The Magus (10 page)

Suddenly he moved. His eyes had flicked up to the top of the small cliff to our left. I looked round. There was nothing. I glanced back at him.

‘Something there?’

‘A bird.’

Silence.

I watched his profiled face. Was he mad? Was he making fun of me? I tried to make conversation again.

‘I gather you’ve met both my predecessors.’ His head turned on me with a snake-like swiftness, accusingly, but he said nothing. I prompted. ‘Leverrier?’

‘Who told you this?’

For some reason he was terrified about what we might have said of him behind his back. I explained about the sheet of notepaper, and he relaxed a little.

‘He was not happy here. On Phraxos.’

‘So Mitford told me.’

‘Mitford?’ Again the accusing stare.

‘I suppose he heard gossip at the school.’

He searched my eyes, then nodded, but not very convincedly. I smiled at him, and he gave me the trace of a wary smile back. We were playing obscure psychological chess again. I apparently had the advantage, but I didn’t know why.

From the invisible house above came the sound of the bell. It rang twice; then after a moment, three times; then twice again. It clearly had a meaning, and it gave a voice to the peculiar state of tension that seemed to pervade both the place and its owner, and which clashed so oddly with the enormous peace of the landscape. Conchis stood at once.

‘I must go. And you have a long walk.’

Halfway up the cliff, where the steep path broadened, there was a small cast-iron seat. Conchis, who had set a quickish pace, sat down gratefully on it. He was breathing hard; so was I. He patted his heart. I put on a look of concern, but he shrugged.

‘When you grow old. The annunciation in reverse.’ He grimaced. ‘Not to be.’

We sat in silence and got our breaths back. I watched the yellowing sky through the delicate fenestrations in the pines. The sky in the west was hazy. A few evening wisps of cloud were curled high, tranced over the stillness of the world.

Then once more out of the blue he said quietly, ‘Are you elect?’

‘Elect?’

‘Do you feel chosen by anything?’

‘Chosen?’

‘John Leverrier felt chosen by God.’

‘I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.’

‘I think you may be.’

I smiled dubiously. ‘Thank you.’

‘It is not a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.’

‘And what chooses me?’

‘Chance wears many faces.’

But then he stood, although his hand rested momentarily on my shoulder, as if to reassure me; to say it did not matter. We climbed the rest of the hill. At last we were on the gravel by the side colonnade. He stopped.

So.

‘Thank you very much indeed.’ I tried to get him to return my smile, to confess that he had been pulling my leg; but his brooding face was drained of humour.

‘I make two requests of you. One is that you tell no one over there that you have met me. This is because of certain events that happened during the war.’

‘I’ve heard about that.’

‘What have you heard?’

‘The story.’

‘There are two versions of the story. But never mind now. For them I am a recluse. No one ever sees me. You understand?’

‘Of course. I shan’t tell anyone.’

I knew what the next request would be: not to visit him again.

‘My second request is that you come here next weekend. And stay Saturday and Sunday nights. That is, if you do not mind the walking back early on Monday morning.’

‘Thank you. Thank you very much. I’d love to.’

‘I think we have many things to discover.’

‘ “We shall not cease from exploration”?’

‘You read that in the book on the beach?’

‘Didn’t you leave it for me to read?’

‘How should I have known you were coming?’

‘I had a feeling someone was watching me.’

His dark-brown eyes burnt into mine; he took a long moment to reply. The faintest ghost of a smile.

‘Do you feel you are being watched now?’

And once again his eyes flicked past my shoulders, as if he could see something inside the trees. I looked round. The pines were empty. I looked back at him; a joke? He was still smiling, a small dry smile.

‘Ami?’

‘I merely wondered, Mr Urfe.’ He held out his hand. ‘If for some reason you cannot come, leave a message at Sarantopoulos’s for Hermes. It will get here the next day.’

Looking as wary as he had begun to make me, I took his hand. He retained it beyond courtesy. There was a stronger pressure in his grip, a quizzical searching in his eyes.

‘Remember. Hazard.’

‘If you say.’

‘Go now.’

I had to smile. It was too absurd – the invitation, then this curt dismissal, as if I had exhausted his patience. But he would concede nothing, and in the end I gave him a dry little bow and thanked him for the tea. All I received was a dry little bow in return. I could only make my exit.

After fifty yards I looked back. He was still standing there, master of his domaine. I waved and he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture, one foot slightly advanced, as if in some kind of primitive blessing. When I looked back again, just before the trees hid the house, he had disappeared.

