to where I could see the front of the house. The french windows under the colonnade were shuttered. So were the ones that led from Conchis’s bedroom on to the terrace. It was clear that no one was there. I walked back through the darkness, feeling depressed, and increasingly furious that Conchis could spirit his world away; deprive me of it, like a callous drug-ward doctor with some hooked addict.
The next day I wrote a letter to Mitford, telling him that I’d been to Bourani, met Conchis, and begging him to come clean on his own experience there. I sent it to the address in Northumberland.
I also saw Karazoglou again, and tried to coax more information out of him. He was obviously quite sure that Leverrier had never met Conchis. He told me what I already knew, that Leverrier had been ‘religious’; he had used to go to Mass in Athens. And he said more or less the same as Conchis:
‘Il avait toujours l’air un peu triste, il ne s’est jamais habitué
à la vie ici.’
Yet Conchis had also said that he had made an excellent ‘seeker’.
I got Leverrier’s address in England out of the school bursar, but then decided not to write; I had it to hand if I needed it.
I also did a little research on Artemis. She
was
Apollo’s sister in mythology; protectress of virgins and patroness of hunters. The saffron dress, the buskins and the silver bow (the crescent new moon) constituted her standard uniform in classical poetry. Though she seemed permanently trigger-happy where amorous young men were concerned I could find no mention of her being helped by her brother. She was ‘an element in the ancient matriarchal cult of the Triple Moon-goddess, linked with Astarte in Syria and Isis in Egypt’. Isis, I noted, was often accompanied by the jackal-headed Anubis, guardian of the underworld, who later became Cerberus.
On Tuesday and Wednesday prep duties kept me at the school. On Thursday I went over to Bourani again. Nothing had changed. It was as deserted as it had been on the Monday.
I walked round the house, tried the shutters, roamed the grounds, went down to the private beach, from which the boat was gone. Then I sat brooding for half an hour in the twilight under the colonnade. I felt both exploited and excluded, and as much angry with myself as with them. I was mad to have got involved in the whole business, and even madder both to want it to go on and be frightened of its going on. I had changed my mind once again in those intervening days. More and more I no longer knew about the schizophrenia; from faintly possible it began to grow probable. I could not imagine why else he should have halted the masque so abruptly. If it had been only an amusement…
I suppose there was a large component of envy too – I thought of Conchis’s foolishness, or arrogance, in leaving the Modigliani and the Bonnards like that, in a deserted house … and from those Bonnards, my mind grasshoppered to Alison. There was that day a special midnight boat to take the boys and masters back to Athens for their half-term holiday. It meant sitting up all night dozing in an armchair in the scruffy first-class saloon, but it gave one the Friday in Athens. I’m not quite sure what it was – anger, spite, revenge? -that made me decide to take the boat. It was certainly not the thought of Alison, beyond a need of someone to talk to. Perhaps it was a last whiff of my old would-be existentialist self: founding freedom on caprice.
A minute later I was walking fast down the track to the gate. Even then, at the last moment I looked back and hoped, with one-thousandth of a hope, that someone might be beckoning me to return.
But no one was. So I embarked for my lack of a better.
38
Athens was dust and drought, ochre and drab. Even the palm trees looked exhausted. All the humanity in human beings had retreated behind dark skins and even darker glasses, and by two in the afternoon the streets were empty, abandoned to indolence and heat. I lay slumped on a bed in a Piraeus hotel, and dozed fitfully in the shuttered twilight. The city was doubly too much for me. After Bourani, the descent back into the age, the machinery, the stress, was completely disorientating.
The afternoon dragged out its listless hours. The closer I came to meeting Alison, the more muddle-motived I grew. I knew that if I was in Athens at all, it was out of a desire to play my own double game with Conchis. Twenty-four hours before, under the colonnade, Alison had seemed a pawn to be used – at least one counter-move I could make; but now, two hours before meeting … sex with her was unthinkable. So too, so close, was to tell her what was happening at Bourani. I no longer knew why I had come. I felt strongly tempted to sneak away back to the island. I wanted neither to deceive Alison nor to reveal the truth.
