She came towards us in the lamplight, towards the table in the southeast corner of the upstairs terrace. It was the antithesis of her first entrance there, the night I had formally met her as Lily. She wore almost the same clothes as that afternoon … the same white trousers, though she had changed into a white shirt, slightly loose-sleeved, as some sort of concession to evening formality. A coral necklace, the red belt and espadrilles; a hint of eye-shadow, a touch of lipstick. Conchis and I stood for her. She hesitated in front of me, then gave me a charged look, faintly desperate, staring.

‘I feel awful about this afternoon. Will you please forgive me?’

‘Forget it. It was nothing.’

She glanced then at Conchis, as if to see whether she had his approval. He smiled, indicated the chair between us. But she reached where her white shirt was buttoned and held out a sprig of jasmine.

‘A peace offering.’

I smelt it. ‘That’s sweet of you.’

She sat. Conchis poured her a cup of coffee, while I offered her a cigarette and then lit it. She seemed chastened, and carefully avoided my eyes after that first look.

Conchis said, ‘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.

‘Oh.’ She stared down at her coffee, then raised the cup and sipped; but at the same time I felt a minute pressure on my foot, under the long table-cloth.

‘Nicholas calls himself an agnostic. But then he went on to say that he does not care.’

She raised her eyes politely at me. ‘No?’

‘More important things.’

She touched the small spoon in the saucer beside her cup. ‘I should have thought nothing was more important.’

‘Than one’s attitude to what one will never know? It seems to me a waste of time.’ I felt for her foot, but it had disappeared. She leant forward and picked up the box of matches I had left on the table between us, and shook out a dozen matchsticks on the white cloth.

‘Perhaps you’re afraid to think about God?’

She was not being natural, and I realized that this was some kind of pre-arranged scene … she was saying what Conchis wanted.

‘One can’t think about what cannot be known.’

‘You never think about tomorrow? About next year?’

‘Of course. I can make reasonable prophecies about them.’

She played with the matches, pushing them idly into patterns with her fingers. I watched her mouth, wished I could end the cold dialogue.

‘I can make reasonable prophecies about God.’

‘Such as?’

‘He is very intelligent.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I don’t understand Him. Why He is, who He is, or how He is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives.’ She stared briefly up at me from her matches; her eyes had a kind of dry query that I recognized from Conchis.

‘Very intelligent – or very unkind?’

‘Very wise. If I prayed, I’d ask God never to reveal Himself to me. Because if He did I should know that He was not God. But a liar.’

Now she glanced at Conchis, who was facing out to sea; waiting for her, I thought, to finish her part of the act. But then I saw her forefinger silently tap the table twice. Her eyes flicked sideways again at Conchis and then back to me. I looked down. She had laid two matches diagonally across each other and two others beside them: XII. She avoided my suddenly comprehending eyes; and then, pushing the matchsticks into a little heap, she leant back out of the pool of light from the lamp and turned to Conchis. ‘You’re very silent, Maurice. Am I right?’

‘I sympathize with you, Nicholas.’ He smiled at me. ‘I felt very much as you do when I was older and more experienced than you are. Neither of us has the intuitive humanity of womankind, so we are not to blame.’ He said it quite without gallantry, as a simple statement. Julie would not meet my eyes. Her face was in shadow. ‘But then I had an experience that led me to understand what Julie has just said to you. Just then she paid us the compliment of making God male. But I think she knows, as all true women do, that all profound definitions of God are essentially definitions of the mother. Of giving things. Sometimes the strangest gifts. Because the religious instinct is really the instinct to define whatever gives each situation.’

He settled back in his chair.

‘I think I told you that when modern history – because that chauffeur stood for democracy, equality, progress – struck de Deukans down in 1922 I was abroad. I was in fact in the remote north of Norway, in pursuit of birds – or to be more exact, bird-sounds. You know perhaps that countless rare birds breed up there on the Arctic tundra. I am lucky. I have perfect pitch. I had by that time published one or two papers on the problems of accurately notating birds’ cries and songs. I had even begun a small scientific correspondence with men like Dr Van Oort of Leiden, the American A. A. Saunders, the Alexanders in England. So in the summer of 1922 I left Paris for three months in the Arctic.’

Julie shifted slightly and I felt another small pressure on my foot; a very soft, naked pressure. I was wearing sandals myself, and without distracting Conchis, I forced the heel of the left one against the ground until I was free of it; then felt a bare sole slide gently down the side of my own naked foot. Her toes curled and brushed the top of mine. It was innocent, but erotic. I tried to get my foot on top of hers, but this time the pressure was reproving. We could stay in contact, but no more. Meanwhile Conchis had gone on.

‘On my way north a professor at Oslo University told me of an educated farmer who lived in the heart of the vast fir-forests that run from Norway and Finland into Russia. It seemed this man had some knowledge of birds. He sent migration records to my professor, who had never actually met him. The fir-forest had several rare species I wanted to hear, so I decided to visit this farmer. As soon as I had ornithologically exhausted the tundra of the extreme north I crossed the Varangerfjord and went to the little town of Kirkenes. From there, armed with my letter of introduction, I set out for Seidevarre.

‘It took me four days to cover ninety miles. There was a road through the forest for the first twenty, but after that I had to travel by rowing-boat from isolated farm to farm along the river Pasvik. Endless forest. Huge, dark firs for mile after mile after mile. The river as broad and silent as a lake in a fairy-tale. Like a mirror unlooked-in since time began.

‘On the fourth day two men rowed me all day, and we did not pass a single farm or see a single sign of man. Only the silver-blue sheen of the endless river, the endless trees. Towards evening we came in sight of a house and a clearing. Two small meadows carpeted with buttercups, like slabs of gold in the sombre forest. We had arrived at Seidevarre.

‘Three buildings stood facing each other. There was a small wooden farmhouse by the water’s edge, half hidden among a grove of silver birches. Then a long turf-roofed barn. And a storehouse built on stilts to keep the rats out. A boat lay moored to a post by the house, and there were fishing nets hung out to dry.

‘The farmer was a smallish man with quick brown eyes – about fifty years old, I suppose. I jumped ashore and he read my letter. A woman some five years younger appeared and stood behind him. She had a severe but striking face, and though I could not understand what she and the farmer were saying I knew she did not want me to stay there. I noticed she ignored the two boatmen. And they in their turn gave her curious looks, as if she was as much a stranger to them as myself. Very soon she went back indoors.

‘However, the farmer bade me welcome. As I had been told, he spoke halting, but quite good, English. I asked him where he had learnt it. And he said that as a young man he had trained as a veterinary surgeon – and had studied for a year in London. This made me look at him again. I could not imagine how he had ended up in that remotest corner of Europe.

‘The woman was not, as I expected, his wife, but his sister-in-law. She had two children, both in their late adolescence. Neither the children nor their mother spoke any English, and without being rude, she made it silently clear to me that I was there against her choice. But Gustav Nygaard and I took to each other on sight. He showed me his books on birds, his notebooks. He was an enthusiast. I was an enthusiast.

‘Of course one of the early questions I asked concerned his brother. Nygaard seemed embarrassed. He said he had gone away. Then as if to explain and to stop any further questions, he said, “Many years ago.”