Whatever else he was he was not like anyone else I had ever met. Something more than mere loneliness, mere senile fantasies and quirks, burnt in his striking eyes, in that abrupt, probing then dropping conversation, in those sudden oblique looks at nothing. But I certainly didn’t think, as I went into the trees, that I should have the apparent answer within another hundred yards.

¹⁴

Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-coloured glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman’s glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label with the words
Mireille, gantière
embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before – musky, old-fashioned, like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he’d been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me.

Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn’t imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn’t imagine; and who she was, I couldn’t imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister – perhaps someone weak-minded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me – that explained the old man’s quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nervous strangeness. He knew she was ‘out’; it explained the second place at the tea-table, and the mysterious bell.

I turned round, half-expecting to hear a giggle, a rather inane giggle; and then as I looked at the thick shadowy scrub near the gate, and remembered the grim reference to Prospero, a more sinister explanation came to me. Not weak-mindedness, but some terrible disfigurement.
‘Not all young and beautiful, Mr Urfe.’
I felt, for the first time on the island, a small cold shiver of solitary-place fear.

The sun was low and night comes with near-tropical speed in Greece. I didn’t want to have to negotiate the steep north-side paths in darkness. So I hung the glove neatly over the centre of the top bar of the gate and went on quickly. Half an hour later the charming hypothesis occurred to me that Conchis was a transvestite. After a while I began, for the first time in months, to sing.

I told no one, not even Méli, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about the mysterious third person in the house. I decided that a weak-minded wife was the most likely answer; it would explain the seclusion, the taciturn servants.

I tried to make up my mind about Conchis too. I was far from sure that he was not just a homosexual; that would explain Mitford’s inadequate warning, though not very flatteringly to me. The old man’s nervous intensity, that jerking from one place to another, one subject to another, hisj aunty walk, the gnomic answers and mystifications, the weird flinging-up of his arms when I left – all his mannerisms suggested, were calculated to suggest, that he wanted to seem younger and more vital than he was.

There remained the peculiar business of the poetry book, which he must have had ready to puzzle me. I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday, far out in the bay, and he could easily have slipped the things on to the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water. But it seemed an oddly devious means of introduction. Then what did my being ‘elect’ mean – our having ‘many things to discover’ ? In itself it could mean nothing; in regard to him it could mean only that he was mad. And
‘Some would say I lived alone’
: I remembered the scarcely concealed contempt with which he had said that.

I found a large-scale map of the island in the school library. The boundaries of the Bourani estate were marked. I saw it was bigger, especially to the east, than I had realized: six or seven hectares, some fifteen acres. Again and again I thought of it, perched on its lonely promontory, during the weary hours of plodding through Eckersley’s purgatorial
English Course.
I enjoyed conversation classes, I enjoyed doing more advanced work with what was known as the Philologic Sixth, a small group of eighteen-year-old duds who were doing languages only because they were hopeless at science, but the endless business of ‘drilling’ the beginners bored me into stone. ‘
What am I doing? I am raising my arm. What is he doing? He is raising his arm. What are they doing? They are raising their arms. Have they raised their arms ? They have raised their arms.’

It was like being a champion at tennis, and condemned to play with rabbits, as well as having always to get their wretched balls out of the net for them. I would look out of the window at the blue sky and the cypresses and the sea, and pray for the day’s end, when I could retire to the masters’ wing, lie back on my bed and sip an ouzo. Bourani seemed greenly remote from all that; so far, and yet so near; its small mysteries, which grew smaller as the week passed, no more than an added tang, or hazard, in its other promise of civilized pleasure.

15

This time he was waiting for me at the table. I dumped my duffel bag by the wall and he called for Maria to bring the tea. He was much less eccentric, perhaps because he had transparently determined to pump me. We talked about the school, about Oxford, my family, about teaching English to foreigners, about why I had come to Greece. Though he kept asking questions, I still felt that he had no real interest in what I was saying. “What interested him was something else, some syndrome I exhibited, some category I filled. I was not interesting in myself, but only as an example. I tried once or twice to reverse our roles, but he again made it clear that he did not want to talk about himself. I said nothing about the glove.

Only once did he seem really surprised. He had asked me about my unusual name.

‘French. My ancestors were Huguenots.’

‘Ah.’

