The Magus, A Revised Version (11 page)

The sun-wind, the breeze that blows almost every summer day in
the Aegean, sent little waves curling like lazy whips along the shingle.
Nothing appeared, everything waited. For the second time that day I felt like Robinson Crusoe.

I put the book back beneath the towel and faced the hill in a rather selfconscious way, convinced by now that I was indeed being watched; then bent down and picked up the towel and the book and put them on top of the rock with the fins, where they would be easier to find if someone came looking for them. Not out of kindness, but to justify my curiosity to the hidden eyes. The towel had a trace of feminine perfume on it; suntan oil.

I went back to where my own clothes were and watched out of the corner of my eye along the beach. After a time I withdrew to the shade of the pine trees behind the beach. The white spot on the rock gleamed in the sun. I lay back and went to sleep. It can
’
t have been for long. But when I woke up and looked down the beach, the things had gone. The girl, for I
’
d decided it was a girl, had done her retrieving unseen. I dressed and walked down to the place.

The normal path back to the school was from the middle of the bay. At this end I could see another small path that led up away from the beach where the wire turned. It was steep, and the undergrowth inside the fence was too dense to see through. Small pink heads of wild gladioli flopped out of the shadows, and some warbler in the thickest of the bushes reeled out a resonant, stuttering song. It must have been singing only a few feet from me, with a sobbing intensity, like a nightingale, but much more brokenly. A warning or a luring bird? I couldn
’
t decide, though it was difficult not to think of it as meaningful. It scolded, fluted, screeched, jug-jugged, entranced.

Suddenly a bell sounded, from some way beyond the undergrowth. The bird stopped singing, and I climbed on. The bell sounded again, three times. It was e
vidently calling people to some
meal, English tea, or perhaps a child was playing with it. After a while the ground levelled out on the back of the headland, and the trees thinned a little, though the undergrowth kept on as thickly as ever.

Then there was a gate, chained and painted. But the paint was peeling, the chain rusty, and a well-worn way had been forced through the wire by the right-hand gatepost. A wide, grassy track led along the headland, seawards and slightly downhill. It curved between the trees and revealed nothing of the house. I listened for a minute, but there was no sound of voices. Down the hill the bird began to sing again.

Then I saw it. I went through the gap. It was two or three trees in, barely legible, roughly nailed high up the trunk of a pine, in the sort
of position one sees
Trespassers will be prosecuted
notices in England.
But this notice said, in dull red letters on a white background,
salle d
’
attente
.
It looked as if years ago it had been taken from some French railway station; some ancient student joke. Enamel had come
off
and cancerous patches of rusty metal showed through. At one end were three or four of what looked like old bullet holes. It was Mitford
’
s warning: Beware of the waiting-room.

I stood on the grassy track, in two minds whether to go on to the house, caught between curiosity and fear of being snubbed. I guessed immediately that this was the villa of the collaborationist he had quarrelled with; but I had pictured a shifty, rat-faced Greek Laval rather than someone cultured enough to read, or have guests who could read, Eliot and Auden in the original. I stood so long that I became impatient with my indecision, and forced myself to turn away. I went back through the gap and followed the track up towards the central ridge. It soon petered out into a goat-path, but one that had been recently used, because there were overturned stones that showed earth-red among the sun-bleached greys. When I reached the central ridge, I looked back. From that particular point the house was invisible, but I knew where it lay. The sea and the mountains floated in the steady evening sunshine. It was all peace, elements and void, golden air and mute blue distances, like a Claude; and as I wound down the steep schoolward paths, the northern side of the island seemed oppressed and banal in comparison.

The next morning after breakfast I crossed over to Demetriades
’
s table. He had been in the village the previous evening and I hadn
’
t bothered to wait up until he returned. Demetriades was small, very plump, frog-faced, a Corfiot, with a pathological dislike of sunshine and the rural. He grumbled incessantly about the
‘
disgusting
’
provincial life we had to lead on the island. In Athens he lived by night, indulging in his two hobbies, whoring and eating. He spent all his money on these two pursuits and on his clothes, and he ought to have looked sallow and oily and corrupt, but he was always pink and immaculate. His hero in history was Casanova. He lacked the Boswellian charm, to say nothing of the genius, of the Italian, but he was in his alternately gay and lugubrious way better company than Mitford had suggested. And at least he was not a hypocrite. He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

I took him out into the garden. His nickname was M
é
li, or honey. He had a childlike passion for sweet things.

‘
Méli
, what do you know about the man over at Bourani?
’

‘
You
’
ve met him?
’

‘
No.
’

‘
Ail
’
He shouted petulantly at a boy who was carving a word on an almond tree. The Casanova persona was confined strictly to his private life; in class he was a martinet.

‘
You don
’
t know his name?
’

‘
Conchis.
’
He pronounced the
ch
hard.

‘
Mitford said he had a row with him. A quarrel with him.
’

‘
He was telling lies. He was always telling lies.
’

‘
Maybe. But he must have met him.
’

‘
Po po.
’
Po po
is Greek for
‘
Tell that to the marines.
’
‘
That man never sees anyone. Never. Ask the other professors.
’

‘
But why?
’

‘
Ech …
‘
He shrugged.
‘
Many old stories. I don
’
t know them.
’

‘
Come on.
’

‘
It is not interesting.
’

We walked down a cobbled path.
Méli
disliked silence, and in a moment he began to tell me what he knew about Conchis.

‘
He worked for the Germans in the war. He never comes to the village. The villagers would kill him with stones. So would I, if I saw him.
’

I grinned.
‘
Why?
’

‘
Because he is rich and he lives on a desert island like this when he could be in Paris …
‘
He waved his pink right hand in rapid small circles, a favourite gesture. It was his own deepest ambition
–
an apartment overlooking the Seine, containing a room with no windows and various other peculiar features.

