Pascali's Island (9 page)

The performance was brought to an end by Lydia asking if we would like a drink. There was German wine or Greek brandy. We both asked for wine. All the time Lydia was out of the room, Mister Bowles was moving restlessly about. He made some desultory remarks to me but my mind was not on his words. I noted the movements of his body, stiff, not ungraceful exactly, but inhibited, as if he felt a need for more room. His manner of touching things too was strange, unduly tentative. It was as though they might change texture or shape in his hands. It was not mere clumsiness, nor did it seem like that contained violence which often gives awkwardness to men's movements. It came to me then, Excellency, that Mister Bowles is not really at home in the world. It came to me with the force of a revelation. We are alike. I knew it from the beginning. Outwardly so dissimilar, yet we are deeply alike. So strong was this feeling that I experienced a violation, almost, of my own privacy and separateness. Doubtless we have come to it by different roads. In my case it is the trade of informing which has lost me the world. The role of informer severs in time all bonds. All action peters out except observing, interpreting. I am like a spent swimmer whose eyes and mind still register everything -everything, hue of sky, refractions and reflections of the water, line of the horizon – but who knows, throughout all this, that he is in the wrong element. (I can look downwards, too, to the deep place where I shall presently drown.)

Mister Bowles has lost the world too, by courses which I can only guess at. He has lost, or perhaps he never had, essential familiarity with things, ease, custom. So of course he simulates, but badly, and this gives him a strange sort of dignity, power even, he imposes himself. Like a critical visitor. Or like a god, a minor god. A god would not, after all, move at ease among the inhabitants and artefacts of this world. He would be characterised by just this kind of hampered grace.

Lydia came back with the wine, in tall glasses. I sipped mine, still absorbed in my pure perception of Mister Bowles. He was standing with Lydia now. She was showing him the painting on the easel. They were close together, and had obviously ceased to be aware of me. I went through into the living-room, where I had earlier noticed some grapes in a bowl on the sideboard. A handful of these I took to the window, and I stood there eating, looking out.

From here I could look inland, over the double row of acacia trees lining the avenue, to the white climbing houses of the town and the summits of Maron and Amphissa. Leros beyond, far off, but glowing clear in the morning light. The town, the whole island, was present to my mind, held in the protracted pang of its existence. For a few moments, standing there, my heart expanded with happiness. The cold wine, the sweet grapes, the indifferent beauty of the world, my recent apercue about Mister Bowles, all combined to reconcile me. My clammy fears receded. I felt tenderness for those two standing together in the next room. More than tenderness. Love, Excellency. Love for them severally and together. And for all the people on the island, whatever the race or creed. As I finished the grapes there were tears in my eyes. I found a small piece of halva on the sideboard and paused briefly at the door to eat it, before returning to the studio.

'You have captured,' I heard Mister Bowles saying gravely, 'the very essence of the landscape there.'

They were still standing before Lydia 's painting. I approached and looked closely at it again: white houses on the lower hillside, the Byzantine dome of Aghios Giorgos, cloaked shepherds, goats; the whole bathed in calmly radiant light.

'Yes, by Jove, you have caught it,' Mister Bowles said, and it was true. Lydia had secured the landscape as effectively as if in some invisible noose. Or net. As always she had been faithful to the form and substance of things. As always she had failed to register what for me is the essence: the effects of a light so clear that it verges on the hallucinatory, cancelling those very perspectives that Lydia works so hard to achieve; the constant, half-surprised, half-acquiescent stirring of landscape and people into myth.

'I must confess,' Mister Bowles said, 'that I like paintings that grapple squarely with reality. Not try to dodge it, you know.'

Lydia did not reply at once. She is not, after all, accustomed to talking about painting in terms of a wrestling match or a scrummage on the rugby field. Again I have the feeling that the Englishman's words belie him in some way. Is he simply a moralist, or does this praise of robust realism mask a sensibility he feels to be discreditable, unmanly?

'Well,' Lydia said, 'I believe myself that art should stay close to nature. That is the source of everything. These people in Paris now, Matisse and the Fauves, you know, they are causing quite a stir at the moment, but it is only a succès de scandale, it will fizzle out.'

'I am not familiar with them,' Mister Bowles said.

