The Magus, A Revised Version (67 page)

The lifeless sea was ruffled here and there by a lost zephyr, by a stippling shoal of sardines, dark ash-blue lines that snaked, broad then narrow, in slow motion across the shimmering mirageous surface, as if the water was breeding corruption.

I began to walk along towards the bay with the three cottages. The landscape to the east came into view, and then I came on the boundary wire of Bourani. As everyw
here else it was rusty, a token
barrier, not a real one; shortly beyond it the inland cliff fell sixty or seventy feet to lower ground. I bent through the wire and walked inland along the edge. There were one or two places where one could clamber down; but at the bottom there was an impenetrable jungle of scrub and thorn-ivy. I came to where the fence turned west towards the gate. There were no telltale overturned stones; no obvious gaps in the wire. Following the cliff to where it levelled out, I eventually came on the seldom used path I had taken on my previous visit to the cottages.

Shortly afterwards I was walking through the small olive-orchard that surrounded them. I watched the three whitewashed houses as I approached through the trees. Strange that there was not even a chicken or a donkey. Or a dog. There had been two or three dogs before.

Two of the one-storey cottages were adjoining. Both front doors were bolted, with bolt-handles padlocked down. The third looked more openable, but it gave only an inch before coming up hard. There was a wooden bar inside. I went round the back. The door there was also padlocked. But on the last side I came to, over a hencoop, I found two of the shutters were loose. I peered in through the dirty windows. An old brass bed, a cube of folded bedclothes in the middle of it. A wall of photographs and ikons. Two cane-bottomed wooden chairs, a cot beneath the window, an old trunk On the window-sill in front of me was a brown candle in a retsina bottle, a broken garland of
immortelles,
a rusty sprocket-wheel, and a month of dust.
I
closed the shutters.

The second cottage had another padlocked bolt on its back door; but though the last one had the bolt, it was simply tied down with a piece of fishing-twine.
I
struck a match. Half a minute later I was standing inside the cottage, in another bedroom. Nothing in the darkened room looked in the least suspicious. I went through to the kitchen and living-room in front. From it a door led straight through into the cottage next door; another kitchen; beyond it, another musty bedroom.
I
opened one or two drawers, a cupboard. The cottages were, beyond any possibility of faking, typical impoverished islanders
’
homes. The one strange thing was that they were empty.

I came out and fastened the bolt h
andle with a bit of wire. Fifty
yards or so away among the olives I saw a whitewashed privy. I went over to it. A spider
’
s web stretched across the hole in the ground. A collection of torn squares of yellowing Greek newspaper hung from a rusty nail.

Defeat.

I went to the cistern beside the double cottage, took
off
the wooden lid and let down an old bucket on a rope that stood beside the white washed neck. Cool air rushed up, like an imprisoned snake. I
sat
on the neck and swallowed great mouthfuls of the water. It had that living, stony freshness of cistern water, so incomparably sweeter than the neutral flavour of tap-water.

A brilliant red-and-black jumping spider edged along the puteal towards me. I laid my hand in its path and it jumped on to it; holding it up close I could see its minute black eyes, like gig-lamps. It swivelled its massive square head from side to side in an arachnoidal parody of Conchis
’
s quizzing; and once again, as with the owl, I had an uncanny apprehension of a reality of witchcraft; Conchis
’
s haunting, brooding omnipresence.

“
What really defeated me was this proof that I was not indispensable. I had assumed the
‘
experiment
’
needed my presence above all; but perhaps it didn
’
t, and I had been a mere side-plot, discarded as soon as I had tried to gain too much prominence. What riled me most was to find myself apparently in the same category as Mitford, and for no clear reason at all. I felt fear as well, a sharp paranoia. Although he might have found some lie to tell the girls, some reason for my not being able to come that weekend, there remained the possibility that they were all three deceiving me. But how could I believe that now? All those kisses, franknesses, caresses, that token coupling in the night water … no girl could pretend to want and to enjoy such things unless she was a prostitute. It was unthinkable. Perhaps the clue lay in dispensability. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view. But it seemed much more like a piece of gratuitous cruelty, closer to tormenting dumb animals than any true teaching. I was drowned in a sea of mistrust
–
not only of outward appearances but of deeper motives as well. For weeks I had had a sense of being taken apart, disconnected from a previous self-or the linked structures of ideas and
conscious feeling that con
stitute self; and now it was like lying on the workshop bench, a litter of parts, the engineer gone … and not being quite sure how one put oneself together again.

I found myself thinking of Alison, for the first time less with guilt than regret. I almost wished she was there, beside me, for companionship. To talk to, nothing more, like a man friend. I had hardly given her a thought since the return of my unopened letter. Events had already swept her into the past. But now I recalled those moments on Parnassus: the sound of the waterfall, the sun on my back, her closed eyes, her whole body arched to have me deeper … that strange certainty I had always had of knowing, even when she lied, how and why she lied; that she couldn
’
t lie, in simple fact. Of course it made her, in daily terms, dull and predictable, rather tediously transparent. What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their clothes into nakedness. That had always been too easy with Alison. And anyway … I stood up and screwed out my promiscuity of mind with my cigarette. She was spilt milk; or spilt semen. I wanted Julie ten times more.

