49

I came to the gate about half past nine, waited a few moments to listen, heard nothing, and went off the track through the trees to where I could observe the house. It lay in silence, black against the last light from the west. There was one lamp on, in the music room; a resinous smell of burning wood, from Maria’s cottage. The scops owl called from somewhere nearby. As I returned to the gate a small black shape slipped overhead and dipped towards the sea between the pines: Conchis perhaps, the wizard as owl.

I walked quickly down, outside the domaine, to the beach at Moutsa: the forest was dark, the water dim, the faintest night lap. Five hundred yards away, out to sea, I saw the red port light of the anchored yacht. There were no other lights visible, no sign of life aboard it. I walked quickly through the edge of the trees towards the chapel.

Julie was waiting under its east wall, a shadow against its whitewash, and moved forward as soon as she saw me coming. She had on one of the dark-blue shortsleeved singlets worn by the Arethusa crew, a pale skirt. Her hair was tied back with a ribbon, which gave her a faintly severe, schoolmarmish look. We halted a yard from each other, suddenly shy.

‘You got away?’

‘It’s all right. Maurice knows I’m here.’ She smiled. ‘And no more spying. We’ve had it all out.’

‘You mean … ?’

‘He knows about us. I told him. And that I might be a schizophrenic in his plot, but I wasn’t in reality.’

Still she smiled. I stepped forward and she came into my arms. But when, during the kiss, I tried to tighten the embrace, she pushed away a little, with her head down.

‘Julie?’

She lifted one of my hands and kissed it.

‘You must be kind. The wretched calendar. I didn’t know how to tell you on Sunday.’

I had come prepared for every eventuality but this most banal and frequent of all. I touched my mouth against her hair: a faint melony scent in it.

‘What a shame.’

‘I so wanted you to come.’

‘Let’s walk towards the far end.’

I took her hand and we began to stroll past the chapel and through the trees to the west. They had had it out with the old man almost as soon as they had gone aboard the previous Sunday afternoon. Apparently he had played the innocent a little, but then June had let fly at him about the Negro and the spying in the chapel. They had had enough, either he told them what he was doing or … Julie gave a little breath of still incredulous amusement, looked at me.

‘Do you know what he said? As coolly as if we’d told him a tap needed mending?’ I shook my head. ‘ “Good. Exactly as I hoped and expected.” Then before we could even get our breath back, he informed us that all that had happened so far was merely a rehearsal. Honestly, you should have seen his smile. It was so smug. Just as if we were two students who’d passed some preliminary examination.’

‘A rehearsal for what?’

‘Firstly, all is to be explained to us. To you as well, this coming weekend. From now on, we shall all work together under his direction. Someone else is coming here soon-he said “people”, so it must be more than one or two. And they are to have our roles up to now. The being spun round and round. But this time, by us.’

‘What people?’

‘He wouldn’t say. Nor what this all that’s to be explained is. He said he wanted you to be there as well.’

‘You’re to vamp someone else?’

‘That was the first thing I said. That I’d had enough of making eyes at strange men. Especially now.’

‘You told him about us?’

She pressed my hand. ‘Yes.’ She let out a little breath. ‘Actually he said he’d feared the worst as soon as he set eyes on you.’

‘What worst?’

‘That the cheese on his trap might fall for the mouse.’

‘And he accepts

‘He swore blind.’

‘Did you believe him?’

She hesitated. ‘As much as one can ever believe him. I’ve even been given a carrot to dangle in front of your nose.’

‘Apart from the one whose hand I’m holding.’

She touched the side of her head against my shoulder. ‘He wouldn’t expect you to do it for nothing … you’d be paid. Whatever it is, it wouldn’t start before your term ended. And he’d want us three to live, sleep anyway, at the house in the village. Initially as if we’d never met Maurice.’

‘Are you tempted?’

She left a pause. ‘There’s one other tiny snag. He’d like you and me to pretend we’re man and wife before whoever it is who’s coming.’

‘I couldn’t possibly pretend. I don’t have your acting ability.’

‘Be serious.’

‘I am. More than you think.’

Again her head turned against my shoulder. ‘Tell me what you feel.’

‘It all depends on next weekend. When we know what’s really at stake.’

‘That’s what we think.’

‘He must have given some clue.’

‘He did say we can definitely think of it as psychiatric. Then in his usual helpful way added that it was really about something there’s no word for. He said … a science yet to be discovered and named. He was terribly curious to know why I finally came to trust you.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That certain feelings between people can’t be faked.’

‘How’s he been otherwise?’

‘Actually rather sweet. Much more as he was in the beginning. Full of compliments about how brave, intelligent, all the rest, we’ve been.’

‘Fear the Greeks

‘I know. But we’ve made it absolutely clear. One more trick from him – and that’s it.’

I looked out towards the silent yacht. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Down to Kythera. We came back yesterday.’

I thought of my own three days: catching up with the eternal backlog of marking, two prep duties, the smell of chalk, of boys … and then of term being ended, the secluded village house, the constant presence of the two girls.

‘I got hold of a copy of Three Hearts.’

‘Could you read it?’

‘Enough to believe that part of it.’

She left a little silence.

‘Someone said something about trusting one’s instincts. Only three days ago.’

‘It’s just that over there … I sit in class and wonder whether this side of the island even exists. If it isn’t all a dream.’

‘You haven’t heard from the man before you?’

‘Not a word.’

Again she left a silence.

‘Nicholas, I’ll do whatever you say.’ She stopped me, took my other hand, looked me in the eyes. ‘We’ll go straight back now and tell him. Seriously.’

I hesitated, then smiled. ‘Can I hold you to that if I don’t like the sound of his next chapter?’

‘You know you can.’

A moment, and her arms came round me. Mouth confirmed eyes. Then we strolled on, very close. We came to the far end of the bay. It was tropically airless.

She said, ‘I love the nights here. More than the day.’

‘Me too.’

‘Shall we paddle?’

We went down over the shingle to the water. She kicked off her shoes, I got free of mine. Then we stood in the tepid sea, and she let me kiss her again; her mouth, her throat. I held her lightly, protectively; then murmured in her ear.

‘Beastly female physiology.’

She moved a little against me in sympathy.

‘I know. I’m so sorry.’

‘I’ve kept remembering how you were in the chapel.’

‘I felt undone.’

‘That’s strictly for maidens.’

‘It’s how you made me feel.’

‘Haven’t other men?’

‘One or two.’

