18

‘I think we should be more comfortable in the lounging-chairs.’

I helped him pull the two long wicker chairs from the far end of the terrace. Then we both put our feet up and sat back. And at once I could smell it on the tied-on head-cushion – that same elusive, old-fashioned perfume of the towel, of the glove. I was sure it did not belong to Conchis or old Maria. I should have smelt it by then. There was a woman, and she often used this chair.

‘It will take me a long time to define what I mean. It will take me the story of my life.’

‘I’ve spent the last seven months among people who can speak only the most rudimentary English.’

‘My French is better than my English now. But no matter. Comprendre, c’est tout.’

‘ “Only connect.” ’

‘Who said that?’

‘An English novelist.’

‘He should not have said it. Fiction is the worst form of connection.’

I smiled in the darkness. There was silence. The stars gave signals. He began.

‘I told you my father was English. But his business, importing tobacco and currants, lay mainly in the Levant. One of his competitors was a Greek living in London. In 1892 this Greek had tragic news. His eldest brother and his wife had been killed in an earthquake over the mountains there on the other side of the Peloponnesus. Three children survived. The two youngest, two boys, were sent out to South America, to a third brother. And the eldest child, a girl of seventeen, was brought to London to keep house for her uncle, my father’s competitor. He had long been a widower. She had the prettiness that is characteristic of Greek women who have some Italian blood. My father met her. He was much older, but quite good-looking, I suppose, and he spoke some demotic Greek. There were business interests which could be profitably merged. In short, they married … and I exist.

‘The first thing I remember clearly is my mother’s singing. She always sang, whether she was happy or sad. She could sing classical music quite well, and play the piano, but it was the Greek folk-tunes I remember best. Those she always sang when she was sad. I remember her telling me – much later in life – of that standing on a distant hillside and seeing the ochre dust float slowly up into the azure sky. When the news about her parents came, she was filled with a black hatred of Greece. She wanted to leave it then, never to return. Like so many Greeks. And like so many Greeks she never accepted her exile. That is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world.

‘My mother sang – and music was the most important thing in my life, from as far back as I can remember. I was something of a child prodigy. I gave my first concert at the age of nine, and people were very kind. But I was a bad pupil at all the other subjects at school. I was not stupid, but I was very lazy. I knew only one obligation: to play the piano well. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical, and I was never accomplished at that.

‘I was fortunate, I had a very remarkable music-teacher – Charles-Victor Bruneau. He had many of the traditional faults of his kind. Vain of his methods and vain of his pupils. A sarcastic agony if one was not talented, and a painstaking angel if one was. But he was a very learned man musicologically. In those days that meant he was rarissima avis. Most executants then wanted only to express themselves. And so they developed accomplishments like enormous velocity and great skill at expressive rubato. No one today plays like that. Or could play like it, even if they wanted to. The Rosenthals and Godowskis are gone for ever. But Bruneau was far in advance of his time and there are still many Haydn and Mozart sonatas I can hear only as he played them.

‘However, his most remarkable acquirement – I speak of before 1914 – was the then almost unknown one of being as good a harpsichordist as a pianist. I first came under him at a period in his life when he was abandoning the piano. The harpsichord requires a very different finger technique from the piano. It is not easy to change. He dreamed of a school of harpsichord players trained as early as possible as pure harpsichordists. And not, as he used to say, des pianistes en costume de bal masqué.

‘When I was fifteen, I had what we could call today a nervous breakdown. Bruneau had been driving me too hard. I never had the least interest in games. I was a day-boy, I had permission to concentrate on music. I never made any real friends at school. Perhaps because I was taken for a Jew. But the doctor said that when I recovered I would have to practise less and go out more often. I made a face. My father came back one day with an expensive book on birds. I could hardly tell the commonest birds apart, had never thought of doing so. But my father’s was an inspired guess. Lying in bed, looking at the stiff poses in the pictures, I began to want to sec the living reality – and the only reality to begin with for me was the singing that I heard through my sickroom window. I came to birds through sound. Suddenly even the chirping of sparrows seemed mysterious. And the singing of birds I had heard a thousand times, thrushes, blackbirds in our London garden, I heard as if I had never heard them before. Later in my life – fa sera pour un autre jour – birds led me into a very unusual experience.