'Colour for colour's sake,' Lydia said. 'You can't found a movement on that.'

Mister Bowles nodded. His face expressed disapproval of these undisciplined Parisians. 'Balance,' he said. 'Self-control. I have always understood these things to be fundamental. They are the classical virtues.'

'Of course,' Lydia said, 'mere imitation is not… You must try to seize the essential nature of things, but the way is through attention to what is there, what is out there.' She made a gesture towards the window.

Have you noticed, Excellency? Capture. Catch. Grapple. Seize. It is astonishing. Neither of them can talk about art for two minutes without using some such word. Odd, in extolling the classical virtues of balance and moderation, and opposing the exuberance of the colourists, odd that they should themselves use such frankly violent terms, words denoting assault and ravishment. I deal in reality myself, Excellency. Reality and illusion, their intimate blending. I have not attempted to disguise from Your Excellency that my reports have not been entirely factual. But my effects are patiently and lovingly contrived – not imposed. To talk about truth as something that can be marched up to and arrested seems solemnly mad to me. Like one of your gendarmes trying to take Proteus into custody. You are left with something in your hands but not what you wanted. Lydia grasps her subjects too firmly, nothing has freedom, there is no potential for movement or change. The spectator also is immobilised.

The violent apprehension of reality… We were still standing in front of the painting. Light flooded over us and over the room, evenly, impartially. Light filled my mind, drained, filled. The painting before me, a tract of land, an area of the mind, experience 'seized' for ever, no possibility of change; Mister Bowles, immobilised at last in this room of disturbing multiplicity, himself another objet trouvé; myself transfixed among unreadable signs and portents; and Lydia, Circe with the wand of her will, capturing our essences, stilling us for ever in these arbitrary shapes. Homeric shadows touched my mind. As before I felt the need to break out, assert autonomy of movement, speech. I said, 'You do not heighten reality by idealising it, Lydia, if that is what you mean. And I suspect it is. It is idealisation that does violence, not experiment, because it consumes its subject. It is dangerous in all departments. In love, in art, in politics. Conscious distortion is better.'

'You mean telling lies,' Mister Bowles said instantly. The man is a pure Manichean. He sees everything in terms of moral opposites. Every conversation with him leads to head-on confrontations between darkness and light, good and evil.

Telling lies?' I said. 'No.' Though half-smiling still, I felt myself becoming angry. 'How have you arrived at this confident knowledge of what is lies and what is truth? I envy it.'

'Kandinsky says colour will express everything,' Lydia said. 'How do we know what colours are expressing?'

'Exactly,' Mister Bowles said. 'I mean to say, we know what a hay-wain is, don't we?'

'I think Expressionism is dangerous,' Lydia said. 'I think it is a retrograde step. It simply encourages the irrational.'

It was now that feeling betrayed me into indiscretion. I freely admit it, Excellency. The fact is that in all this talk of respect for reality, I began to smell again the swamp steam of your Empire, began to feel again that horror of immobility. 'Not so dangerous,' I said, 'as trying to petrify things, even if you do it out of love. Not so violent as the means we use to contain the irrational, as you call it. Your paintings are violent, Lydia.'

As soon as I had said this, I regretted it. I could see from Lydia 's face that she was hurt – the severity of its repose once broken, her face has no guard against feeling. Besides this, I was weakening, faltering. My poor burst of fervour was over.

'That is absolute poppycock,' Mister Bowles said. 'Anyone with half an eye -'

Fortunately, at this point there was a brisk double-knock on the living-room door. Lydia left us and returned a moment later with Doctor Hogan. He had an arm over her shoulder. 'Hello, Basil my boy,' he said, in his breezy way. 'How's the old stomachi?'

'Fine,' I said. 'As an organ that is, not as an object of view.' Some months ago I had persistent stomach pains, quite disabling. I thought at first they were due to dietary deficiencies consequent upon my poverty, but they turned out to be neurasthenic, the result of long hours of creative tension at my table here. The doctor provided me with a sedative syrup and I have been quite free of the pains since then.

'This is Mister Anthony Bowles,' Lydia said. 'Doctor Michael Hogan. Our beloved physician. Mister Bowles is a recent arrival on the island.'