Yet something kept me lying there, some remnant of interest in hearing what had become of her, some pity, some memory of past affection. I saw it as a kind of test, as well: of both my depth of feeling about Julie and my doubts. Alison could stand for past and present reality in the outer world, and I would put her secretly in the ring with my inner adventure. Also I had hit, during the long night on the boat, on a way of keeping the meeting safely antiseptic-something that would make her feel sorry for me
and
keep her at arm’s length.
At five I got up, had a shower, and caught a taxi out to the airport. I sat on a bench opposite the long reception counter, then moved away; finding, to my irritation, that I was increasingly nervous. Several other air hostesses passed quickly – hard, trim, professionally pretty, the shallow unreality of characters from science fiction.
Six came, six-fifteen. I goaded myself to walk up to the counter.
There was a Greek girl there in the right uniform, with flashing white teeth and dark-brown eyes whose innuendoes seemed put on with the rest of her lavish make-up.
‘I’m supposed to be meeting one of your girls. Alison Kelly.’
‘Allie? Her flight’s in. She’ll be changing.’ She picked up a telephone, dialled a number, gleamed her teeth at me. Her accent was impeccable; and American. ‘Allie? Your date’s here. If you don’t come right away he’s taking me instead.’ She held out the receiver. ‘She wants to speak to you.’
‘Tell her I’ll wait. Not to hurry.’
‘He’s shy.’ Alison must have said something, because the girl smiled. She put the phone down.
‘She’ll be right over.’
‘What did she say then?’
‘She said you’re not shy, it’s just your technique.’
‘Oh.’
She gave me what was meant to be a coolly audacious look between her long black eyelashes, then turned to deal with two women who had mercifully appeared at the other end of the counter. I escaped and went and stood near the entrance. When I had first lived on the island, Athens, the city life, had seemed like a normalizing influence, as desirable as it was still familiar. Now I realized that it began to frighten me, that I loathed it; the slick exchange at the desk, its blatant implications of contracepted excitement, the next stereotyped thrill. I came from another planet.
A minute or two later Alison appeared through the door. Her hair was short, too short, she was wearing a white dress, and immediately we were on the wrong foot, because I knew she had worn it to remind me of our first meeting. Her skin was paler than I remembered. She took off her dark glasses when she saw me and I could see she was tired, her most bruised. Pretty enough body, pretty enough clothes, a good walk, the same old wounded face and truth-seeking eyes. Alison might launch ten ships in me; but Julie launched a thousand. She came and stood and we gave each other a little smile.
‘Hi.’
‘Hallo, Alison.’
‘Sorry. Late as usual.’
She spoke as if we had last met the week before. But it didn’t work. The nine months stood like a sieve between us, through which words came, but none of the emotions.
‘Shall we go?’
I took the airline bag she was carrying and led her out to a taxi. Inside we sat in opposite corners and looked at each other again. She smiled.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come.’
‘I didn’t know where to send my refusal.’
‘I was cunning.’
She glanced out of the window, waved to a man in uniform. She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.
‘I’ve got you a room overlooking the port.’
‘Fine.’
‘They’re so bloody stuffy in Greek hotels. You know.’
‘
Toujours
the done thing.’ She gave me a tweak of irony from her grey eyes, then covered up. ‘It’s fun.
Vive
the done thing.’ I nearly made my prepared speech, but it annoyed me that she assumed I hadn’t changed, was still slave to English convention; it even annoyed me that she felt she had to cover up. She held out her hand and I took it and we pressed fingers. Then she reached out and took off my dark glasses.
‘You look devastatingly handsome now. Do you know that? You’re so brown. Dried in the sun, sort of beginning to be ravaged. Jesus, when you’re forty.’