‘You see the child I was. Lazy, lonely, yes, very lonely. What is that word? A cissy. Talented in music, and in nothing else. And I was an only child, spoilt by my parents. As I entered my fourth lustre, it became evident that I was not going to fulfil my early promise. Bruneau saw it first, and then I did. Though we tacitly agreed not to tell my parents, it was difficult for me to accept.

Sixteen is a bad age at which to know one will never be a genius. But by then I was in love.

‘I first saw Lily when she was fourteen, and I was a year older, soon after my breakdown. We lived in St John’s Wood. In one of those small white mansions for successful merchants. You know them? A semi-circular drive. A portico. At the back was a long garden, at the end of it a little orchard, some six or seven overgrown apple and pear trees. Unkempt, but very green. I had a private “house” under a lime tree. One day – June, a noble blue day, burning, clear, as they are here in Greece – I was reading a life of Chopin. I remember that exactly. You know at my age you recall the first twenty years far better than the second – or the third. I was reading and no doubt seeing myself as Chopin, and I had my new book on birds beside me. It is 1910.

‘Suddenly I hear a noise on the other side of the brick wall which separates the garden of the next house from ours. This house is empty, so I am surprised. And then … a head appears. Cautiously. Like a mouse. It is the head of a young girl. I am half hidden in my bower, I am the last thing she sees, so I have time to examine her. Her head is in sunshine, a mass of pale blonde hair that falls behind her and out of sight. The sun is to the south, so that it is caught in her hair, in a cloud of light. I see her shadowed face, her dark eyes, and her small half-opened inquisitive mouth. She is grave, timid, yet determined to be daring. She sees me. She stares at me for a moment in her shocked haze of light. She seems more erect, like a bird. I stand up in the entrance of my bower, still in shadow. We do not speak or smile. All the unspoken mysteries of puberty tremble in the air. I do not know why I cannot speak … and then a voice called her name.

‘The spell was broken. And all my past was broken, too. There is a line from Seferis – “The broken pomegranate is full of stars”? It was like that. She disappeared, I sat down again, but to read was impossible. I went to the wall near the house, and heard a man’s voice and silver female voices that faded through a door.

‘I was in a morbid state. But that first meeting, that mysterious… how shall I say, message from her light, from her light to my shadow, haunted me for weeks.

‘Her parents moved into the house next door. I met Lily face to face. And there was some bridge between us. It was not all my imagination, this something came from her as well as from me – a joint umbilical cord, something we dared not speak of, of course, yet which we both knew was there.

‘She was not unlike me in many ordinary ways. She too had few friends in London. And the final touch to this fairy story was that she too was musical. Not very strikingly gifted, but musical. Her father was a peculiar man, Irish, with private means, and with a passion for music. He played the flute very well. Of course he had to meet Bruneau, who sometimes came to our house, and through Bruneau he met Dolmetsch, who interested him in the recorder. Another forgotten instrument in those days. I remember Lily playing her first solo on a flat-sounding descant recorder made by Dolmetsch and bought for her by her father.

‘Our two families grew very close. I accompanied Lily, we sometimes played duets, sometimes her father would join us, sometimes the two mothers would sing. We discovered a whole new continent of music. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Arbeau, Frescobaldi, Froberger – in those years people suddenly realized that there had been music before 1700.’

He paused. I wanted to light a cigarette, but more than that I wanted not to distract him; his reaching back. So I held the cigarette between my fingers, and waited.

‘She had, yes, I suppose a Botticelli beauty, long fair hair, grey-violet eyes. But that makes her sound too pale, too Pre-Raphaelite. She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress. I make her sound too colourless to you. Of course, in those days, what we young men looked for was not so much the body as the soul. Lily was a very pretty girl. But it was her soul that was sans pareil.

‘No obstacles except those of propriety were ever put between us. I said just now that we were alike in interests and tastes. But we were opposites in temperament. Lily was always so very self-controlled, patient, helping. I was temperamental. Moody. And very selfish. I never saw her hurt anyone or anything. But if I wanted something I wanted it at once. Lily used to disgust me with myself. I used to think of my Greek blood as dark blood. Almost Negro blood.