‘This one particular other man?’ She said nothing. ‘I wish you’d tell me about him.’

‘There’s nothing much to tell.’

‘Let’s go and sit down.’

We went back into the trees, a little way up the slope where the spine of the western headland rose. One or two large boulders had fallen in the past, and we installed ourselves where one had lodged. I sat with my back to it, and Julie leant against me. I reached up and undid the bow in the ribbon round her long hair, loosed it.

He had been a young don at Cambridge, a mathematician, nearly ten years older than she: very intelligent, sensitive, well-read, ‘not at all a monomaniac’. They had met in her second year, but it had stayed ‘demi-platonic’ until well into her last.

‘I don’t know what it was, perhaps realizing I had only two terms to go, but Andrew started getting very hurt if I went out with anyone else. He hated the university drama set June and I were involved with. He seemed to sort of make up his mind that he ought to be in love with me. He was always very gentle – even funny about it, in a way – how I’d corrupted a born bachelor. I did like being with him, we used to go out in the country a lot, he was very generous, always flowers, books … you know. He wasn’t a born bachelor at all in that way. But even then, it was never really a physical thing for me. You know how it is, you like someone in every other way, you feel flattered, even a tiny bit embarrassed to have a tame don as your escort everywhere. You admire them intellectually and … ‘

‘Acquire a blind spot?’

‘He insisted we got informally engaged. This was at the beginning of the summer term. I was working like mad. We hadn’t been to bed, and I thought he was being very considerate … the understanding was that we were going to have a holiday in Italy, then get married in the autumn.’

She was silent. ‘What happened?’

‘It’s so embarrassing.’

I stroked her hair. ‘Better than keeping it bottled up.’

She hesitated, then spoke in an even lower voice.

‘I’d always realized there was something, I can’t really describe it, not quite natural about him when we … always a little bit of an air of going through the motions. Kissing me because he knew girls expected to be kissed. I never felt any real desire in him. On that side.’ She smoothed her skirt over her knees. ‘Quite simply in Italy it turned out that he did have … rather serious problems. He’d never told me before, but he’d had homosexual experiences at school. Even when he was a student himself at Cambridge before the war.’ She paused. ‘I must sound appallingly innocent.’

‘No. Just innocent.’

‘He honestly didn’t have any of the outward signs. He wanted so desperately to be absolutely normal. Perhaps too desperately.’

‘I understand.’

‘I kept saying it didn’t matter, to myself as well. It only needed patience. And there were … times. And out of bed he was still a terribly nice man to be with.’ She was silent a long moment. ‘I did something terrible, Nicholas. I walked out of the pension in Sienna where we were staying and caught a train back to England. Just like that, without warning him. Something in me snapped. I somehow knew there would always be that problem between us. We used to go out after … it hadn’t worked, and I used to look at the Italian boys and think – ‘ she broke off, as if she were still ashamed at what she had thought. She said, ‘What you made me feel in the chapel. How simple it can be.’

‘You haven’t seen him since?’

‘Yes. That’s the trouble.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I fled home to Dorset. I couldn’t tell my mother what had really happened. Andrew came back, insisted we met in London.’ She shook her head in memory. ‘He was in such distress, nearly suicidal, I … I gave in in the end. I won’t go into all the grisly details. I wouldn’t go through with the marriage, I took the London teaching job really so that I could be away from Cambridge. But … well, we tried again on the physical side and … oh, it dragged on for several months. Two supposedly intelligent human beings slowly destroying each other. He’d ring and say he couldn’t get down to London the next weekend and all I’d feel was relief She stopped once more, then took courage in the darkness and her averted face. ‘It really worked best if I played boy to him … and I hated that. He hated it himself, really.’ I felt her take a breath against me. ‘In the end June made me do what I ought to have done months before. He writes to me occasionally. But that’s all now.’ There was a silence. ‘End of sad little story.’

‘It is sad.’

‘I’m honestly not a prude. It’s just that

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘It became a masochistic thing with me in the end. The more awful it got, the nobler I was being.’

‘There’s been no one since?’

‘I was going out with someone at the Tavistock earlier this year. But he was already deciding I was a bad job.’

I kept running skeins of her hair through my fingers.

‘Why?’

‘Because I wouldn’t go to bed with him.’

‘As a matter of general policy?’

‘There was someone else at Cambridge. In my first year.’

‘What happened to that?’

‘It was the reverse, absurdly enough. He was much nicer in bed than out of it.’ She added drily, ‘Unfortunately he knew it. I discovered one day I wasn’t the only string to his bow.’

‘He must have been a fool.’

‘I know it’s different for men. Or for men like that. I just felt so humiliated. One more stuffed head on the wall.’

I kissed her hair. ‘At least I approve his taste in stuffed heads.’

There was a little silence. Her voice dropped, was shy, almost naive.

‘Have you slept with many girls?’

‘None like you. And I’ve never two-timed.’

She must have belatedly realized the question had been gauche. ‘I didn’t mean … you know.’ It was not a subject I wanted to linger over, but it obviously held a certain fascination for her, now it was broached. ‘It’s just that I can’t be as clinical about it as June is.’

‘Is she clinical about me?’

‘You have her approval. For what it’s worth.’

‘You might sound as if you put more value on it.’

‘I hated her on Sunday.’ An elbow nudged back. ‘And you for not hating her as well.’

‘Only because it helped me imagine you like that.’

‘She’s been teasing me about it ever since. How she’s really much more your type.’

I held her a little closer. ‘I know which mind I prefer. By a long chalk.’

There was a silence. She took my hand and traced its fingers.

‘We came down here last night.’

‘Why?’

‘It was so hot. We couldn’t sleep. To swim. She was hoping some lovely Greek shepherd would spring from the trees.’

‘And you?’

‘I thought about my English one.’

‘What a pity we haven’t got costumes.’

Still she traced the backs of my fingers.

‘We didn’t last night.’

‘Is that a suggestion?’

She left a little pause. ‘June bet me I wouldn’t dare.’

‘We can’t let her get away with that.’

‘Just to swim.’

‘But only because … ?’

She said nothing for a moment, yet I could sense that she was smiling. Then she leant up and whispered in my ear.

‘Why do men always want to know in words?’

The next second she was on her feet and pulling me to mine. We went back to the beach. The red light floated on the side of the ghostly white yacht, shimmering a little in the water. There was a glint of light through the highest trees opposite us, from the house.