‘
Does he speak English?
’

‘
I suppose. But why are you so interested?
’

‘
I
’
m not. I just saw the house.
’

The bell for second school rang through the orchards and paths against the high white walls of the grounds. On the way back to class I invited
Méli
to have dinner with me in the village the next day.

The leading
estiatoras
of the village, a great walrus of a man called Sarantopoulos, knew more about Conchis. He came and had a glass of wine with us while we ate the meal he
’
d cooked. It was true that Conchis was a recluse and never came to the village, but that he had been a collaborationist was a lie. He had been made mayor by the Germans during the Occupation, and had in fact done his best for the villagers. If he was not popular now, it was because he ordered most of his provisions from Athens. He launched out on a long story. The island dialect was difficult, even for other Greeks, and I couldn
’
t understand a word. He leant earnestly across the table. Demetriades looked bored and nodded complacently in the pauses.

‘
What
’
s he say,
Méli
?
’

‘
Nothing. A war story. Nothing at all.
’

Sarantopoulos suddenly looked past us. He said something to Demetriades, and rose. I turned. In the door stood a tall, mournful-looking islander. He went to a table in the far corner, the islanders
’
corner, of the long bare room. I sa
w Sarantopoulos put his hand on
the man
’
s shoulder. The man stared at us doubtfully, then gave in and allowed himself to be led to our table.

‘
He is the
agogiati
of Mr Conchis.
’

‘
The how much?
’

‘
He has a donkey. He takes the mail and the food to Bourani.
’

‘
What
’
s his name?
’
His name was Hermes. I had become far too used to hearing not conspicuously brilliant boys called Socrates and Aristotle, and to addressing the ill-favoured old woman who did my room out as Aphrodite, to smile. The donkey-driver sat down and rather grudgingly accepted a small tumbler of retsina. He fingered his
koumbologi,
his amber patience-beads. He had a bad eye, fixed, with a sinister pallor. From him
Méli
, who was much more interested in eating his lobster, extracted a little information.

What did Mr Conchis do? He lived alone-yes, alone-with a housekeeper, and he cultivated his garden, quite literally, it seemed. He read. He had many books. He had a piano. He spoke many languages. The
agogiati
did not know which
–
all, he thought. Where did he go in winter? Sometimes he went to Athens, and to other countries. Which? The man did not know. He knew nothing about Mitford visiting Bourani. No one ever visited.

‘
Ask him if he thinks I might visit Mr Conchis.
’

No; it was impossible.

Our curiosity was perfectly natural, in Greece
–
it was his reserve that was strange. He might have been picked for his sullenness. He stood up to go.

‘
Are you sure he hasn
’
t got a harem of pretty girls hidden there?
’
said
Méli
. The
agogiati
raised his blue chin and eyebrows in a silent no, then turned contemptuously away.

‘
What a villager!
’
Having muttered the worst insult in the Greek language at his back
Méli
touched my wrist moistly.
‘
My dear fellow, did I ever tell you about the way two men and two ladies I once met on Mykonos made love?
’

‘
Yes. But never mind.
’

I felt oddly disappointed. And it was not only because it was the third time I had heard precisely how that acrobatic quartet achieved congress.

Back at the school I picked up, during the rest of the week, a little more. Only two of the masters had been there before the war. They had both met Conchis once or twice then, but not since the school had re-started in 1949. One said he was a retired musician. The other had found him a very cynical man, an atheist. But they both agreed that Conchis was a man who cherished his privacy. In the war the Germans had forced him to live in the village. They had one day captured some
andarte
–
resistance fighters
–
from the mainland and ordered him to execute them. He had refused and had been put before a firing-squad with a number of the villagers. But by a miracle he had not been killed outright, and was saved. This was evidently the story Sarantopoulos had told us. In the opinion of many of the villagers, and naturally of all those who
’
d had relatives massacred in the German reprisal, he should have done what they ordered. But that was all past. If he had been wrong, it was to the honour of Greece. However, he had never set foot in the village again.

Then I discovered something small, but anomalous. I asked several
people besides Demetriades, who had been at the school only a year, whether Leverrier, Mitford
’
s predecessor, or Mitford himself had ever spoken about meeting Conchis. The answer was always no -understandably enough, it seemed, in Leverrier
’
s case, because he was very reserved,
‘
too serious
’
as one master put it, tapping his head. It so happened that the last person I asked, over c
off
ee in his room, was the biology master. Karazoglou said in his aromatic broken French that he was sure Leverrier had never been there, as he would have told him. He
’
d known Leverrier rather better than the other masters; they had shared a common interest in botany. He rummaged about in a chest of drawers, and then produced a box of sheets of paper with dried flowers that Leverrier had collected and mounted. There were lengthy notes in an admirably clear handwriting and a highly technical vocabulary, and here and there professional-looking sketches in Indian ink and water-colour. As I sorted uninterestedly through the box I dropped one of the pages of dried flowers, to which was attached a sheet of paper with additional notes. This sheet slipped from the clip that was holding it. On the back was the beginning of a letter, which had been crossed out, but was still legible. It was dated June 6th, 1951, two years before.
Dear Mr
Conchis, I am much afraid that since the extraordinary …
and then it
stopped.

I didn
’
t say anything to Karazoglou, who had noticed nothing; but I then and there decided to visit Mr Conchis.

I cannot say why I suddenly became so curious about him. Partly it was for lack of anything else to be curious about, the usual island obsession with trivialities; partly it was that one cryptic phrase from Mitford and the discovery about Leverrier; partly, perhaps mostly, a peculiar feeling that I had a sort of right to visit. My two predecessors had both met this unmeetable man; and not wanted to talk about it. In some way it was now my turn.