‘The farmhouse was very small and a space was cleared in the hayloft above the barn for my camp-bed. I took my meals with the family. Nygaard talked only with me. His sister-in-law remained silent. Her chlorotic daughter the same. I think the inhibited boy would have liked to join in, but his uncle could rarely be bothered to translate what we said. Those first days none of this little Norwegian domestic situation seemed important to me, because the beauty of the place and the extraordinary richness of its bird life overwhelmed me. I spent each day looking and listening to the rare duck and geese, the divers, the wild swans, that abounded in all the inlets and lagoons along the shore. It was a place where nature was triumphant over man. Not savagely triumphant, as one may feel in the tropics. But calmly, nobly triumphant. It is sentimental to talk of a landscape having a soul, but that one possessed a stronger character than any other I have seen, before or since. It ignored man. Man was nothing in it. It was not so bleak that he could not survive in it – the river was full of salmon and other fish and the summer was long and warm enough to grow potatoes and a crop of hay – but so vast that he could not equal or tame it. I make it sound forbidding, perhaps. However, from being rather frightened by the solitude when I first arrived at the farm, I realized in two or three days that I had fallen in love with it. Above all, with its silences. The evenings. Such peace. Sounds like the splash of a duck landing on the water, the scream of an osprey, came across miles with a clarity that was first incredible -and then mysterious because, like a cry in an empty house, it seemed to make the silence, the peace, more intense. Almost as if sounds were there to distinguish the silence, and not the reverse.

‘I think it was on the third day that I discovered their secret. The very first morning Nygaard had pointed out a long tree-covered spit of land that ran into the river some half a mile south of the farm, and asked me not to go on it. He said he had hung many nesting-boxes there and started a thriving colony of smew and goldeneye, and he did not want them disturbed. Of course I agreed, though it seemed late, even at that latitude, for duck to be sitting their eggs.

‘I then noticed that when we had our evening meal, we were never all present. On the first evening, the girl was away. On the second the boy appeared only when we had finished – even though I had seen him sitting gloomily by the shore only a few minutes before Nygaard came and called me to eat. The third day it so happened that I came back late myself to the farm. As I was walking back through the firs some way inland I stopped to watch a bird. I did not mean to hide, but I was hidden.’

Conchis paused, and I remembered how he had been standing two weeks before, when I left Julie; like a pre-echo of this.

‘Suddenly about two hundred yards away I saw the girl going through the trees by the shore. In one hand she held a pail covered with a cloth, in the other a milk-can. I remained behind a tree and watched her walk on. To my surprise she followed the shore and went on to the forbidden promontory. I watched her through glasses until I saw her disappear.

‘Nygaard disliked having to sit in the same room with both his relations and myself. Their disapproving silence irked him. So he took to coming with me when I went to my “bedroom” in the barn, to smoke a pipe and talk. That evening I told him I had seen his niece carrying what must have been food and drink on to the point. I asked him who was living there. He made no effort to hide the truth. The fact was this. His brother was living there. And he was insane.’

I glanced from Conchis to Julie and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present. I pressed against her foot. She returned the touch, but then moved her foot away. The story caught her, she was not to be distracted.

‘I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said, “I think we are all insane here.” He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my camp-bed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant “hill of the holy stone”, the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures.

‘Originally the farm had been no more than a summer dacha, a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father – an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of the traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing – of returning to the wild. Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side. Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship’s engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the Church. While staying with Gustav, who had by then begun to practise in Trondheim, Henrik met Ragna, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre.

‘All went well for a year or two, but then his behaviour grew stranger and stranger. Finally Ragna wrote Gustav a letter. What it said made him catch the next boat north. He found that for nearly nine months she had managed the farm single-handed – what is more, with two babies to look after. He returned briefly to Trondheim to clear up his affairs, and from then on assumed the responsibility of the farm and his brother’s family.

‘He said, “I had no choice.” I had already suspected it in the strain between them. He was, or had been, in love with Ragna. Now they were locked together more tightly than love can ever lock – in a state of total unrequitedness on his side and one of total fidelity on hers.

‘I wanted to know what form the brother’s madness had taken. And then, nodding at the stones, Gustav went back to Seidevarre. To begin with, his brother had taken to going there for short periods to “meditate”. Then he had become convinced that one day he – or at any rate the place – was to be visited by God. For twelve years he had lived as a hermit, waiting for this visit.

‘He never returned to the farm. Barely a hundred words had passed between the brothers those last two years. Ragna never went near him. He was of course dependent for all his needs on them. Especially since, by a surcroît de malheur, he was almost blind. Gustav believed that he no longer fully realized what they did for him. He took it as manna fallen from heaven, without question or human gratitude. I asked Gustav when he had last spoken to his brother -remember we were then at the beginning of August. And he said shamefacedly but with a hopeless shrug, “In May.”

‘I now found myself more interested in the four people at the farm than in my birds. I looked at Ragna again, and thought I saw in her a tragic dimension. She had fine eyes. Euripidean eyes, as hard and dark as obsidian. I felt sorry for the children too. Brought up, like bacilli in a test-tube, on a culture of such pure Strindbergian melancholia. Never to be able to escape the situation. To have no neighbours within twenty miles. No village within fifty. I realized why Gustav had welcomed my arrival. In a way he had kept his sanity, his sense of perspective. His insanity, of course, lay in his doomed love for his sister-in-law.

‘Like all young men I saw myself as a catalyst, as a solver of situations. And I had my medical training, my knowledge of the still then not ubiquitously familiar gentleman from Vienna. I recognized Henrik’s syndrome at once – it was a textbook example of anal overtraining. With an obsessive father identification. The whole exacerbated by the solitude in which they lived. It seemed as clear to me as the behaviour of the birds I watched each day. Now that the secret was revealed, Gustav was not unreluctant to talk. And the next evening he told me more, which confirmed my diagnosis.

‘It seemed Henrik had always loved the sea. This was why he had studied engineering. But gradually he realized that he did not like machinery, and he did not like other men. It began with miso-mechanism. The misanthropism took longer to develop, and his marriage was probably at least partly an attempt to prevent its development. He had always loved space, solitude. That is why he loved the sea, and no doubt why he came to hate being cramped aboard a ship, in the grease and clangour of an engine-room. If he could have sailed round the world alone … But instead he came to live at Seidevarre where the land was like the sea. His children were born. And then his eyesight began to fail. He knocked glasses over at table, stumbled over roots in the forest. His mania began.

‘Henrik was a Jansenist, he believed in a divine cruelty. In his system, he was elect, especially chosen to be punished and tormented. To sweat out his youth in bad ships in filthy climates so that his reward, his paradise should be snatched out of his hands when he came to enjoy it. He could not see the objective truth, that destiny is hazard: nothing is unjust to all, though many things may be unjust to each. This sense of God’s injustice smouldered in him. He refused to go to hospital to have his eyes looked at. He became red-hot for lack of the oil of objectivity, and so his soul both burnt in him and burnt him. He did not go to Seidevarre to meditate. But to hate.

‘Needless to say, I was eager to have a look at this religious maniac. And not altogether out of medical curiosity, because I had grown to like Gustav very much. I even tried to explain to him what psychiatry was, but he seemed uninterested. It is best left alone, was all he said.

I promised him still to avoid the promontory. And there the matter was left.