Someone there was still awake. I took the sides of her singlet and she raised her arms for me to peel it off; then turned her back for me to unhook her bra, while she fiddled at the side of her skirt. I slipped my hands to the front. The skirt fell. For a moment she rested back against me, and her hands covered mine, to still them, on the bare breasts. I kissed the curve of her neck. Then she was gone down towards the water, long-haired, a slim pale figure with a narrow white band around her waist; a nocturnal echo of her sister on the same beach, in the sun, three days before. I stripped off my clothes. Without looking back she waded in to her waist, then plunged forward with a small splash and began to swim, a breast-stroke, out towards the yacht. Haifa minute later I was beside her and we swam out together a little further. She stopped first, trod water, grinned at me -it was suddenly a jape, a little piece of daring achieved.

She began to speak in Greek, but not the Greek I knew; something much more archaic, less lisping, unelided.

‘What was that?’

‘Sophocles.’

‘What did it say?’

‘Just the sound.’ She said, ‘When I first arrived, I couldn’t believe it. Thousands and thousands of little black squiggles suddenly alive. Not past, but present.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Like someone who’s always lived in exile. But never realized it.’

‘I’ve felt that.’

‘Do you miss England at all?’

‘No.’

I saw her smile. ‘There must be something we don’t agree on.’

‘In some other life. Not this.’

‘I’m going to float. I’ve only just learnt how to do it.’

She extended her arms and floated on her back, like a child showing off. I swam a stroke or two closer. She lay with her eyes closed, a small smile on her lips, and her wet hair made her look younger. The sea was absolutely calm, like black glass.

‘You look like Ophelia.’

‘Shall I get me to a nunnery?’

‘I never felt less like Hamlet.’

‘Perhaps you’re the fool he advised me to marry.’

I smiled in the darkness. ‘Have you played her?’

‘At school. Just those scenes. Against a ghastly repressed lesbian girl who revelled in every minute of being in male drag.’

‘Right down to the codpiece?’

Her voice sank in reproach. ‘Mr Urfe! I thought you were above such vulgarity.’

I pushed myself a little closer still and kissed the side of her body, then attempted to peck up it; but was pushed away as she twisted and sank beneath the water again. There was a little struggle, a flurry of water, a splashing, as I tried to embrace her. I was allowed one fleeting pressure of her mouth, but then she had twisted away again and was doing her old-fashioned breast-stroke back towards the beach.

However, she slowed, as if the effort had exhausted her, when we came near the shore, and stood with the water up to her armpits. I stood beside her, our hands met again under the water, this time she let herself be drawn towards me, then my hands were on her waist. She raised her arms and put them round my neck, and then lowered her eyes as I gently explored under the water – the curves, the breasts, the armpits. I coaxed her closer still and felt the soles of her feet inch over the top of mine. Our bodies pressed, her face came up, the eyes closed, to meet mine. I eased a hand behind beneath the wet band of cloth round her hips, cupped the other round the side of a breast. It was cool, liquid, restrained in comparison to the fever of our nakedness in the chapel.

I had guessed, as she had talked, what was missing from her account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination … the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point – all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attempts to tame. She set little boundaries, almost like snares, to see if one understood – behaved, advanced, withdrew, as she wanted. Yet behind it all I foresaw an eventual place without boundaries, where she would one day allow me anything … and one day soon, for she clung to me now, succumbed, her femaleness against my maleness, and our tongues interlaced, aped what out loins wanted.

The silence, the dark water, the brilliant canopy of stars; and my sexual excitement, which she must have felt. Suddenly she turned her head away, almost with violence, though she still clung to me. After a moment I heard her whisper.

‘You poor thing. It’s not fair.’

‘I can’t help it. You excite me so much.’

‘I don’t want you to help it.’

She pulled away a little and a hand slipped down through the water between us. She brought me gently up, curled her fingers round me; timidly, with a return of that naivety she had shown earlier.

‘Poor little eel.’

‘With nowhere to swim.’

She began to brush and tease her fingers through the water; then whispered again.

‘Do you like me to do this?’

‘Idiot.’

She hesitated, then turned, slipped her right arm round my waist, while I put my left one over her shoulder and drew her close against my side. Her left hand felt lower, all round my loins, caressed, lifted and let fall, touched; then silked its way up the shaft, gripped, gently squeezed. The fingers seemed inexperienced, afraid of hurting. I slid my own free hand down and gave hers a little lesson, then left it, and raised her head, found her mouth. I began to lose all sense of everything around us. There was nothing but her tongue, her pressed nakedness, the wet hair, the gentle rhythm of the underwater hand. I would have had it go on all night, this being seduced that was also a seduction, this sudden conversion of the aloof, the fastidious, the voice that quoted Sophocles, into an obedient geisha, an adorable mermaid – though not physiologically the latter. I had shifted my own feet wider to stand more firmly, and one of her legs had curled round mine. The one little garment she wore was pressed very hard against my hip. I slid a hand down from the breast it was holding towards the place; but it was caught, discreetly returned to where it had left.

All night; but it was too erotic. She seemed to know by instinct that I no longer wanted her gentle; clung tighter still, began to show herself less of a novice; and as I racked quietly beneath the water, she bent her head and bit into the side of my armpit, as if she too had her orgasm, though only in the mind.

It was done. Her hand left me, then stroked gently up my stomach. I forced her round and kissed her, a little stunned by how complete and quick this descent from prudishness had been. I suspected that I had her sister’s teasing partly to thank for it; but something in Julie herself as well, perhaps always a secret willingness for something like this to happen. We stood clung together, as before, not needing to say anything, the final barrier between us broken. She kissed my skin softly; an unspoken promise.

‘I must go. June’s waiting up for me.’

One last quick kiss, then we swam a few strokes to where the beach shelved to land. Hand in hand to where our clothes lay. We didn’t bother to dry. She stepped into her skirt, twisted to fasten it. I kissed the wet breasts, then hooked her bra for her, helped her back into the singlet; was in turn helped to dress by her. We walked back along beside the water to Bourani, arms enlaced. I had an intuition it had meant more for her … it was a kind of discovery, or rediscovery, of her own latent sexuality, through the satisfaction of mine – and through the night, the warmth, the old magic of wild Greece. Her face seemed softer, simpler, maskless now. I also knew, with an inwardly crowning elation, that it had destroyed whatever last traces had remained of the suspicion Conchis had tried to sow between us. I needed no answers to my letters now. It might on the surface – or under the water – be a trivial little moment of wickedness, but it was a shared one, wanted on both sides; and a little to test that, I suddenly pulled her round as we walked. She turned and raised her mouth as eagerly as if she had been inside my mind and read my thoughts. All was transparent between us.