‘And then too I soon began to love her physically. Whereas she loved me, or treated me, as a brother. Of course we knew we were going to marry, we promised ourselves to each other when she was only sixteen. But I was hardly ever allowed to kiss her. You cannot imagine this. To be so close to a girl and yet so rarely be able to caress her. My desires were very innocent. I had all the usual notions of the time about the need for chastity. But I was not completely English.

‘There was o Pappous – my grandfather – really my mother’s uncle. He had become a naturalized Englishman, but he never carried his anglophilia to the point of being puritan, or even respectable. He was not, I think, a very wicked old man. What I knew of him corrupted me far less than the false ideas I conceived. I always spoke with him in Greek, and as you perhaps realize, Greek is a naturally sensual and uneuphemistic language. I surreptitiously read certain books I found on his shelves. I saw La Vie Parisienne. I came one day on a folder full of tinted engravings. And so I began to have erotic daydreams. The demure Lily in her straw hat, a hat I could describe to you now, still, as well as if I had it here in front of me, the crown swathed in a pale tulle the colour of a summer haze … in a long-sleeved, high-necked, pink-and-white striped blouse … a dark-blue hobble skirt, beside whom I walked across Regent’s Park in the spring of 1914. The entranced girl I stood behind in the gallery at Covent Garden in June, nearly fainting in the heat – such a summer, that year – to hear Chaliapin in Prince Igor ... Lily – she became in my mind at night the abandoned young prostitute. I thought I was very abnormal to have created this second Lily from the real one. I was bitterly ashamed again of my Greek blood. Yet possessed by it. I blamed everything on that, and my mother suffered, poor woman. My father’s family had already humiliated her enough, without her own son joining in.

‘I was ashamed then. I am proud now to have Greek and Italian and English blood and even some Celtic blood. One of my father’s grandmothers was a Scotswoman. I am European. That is all that matters to me. But in 1914 I wanted to be purely English so as to be able to offer myself untainted to Lily.

‘You know, of course, that something far more monstrous than my adolescent Arabian Nights was being imagined in the young mind of twentieth-century Europe. I was just eighteen. The war began. They were unreal, the first days. So much peace and plenty, for so long a time. In the collective unconscious, perhaps everyone wanted a change, a purge. A holocaust. But it appeared to us unpolitical citizens a matter of pride, of purely military pride. Something which the Regular Army and His Majesty’s invincible Navy would settle. There was no conscription, no feeling in my world, of necessity to volunteer. It never crossed my mind that I might one day have to fight. Moltke, Biilow, Foch, Haig, French – the names meant nothing. But then came the sombre coup d’archet of Mons and Le Cateau. That was totally new. The efficiency of the Germans, the horror stories about the Prussian Guards, the Belgian outrages, the black shock of the casualty lists. Kitchener. The Million Army. And then in September the battle of the Marne – that was no longer cricket. Eight hundred thousand – imagine them drawn up down there on the sea – eight hundred thousand candles all blown out in one gigantic breath.

‘December came. The “flappers” and the “nuts” had disappeared. My father told me one evening that neither he nor my mother would think the worse of me if I did not go. I had started at the Royal College of Music, and the atmosphere there was at first hostile to volunteering. The war had nothing to do with art or artists. I remember my parents and Lily’s discussing the war. They agreed it was inhuman. But my father’s conversation with me became strained. He became a special constable, a member of the local emergency committee. Then the son of his head clerk was killed in action. He told us that one silent dinner-time, and left my mother and me alone immediately afterwards. Nothing was said, but everything was plain. One day soon afterwards, Lily and I stood and watched a contingent of troops marching through the streets. It was wet after rain, the pavements were shining. They were going to France, and someone beside us said they were volunteers. I watched their singing faces in the yellow of the gas-lamps. The cheering people around us. The smell of wet serge. They were drunk, marchers and watchers, exalted out of themselves, their faces set in the rictus of certainty. Medieval in their certainty. I had not then heard the famous phrase. But this was le consentement frémissant à la guerre.

‘They are mad, I said to Lily. She did not seem to hear me. But when they had gone she turned and said, If I was going to die tomorrow I should be mad. It stunned me. We went home in silence. And all the way she hummed, I now – but could not then – believe without malice, a song of the day.’ He paused, then half sung it:

‘ “We shall miss you, we shall kiss you,

But we think you ought to go.”