I smiled, but I looked down and let go of her hand to get a cigarette. I knew what her flattery meant; the invitation extended.
‘Alison, I’m in a sort of weird situation.’
It knocked all the false lightness out of her. She stared straight ahead.
‘Another girl?’
‘No.’ She flashed a look at me. ‘I’ve changed, I don’t know how one begins to explain things.’
‘But you wish to God I’d kept away.’
‘No, I’m … glad you’ve come.’ She glanced at me suspiciously again. ‘Really.’
She was silent for a few moments. We moved out on to the coast road.
‘I’m through with Pete.’
‘You said.’
‘I forgot.’ But I knew she hadn’t.
‘And I’ve been through with everyone else since I’ve been through with him.’ She kept staring out of the window. ‘Sorry. I ought to have started with the small talk.’
‘No. I mean … you know.’
She slid another look at me; hurt and trying not to be hurt. She made an effort. ‘I’m living with Ann again. Only since last week. Back in the old flat. Maggie’s gone home.’
‘I liked Ann.’
‘Yes, she’s nice.’
There was a long silence as we drove down past Phaleron. She stared out of the window and after a minute reached into her white handbag and took out her dark glasses. I knew why, I could see the lines of wet light round her eyes. I didn’t touch her, take her hand, but I talked about the difference between the Piraeus and Athens, how the former was more picturesque, more Greek, and I thought she’d like it better. I had really chosen the Piraeus because of the small, but horrifying, possibility of running into Conchis and Julie. The thought of
her
cool, amused and probably contemptuous eyes if such a thing happened sent shivers down my spine. There was something about Alison’s manner and appearance; if a man was with her, he went to bed with her. And as I talked, I wondered how we were going to survive the next three days.
I tipped the boy and he left the room. She went to the window and looked down across the broad white quay, the slow crowds of evening strollers, the busy port. I stood behind her. After a moment’s swift calculation I put my arm round her and at once she leant against me.
‘I hate cities. I hate aeroplanes. I want to live in a cottage in Ireland.’
“Why Ireland?’
‘Somewhere I’ve never been.’
I could feel the warmth, the willingness to surrender, of her body. At any moment she would turn her face and I would have to kiss her.
‘Alison, I… don’t quite know how to break the news.’ I took my arm away, and stood closer to the window, so that she could not see my face. ‘I caught a disease two or three months ago. Well… syphilis.’ I turned and she gave me a look – concern and shock and incredulity. ‘I’m all right now, but… you know, I can’t possibly
‘You went to a … ‘I nodded. The incredulity became credulity. She looked down.
‘You had your revenge.’
She came and put her arms round me. ‘Oh Nicko, Nicko.’
I said over her head, ‘I’m not meant to have oral or closer contact for at least another month. I didn’t know what to do. I ought never to have written. This was never really on.’
She let go of me and went and sat on the bed. I saw I had got myself into a new corner; she now thought that this satisfactorily explained our awkwardness till then. She gave me a kind, gentle little smile.
‘Tell me all about it.’
I walked round and round the room, telling her about Patarescu and the clinic, about the poetry, even about the venture at suicide, about everything except Bourani. After a while she lay back on the bed, smoking, and I was unexpectedly filled with a pleasure in duplicity; with that pleasure, I imagined, Conchis felt when he was with me. In the end I sat on the end of the bed. She lay staring up at the ceiling.
‘Can I tell you about Pete now?’
‘Of course.’
I half listened, playing my part, and suddenly began to enjoy being with her again; not particularly with Alison, but being in this hotel bedroom, hearing the murmur of the evening crowds below, the sound of sirens, the smell of the tired Aegean. I felt no attraction and no tenderness for her; no real interest in the break-up of her long relationship with the boor of an Australian pilot; simply the complex, ambiguous sadness of the darkening room. The light had drained out of the sky, it became rapid dusk. All the treacheries of modern love seemed beautiful, and I had my great secret, safe, locked away. It was Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy; there were only degrees of aesthetic pleasure; of beauty in decadence. Morality was a North European lie.