‘One windy day soon after, I had gone three or four miles south along the river when I heard someone calling my name. It was Gustav in his boat. I stood out from the trees and he rowed towards me. I thought he had been netting grayling, but he had come to find me. He wanted me after all to look at his brother. We were to remain hidden, to stalk and watch Henrik like a bird. Gustav explained that it was the right day. Like many afflicted with near-blindness, his brother had developed very sharp hearing and so the wind was in our favour.

‘I got into the boat and we rowed to a little beach near the end of the point. Gustav disappeared and then came back. He said Henrik was waiting near the seide, the Lapp dolmen. It was safe for us to visit his hut. We made our way through the trees up a small slope, passed over to the southern side, and there, where the trees were thickest, in a depression, was a curious cabin. It had been sunk into the ground, so that only the turf roof showed on three sides. On the fourth, where the ground fell away, there was a door and a small window. A stack of wood lay beside the house. But no other sign of any employment.

‘Gustav made me go in while he stayed on watch outside. It was very dark. As bare as a monastic cell. A truckle bed. A rough table. A tin with a bundle of candles. The only concession to comfort, an old stove. There was no carpet, no curtain. The lived-in parts of the room were fairly clean. But the corners were full of refuse. Old leaves, dirt, spiders’ webs. An odour of unwashed clothes. There was one book, on the table by the one small window. A huge black Bible, with enormous print. Beside it, a magnifying glass. Pools of candle-wax.

‘I lit one of the candles to look at the ceiling. Five or six beams that supported the roof had been scraped pale and along them had been carved two long brown-lettered texts from the Bible. They were in Norwegian, of course, but I noted down the references. And on a cross-beam facing the door there was another sentence in Norwegian.

‘When I came out into the sunlight again I asked Gustav what the Norwegian sentence meant. He said “Henrik Nygaard, cursed by God, wrote us in his own blood in the year 1912.” That was ten years before. Now I will read you the other two texts he had cut and then stained in with blood.’

Conchis opened the book beside him.

‘One was from Exodus: They encamped in the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar off re. The other was an echo of the same text in the Apocrypha. Here. From Esdras: I gave you light in a pillar of fire, yet have you forgotten me, saith the Lord.

‘These texts reminded me of Montaigne. You know he had forty-two proverbs and quotations painted across the beams of his study roof. But there was none of the sanity of Montaigne in Henrik. More the intensity of Pascal’s famous Mémorial – those two crucial hours in his life that he could afterwards describe only by one word: feu. Sometimes rooms seem to imbibe the spirit of the people who have lived in them – think of Savonarola’s cell in Florence. And this was such a place. One did not have to know the occupant’s past. The suffering, the agony, the mental sickness were as palpable as tumours.

‘I left the cabin and we went cautiously towards the setde. It came in sight through the trees. It was not a true dolmen, but simply a tall boulder that wind and frost had weathered into a picturesque shape. Gustav pointed. Some fifty yards away, on the far side of a clump of birches, hidden from the seide, stood a man. I focused my glasses on him. He was taller than Gustav, a thin man with rough-cut dark-grey hair and beard and an aquiline nose. He turned by chance and faced us and I had a full view of his gaunt face. What surprised me was its fierceness. A severity that was almost savagery. I bad never seen a face that expressed such violent determination never to compromise, never to deviate. Never to smile. And what eyes! They were slightly exophthalmic, of the most startling cold blue. Beyond any doubt, insane eyes. Even at fifty yards I could see that. He wore an old indigo Lapp smock with faded red braid round its edges. Dark trousers and heavy snout-ended Lapp boots. And in his hand he held a staff.

‘I watched this rare specimen of humanity for some time. I had expected to see some furtive creature, someone who mumbled to himself as he crept through the trees. Not this fierce blinded hawk of a man. Gustav nudged my arm again. The nephew appeared by the seide with a bucket and the milk-can. He put them down, picked up another empty bucket that must have been set there by Henrik, looked round, and then cried something in Norwegian. Not very loud. He evidently knew where his father was, for he faced the clump of birches. Then he disappeared back through the trees. After five minutes Henrik began to walk up towards the seide. Quite confidently, but feeling his way with the end of the staff. He picked up the bucket and can, placing the staff under his arm, and then started back along the familiar path to his cabin. The path brought him within twenty yards of the birch-scrub behind which we were standing. Just as he passed us I heard high overhead one of the frequent sounds of the river, a very beautiful one, like the calling of Tutankhamen’s trumpets. The flight cry of a black-throated diver. Henrik stopped, although the sound must have been as banal to him as the wind in the trees. He stood there, his face turned up towards the sky. Without emotion, without despair. But listening, waiting, as if it might be the first notes of the herald angels telling him the great visit was near.

‘He went on out of sight and I returned to the farmstead with Gustav. I did not know what to say. I did not like to disappoint him, to admit defeat. I had my own foolish pride. After all, I was a founder-member of the Society of Reason. In the end I concocted a plan. I would visit Henrik alone. I would tell him I was a doctor and that I would like to look at his eyes. And while I looked at his eyes, I would try to look at his mind.

‘I arrived outside Henrik’s hut at midday the next morning. It was raining slightly. A grey day. I knocked on the cabin door and stood back a few steps. There was a long pause. Then he appeared, dressed exactly as he had been the evening before. Face to face and close to him I was struck more than ever by his fierceness. It was very difficult to believe that he was nearly blind, because his eyes had such a pale, staring blueness. But now I was close to him I could see that it was a poorly focused stare; and I could also see the characteristic opacity of cataract in both eyes. He must have been very shocked, but he gave no sign of it. I asked him if he understood English – I knew from Gustav that he in fact did, but I wanted him to answer. All he did was to raise his staff, as if to keep me at bay. It was a warning rather than a threatening gesture. So I took it to mean that I could go on provided that I kept my distance.

‘I explained that I was a doctor, that I was interested in birds, I had come to Seidevarre to study them – and so on. I spoke very slowly, remembering that he could not have heard the language for fifteen years or more. He listened to me without expression. I began to talk about modern methods of treatment for cataract. I was sure that a hospital could do something for him. All the time, not a single word. At last I fell silent.

‘He turned and went back into the hut. He left the door open, so I waited. Suddenly he appeared again. In his hand he held what I held, Nicholas, when I came on you this afternoon. A long axe. But I knew at once that he was no more thinking of chopping wood than a berserk about to enter battle. He hesitated a moment, then rushed at me, swinging the axe up as he ran. If he had not been nearly blind he would beyond any doubt have killed me. As it was I sprang back only just in time. The axe head went deep into the soil. The two moments he took to jerk it free gave me the time to run.

‘He came stumbling after me across the little clearing in front of the hut. I ran some thirty yards into the trees, but he stopped by the first one. At twenty feet he probably could not have told me from a tree-trunk. He stood with the axe poised in his hands, listening, straining his eyes. He must have known I was watching him, for without warning he turned and swung the axe with all his strength into a silver birch just in front of him. It was a fair-sized tree. But it shook from top to bottom with the blow. And that was his answer. I was too frightened by the violence of the man to move. He stared a moment into the trees where I stood and then turned and walked into the hut, leaving the axe where it had struck.