'I hope you enjoy your stay here.' The doctor detached himself from Lydia to shake hands. I have described him before to Your Excellency's officials. He stood now just inside the studio, bulky, untidy-looking, grey hair slightly dishevelled, as always, small blue eyes full of a cheerful guile.

'You are an old resident here, I take it,' Mister Bowles said, his blurting habit of speech more noticeable now that he was addressing a stranger.

'Been here thirty years,' the doctor said.

'He came here first on a cruise, didn't you, Michael?' Lydia said. 'He liked it so much he decided to stay.' She said this with evident pleasure and affection, making Mister Bowles a gift of it.

'That is about the sum of it,' the doctor said.

Mister Bowles nodded, without much expression. It was not clear how he regarded this distant impulse of the doctor's.

'He had a practice in Dublin,' Lydia said. 'He went home, sold his practice, then came back here. Didn't you, Michael?'

'I've been here ever since,' the doctor said.

It was at this point that I got up to go. Rather to my surprise, Mister Bowles offered to accompany me. Now, of course, I know why.

Mister Bowles's reference to lying annoyed me at the time, because I suspected him of turning the conversation, with whatever it contained of interest or truth, into an occasion for establishing moral superiority. I still do suspect him of this, but I cannot yet decide whether it is the result of policy on his part, or personal need. Even after this morning's visit to the Pasha, I cannot decide.

I was feeling rather spruce, in my linen suit, with a clean white shirt buttoned up to the neck, my hair parted carefully with a wet comb, my monogrammed handkerchief and my ruby ring. Not having a watch now, I was afraid of being late. There is a clock in the shipping office of Gavros et Fils and that is the one I invariably go by, not because it keeps good time – in fact it doesn't – but because I prefer not to be confused by different versions. I glanced at this clock as I passed by, saw that I had time to spare and decided to walk the longer way, by the road. Plaints of sheep loud on the hillside. I saw the Petroulis boy herding sheep on the slope between the road and the shore. He will be bringing them into town today, to sell for the Sacrifice Bayram. He is about fourteen now, and good-looking.

I was on time at the Metropole and found Mister Bowles waiting in the lounge, sitting upright in a rattan chair. On the wall beyond him Zeus in the guise of a somewhat puny swan was descending on a Leda who looked quite capable of strangling him with one hand.

I could see that Mister Bowles too had taken extra care with his appearance this morning. He was wearing a grey suit of thin flannel, with rounded lapels in the English style. His collar was high and firm, and his dark green necktie carefully knotted. As he rose he took up a polished black cane from the floor beside his chair.

We walked across the square together, to where the fiacre drivers wait, in the shade of the municipal acacia trees. Costas Gavroulis was at the head of the line. I was afraid he would refuse me as a passenger, but he agreed at once to take us, though his manner was surly. We climbed into the creaking carriage, settled our backs against the seamed brown leather; the driver whipped up his stringy chestnut mare, and we moved sedately off. The smell of the dying acacia blossom was heavy in the air, morning sunshine fell through the thin leaves on to the buckles of the harness, the marigolds twisted in the bridle, and on to Mister Bowles and me sitting side by side.

We kept to the lower road, which follows the line of the bay, for some time, in the direction away from the promontory, away from the ruins that Mister Bowles is interested in, before turning inland. On our right the long fluid line of Mt Laris, and on the other side the blue water of the bay.

We did not talk much on the way. The Pasha's house is on the northern side of the island, where the hills come in nearer to the shore, dip towards the sea in long slopes that have been terraced for vines and olives. In the narrow fertile strip between hills and shore, maize and vegetables grow well, and there are extensive orange groves. All this land, whether tended by Greek or Turk, belongs to the Pasha. After a mile or so, the road begins to climb and curve inland, into the foothills. The Pasha's house and the garrison barracks are on the landward side, soon after this curve begins. The house is set well back from the road, its white walls only partially visible beyond clumps of umbrella pines.

The driver set us down on the road – he was unwilling to turn into the drive. We asked him to wait, and passed through the wrought iron gates, open and unguarded. The driveway is short. It opens directly on to the house, which is wide-fronted, Italianate in style, with steps going up to a colonnaded entrance. To the right, separated by a sparse shrubbery, the dusty desolate expanse of the parade ground with the barracks and outbuildings beyond.