I accompanied her back inside the grounds, to within sight of the house. The light in the music-room was off, but I could see one in the back, in the window of the bedroom I used myself. Apparently another bed was brought in, she and June slept there when I was not visiting – and that seemed a perfect symbolic ending to the night, that she was going to sleep in ‘my’ bed. We had one last brief whispered discussion about the following weekend; but all that had receded now. The old man had been as good as his word, we had not been spied on, I was at last sanctioned as the Ferdinand to his salt-haired, clinging, warm-mouthed Miranda. Whatever happened, the summer ahead, all life ahead, was ours.

She kissed and left me, then after a few steps, turned quickly and ran back and kissed me once more. I waited until I saw her slip under the colonnade and disappear.

Though I felt tired, I walked the uphill path to the central crest quickly, to dry my damp clothes. I hardly thought about the day to come, the lack of sleep, the dread struggle to stay awake in class; all that was now tolerable. Julie entranced me. It was as if I had stumbled on a sleeping princess and found her, once woken, not merely in love with me, but erotically starved, deliciously eager to exorcize whatever sour and perverse lovemaking had gone on with her ill-starred choice of the previous year. I imagined a Julie who had acquired all Alison’s experience and adeptness, her quick passions, her slow lubricities, but enhanced, enriched, diversified by superior taste, intelligence, poetry … I kept smiling to myself as I walked. There was a thin new moon, the starlight, and I now knew almost by heart my way up through the ghostly, silent forest of Aleppo pines. I saw nothing in the present, only the endless seduction and surrender of that willing body: nights in the village house, indolent naked siestas on some shadowed bed … and when we were satiated, that other, golden, lapping presence, June, implicit two for the price of one. Of course it was Julie I loved, but all love needs a teasing, a testing dry relief.

I began to review the miracle-mystery that had brought us together – Conchis, and his purposes. If you have a private menagerie, your concern is to keep the animals in, not to dictate exactly what they do inside the cage. He constructed bars around us, subtle psycho-sexual bars that kept us chained to Bourani. He was like some Elizabethan nobleman. We were his Earl of Leicester’s troupe, his very private company; but he might well have incorporated the Heisen-berg principle into his ‘experiment’, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles. I guessed that he partly wanted to taunt us with a false contrast between an all-wise Europe and a callow England. In spite of all his gnomic cant he was like so many other Europeans, quite unable to understand the emotional depths and subtleties of the English attitude to life. He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperfidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.

I came towards the main ridge. As I walked I overturned a loose stone here and there, but otherwise the landscape was totally silent. Far below, over the crumpled grey velvet of the outstretched pine-tops, the sea glistened obscurely under the spangled sky. The world belonged to night.

The trees thinned out where the ground rose steeply to the small bluff that marked the south side of the main ridge. I paused a moment for breath and turned to look back down towards Bourani; glanced at my watch. It was just after midnight. The whole island was asleep. Under the silver nailparing of a moon, I felt, though without any melancholy at all, that sense of existential solitude, the being and being alone in a universe, that still nights sometimes give.

Then from behind me, from somewhere up on the ridge, I heard a sound. A very small sound, but enough to make me step swiftly off the path into the cover of a pine. Someone or something up there had overturned a stone. A pause of fifteen seconds or more. Then I froze; both with shock and as a precaution.

A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky. Then a second man, and a third. I could hear the faint noise of their feet on the rock, the muffled clink of something metallic. Then, like magic, there were six. Six grey shadows standing along the skyline. One of them raised an arm and pointed; but I heard no sound of voices. Islanders? But they hardly ever used the central ridge in summer; and never at that time of night. In any case I suddenly realized what they were. They were soldiers. I could just see the indistinct outlines of guns, the dull sheen of a helmet.

There had been Greek army manoeuvres on the mainland a month before, and a coining and going of landing-craft in the strait. These men must be on some similar commando-type exercise. But I didn’t move.

One of the men turned back, and the others followed. I thought I knew what had happened. They had come along the central ridge and overshot the transverse path that led down to Bourani and Moutsa. As if to confirm my guess there was a distant pop, like a firework. I saw, from somewhere west of Bourani, a shimmering Very light hanging in the sky. It was one of the starshell variety and fell in a slow parabola. I had fired dozens myself, on night exercises. The six were evidently on their way to ‘attack’ some point on the other side of Moutsa.

For all that, I looked round. Twenty yards away there was a group of rocks with enough small shrubs to give cover. I ran silently under the trees and, forgetting my clean trousers and shirt, dropped down in a natural trough between two of the rocks. They were still warm from the sun. I watched the cleft in the skyline down which the path lay.

In a few seconds a pale movement told me I was right. The men were coming down. They were probably just a group of friendly lads from the Epirus or somewhere. But I pressed myself as flat as I could. When I could hear that they had come abreast, about thirty yards away, I sneaked a facedown look through the twigs that shielded me.

My heart jumped. They were in German uniforms. For a moment I thought that perhaps they were dressed up to be the ‘enemy’ on the manoeuvres; but it was unthinkable, after the atrocities of the Occupation, that any Greek soldier would put on a German uniform, even for an exercise; and from then on I knew. The masque had moved outside the domaine, and the old devil had not given in one bit.

The last man was carrying a much bulkier pack than the others; a pack with a thin, just visible rod rising from it. The truth flashed in on me. In an instant I knew Demetriades had a fellow-spy at the school. He was a very Turkish-looking Greek, a compact, taciturn man with a close-cropped head, one of the science masters. He never came into the common-room; lived in his laboratory. His colleagues nicknamed him ‘o Akhemikos’, the alchemist. With a grim realization of new depths of treachery, I remembered that he was one of Patarescu’s closest cronies. But what I had remembered first was that there was a transmitter in his laboratory, since some of the boys wanted to become radio officers. The school even had a ham radio station sign. I hit the ground with my fist. It had all been so obvious. That was why they always knew I was coming. There was only the one gate; the old gatekeeper was always on duty.

The men had gone. They must have been wearing rubber-soled boots; and they must have wadded their equipment well to make so little noise. But the fact that I had walked fast had evidently upset their calculations. The flare could only have been a belated signal that I was on my way. For a moment I accused Julie, then exonerated her. Suspicion of her was far too obviously now what Conchis hoped for; but he had not allowed for the way his ‘bait’ would prove she was on the mouse’s side. I knew she must be totally innocent of this new trap; and the mouse was turned fox, not to be tricked so easily.