‘I went back to the farmstead a wiser young man. It seemed incredible to me that a man should reject medicine, reason, science so violently. But I felt that this man would have rejected everything else about me as well if he had known it – the pursuit of pleasure, of music, of reason, of medicine. That axe would have driven right through the skull of all our pleasure-orientated civilization. Our science, our psycho-analysis. To him all that was not the great meeting was what the Buddhists call lilas – the futile pursuit of triviality. And of course to have been concerned about his blindness would have been for him more futility. He wanted to be blind. It made it more likely that one day he would see.

‘Some days afterwards I was due to leave. On my last evening Gustav kept me talking very late. I had said nothing to him of my visit. It was a windless night, but in August up there it begins to get cold. I went out of the barn to urinate when Gustav left. There was a brilliant moon, but in one of those late summer skies of the extreme north, when day lingers even in the darkness and the sky has strange depths. Nights when new worlds seem always about to begin. I heard from across the water, from Seidevarre, a cry. For a moment I thought it must be some bird, but then I knew it could only be Henrik. I looked towards the farmstead. I could see Gustav had stopped, was standing outside, listening. Another cry came. It was dragged out, the cry of someone who is calling a great distance. I walked across the grass to Gustav. “Is he in trouble?” I asked. He shook his head, and remained staring out at the dark shadow of Seidevarre across the moon-grey water. What was he calling? Gustav said, “Do you hear me? I am here.” And then the two cries, with an interval between, came again and I could make out the Norwegian words. “Hører du mig? Jeg er her.” Henrik was calling to God.

‘I told you how sounds carried at Seidevarre. Each time he called the cry seemed to stretch out infinitely, through the forest, over the water, into the stars. Then there were receding echoes. One or two shrill cries from distant disturbed birds. There was a noise from the farmstead behind us. I looked up, and saw a white figure at one of the upper windows – whether Ragna or her daughter, I could not see. It was as if we were all under a spell.

‘To break it, I began to question Gustav. Did he often call like this? He said, not often – three or four times a year, when there was no wind and a full moon. Did he ever cry other phrases? Gustav thought back. Yes – “I am waiting” was one. “I am purified”, another. “I am prepared”, another. But the two phrases we had heard were the ones he used most.

‘I turned to Gustav and asked him if we could go again and see what Henrik was doing. Without answering, he nodded, and we set off. It took us some ten or fifteen minutes to get to the base of the point. Every so often we heard the cries. We came to the seide, but the cries were still some way off. Gustav said, “He is at the end.” We passed the cabin, and walking as quietly as we could, made our way to the end of the point. At last we came through the trees.

‘Beyond them there ran out a beach. Some thirty or forty yards of shingle. The river narrowed a little and the point took the force of what current there was. Even on a night as calm as that there was a murmur over the shallow stones. Henrik was standing at the very tip of the shingle spit, in about a foot of water. He was facing out to the northeast, to where the river widened. The moonlight covered it in a grey satin sheen. Out in midstream there were long low banks of mist. As we watched, he called. “Hører du mig?” With great force. As if to someone several miles away, on the invisible far bank. A long pause. Then, “Jeg er her.” I trained my glasses on him. He was standing legs astride, his staff in his hand, biblically. There was silence. A black silhouette in the glittering current.

‘Then we heard Henrik say one word. Much more quietly. It was “Takk.” The Norwegian for “thanks”. I watched him. He stepped back a pace or two out of the water, and knelt on the shingle. We heard the sound of the stones as he moved. He still faced the same way. His hands by his side. It was not an attitude of prayer, but a watching on his knees. Something was very close to him, as visible to him as Gustav’s dark head, the trees, the moonlight on the leaves around us, was to me. I would have given ten years of my life to have been able to look out there to the north, from inside his mind. I did not know what he was seeing, but I knew it was something of such power, such mystery, that it explained all. And of course Henrik’s secret dawned on me, almost like some reflection of the illumination that shone over him. He was not waiting to meet God. He was meeting God; and had been meeting him probably for many years. He was not waiting for some certainty. He lived in it.

‘Up to this point in my life you will have realized that my whole approach was scientific, medical, classifying. I was conditioned by a kind of ornithological approach to man. I thought in terms of species, behaviours, observations. Here for the first time in my life I was unsure of my standards, my beliefs, my prejudices. I knew the man out there on the point was having an experience beyond the scope of all my science and all my reason, and I knew that my science and reason would always be defective until they could comprehend what was happening in Henrik’s mind. I knew that Henrik was seeing a pillar of fire out there over the water, I knew that there was no pillar of fire there, that it could be demonstrated that the only pillar of fire was in Henrik’s mind.

‘But in a flash, as of lightning, all our explanations, all our classifications and derivations, our aetiologies, suddenly appeared to me like a thin net. That great passive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of a mysterious vigour, new forms, new possibilities. The net was nothing, reality burst through it. Perhaps something telepathic passed between Henrik and myself. I do not know.

‘That simple phrase, I do not know, was my own pillar of fire. For me, too, it revealed a world beyond that in which I lived. For me, too, it brought a new humility akin to fierceness. For me too a profound mystery. For me too a sense of the vanity of so many things our age considers important. I do not say I should not have arrived at such an insight one day. But in that night I bridged a dozen years. Whatever else, I know that.

‘In a short time we saw Henrik walk back into the trees. I could not see his face. But I think the fierceness it wore in daylight was the fierceness that came from his contact with the pillar of fire. Perhaps for him the pillar of fire was no longer enough, and in that sense he was still waiting to meet God. Living is an eternal wanting more, in the coarsest grocer and in the sublimest mystic. But of one thing I am certain. If he still lacked God, he had the Holy Spirit.

‘The next day I left. I said goodbye to Ragna. There was no lessening of her hostility. I think that unlike Gustav she had divined her husband’s secret, that any attempt to cure him would kill him. Gustav and his nephew rowed me the twenty miles north to the next farm. We shook hands, we promised to write. I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted. And so I returned to France.’

⁴⁵

Julie glanced at me, as if asking tacitly whether this didn’t prove that we must ultimately be in safe hands. I didn’t dispute it, and not only because I could see she didn’t want me to. I half expected to hear a voice calling in Norwegian from Moutsa, or to see some brilliantly contrived pillar of fire rise out of the trees. But there was a long silence; only the crickets cheeping. ‘You never went back there?’ ‘Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.’

‘But you must have been curious to know how it all ended?’ ‘Not at all. Perhaps one day, Nicholas, you will have an experience that means a great deal to you.’ I could hear no irony in his voice, but it was implicit. ‘You will then realize what I mean when I say that some experiences so possess you that the one thing you cannot tolerate is the thought of their not being in some way for ever present. Seidevarre is a place I do not want time to touch. So I am not interested in what it is now. Or what they are now. If they still are.’

Julie spoke. ‘But you said you would write to Gustav?’ ‘So I did. He wrote to me. He wrote for two years with regularity, at least once a season. But he never referred to what interests you -except to say that the situation was unchanged. His letters were full of ornithological notes. They became very dull reading, because I had lost most of my interest in the classifying aspects of natural history. Our letters became very infrequent. I think I had a Christmas card from him in 1926 or 1927. Since then, no sound. He is dead now. Henrik is dead, Ragna is dead.’

‘What happened to you when you got back to France?’ ‘I saw Henrik meet his pillar of fire at about midnight on August 17th, 1922. The fire at Givray-le-Duc began at the same hour of the same night.’

