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.”

“All those stories about sinister hypnotists forcing—?”

“A hypnotist can make you do foolish and incongruous things. But he is powerless against the superego.”

We went through the gate. I let a few moments pass.

“You hypnotize Lily?”

“From time to time. For therapeutic reasons.”

He indicated the line we should take through the trees.

“It reduces her schizophrenia?”

“Precisely. It reduces her schizophrenia.” Again we walked some way before he spoke again; but this time it was with less asperity, as if the leaving Bourani had allowed him to recover his equanimity. “How did you find her just now?”

“Enigmatic.”

“Not to me.” He gave me a quick, burning look. “She is assuming her persecution role. I saw that at once.”

I grinned; he studiously avoided looking at me.

“I didn’t notice it.”

“She is deceitful.” Then he said, as if it followed, “She has spoken of you a great deal in our absence.”

“May I ask where you were?”

“We were in Beirut, Nicholas. And she talked about you in terms that suggested the possibility of a certain physical attraction. I say this merely to warn you. You must resist all her advances in that line. This will be difficult for you. She is a pretty girl. And very clever at getting what she wants.”

“I’ll do my best.”

I smiled at him again, to insure myself against seeming his fool. But once more he had neatly slashed off the cautious belief I was beginning to grow in Lily as a totally independent person, with independent motives. It was as if he could never let me rest too long on the pleasant side of the masque; always the black side had to be evoked. Always he had to suggest that Lily was simply the personification of his irony, his partner in making all declarations ambivalent. Every truth at Bourani was a sort of lie; and every lie there, a sort of truth.

I asked him what they had been doing in Beirut, and as we went down through the trees, he talked about the Lebanon, which had not been the subject of my question, but which I guessed was all the answer I should get to it. Later, when he pressed me to tell him about Alison, I paid him back in his own coin.

44

She came with her lovely swaling walk towards the lamplight, towards the table, in the corner of the terrace, in a white dress under a black evening cloak. It looked more an Empire than a First World War dress, but I assumed that it was in period. Conchis and I stood for her. She allowed him to take off her cloak, then bowed imperceptibly to me. We sat, Conchis poured her a cup of coffee.

“Nicholas and I have been discussing religion.”

It was true. He had brought a Bible to table, with two reference slips in it; and we had got on to God and no-God.

“Indeed.” She looked at me; almost with hostility, so formally, in role.

“Nicholas calls himself an agnostic. But then he went on to say that he did not care.”

She switched her eyes back to me.

“Why do you not care?”

We had returned to uncontracted forms.

“More important things.”

“Is anything more important?”

“Practically everything, I should have thought.”

She pressed her lips together, and stared down at the tablecloth without speaking.' Then she leant forward and picked up a box of matches I had left on the table. She took out a dozen matchsticks and began to build a house.

“Perhaps you are afraid to think about God.”

“One can’t think about what cannot be known.”

“You never think about what is not certain? About tomorrow? About next year?”