I was even half-tempted to follow the men down to see where they went, but I remembered old lessons from my own military training. Never patrol on a windless night if you can avoid it; remember the man nearer the moon sees you better than you see him. Already, within thirty seconds of the passing, I could hardly hear them. A stone was sent scuttering, then silence; then another, very faintly. I gave them another thirty seconds, then I pushed myself up and began to climb the path as fast as I could.

At the top of the cleft where the ridge flattened out I had to cross fifty yards or so of open space before the ground dipped down to the northern side. It was a windswept area littered with stones, a few lone bushes. On the far side lay a large patch, an acre or so, of high tamarisk. I could see the black opening in the feathery branches where my path went in. I stood and listened. Silence. I began to lope across the open space.

I had got halfway across when I heard a bang. A second later a Very flare burst open some two hundred yards to the right. It flooded the ridge with light. I dropped, my face averted. The light died down. The moment it hissed into darkness I was on my feet and racing, careless of noise, for the tamarisks. I got into them safely, stopped a moment, trying to work out what insane new trick Conchis was playing. Then I heard footsteps running along the ridge, from the direction the flare had come. I began to sprint down the path between the seven-foot bushes.

I came to a flat, wider curve in the path, where I could run faster. Then terrifyingly, without any warning, my foot was caught and I was plunging headlong forward. A searing jab as my flung-out hand hit the sharp edge of a stone. An agonizing bang in the ribs. I heard my breath blasted out of my lungs with the impact and my shocked voice saying ‘Oh Christ’. I was too dazed for a moment to realize what had happened. Then came a sharp low command from behind the tamarisks to the right. I spoke only a word or two of the language. But the voice sounded authentically German.

There were sounds all around me, on both sides of the path. I was surrounded by men dressed as German soldiers. There were seven of them.

‘What the bloody hell’s the game?’

I scrambled on to my knees, rubbing the grit off the palms of my hands. Blood covered the knuckles of one of them. Two men came behind me and seized me by the arms, jerked me up. Another man stood in the centre of the path. He was apparently in charge. He had no rifle or submachine-gun, like the others, but only a revolver. I looked sideways at the rifle the man to my left had slung over Iris shoulder. It looked real; not a stage property. He also looked really German: not Greek.

The man with the revolver, evidently some kind of N.C.O., spoke again in German. Two men bent, one on either side of the path, and fiddled by the tamarisk stems: a tripwire. The man with the revolver blew a whistle quietly. I looked at the two men beside me.

‘You speak English? Sprechen Sie Englisch?’

They took not the slightest notice, except to jerk my arms for silence. I thought, Christ, wait till I see Conchis again. The N.C.O. stood in the path with his back to me, and the other four men gathered beyond him. Two of them sat down.

One evidently asked if they could smoke. The N.C.O. gave permission.

They lit up, helmeted faces in matchflares, and began to talk in a low murmur of voices. They seemed all German. Not just Greeks who knew a few words of German; but Germans. I spoke to the sergeant.

‘When you’ve finished the clowning perhaps you’ll tell me what we’re waiting for.’

The man pivoted round and came up to me. He was a man of about forty-five, long-cheeked. He stood with his face about two feet from mine. He did not look particularly brutal; but he looked his part. I expected another spit routine, but he simply said quietly, ‘Was sagen Sie?’

‘Oh go to hell.’

He remained staring at me, as if he did not understand, but was interested to see me at last; then expressionlessly turned away. The grip of the soldiers relaxed a little. If I had felt less battered, I might have run for it. But then I heard footsteps from the ridge above. A few seconds later the six men I had first seen came marching down the path in a loose single file. But before they came to us, they fell out by the group of smoking men.

The boy who was holding me on the right was only about twenty. He began siss-whistling under his breath; and in what had been, in spite of my remark about clowning, a pretty convincing performance until then, he struck a rather obvious note, for the tune was the most famous of all, ‘Lili Marlene’. Or was it a very bad pun? He had a huge acne-covered jaw and small eyelashless eyes; specially chosen, I suppose, because he appeared so Teutonic, with a curious machinelike indifference, as if he didn’t know why he was there, who I was; and didn’t care; just carried out orders.

I calculated: thirteen men, at least half of whom were German. Cost of getting them to Greece, from Athens to the island. Equipment. Training-rehearsing. Cost of getting them off the island, back to Germany. It couldn’t be done under five hundred pounds. And for what? To frighten – or perhaps to impress – one unimportant person. At the same time, now that the first adrenalin panic had subsided, I felt my attitude changed. This scene was so well organized, so elaborate. I fell under the spell of Conchis the magician again. Frightened, but fascinated; and then there were more footsteps.

Two more men appeared. One was short and slim. He came striding down the path with a taller man behind him. Both had the peaked hats of officers. Eagle badges. The soldiers he passed stood hurriedly, but he made a brisk movement of his hand to put them at ease. He came straight to me. He was obviously an actor who had specialized in German colonel roles; a hard face, a thin mouth; all he lacked were spectacles with oblong lenses and steel frames.

‘Hallo.’

He did not answer, but looked at me rather as the sergeant, who was now standing stiffly some way behind him, had. The other officer was apparently a lieutenant, an aide. I noticed he had a slight limp; an Italian-looking face, very dark eyebrows, round tanned cheeks; handsome.

‘Where’s the producer?’

The ‘colonel’ took a cigarette case out of his inside pocket and selected a cigarette. The ‘lieutenant’ reached forward with a light. Beyond them I saw one of the soldiers cross the path with something in loose paper – food of some sort. They were eating.

‘I must say you look the part.’

He said one word, carefully pursed in his mouth, spat out like a grape pip.

‘Gut.’

He turned away; said something in German. The sergeant went up the path and came back with a hurricane lamp, which he lit, then set behind me.

The ‘colonel’ moved up the path to where the ‘sergeant’ was standing, and I was left staring at the ‘lieutenant’. There was something strange in his look, as if he would like to tell me something, but couldn’t; searching my face for some answer. His eyes flicked away, and he turned abruptly, though awkwardly, on his heel and rejoined the colonel. I heard low German voices, then the sergeant’s laconic command.

The men stood to, and for some reason I couldn’t understand lined up on both sides of the path, facing inwards, irregularly, not standing to attention, as if waiting for someone to pass. I thought they were going to take me somewhere, I had to pass through them. But I was pulled back by my two guards in line with the others. Only the sergeant and the two officers stood in the centre of the path. The lamp threw a circle of light round me. I realized it had a dramatic function.