Julie was more nakedly incredulous than I was. He sat turned away, and our eyes met. She lowered hers with a little grimace, like someone disappointed.

I said, ‘You’re not suggesting …’

‘I am suggesting nothing. There was no connection between the events. No connection is possible. Or rather, I am the connection, I am whatever meaning the coincidence has.’

There was an unusual shade of vanity in his voice, as if in fact he believed he had in some way precipitated both events and their common timing. I sensed that the coincidence was not literally true, but something he had invented, which held another, metaphorical, meaning ; that the two episodes were linked in significance, that we were to use both to interpret him. Just as the story of de Deukans had thrown light on Conchis himself, this threw light on the hypnosis – that image he had used, ‘reality breaking through the thin net of science ‘ … I had myself recalled something too similar from the hypnosis for it to be coincidence. Everywhere in the masque, these inter-relationships, threads between circumstance.

He turned parentally to Julie. ‘My dear, I think it is your bedtime.’ I glanced at my watch. It was just after eleven. Julie gave a little shrug, as if the question of bedtime was unimportant.

She said, ‘Why have you told us this, Maurice?’

‘All that is past possesses our present. Seidevarre possesses Bourani. Whatever happens here now, whatever governs what happens, is partly, no, is essentially what happened thirty years ago in that Norwegian forest.’

He spoke to her then as he often spoke to me. The pretence that Julie was basically any different, any more understanding of what was going on, was wearing very thin. I knew he was initiating another shift in our relationships, or the conventions that ruled them. In some way we were both cast now as his students, his disciples. I remembered that favourite Victorian picture of the bearded Elizabethan seaman pointing to sea and telling a story to two goggle-eyed little boys. Another surreptitious look passed between Julie and myself. It was clear to both of us that we were moving into new territory. Then I felt her foot: a fleeting touch like a snatched kiss.

‘Well. I suppose I must go.’ The mask of formality was reassumed. We all stood. ‘Maurice, that was so remarkable and interesting.’

She moved and kissed him briefly on the cheek. Then she offered me her hand. One shadow of conspiracy in her eyes, one minute extra pressure of her fingers. She turned to go; stopped.

‘I’m sorry. I forgot to replace your matches.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Conchis and I sat again, in silence. A few moments later I heard light footsteps going across the gravel towards the sea. I smiled across the table at his unrevealing face. The pupils of his eyes seemed black in their clear whites – a mask that watched me, watched me.

‘No illustrations in the text tonight?’

‘Does it need them?’

‘No. You told it… very well.’

He shrugged dismissively, then waved his arm briefly round: at house, at trees, at sea.

‘This is the illustration. Things as they are. In my small domaine.’

At any point before that day I should have argued with him. His not so small domaine held a lot more mystification than mysticism; and the one sure feature of ‘things’ there was that they were not what they seemed. He might have his profound side, but another was that of a cunning old charlatan.

I said lightly, ‘Your patient seemed much more normal this evening.’

‘She may appear more normal tomorrow. You must not let that deceive you.’

‘There’s no chance of that.’

‘As I told you, I shall keep myself out of sight tomorrow. But if we do not see each other again … I shall see you next weekend?’

‘I’ll be here.’

‘Good. Well … ‘He stood up, as if he had really only been waiting for a certain time, I presumed the time for Julie to ‘disappear’, to pass.

As I stood as well I said, ‘Thank you. Once again. For possessing me.’

He inclined his head, like some seasoned impresario too accustomed to first-night compliments to take them very seriously. We walked indoors. The two Bonnards glowed gently from the inner wall of his bedroom. On the landing outside I came to a decision.

‘I think I’ll go for a stroll, Mr Conchis. I don’t feel very sleepy. Just down to Moutsa.’

I knew he might say he would come with me and so make it impossible to be at the statue at midnight; but it was a counter-trap for him, an insurance for me. If we were caught, I could claim the assignation was an accident. At least I hadn’t concealed that I was going out.

‘As you wish.’

He put out his hand and clasped mine, then watched me for a moment as I went downstairs. But before I reached the bottom I heard his door close. He might have been out on the terrace listening, so I crunched noisily on the gravel as I walked north towards the track out of Bourani. But at the gate, instead of turning down to Moutsa, I went on up the hill for fifty yards or so and sat down against a tree-trunk, from where I could watch the entrance and the track. It was a dark night, no moon, but the stars diffused a very faint luminescence over everything, a light like the softest sound, touch of fur on ebony.

My heart was beating faster than it should. It was partly at the thought of meeting Julie, partly at something far more mysterious, the sense that I was now deep in the strangest maze in Europe. Now I really was Theseus; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne waited; and perhaps the Minotaur.

I sat there for a quarter of an hour, smoking but shielding the red tip from view, ears alert and eyes alert. Nobody came; and nobody went.

At five to twelve I slipped back through the gate and struck off eastwards through the trees to the gulley. I moved slowly, stopping frequently. I reached the gulley, waited, then crossed it and walked as silently as I could up the path to the clearing with the statue. It came, majestic shadow, into sight. The seat under the almond tree was deserted. I stood in the starlight at the edge of the clearing, very tense, certain that something was about to happen, straining to see if there was anyone in the dense black background. I had an idea it might be a man with blue eyes and an axe.

There was a loud ching. Someone had thrown a stone and hit the statue. I stepped into the darkness of the pine trees beside me. Then I saw a movement, and an instant later another stone, a pebble, rolled across the ground in front of me. The movement showed a gleam of white, and it came from behind a tree on my side of the clearing, higher up. I knew it was Julie.

I ran up the steep slope, stumbled once, then stood. She was standing beside the tree, in the thickest shadow. I could see her white shirt and trousers, her blonde hair, and she reached forward with both hands. In four long strides I got to her and her arms went round me, and we were kissing, one long wild kiss that lasted, with one or two gulps for air, for a fevered readjustment of the embrace, and lasted … in that time I thought I finally knew her. She had abandoned all pretence, she was passionate, almost hungry. She let me crush her body; met mine. I murmured one or two torn endearments, but she stopped my mouth. I turned to kiss her hand; caught it; and brushed my lips down its side and round the wrist to the scar on the back.

A second later I had let go of her and was reaching in my pocket for the matches. I struck one and lifted her left hand. It was scarless. I raised the match. The eyes, the mouth, the shape of the chin, everything about her was like Julie. But she was not Julie. There were little puckers at the corner of her mouth, a slight over-alertness in the look, a sort of calculated impudence; above all, there was a deep sun-tan. She sustained my stare, then looked down, then up again under her eyelashes.

‘Damn.’ I nicked the match away, and struck another. She promptly blew it out.

‘Nicholas.’ A low, reproachful – and strange – voice.

‘There must be some mistake. Nicholas is my twin brother.’

‘I thought midnight would never come.’

‘Where is she?’

I spoke angrily, and I was angry, but not quite as much as I sounded. It was so neat a modulation into the world of Beaumarchais, of Restoration comedy; and I knew the height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

‘She?’

‘You forgot your scar.’

‘How clever of you to see it was make-up before.’

‘And your voice.’

‘It’s the night air.’ She coughed.

I caught hold of her hand and pulled her over to the seat under the almond tree.

‘Now. Where is she?’

‘She couldn’t come. And don’t be so rough.’

‘Well, where is she?’ The girl was silent. I said, ‘That wasn’t funny.’