I spent the rest of that afternoon searching the coast eastward of the three cottages, then came back past them to Bourani again, nicely timed for tea under the colonnade. But the place remained as deserted as before. I spent a further hour searching for a note, a sign, anything; it became like the idiot ransacking of a drawer already ten times searched.

At six I set
off
back to the school, with nothing but a useless rage of frustration. With Conchis; with Julie; with everything.

On the far side of the village there was another harbour, used exclusively by the local fishermen. It was avoided by everyone from the school, and by everyone with any claim to social
ton
in the village. Many of the houses had been ruthlessly dilapidated. Some were no more than the carious stumps of walls; and the ones that still stood along the broken quays had corrugated iron roofs, concrete patches and other unsightly evidence of frequent mending. There were three tavernas, but only one was of any size. It had a few rough wooden tables outside its doors.

Once before, coming back from one of my solitary winter walks, I had gone there for a drink; I remembered the taverna-keeper was loquacious and comparatively easy to understand. By island standards, and perhaps because he was Anatolian by birth, conversable. His name was Georgiou; rather foxy-faced, with a lick of grey-black hair and a small moustache that gave him a comic resemblance to Hitler. On Sunday morning I sat under a catalpa and he came up, obsequiously delighted to have caught a rich customer. Yes, he said, of course he would be honoured to have an ouzo with me. He called one of his children to serve us … the best ouzo, the best olives. Did things go well at the school, did I like Greece … ? I let him ask the usual questions. Then I set to work. Twelve or so faded carmine and green ca
ï
ques floated in the still blue water in front of us. I pointed to them.

‘
It
’
s a pity you do not have any foreign tourists here. Yachts.
’

‘
Ech.
’
He spat out an olive-stone.
‘
Phraxos is dead.
’

‘
I thought Mr Conchis from Bourani kept his yacht over here sometimes.
’

‘
That man.
’
I knew at once that Georgiou was one of the village enemies of Conchis.
‘
You have met him?
’

I said no, but I was thinking of visiting him. He did have a yacht then?

Yes. But it never came to this side of the island.

Had
he
ever met Conchis?

‘
Ochi.’
No.

‘
Does he have houses in the village?
’

Only the one where Hermes lived. It was near a church called St Elias, at the back of the village. As if changing the subject I asked idly about the three cottages near Bourani. Where had the families gone?

He shook his hand to the south.
‘
To the mainland. For the summer.
’
He explained that a minority of the island fishermen were semi-nomadic. In winter they fished in the protected waters
off
Phraxos; but in summer, taking their families with them, they wan
dered round the Peloponnesus, even as far as Crete, in search of better
fishing. He returned to the cottages.

He pointed down and then made drinking gestures.
‘
The cisterns are bad. No good water in summer.
’

‘
Really
–
no good water?
’

‘
No.
’

‘
What a shame.
’

‘
It is his fault. He of Bourani. He could make better cisterns. But he is too mean.
’

‘
He owns the cottages then?
’

‘
Vevaios.
’
Of course.
‘
On that side of the island, all is his.
’

‘
All the land?
’

He ticked
off
his stubby fingers: Korbi, Stremi, Bourani, Moutsa, Pigadi, Zastena … all names of bays and capes around Bourani; and apparently this was another complaint against Conchis. Various Athenians,
‘
rich people
’
, would have liked to build villas over there. But Conchis refused to sell one metre; deprived the island of badly needed wealth. A donkey loaded with wood tripped down the quay towards us; rubbing its legs together, picking its fastidious way like a model. This news proved Demetriades
’
s complicity. It must have been common gossip.

‘
I suppose you see his guests in the village?
’

He raised his head, negatively, uninterestedly; it was nothing to him whether there were guests or not. I persisted. Did he know if there were foreigners staying over there?

But he shrugged.
‘
Isos.
’
Perhaps. He did not know.

Then I had a piece of luck. A little old man appeared from a side-alley and came behind Georgiou
’
s back; a battered old seaman
’
s cap, a blue canvas suit so faded with washing that it was almost white in the sunlight. Georgiou threw him a glance as he passed our table, then called.

‘
Eh, Barba Dimitrakil Ela.
’
Come. Come and speak with the English professor.

The old man stopped. He must have been about eighty; very shaky, unshaven, but not totally senile. Georgiou turned to me.

‘
Before the war. He was the same as Hermes. He took the mail to Bourani.
’

I pressed the old man to take a seat, ordered more ouzo and another
meze.

‘
You know Bourani well?
’

He waved his old hand; he meant, very well, more than he could express. He said something I didn
’
t understand. Georgiou, who had
some linguistic resourcefulness, piled our cigarette boxes and matches
together like bricks. Building.