There was a tense silence. I was cast as a spectator in some way, not as the protagonist. At last I heard more people coming. A different, unmilitary figure came into sight. For a second I thought he was drunk. But then I realized he had his hands tied behind his back; like me, a prisoner. He wore dark trousers, but was bare above the waist. Behind him came two more soldiers. One of them seemed to prod him, and he groaned. As he came closer to me I saw, with a sharp sense that the masque was running out of control, that he was barefoot. His stumbling, ginger walk was real, not acted.

He came abreast of me. A young man, evidently Greek, rather short. His face was atrociously bruised, puffed, the whole of one side covered in blood from a gash near the right eye. He appeared stunned, hardly able to walk. He didn’t notice me until the last moment, when he stopped, looked at me wildly. I had a swift stab of terror, that this really was some village boy they had got hold of and beaten up – not someone to look the part, but be the part. Without warning the soldier behind jabbed him savagely in the small of the back. I saw it, I saw his spasmic jerk forward, and the – or so it sounded – absolutely authentic gasp of pain the jab caused. He stumbled on another five or six yards. Then the colonel spat one word. The guards reached roughly out and brought him to a halt. The three men stood there in the path facing downhill. The colonel moved down to just in front of me, his lieutenant limping beside him; both backs to me.

Another silence; the panting of the man. Then almost at once came another figure, exactly the same, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers behind him. I knew by then where I was. I was back in 1943, and looking at captured resistance fighters.

The second man was obviously the kapetan, the leader – heavily built, about forty, some six feet tall. He had one naked arm in a rope sling, a rough bandage covered in blood round his upper arm. It seemed to have been made from the sleeve torn off his shirt; was too thin to staunch the blood. He came down the path towards me; a magnificent klepht face with a heavy black moustache, an accipitral nose. I had seen such faces one or twice in the Peloponnesus, but I knew where this man came from, because over his forehead he still wore the fringed black headband of the Cretan mountaineer. I could see him standing in some early-nineteenth-century print, in folk-costume, silver-handled yataghan and pistols in his belt, the noble brigand of the Byronic myth. He was actually wearing what looked like British Army battledress trousers, a khaki shirt. And he too was barefooted. But he seemed to refuse to stumble. He was less battered than the other man, perhaps because of the wound.

As he came up level with me, he stopped and then looked past the colonel and the lieutenant straight at me. I understood that he was meant to know me, that I had once known him. It was a look of the most violent loathing. Contempt. At the same time of a raging despair. He said nothing for a moment. Then he hissed in Greek one word.

‘Prodotis.’ His lips snarled on the v-sounding demotic Greek delta.

Traitor.

He had great power, he was completely in his role; and in a barely conscious way, as if I sensed that I must be an actor too, I did not come out with another flip remark but took his look and his hatred in silence. For a moment, I was the traitor.

He was kicked on, but he turned and gave me one last burning look back across the ten feet of lamplight. Then again that word, as if I might not have heard it the first time.

‘Prodotis.’

As he did so there was a cry, an exclamation. The colonel’s rapped command: Nicht schiessenl My guards gripped me vice tight. The first man had bolted, diving headlong sideways into the tamarisks. His two guards plunged after him, then three or four of the soldiers lining the path. He can’t have got more than ten yards. There was a cry, German words, then a sickening scream of pain and another. The sound of a body being kicked, butt-ended.

At the second cry the lieutenant, who had been standing watching just in front of me, turned and looked past me into the night. I was meant to understand he was revolted by this, by brutality; his other first look at me was explained. The colonel was aware that he had turned away. He gave the lieutenant a quick stare round, flicked a look at the guards holding me, then spoke – in French; so that the guards could not understand … and no doubt, so that I could.

‘Mon lieutenant, violà pour moi la plus belle musique dans le monde.’

His French was heavily German; and he gave a sort of mincing lip-grimacing sarcasm to the word musique that explained the situation. He was a stock German sadist; the lieutenant, a stock good German.

The lieutenant seemed about to say something, but suddenly the night was torn open by a tremendous cry. It came from the other man, the noble brigand, from the very depths of his lungs and it must have been heard, if anyone had been awake to hear it, from one side of the island to the other. It was just one word, but the most Greek of all words.

I knew it was acting, but it was magnificent acting. It came out harsh as fire, more a diabolical howl than anything else, but electrifying, right from the very inmost core.

It jagged into the colonel like the rowel of a spur. He whipped round like a steel spring. In three strides he was in front of the Cretan and had delivered a savage smashing slap across his face. It knocked the man’s head sideways, but he straightened up at once. Again it shocked me almost as if I was the one hit. The beating-up, the bloody arm could be faked, but not that blow.

Lower down the path they came dragging the other man out of the bushes. He could not stand and they were pulling him by the arms. They dropped him in mid-path and he lay on his side, groaning. The sergeant went down, took a water-bottle from one of the soldiers and poured it over his face. The man made an attempt to stand. The sergeant said something and the original guards hauled him to his feet.

The colonel spoke.

The soldiers split into two sections, the prisoners in the middle, and began to move oft. In under a minute the last back disappeared. I was alone with my two guards, the colonel and the lieutenant.

The colonel came up to me. His face had a basilisk coldness. He spoke in a punctiliously over-distinct English.

‘It. Is. Not. Ended.’

There was just the trace of a humourless smile on his face; and more than a trace of menace. As if he meant something more than that there was a sequel to this scene; but that the whole Nazi Weltanschauung would one day be resurrected and realized. He was an impressively iron man. As soon as he spoke he turned and began to follow the soldiers down the path. The lieutenant went with him. I called out.

‘What isn’t ended?’

But there was no reply. The two dark figures, the taller limping, disappeared between the pale, soft walls of the tamarisk. I turned to my guards.

‘What now?’

For answer I found myself jerked forward and then back, and so forced to sit. There were a ridiculous few moments of struggle, which they easily won. A minute later they had roped my ankles together tightly, then hoisted me back against a boulder, so that I had support for my back. The younger soldier felt in his tunic top-pocket and tossed me down three cigarettes. In the flare of the match I lit I looked at them. They were rather cheap-looking. Along each one was printed in red, between little black swastikas, the words Leipzig dankt euch. The one I smoked tasted very stale, at least ten years old, as if they had been overthorough and actually used cigarettes from some war-issue tin. In 1943 it would have tasted fresh.