‘I thought it was rather exciting.’ She sat, then glanced up at me. ‘And so did you.’

‘For Christ’s sake I thought you … ‘ but I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. ‘You’re June?’

‘Yes. If you’re Nicholas.’

I sat down beside her and fished out a packet of Papastratos. She took one, and I gave her a good long look in the matchflare. In return she examined me, with eyes markedly less frivolous than her voice till then.

The striking facial similarity with her sister upset me in some unexpected way. It seemed a hitherto unrealized aspect of Julie that I could do without, an unnecessary complication. Perhaps it was the tan on this other girl’s skin, a general air of living a more outdoor, physical life, of being healthier, a fraction more rounded in the cheeks … indeed of being what Julie herself must look like in normal circumstances. I leant forward, elbows on knees.

‘Why didn’t she come herself?’

‘I thought Maurice had told you why.’

I didn’t show it, but I felt like an over-confident chess-player who suddenly sees that his supposedly impregnable queen is only one move from extinction. Once again I thought frantically back – perhaps the old man had been right about the high intelligence of some schizophrenics. The tea-throwing scene had seemed too far out of character if she was cunning-mad; but cunning-madder still might have precipitated it just to plant the wink at the end; then those collusive bare feet under the table, the message with the matches … perhaps he had been less oblivious than he had seemed.

‘We don’t blame you. Julie’s misled far greater experts than you.’

‘Why are you so sure I’m misled?’

‘Because you wouldn’t have kissed someone you really thought was mentally unbalanced like that.’ She added, ‘At least I hope you wouldn’t.’ I said nothing. ‘Honestly, we’re not blaming you. I know how clever she is at suggesting that the madness is in everyone around her. The damsel-in-distress line.’

But there was something faintly interrogative behind her tone of voice in that last little phrase, as if she wasn’t quite certain how I would react – how far I could be pushed.

‘She’s certainly cleverer at that than the line you’re taking.’

She was silent a long moment. ‘You don’t believe me?’

‘You know I don’t believe you. And I think your sister’s mean to still doubt me.’

She left a longer silence still.

‘We couldn’t both get away together.’ She added in a lower voice, ‘I wanted to be sure, too.’

‘Sure of what?’

‘That you are what you claim.’

‘I’ve told her the truth.’

‘As she keeps claiming. With a little too much enthusiasm to make me feel she’s in a fit state to judge.’ She added drily, ‘Which I now begin to understand. At least physically.’

‘You can easily check that I work at a school on the other side of the island.’

‘We know there’s a school. I don’t suppose you have any means of identification on you?’

‘This is ridiculous.’

‘Not so ridiculous, in present circumstances, as my not asking.’

I had to grant some justice to that. ‘I haven’t got my passport. A Greek permis de séjour, if that’s any good.’

‘May I see it? Please?’

I fished in my back pocket, then struck three or four matches while she examined the permis. It gave my name, address and profession. She handed it back.

‘Satisfied?’

Her voice was serious. ‘You swear you’re not working for him?’

‘Only in the sense you know. That I’ve been told Julie is undergoing some kind of experimental cure for schizophrenia. Which I’ve never believed. Or never face-to-face with her.’

‘You never met Maurice before you came here a month ago?’

‘Categorically not.’

‘Or signed a contract of any sort with him?’

I looked at her. ‘Meaning you have?’

‘Yes. But not for what’s happening.’

She hesitated. ‘Julie will tell you tomorrow.’

‘I wouldn’t mind seeing some documentary evidence either.’

‘All right. That’s fair enough.’ She dropped her cigarette and screwed it out. Her next question came out of the blue. ‘Are there any police on the island?’

‘A sergeant, two men. Why do you ask?’

‘I just wondered.’

I drew a breath. ‘Let me get this straight. First of all you were ghosts. Then you were schizophrenics. Now you’re next week’s consignment to the seraglio.’

‘Sometimes I almost wish we were. It would be simpler.’ She said quickly, ‘Nicholas, I’m notorious for never taking anything very seriously, and that’s partly why we’re here, and even now it’s fun in a way – but we really are just two English girls who’ve got themselves into such deep waters these last two months that… ‘ she broke off, and there was a silence between us.

‘Do you share Julie’s fascination for Maurice?’

She didn’t answer for a moment, and I looked at her. She had a wry smile.

‘I have a suspicion that you and I are going to understand each other.’

‘You don’t share it?’

She looked down. ‘She’s academically much brighter than I am, but … I do have a sort of basic common-sense she lacks. I smell a rat if I don’t understand what’s going on. Julie tends to be all starry-eyed about it.’

‘Why did you bring up the police?’

‘Because we’re prisoners here. Oh, very subtle prisoners. No expense spared, there aren’t any bars – I gather she’s told you we’re constantly being assured we can go home whenever we like. Except that somehow we’re always being shepherded and watched.’

‘Are we safe at the moment?’

‘I hope so. But I must go soon.’

‘I can easily get the police. If you want.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘And what’s your theory about what’s going on?’

She gave me a rueful smile. ‘I was going to ask you that.’

‘I accept he has been genuinely connected with psychiatry.’

‘He questions Julie for hours after you’ve been here. What you said, how you behaved, what lies she told you … all the rest of it. It’s as if he gets some vicarious thrill from knowing every detail.’

‘And he does hypnotize her?’

‘He’s done us both – me only once. That extraordinary … you had it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Julie several times. To help her learn her parts. All the facts about the Lily thing. Then a whole session on how a schizophrenic would behave.’

‘Does he question her while she’s under?’

‘To be fair, no. He’s always scrupulous about whichever one of us isn’t being hypnotized being present. I’ve always been there listening.’

‘But you have doubts?’

She hesitated again. ‘There’s something that worries us. A sort of voyeuristic side. The feeling we have that he’s watching you two falling for each other.’ She looked at me. ‘Has Julie told you about three hearts?’ She must have seen by my face that the answer was no. ‘I’d rather she told you. Tomorrow.’

‘What three hearts?’

‘The original idea wasn’t that I should always stay in the background.’

‘And?’

‘I’d rather she told you.’

I made a guess. ‘You and me?’

She hesitated. ‘It has been dropped now. Because of what’s happened. But we suspect it was always meant to be dropped. Which leaves me wondering why I’m here at all.’

‘But it’s vile. We’re not just pawns on a chessboard.’

‘As he knows full well, Nicholas. It’s not just that he wants to be mysterious to us. He wants us to be mysterious to him.’ She smiled and murmured, ‘Anyway, speaking for myself, I’m not sure I don’t wish it hadn’t been dropped.’

‘Can I tell your sister that?’

She grinned and looked down. ‘You mustn’t take me too seriously.’

‘I’ve already begun to realize that.’

She let a little silence pass. ‘Julie’s only just got over a particularly messy affaire, Nicholas. That’s one reason she wanted to be out of England.’

‘She has my sympathies.’

‘So I understand. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to see her hurt again.’

‘She won’t be hurt by me.’

She leant forward. ‘She has a kind of genius for picking the wrong men. I don’t know you, so that’s not meant personally at all. Simply that her past record doesn’t give me much confidence.’ She said, ‘I’m being over-protective.’

‘She doesn’t need protecting from me.’

‘I just mean that she’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.’

‘Prose and pudding?’

