I knew I was supposed to be looking at Lily. It was unmistakably the same girl as in the photographs; especially that on the cabinet of cuiiosa. The Botticelli face; gray-violet eyes. The eyes especially were beautiful; very large, their ovals faintly twisted, a cool doe’s eyes, almond eyes, giving a natural mystery to a face otherwise so regular that it risked perfection. Perfectly beautiful faces are always boring.

She saw me at once. I stood rooted to the stone floor. For a moment she seemed as surprised as I was. Then she looked swiftly, secretly with her large eyes back to where Conchis must have been sitting at the harpsichord, and then again at me. She raised the fluebrush to her lips, shook it, forbidding me to move, to say anything, and she smiled. It was like some genre picture—The Secret. The Admonition. But her smile was strange—as if she was sharing a secret with me, that this was an illusion that we must both keep up. There was something about her mouth, calm and amused, that was at the same time enigmatic and debunking; pretending and admitting the pretense. She flashed another look back at Conchis, then leant forward and lightly pushed my arm with the tip of the brush, as if to say, Go away.

The whole business can’t have taken more than five seconds. The door was closed, and I was standing in darkness and an eddy of sandalwood. I think if it had been a ghost, if the girl had been transparent and headless, I might have been less astonished. She had so clearly implied that of course it was all a charade, but that Conchs must not know it was; that she was in fancy dress for him, not for me.

I went swiftly down the hall to the front door, and eased its bolts open. Then I padded out onto the colonnade. I looked through one of the narrow arched windows and immediately saw Conchs. He had begun to play again. I moved to look for the girl. I was sure that no one could have had time to cross the gravel. But she was not there. I moved round behind his back, until I had seen every part of the room. And she was not there. I thought she might be under the front part of the colonnade, and peered cautiously round the corner. It was empty. The music went on. I stood, undecided. She must have run through the opposite end of the colonnade and round the back of the house. Ducking under the windows and stealing past the open doors, I stared out across the vegetable terrace, then walked around it. I felt sure she must have escaped this way. But there was no sign of anybody. I waited out there for several minutes, and then Conchis stopped playing. Soon the lamp went out and he disappeared. I went back and sat in the darkness on one of the chairs under the colonnade. There was a deep silence. Only the crickets cheeped, like drops of water striking the bottom of a gigantic well. Conjectures flew through my head. The people I had seen, the sounds I had heard, and that vile smell, had been real, not supernatural; what was not real was the absence of any visible machinery—no secret rooms, nowhere to disappear—or of any motive. And this new dimension, this suggestion that the “apparitions” were mounted for Conchs as well as myself, was the most baffling of all.

I sat in the darkness, half hoping that someone, I hoped “Lily,” would appear and explain. I felt once again like a child, like a child who walks into a room and is aware that everyone there knows something about him that he does not. I also felt deceived by Conchis’s sadness. The dead live by love; and they could evidently also live by impersonation.

But I waited most for whoever had acted Lily. I had to know the owner of that young, intelligent, amused, dazzlingly pretty North European face. I wanted to know what she was doing on Phraxos, where she came from, the reality behind all the mystery.

I waited nearly an hour, and nothing happened. No one came, I heard no sounds. In the end I crept back up to my room. But I had a poor night’s sleep. When Maria knocked on the door at half-past five I woke as if I had a hangover.

Yet I enjoyed the walk back to the school. I enjoyed the cool air, the delicate pink sky that turned primrose, then blue, the still-sleeping gray and incorporeal sea, the long slopes of silent pines. In a sense I reentered reality as I walked. The events of the weekend seemed to recede, to become locked away, as if I had dreamt them; and yet as I walked I had the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth; a knowledge of what it was like physically, moment by moment, to have been young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny. I could not describe it. It was not in the least a literary feeling, but an intensely mysterious present and concrete feeling of excitement, of being in a situation where anything still might happen. As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, changed from being the discovered to the still undiscovered.

26

There was a letter for me. The Sunday boat had brought it.

DEAR NICHOLAS,

I thought you were dead. I’m on my own again. More or less. I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to see you again—the point is, I could. I come through Athens now. I mean I haven’t decided whether you aren’t such a pig that it’s crazy to get involved with you again. I can’t forget you, even when I’m with much nicer boys than you’ll ever be. Nicko, I’m a little bit drunk and I shall probably tear this up anyway.

Well, I may send a telegram if I can work a few days off at Atheus. If I go on like this you won’t want to meet me. You probably don’t now as it is. When I got your letter I knew you’d just written it because you were bored out there. lsn’t it awful I still have to get boozed to write to you. It’s raining, I’ve got the fire on it’s so bloody cold. It’s dusk, it’s gray it’s so bloody miserable. The wallpaper’s muave or is it mauve hell with green plums. You’d be sick all down it.

A.

Write care of Ann.

Her letter came at the wrongest time. I realized that I didn’t want to share Bourani with anyone. After the first knowledge of the place, and still after the first meeting with Conchis, even as late as the Foulkes incident, I had wanted to talk about it—and to Alison. Now it seemed fortunate that I hadn’t, just as it seemed, though still obscurely, fortunate that I hadn’t lost my head in other ways when I wrote to her.

One doesn’t fall in love in five seconds; but five seconds can set one dreaming of falling in love, especially in a community as unrelievedly masculine as that of the Lord Byron School. The more I thought of that midnight face, the more intelligent and charming it became; and it seemed too to have had a breeding, a fastidiousness, a delicacy, that attracted me as fatally as the local fishermen’s lamps attracted fish on moonless nights. I reminded myself that if Conchs was rich enough to own Modiglianis and Bonnards, he was rich enough to pick the very best in mistresses. I had to presume some sort of sexual relationship between the girl and him—to do otherwise would have been naïve; but for all that there had been something much more daughterly, affectionately protective, than sexual in her glance back at him.

I must have read Alison’s letter a dozen times that Monday, trying to decide what to do about it. I knew it had to be answered, but I came to the conclusion that the longer I left it, the better. To stop its silent nagging I pushed it away in the bottom drawer of my desk; went to bed, thought about Bourani, drifted into various romanticsexual fantasies with that enigmatic figure; and failed entirely, in spite of my tiredness, to go to sleep. The crime of syphilis had made me ban sex from my mind for weeks; now I was not guilty—half an hour with a textbook Conchis had given me to look at had convinced me his diagnosis was right—the libido rose strong. I began to think erotically of Alison again; of the dirty-weekend pleasures of having her in some Athens hotel bedroom; of birds in the hand being worth more than birds in the bush; and with better motives, of her loneliness, her perpetual mixed-up loneliness. The one sentence that had pleased me in her unfastidious and not very delicate letter was the last of all—that simple Write care of Ann. Which denied the gaucheness, the lingering resentment, in all the rest.