I made attempt after attempt to speak with them. In English, then in my exiguous German; French, Greek. But they sat stolidly opposite me, on the other side of the path. They hardly spoke ten words to each other; and were obviously under orders not to speak to me.

I had looked at my watch when they first tied me. It had said twelve thirty-five. Now it was one thirty. Somewhere on the north coast of the island, a mile or two west of the school, I heard the first faint pump of an engine. It sounded more like the diesel of a large coastal caïque than that of the yacht. The cast had re-embarked. My two guards must have been waiting for the sound. They stood, and the elder one held a table-knife up for me to see, then threw it down where they had been sitting. Then without a word they began to walk away-but not in the direction the others had taken. They climbed the path back to the ridge, and down to Bourani.

As soon as I was sure they had gone I crawled over the stones to the knife. It was blunt, the rope was new, and I wasn’t free for another twenty exasperating minutes. I climbed back to the ridge, to where I could look down over the south coast. Of course it was quiet, serene, a landscape tilted to the stars, an Aegean island lying in its classical nocturnal peace. The yacht still rode at anchor. I could hear the caïque, whatever it was, heading away behind me towards Nauplia. I thought of storming down to Bourani, of waking the girls, bearding Conchis, demanding explanation at once. But I felt exhausted, I felt sure of the girls’ innocence and I was far from sure I would be allowed anywhere near the villa … they would have anticipated such a reaction on my part, and I was hopelessly outnumbered in mere physical terms. I also felt, beneath my anger, a return of the old awe for what Conchis was doing. Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripateia.

⁵⁰

Morning school began at seven, so I had had less than five hours’ sleep when I appeared in class. It was ugly weather, too, without wind, remorselessly hot and stagnant. All the colour was burnt out of the land, what few remaining greens there were looked parched and defeated. Processional caterpillars had massacred the pines; the oleander flowers were brown at the edges. Only the sea lived, and I did not begin to think coherently until school was over at noon and I could plunge into the water and lie in its blue relief.

One thing had occurred to me during the morning. Except for the main actors, almost all the German ‘soldiers’ had looked very young – between eighteen and twenty. It was the beginning of July; the German and the Greek university terms would probably be over. If Conchis really had some connection with film-producing he could probably have got Germans students to come easily enough – to work for a few days for him and then holiday in Greece. What I could not believe was that having got them to Greece he would use them only once. More sadism was, as the colonel warned, to come.

I floated on my back with my arms out and my eyes shut, crucified in the water. I had already cooled down enough in other ways to know that I wasn’t going to write the angry and sarcastic letter I had been phrasing on the return from the ridge. Apart from anything else it was what the old man would be expecting – I had that morning in school detected something speculative and inquisitive in Demetriades’ eyes – and my one sure good move was not to do what was expected. Nor on reflection did I think there was any great danger for the sisters; as long as he believed them misled, they were safe, or as safe as they always had been. If I was to get them out of it, it was better to wait till they were in front of me; not to warn him of what I intended. And then he had the enormous advantage of giving the entertainment – and such entertainment. It seemed, in some peculiar way, foolish to be angry about the way the thing had been done when the staggering fact was that it had been done at all.

The post came on the noon boat and was distributed during lunch. I had three letters; one of the rare ones from my uncle in Rhodesia, another with one of the information bulletins sent out by the British Council in Athens; and the third … I knew the handwriting, round, a bit loose, big letters. I slit it. My letter to Alison fell out, unopened. There was nothing else. A few minutes later, back in my room, I put it on an ashtray, still unopened, and burnt it.

The next day was Friday. I had another letter at lunch. It had been delivered by hand and I knew the writing. I didn’t open it until I had escaped from the dining-room – which was as well, because its brief contents made me swear aloud. It was as brutal and unexpected as a slap across the face; dateless, placeless, without superscription.

Any further visits to Bourani will be in vain. I do not think I have to explain why. You have gravely disappointed me.

MAURICE CONCHIS

I knew a stunned plunge of disappointment and a bitter anger. What right had he to issue such an arbitrary ukase? It was incomprehensible, it contradicted everything I had learnt from Julie; but not, as I soon saw, what had happened after I left her … that accusation of treachery gained a fresh significance. I chillingly realized that the Occupation episode could also have been a finale, a notice of dismissal – he had no more time for me. But then there were the girls. What story could he have told them? Or could tell them, when they knew he had been lying to them?

All through that day I half expected to see them appear at the school. They must have seen through him now. I had notions of going to the police, of contacting the British Embassy in Athens. But slowly I came back on a more even keel. I recalled the parallels with The Tempest, and that old man’s trial of the young usurper in his domaine. I recalled the constant past occasions when Conchis had said the opposite of what he meant; and above all, I remembered Julie… not only the naked body in the sea, but her intuitive trust in our Prospero. I decided by the time I went to bed that it must be taken as some last black joke on his part, some testing trick analogous to the dice-game and the suicide pill. I refused to believe that he would really keep either Julie or the truth from me for another week. He must know I should go over to Bourani on the morrow. He might carry on with some comedy of intense disapproval, but he would be there; and his other puppet would also be there to help me finally call his bluff.

Soon after two o’clock on Saturday, I was on my way up into the hills. At three, I entered the clump of tamarisk. In the blazing heat -the weather remained windless, stagnant – it was difficult to believe that what I had seen had happened. But there were two or three recently broken twigs and branches; and where the ‘prisoner’ had dived away there were several overturned stones, their bottoms stained ruddy from the island earth; and more broken sprays of tamarisk. A little higher I picked up several screwed-out cigarette-ends. One was only half-smoked and had the beginnings of the same phrase: Leipzig da …

I stood on the bluff looking down over the other side of the island. I saw at once that the yacht wasn’t there; yet I wouldn’t let that kill all hope.

I arrived at the gate and walked straight to the house. It lay with the cottage in the sun, closed and deserted. I rattled the french window shutters hard, and tried the others. But none of them gave. All the time I kept looking round, not because I actually felt I was being watched so much as because I felt I ought to be feeling it. They must be watching me; might even be inside the house, smiling in the darkness just behind the shutters, only four or five feet away. I went and gazed down at the private beach. It lay in the heat; the jetty, the pump-house, the old baulk, the shadowed mouth of the little cave; but no boat. Then to the Poseidon statue. Silent statue, silent trees. To the cliff, to where I had sat with Julie the Sunday before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Had he ever met Conchis?

‘Ochi.’ No.