There was a long silence.
She said, ‘Where are we, Nicko?’
‘How do you mean?’
She was leaning on her elbow, staring at me, but I wouldn’t look round at her.
‘Now I know – of course … ‘ she shrugged. ‘But I didn’t come to be your old chum.’
I put my head in my hands.
‘Alison, I’m sick of women, sick of love, sick of sex, sick of everything. I don’t know what I want. I should never have asked you to come.’ She looked down, seeming tacitly to agree. ‘The fact is… well, I suppose I have a sort of nostalgia for a sister at the moment. If you say fuck that – I understand. I have no right not to understand.’
‘All right.’ She looked up again. ‘Sister. But one day you’ll be cured.’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ I sounded suitably distraught. ‘Look – please go away, curse me, anything, but I’m a dead man at the moment.’ I went to the window. ‘It’s all my fault. I can’t ask you to spend three days with a dead man.’
‘A dead man I once loved.’
A long silence crept between us. But then she briskly sat up and got off the bed; and went and switched on the light and combed her hair. She produced the jet earrings I had left that last day in London and put them on; then lipstick. I thought of Julie, of lips without lipstick; coolness, mystery, elegance. It seemed almost marvellous, to be so without desire; at last in my life, to be able to be so faithful.
By an unhappy irony the way to the restaurant I had chosen lay through the red-light area of the Piraeus. Bars, multilingual neon signs, photos of strippers and bellydancers, sailors in lounging groups, glimpses through bead curtains of Lautrec-like interiors, women in lines along the padded benches. The streets were thronged with pimps and tarts, barrow-boys selling pistachios and sunflower-pips, chestnut-sellers, pasty-sellers, lottery-ticket hawkers. Doormen invited us in, men slid up with wallets of watches, packets of Lucky Strike and Camel, shoddy souvenirs. And every ten yards someone whistled at Alison.
We walked in silence. I had a vision of ‘Lily’ walking through that street, and silencing everything, purifying everything; not provoking and adding to the vulgarity. Alison had a set face, and we started to walk quickly to get out of the place; but I thought I could see in her walk a touch of that old amoral sexuality, that quality she could not help offering and other men noticing.
When we got to Spiro’s, she said, too brightly, ‘Well, brother Nicholas, what are you going to do with me?’
‘Do you want to call it off?’
She twisted her glass of ouzo.
‘Do you?’
‘I asked first.’
‘No. Now you.’
‘We could do something. Go somewhere you haven’t seen.’ To my relief she’d already told me that she had spent a day in Athens earlier that summer; had done the sights.
‘I don’t want to do a tourist thing. Think of something no one else ever does. Somewhere where we shall be alone.’ She added quickly, ‘Because of my job. I hate people.’
‘How’s your walking?’
‘I’d love to. Where?’
‘Well, there’s Parnassus. Apparently it’s a very easy climb. Just a long walk. We could hire a car. Go on to Delphi afterwards.’
‘Parnassus?’ She frowned, unable to quite place it.
‘Where the muses dash about. The mountain.’
‘Oh, Nicholas!’ A flash of her old self; the headlong willingness to go.
Our
barhounia
came and we started eating. She suddenly became over-vivacious, over-excited by the idea of climbing Parnassus, and she drank glass for glass of retsina with me; did everything that Julie would never have done; then called, in her characteristic way, her own bluff.
‘I know I’m trying too hard. But you make me like that.’
‘If–’
‘Nicko.’
‘Alison, if only you – ‘
‘Nicko, listen. Last week I was in my old room in the flat. The first night. And I could hear footsteps. Upstairs. And I cried. Just as I cried in the taxi today. Just as I could cry now but I’m not going to.’
She smiled, a little twisted smile. ‘I could even cry because we keep on using each other’s names.’
‘Shouldn’t we?’