‘I felt like a small boy beside her. Once again I blamed my miserable Greek blood. It had made me a coward as well as a lecher. I see, when I look back, that indeed it had. Because I was less a true coward, a calculating coward, than someone so innocent, or so Greek, that he could not see what the war had to do with him. Social responsibility has never been a Greek characteristic.

‘When we reached our houses, Lily kissed my cheek and ran in. I understood. She could not apologize, but she could still pity. I spent a night and a day and a second night in agony. The next day I saw Lily and told her I was going to volunteer. All the blood left her cheeks. Then she burst into tears and threw herself into my arms. So did my mother when I told her. But hers was a purer grief.

‘I was passed fit, accepted. I was a hero. Lily’s father presented me with an old pistol he had. My father opened champagne. And then when I got to my room, and sat on my bed with the pistol in my hands, I cried. Not from fear – for the sheer nobility of what I was doing. I had never felt public-spirited before. And I also thought that I had conquered that Greek half of me. I was fully English at last.

‘I was pushed into the 13th London Rifles – Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment. There I became two people – one who watched and one who tried to forget that the other watched. We were trained less to kill than to be killed. Taught to advance at two-pace intervals – against guns that fired two hundred and fifty bullets a minute. The Germans and the French did the same. No doubt we should have objected if we had ever seriously thought about action. But the current myth at that time maintained that the volunteers were to be used only for guard and communication duties. The regulars and the reservists were the fighting troops. Besides, every week we were told that because of its enormous cost the war could not last another month.’

I heard him move in his chair. In the silence that followed I waited for him to continue. But he said nothing. The stars shimmered in their dustless, glittering clouds; the terrace was like a stage beneath them.

‘A glass of brandy?’

‘I hope you’re not going to stop.’

‘Let us have some brandy.’

He stood up and lit the candle. Then he disappeared.

I lay in my chair and stared up at the stars. 1914 and 1953 were aeons apart; 1914 was on a planet circling one of those furthest faintest stars. The vast stretch, the pace of time.

Then they came again, those footsteps. This time, they approached. It was the same rapid walk. But it was much too warm for rapid walking. Someone wanted to reach the house urgently, and without being seen. I got quickly to the parapet.

I was just in time to glimpse a pale shape at the far end of the house move up the steps and under the colonnade. I could not see well, my eyes had been dazzled, after the darkness, by the candle. But it was not Maria; a whiteness, a flowing whiteness, a long coat or a dressing-gown – I had only a second’s sight, but I knew it was a woman and I knew it was not an old woman. I suspected, too, that I had been meant to see her. Because if one wanted to get into the house unheard, one wouldn’t cross the gravel, but approach the house from the rear, or the far side.

There was a sound from the bedroom and Conchis appeared in the lamplit doorway, carrying a tray with a bottle and two glasses. I waited till he had set it by the candle.

‘You know someone has just come in downstairs.’

He betrayed not the least surprise. He uncorked the bottle and carefully poured the brandy. ‘A man or a woman?’

‘A woman.’

‘All.’ He handed me my brandy. ‘This is made at the monastery of Arkadion in Crete.’ He snuffed the candle and went back to his chair. I remained standing.

‘You did say you lived alone.’

‘I said that I liked to give the islanders the impression that I lived alone.’

The dryness in his voice made me feel that I was being very naive. The woman was simply his mistress, whom for some reason he did not want me to meet; or who perhaps did not want to meet me. I went and sat down on the lounging-chair.

‘I’m being tactless. Forgive me.’

‘Not tactless. Perhaps a little lacking in imagination.’

‘I thought perhaps I was meant to notice what obviously I’m not meant to notice.’

‘Noticing is not a matter of choice, Nicholas. But explaining is.’

‘Of course.’

‘Patience.’

Tm sorry.’

‘Do you like the brandy?’

‘Very much.’

‘It always reminds me of Armagnac. Now. Shall I continue?’

As he began to speak again I smelt the night air, I felt the hard concrete under my feet, I touched a piece of chalk in my pocket. But a strong feeling persisted, when I swung my feet off the ground and lay back, that something was trying to slip between me and reality.