‘Does he have houses in the village?’

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

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

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

‘Really – no good water?’

‘No.’

‘What a shame.’

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

‘He owns the cottages then?’

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

‘All the land?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You know Bourani well?’

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

‘I understand. In 1929?’

The old man nodded.

‘Did Mr Conchis have many guests before the war?’

‘Many, many guests.’ This surprised Georgiou; he even repeated my question, and got the same answer.

‘Foreigners?’

‘Many foreigners. Frenchmen, Englishmen, all.’

‘What about the English masters at the school? Did they go there?’

‘Ne, ne. Oloi.’ Yes, all of them.

‘You can’t remember their names?’ He smiled at the ridiculousness of the question. He couldn’t even remember what they looked like. Except one who was very tall.

‘Did you meet them in the village?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes.’

‘What did they do at Bourani, before the war?’

‘They were foreigners.’

Georgiou was impatient at this exhibition of village logic. ‘Ne, Barba. Xenoi. Ma ti ekanon?

‘Music. Singing. Dancing.’ Once again Georgiou didn’t believe him; he winked at me, as if to say, the old man is soft in the head. But I knew he wasn’t; and that Georgiou had not come to the island till 1946.

‘What kind of singing and dancing?’

He didn’t know; his rheumy eyes seemed to search for the past, and lose it. But he said, ‘And other things. They acted in plays.’ Georgiou laughed out loud, but the old man shrugged and said indifferently, ‘It is true.’

Georgiou leant forward with a grin. ‘And what were you, Barba Dimitraki? Karayozis?’ He was talking about the Greek shadowplay Punch.

I made the old man see I believed him. ‘What kind of plays?’

But his face said he didn’t know. ‘There was a theatre in the garden.’

‘Where in the garden?’

‘Behind the house. With curtains. A real theatre.’

‘You know Maria?’

But it seemed that before the war it had been another housekeeper, called Soula, now dead.

‘When were you last there?’

‘Many years. Before the war.’

‘Do you still like Mr Conchis?’

The old man nodded, but it was a brief, qualified nod. Georgiou chipped in.

‘His eldest son was killed in the execution.’

‘Ah. I am very sorry. Very sorry.’

The old man shrugged; kismet. He said, ‘He is not a bad man.’

‘Did he work with the Germans in the Occupation?’

The old man raised his head, a firm no. Georgiou made a hawk of violent disagreement. They began to argue, talking so fast that I couldn’t follow them. But I heard the old man say, ‘I was here. You were not here.’

Georgiou turned to me with a wink. ‘He has given the old man a house. And money every year. The old man cannot say what he really thinks.’

‘Does he do that for the other relatives?’

‘Bah. One or two. The old ones. Why not? He has millions.’ He made the corruption gesture, meaning conscience money.

Suddenly the old man said to me, ‘Mia phora … once there was a big paneyiri with many lights and music and fireworks. Many fireworks and many guests.’

I had an absurd vision of a garden party: hundreds of elegant women, and men in morning-dress.

‘When was that?’

‘Three, five years before the war.’

‘Why was this celebration?’

But he didn’t know.

‘Were you there?’

I was with my son. We were fishing. We saw it up in Bourani. Many lights, many voices. Kai ta pyrotechnimata.’ And the fireworks.

Georgiou said, ‘Yah. You were drunk, Barba.’

‘No. I was not drunk.’

Try as I did, I could get nothing more out of the old man. So in the end I shook them both by the hand, paid the small bill, tipped Georgiou heavily, and walked back to the school.

One thing was clear. There had been Leverrier, Mitford, and myself; but then others whose names I did not yet know back in the ‘thirties; a long line. It gave me a return of great expectations; and the courage to face whatever new was being prepared in that now uncurtained theatre over on the far side.

I returned to the village that evening, and climbed up the narrow cobbled streets that led to the back of the village; past warrens of whitewashed walls, peasant interiors, through tiny squares shaded by almond trees. Great magenta sprays of bougainvillaea flamed in the sun or glowed in the pale evening shadows. It was a sort of kasbah area of the village, a very pretty kasbah, with its cross-glimpses of the plumbago-blue six-o’clock sea below, and the gold-green pine-covered hills above. People sitting outside their cottages greeted me, and I collected the inevitable small Pied Piper chain of children, who subsided into giggles if I looked at them and waved them away. When I came to the church I went in. I wanted to justify my presence in the quarter. It was densely gloomy, with a miasma of incense over everything; a row of ikons, sombre silhouettes set in smoky gold, stared down at me, as if they knew what an alien I was in their cryptlike Byzantine world.

After five minutes I came out. The children had mercifully disappeared, and I could take the alley to the right of the church. On one side there were the round cylinders of the church apses, on the other a wall eight or nine feet high. The alley turned and the wall continued. But halfway along it there was an arched gateway: a keystone with the date 1823 on it, and above that a place where there had once been a coat of arms. I guessed that the house inside had been built by one of the pirate ‘admirals’ of the War of Independence. There was a narrow door let into the right-hand of the two gate-doors, with a slit for letters. Above it, stencilled white on black on an old bit of sheet metal, was the name ‘Hermes Ambelas’. To the left the ground fell away behind the church. There was no way of looking over the wall from that side. I went to the small door and pushed it gently to see if it gave. But it was locked. The islanders were notoriously honest, thieves unknown; and I could not remember having seen an outer gate locked like that anywhere else on Phraxos.

The rocky lane dipped abruptly down between two cottages. The roof of the one on the right was below the wall of the house. At the bottom a cross alley took me back and round to the other side. There the ground fell away even more precipitously and I found myself looking up ten feet of vertical rock even before the wall foundation started. The house and its garden walls on this side continued the rock face, and I could see that in fact it was not a very big house, though still by village standards much too grandiose for a donkey-driver.

Two ground-floor windows, three upstairs, all shuttered. They were still in the last sunlight and must have given a fine view west over the village and the straits to the Argolian mainland. Was it a view Julie knew well? I felt like Blondel beneath Richard Cœur-de-Lion’s window; but not even able to pass messages by song. Down in a small square below I could see two or three women interestedly watching me. I waved, strolled on, as if my look upwards had been idle curiosity. I came to yet another cross alley, and climbed up it to my starting-point outside Agios Elias. The house was impregnable to passing eyes.

Later, down in front of the Hotel Philadelphia, I looked back. I could see over all the intervening roofs the church and the house to the right of it, the five windows staring out.

They seemed defiant, but blind.