‘I don’t expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.’

She said it with a dryness tinged with wistfulness that I liked. I looked secretly at her profiled face; and had a glimpse of a world where they did both play the same part, where I had both, the dark and the pale; Renaissance bawdy stories about girls who changed places in the night. I saw a future where, all right, of course, I married Julie, but this equally attractive and evidently rather different sister-in-law accompanied, if only aesthetically, the marriage. With twins there must always be nuances, suggestions, blendings of identity, souls and bodies that became indistinguishable and reciprocally haunting.

She murmured, ‘I must go now.’

‘Have I convinced you?’

‘As much as you can.’

‘Can’t I walk back with you to wherever you hide?’

‘You can’t come in.’

‘All right. But I need reassurance, too.’

She hesitated. ‘If you’ll promise to turn back when I say.’

‘Agreed.’

We stood up and went down towards the statue of Poseidon in the starlight. We had hardly reached it when we saw we hadn’t been alone. We both froze. A white figure had stood out, some twenty-five yards away, from among the bushes at the bottom, seaward side of the clearing round the statue. We had spoken in voices too low to be overheard, but it was still a shock.

June whispered, ‘Oh God. Damn.’

‘Who is it?’

She caught my hand and made me turn away.

‘It’s our beloved watchdog. Don’t do anything. I’ll have to leave you here.’

I looked over my shoulder and made him out better – a man in a white medical coat, a would-be male nurse with some kind of dark mask over his face, whose features I couldn’t distinguish. June pressed my hand and sought my eyes, a look as direct as her sister’s.

‘I do trust you. Please trust us.’

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I don’t know. But don’t start arguing. Just go back to the house.’

She leant quickly forward, pulling me a little towards her, and kissed my cheek. Then she was walking down towards the white coat. When she was near the man, I followed her. He stood silently aside to let her pass into the deeper darkness between the trees, but then blocked the opening between the bushes again. With a shock, almost greater than seeing him in the first place, I suddenly realized as I came down to him that he wasn’t wearing a mask. He was a Negro: a big, tall man, perhaps five years older than myself. He stared at me without expression. I came to within some ten feet of him. He extended his arms, warning, forbidding the way. I could see he was lighter-skinned than some black men, a smooth face, intent eyes, somehow liquid and animal, concentrated purely on the physical problem of my next move. He stood poised yet coiled, like an athlete, a boxer.

I stopped and said, ‘You look prettier with your jackal mask on.’

He did not move. But June’s face reappeared behind him. It was anxious, beseeching.

‘Nicholas. Go back to the house. Please.’ I looked from her concerned eyes to his. She said, ‘He can’t speak. He’s a mute.’

‘I thought black eunuchs went out with the Ottoman Empire.’

His expression did not change a millimetre, and I had the impression that he hadn’t even understood my words. But after a moment he folded his arms and widened his stance. I could see a black polo-neck jumper under the medical coat. I knew he wanted me to come at him, and I was tempted to take him on.

I let June decide. I looked past him at her. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘Yes. Please go.’

‘I’ll wait by the statue.’

She nodded and turned away. I went back to the sea-god, and sat on the rock he stood on; for some reason, I don’t know why, reached out a hand and grasped his bronze ankle. The Negro stood with folded arms, like a bored attendant in a museum – or perhaps indeed like some scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem. I relinquished the ankle and lit a cigarette to counter the released adrenalin. A minute passed, two. I listened, despite the sisters’ talk of a hiding-place, for a boat engine. But there was silence. I felt, beyond the insult to my virility before an attractive girl, ill-at-ease and guilty. The news of the clandestine meeting would obviously go straight back to Conchis now. Perhaps he would appear. It wasn’t so much that I was frightened of having a show-down over the schizophrenia nonsense; but that having broken his rules so signally, I would be sent off the field for good. I contemplated trying to suborn the Negro in some way, argue with him, plead. But he simply waited in the shadows, a doubly, both racially and personally, anonymous face.

From somewhere down by the sea there was a whistle. Things happened very fast then.

The white figure strode swiftly up towards me. I stood and said, ‘Now wait a minute.’ But he was strong and quick as a leopard, two inches taller than I am. An obviously humourless face, and an angry one. It was no good – I was frightened – there was something insanely violent about his eyes, and it flashed through my mind that he was a black surrogate of Henrik Nygaard. Without warning he spat full in my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back on to the rock pedestal of the statue. The edge caught the back of my knees and I had to sit. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him already walking away down the slope. I opened my mouth to shout something after him, then swallowed it. I pulled out a handkerchief, kept wiping my face. It was filthy, defiled. I would have murdered Conchis if he had stood in front of me then.

But in fact I went back to the gate and down the path to Moutsa; I had to be outside the domaine. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea; rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the “water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches.

I had long suspected there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into his puppets… and I was not going to stand much more of it. June had impressed me, her common-sense view of the situation. I was clearly the only male around that they could trust; and quite apart from anything else, they needed my help, my strength. I knew it would be no good storming into the house and having it out with the old man – he would only feed me more lies. He was like some animal in a den, he had to be coaxed out a little more before he could be trapped and destroyed.

I slowly trod water, with the dark slope of Bourani across the silent water to the east; and gradually I quietened down. It might have been worse than just that spit; and I had insulted the man. I possessed a lot of faults, but racialism wasn’t one of them … or at least I liked to think racialism wasn’t one of them. Besides, the ball was now firmly in the old man’s court; however he reacted, I would discover something about him. I must wait to sec what change this brought to tomorrow’s ‘script’. There returned that old excitement -let it all come, even the black Minotaur, so long as it came; so long as I might reach the centre, and have the final prize I coveted.

I went ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house. It was silent. I listened, without bothering to conceal it from anyone who might have been listening in return, outside Conchis’s bedroom door. There was no sound.

46

I woke up feeling more slugged, more beaten-steak – the heat does it in Greece – than usual. It was nearly ten o’clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs under the colonnade. I looked under the muslin on the table; my breakfast, the spirit-stove to heat up the usual brass vriki of coffee. I waited a moment, but no one appeared. There was a deserted silence about the house that puzzled me. I had expected Conchis, more comedy; not an empty stage. I sat down and ate my breakfast.

Afterwards I carried the breakfast things round to Maria’s cottage, on the pretext of being helpful; but her door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis’s door, tried it: second failure. Then I went round all the ground-floor rooms in the house. I even cursorily searched the book-cases in the music-room for his psychiatric papers, also without success. I knew a sudden fear: because of last night, it was all over. They were all vanished for good.

I walked to the statue, all round the domaine, like a man searching for a lost key – then back to the house, nearly an hour had passed. It remained as deserted as before. I began to feel desperate and at a loss – what should I do now? Go to the village, tell the police? In the end I went down to the private beach. The boat was gone. I swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high, fell into the sea among a litter of boulders and broken rocks. The cliffs curved in a very flat concave arc half a mile eastwards, not really making a bay, but finally jutting sufficiently from the coast to hide the beach where the three cottages were. I examined every yard of the cliffs: no way down, no place where even a small boat could land. Yet this was the area the two sisters supposedly headed for when they went ‘home’. There was only low scrub on the abrupt-sloping cliff-tops after the pines ended, manifestly impossible to hide in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages.

