70

I thought in the same way of Lily. One day I nearly crashed, breaking hard at the glimpse of a girl with long blonde hair walking down a side street. I swerved the car into the curb and raced after her. Even before I saw the plain face I knew it was not Lily. But if I had rushed after the girl in the side street it was because I wanted to face Lily, to question her, to try to understand the ununderstandable; not because I longed for her. I could have longed for certain aspects of her, for certain phases—but it was that very phasality that made her impossible to love. So I could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one’s life, and yet still hate her for what she had done.

But I had to do something while I waited, while I absorbed the experience osmotically into my life. So throughout the latter half of August I pursued the trail of Conchis and Lily in England; and through them, of Alison.

It kept me, however tenuously and vicariously, in the masque; and it dulled my agonizing longing to see Alison. Agonizing because a new feeling had seeded and was growing inside me, a feeling I wanted to eradicate and couldn’t, not least because I knew the seed of it had been planted by Conchis and was germinating in this deliberate silence and absence he had surrounded me with; a feeling that haunted me as the embryo grows in the reluctant mother’s womb, sweeping her day and night, that I despised, disproved, dismissed, and still it grew, with rage, then in green moments melting her with… but I couldn’t say the word.

And for a time it lay buried under inquiries, conjectures, letters.

The newspaper cuttings. Different type from that of the Holborn Gazette, where the inquest report would have appeared; and did not appear.

Foulkes pamphlet. Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis’s are not.

Theatre costumier’s. I tried Berman’s and one or two others, without the least success.

Earthquakes. There were earthquakes in 1884 and 1892 in the Ionian Islands. In a tragic way that part of Conchis’s story was confirmed just before I began my research. On August 9, 1953, 450 people died in the Ionian disaster.

Military history. Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones.

DEAR MR. URFE,

I’m afraid your letter does ask, as you say yourself, for the impossible. The units engaged in the Neuve Cha pelle set piece were mostly regular ones. I think it most unlikely that any Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment volunteers would have seen that engagement, even under the circumstances you suggest. But of course we have poor detailed records of that chaotic time, and I can’t hazard more than an opinion.

I can find no trace in the records of a captain called Montague. Usually one is on safer ground with officers. But perhaps he was seconded from one of the county regiments.

De Deukans. No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at.

The fire at Givray-le-Duc on August 17, 1922. Unreported in The Times and the Telegraph. Perhaps not surprisingly, as I found Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider Theridion deukansii: doesn’t exist, though there is a genus Theridion.

Seidevarre. Letter from Johan Fredriksen.

DEAR SIR,

The mayor of Kirkenes has passed to me, who is the schoolmaster, your letter to answer. There is in Pasvikdal a place of the name Seidevarre and there was in that place many years from now a family of the name Nygaard. I am very sorry we do not know what is become with this family.

I am very pleased to help you.

Lily’s mother. I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find either an Ansty Cottage or a Silver Street. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I’d once known two girls from Genie Abbas—twins, very pretty, but I’d forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried—she knew everyone in the village and couldn’t think who it could have been. The “headmaster” at the primary school: in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters bad been intercepted on Phraxos; and a reply sent to England for posting.

Charles-Victor Bruneau. Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Gonchis.

Conchis’s costume at the “trial.” On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and passed an antique shop on my way to the hotel. Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them was a man dressed exactly as Gonchis had been; even to the same emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words Le Sorcier—the sorcerer. The shop was shut, but I took its address and later they sold me the card by post; a “nice eighteenthcentury card.”

It gave me a sharp shock when I first saw it—I looked round, as if it had been planted there for me to notice; as if I was being watched.

The “psychologists” at the trial. I tried the Tavistock Clinic and the American Embassy. All the names totally unknown, though some of the institutes exist.

Nevinson. This was the man whose Oxford college was in a book in the school library. The Bursar’s Office at Balliol sent me an address in Japan. I wrote him a letter. Two weeks later I had a reply.

Faculty of English,

Osaka University

DEAR MR. URFE,

Thank you for your letter, it came, as it were, from the distant past, and gave me quite a surprise! But I was delighted to hear that the school has survived the tvar, and I trust you have enjoyed your stay there as much as I did.

I had forgotten about Bourani. I remember the place now, however, and (very vaguely!) the owner. Did I have a iolent argument with him once about Racine and predestination? I have an intuition, no more, that I did. But so much has flowed under the bridges since those days.

Other “victims” before the war—alas, I can’t help you. The man before me I never met. I did know Geoffrey Sugden, who was there for three years after me. I never heard him refer especially to Bourani.

If you are ever in this part of the world, I should be delighted to talk over old times with you, and to offer you, if not an ouzo, at least a sake pou na pinete.

Yours sincerely,

DOUGLAS NEVINSON

The incident on the ridge. When the kapetan called me prodotis (traitor). Of course they knew one day I would know what treachery they meant.

Wimmel. In late August, a piece of luck. One of my teeth began to hurt and Kemp sent me to her dentist to have it seen to. While I was in the waiting room I picked up an old film magazine of the previous January. Halfway through I came on a picture of “Wimmel.” He was even dressed in Nazi uniform. Underneath there was a caption paragraph. Ignaz Pruszynski, who plays the fiendish Town Commandant in Poland’s much praised film of the Resistance, Black Ordeal, in real life played a very different role. He led a Polish underground group all through the Occupation, and was awarded the Polish equivalent of our own Victoria Cross.