I swam a little further out to sea, but then a colder vein of water made me turn back. I saw at once. A girl in a pale pink summer dress was standing under the edge of the pines on top of the cliff, some hundred yards to the east of where I was; in shadow, but brilliantly, exuberantly conspicuous. She waved down and I waved back. She walked a few yards along under the green wall of trees, the sunlight between the pines dappling the pale rose of the dress; and then, with a leap of surprise, I saw another flash of pink, a second girl. They stood, each replica of each, and the closer waved again, beckoning me ashore. They both turned and disappeared, as if they were setting off to meet me halfway.

Five or six minutes later I arrived, very out of breath, with a shirt pulled over my wet trunks, at the far side of the gulley. They weren’t by the statue, and I had a few moments’ angry suspicion that I was being teased again – shown them only to lose them. But I went down towards the cliffs, past the carob. The sea seared blue through the furthermost pines. Suddenly I saw their two figures. They were sitting on a shaded hummock of earth and rock, to the east. I walked more slowly, sure of them now. The identical dresses were very simple, with short faintly puffed sleeves, scalloped deep above the breast; they wore powder-blue stockings, pale grey shoes. They looked very feminine, pretty, a pair of nineteen-year-olds in their Summer Sunday best … yet to my mind vaguely over-dressed, towny – even, weirdly, there was a rush basket beside June, as if they were still students at Cambridge.

June stood as I got near and came to meet me. She had her hair down, like her sister; golden skin, an even deeper tan than I had realized the previous night; and there was a facial difference at close range, a greater openness, even a touch of impudent tomboyishness. Behind her Julie watched us meet. She was noticeably unsmiling and holding herself aloof. June grinned.

‘I told her you said you didn’t care which of us you met this morning.’

‘That was kind of you.’

She took my hand and led me to the foot of the hummock.

‘Here’s your knight in shining armour.’

Julie looked coolly down at me. ‘Hallo.’

Her sister said, ‘She knows all.’

Julie slid a look at her. ‘I also know whose fault it was.’

But then she stood and came down beside us. The reproof in her eyes gave way to concern.

‘Did you get back all right?’

I told them what had happened, the spitting. The first moments of sisterly banter rapidly disappeared. I had the benefit of two pairs of disturbed blue-grey eyes. Then they looked at each other, as if this confirmed something they had been discussing. Julie spoke first.

‘Have you seen Maurice this morning?’

‘Not a sign.’

There was another exchanged glance.

June said, ‘Nor have we.’

‘The whole place seems deserted. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

June glanced behind me, into the trees. ‘It may seem. But I bet it isn t.

‘Who is that damned black man?’

‘Maurice calls him his valet. When you’re not here he even serves at table. He’s supposed to look after us when we’re in hiding. Actually he gives us both the creeps.’

‘Is he really a mute?’

‘You may well ask. We suspect not. He just sits and stares. As if he could say worlds.’

‘He’snever … ?’

Julie shook her head. ‘He hardly even seems aware we’re female.’

‘He must be blind as well.’

June made a little grimace. ‘It would be insulting if it wasn’t such a relief.’

‘The old man must know what happened last night.’

‘That’s what we’re trying to work out.’

June added, ‘The mystery of the dog that didn’t bark in the night.’

I looked at her. ‘I thought you and I weren’t supposed to meet officially.’

‘We were always going to, today. I was supposed to back Maurice’s story.’

Julie added, After I’d put on another of my celebrated madwoman acts.’

‘But he must … ‘

‘That’s what puzzles us. The trouble is he hasn’t told us the next chapter. What we’re supposed to be when you’ve seen through the schizophrenia.’

June said, ‘So we’ve decided to be ourselves. And see what happens.’

‘You must tell me all you know now.’

Julie gave her sister a dry look. June gave a little start of mock surprise.

Tm not de trop by any chance?’

‘You can go and improve your nauseating tan. We’ll perhaps tolerate you at lunch.’

June made a little curtsey, then went and picked up the basket; but as she came back, she raised a warning finger. ‘I shall want to hear all that concerns me.’

I smiled, then belatedly realized, as June walked away, that I was getting a cool and wide-eyed look from Julie.

‘It was so dark. The same clothes, I … ‘

Tm very angry with her. Things are quite complicated enough without that.’

‘She’s very different from you.’

‘We’ve rather cultivated that.’ But then her voice was gentler, more honest. ‘We’re very close, really.’

I took her hand. ‘I prefer you.’

But she wouldn’t let me pull her close, though the hand was not withdrawn. ‘I’ve found a place along the cliff. Where at least we can talk without being seen.’

We went through the trees to the east.

‘You’re not seriously angry?’

‘Did you enjoy kissing her?’

‘Only because I thought it was you.’

‘How long did it last?’

‘A few seconds.’

She jerked on my hand. ‘Liar.’

But there was a hidden smile on her face. She led the way round an outcrop of rock; a solitary pine, then the steep slope down to the cliff-edge. The outcrop formed a natural wall shielding us from eyes inland, behind us. Another basket stood on a dark green rug spread in the thin shade of the wind-bent tree. I glanced round, then took Julie in my arms. This time she let me kiss her, but only briefly before she turned her head away.

‘I so wanted to come last night.’

‘It was awful.’

‘I had to let her meet you.’ There was a little outbreath. ‘She complains I have all the excitement, apart from anything else.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Now we’ve got all day.’

She kissed my shoulder through my damp shirt. ‘We must talk.’

She slipped out of her flat-heeled shoes, then sat down on the rug with her legs curled beside her. The pale-blue stockings ended just below her bare knees. The dress was really white, but thick-sewn with a close pattern of tiny roses. It was cut deep round the neck, to where the breasts began to swell apart. The clothes gave her a kind of sensual innocence, a schoolgirlishness. The sun-wind teased the ends of her hair against her back, as when she had been ‘Lily’ on the beach – but all that side of her had drained away, like water between stones. I sat beside her, and she turned away and reached for the basket. The fabric tightened over the breasts, the small waist. She faced back and our eyes met; those fine grey-hyacinth eyes, tilted corners, lingering a little in mine.

‘Go on. Ask me anything.’

‘What did you read at Cambridge?’

‘Classics.’ She saw my surprise. ‘My father’s subject. He was like you. A schoolmaster.’

‘Was?’

‘He died in the war. In India.’

‘And June as well?’

She smiled. ‘I was the sacrificial lamb. She was allowed to do what she liked. Modern languages.’

‘When did you come down?’

‘Last year.’ She opened her mouth, then changed her mind, and set the basket between us. ‘I’ve brought all I could. I’m so scared they’ll see what I’m doing.’ I looked round, but the natural wall protected us completely. Only someone on top of it could have observed us. She produced a book. It was small, half bound in black leather, with green marbled-paper sides; rubbed and worn. I looked at the title-page: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Parisiis.

‘It’s a Didot Aîné.’

‘Who’s he?’ I saw the date 1800.

‘A famous French printer.’

She turned me back to the flyleaf. On it, in very neat writing, was an inscription: From the ‘idiots’ of IVB to their lovely teacher, Miss Julia Holmes. Underneath were fifteen or so signatures: Penny O’Brien, Susan Smith, Susan Mowbray, Jane Willings, Lea Gluckstein, Jean Ann Moffat…

‘Where was this?’

‘Please look at these first.’