‘There’s a writer called Honore d’Urfé ̶ ’

He gave me a swift look. ‘He is an ancestor of yours?

‘It’s just a family tradition. No one’s ever traced it. As far as I know.’ Poor old d’Urfé; I had used him before to suggest that centuries of high culture lay in my blood. Conchis’s smile was genuinely warm, almost radiant, and I smiled back. ‘That makes a difference?’

‘It is amusing.’

‘It’s probably all rubbish.’

‘No no, I believe it. And have you read
L’Astrée?’

‘For my pains. Terrible bore.’

‘Oui, un peu fade. Mais pas tout à fait sans charmes.’
Impeccable accent; he could not stop smiling. ‘So you speak French.’

‘Not very well.’

‘I have a direct link with
le
grand siècle
at my table.’

‘Hardly direct.’

But I didn’t mind his thinking it, his sudden flattering benignity. He stood up.

‘Now. In your honour. Today I will play Rameau.’

He led the way into the room, which ran the whole width of the house. Books lined three walls. At one end there was a green-glazed tile stove under a mantelpiece on which stood two bronzes, both modern. Above them was a lifesize reproduction of a Modigliani, a fine portrait of a sombre woman in black against a glaucous green background.

He sat me in an armchair, sorted through some scores, found the one he wanted; began to play; short, chirrupy little pieces, then some elaborately ornamented courantes and passacaglias. I didn’t much like them, but I realized he played with some mastery. He might be pretentious in other ways, but he was not posing at the keyboard. He stopped abruptly, in midpiece, as if a light had fused; pretension began again.

‘Voilà.’

‘Very charming.’ I determined to stamp out the French ‘flu before it spread. ‘I’ve been admiring that.’ I nodded at the reproduction.

‘Yes?’ We went and stood in front of it. ‘My mother.’

For a moment I thought he was joking.

‘Your mother?’

‘In name. In reality, it is his mother. It was always his mother.’ I looked at the woman’s eyes; they hadn’t the usual fish-like pallor of Modigliani eyes. They stared, they watched, they were simian. I also looked at the painted surface. I belatedly realized I was not looking at a reproduction.

‘Good lord. It must be worth a fortune.’

‘No doubt.’ He spoke without looking at me. ‘You must not think that because I live simply here I am poor. I am very rich.’ He said it as if ‘very rich’ was a nationality; as perhaps it is. I stared at the picture again. ‘It cost me … nothing. And that was charity. I should like to say that I recognized his genius. But I did not. No one did. Not even the clever Mr Zborowski.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Modigliani? I met him. Many times. I knew Max Jacob, who was a friend of his. That was in the last phase of his life. He was quite famous by then. One of the sights of Montparnasse.’

I stole a look at Conchis as he gazed up at the picture; he had, by no other logic than that of cultural snobbery, gained a whole new dimension of respectability for me, and I began to feel much less sure of his eccentricity and his phoniness, of my own superiority in the matter of what life was really about.

‘You must wish you’d bought more from him.’

‘I did.’

‘You still own them?’

‘Of course. Only a bankrupt would sell beautiful paintings. They are in my other houses.’ I stored away that plural; one day I would mimic it to someone.

‘Where are your … other houses?’

‘Do you like this?’ He touched the bronze of a young man beneath the Modigliani. ‘This is a maquette by Rodin. My other houses. Well. In France. In the Lebanon. In America. I have business interests all over the world.’ He turned to the other characteristically skeletal bronze. ‘And this is by Giacometti.’

‘I’m staggered. Here on Phraxos.’

‘Why not?’

‘Thieves?’

‘If you have many valuable paintings, as I have – I will show you two more upstairs later – you make a decision. You treat them as what they are – squares of painted canvas. Or you treat them as you would treat gold ingots. You put bars on your windows, you lie awake at night worrying. There.’ He indicated the bronzes. ‘If you want, steal them. I shall tell the police, but you may get away with them. The only thing you will not do is make me worry.’

‘They’re safe from me.’

‘And on Greek islands, no thieves. But I do not like everyone to know they are here.’

‘Of course.’

‘This picture is interesting. It was omitted from the only
catalogue raisonné
of his work I have seen. You see also it is not signed. However – it would not be difficult to authenticate. I will show you. Take the corner.’

He moved the Rodin to one side and we lifted the frame down. He tilted it for me to see. On the back were the first few lines of a sketch for another painting, then scrawled across the lower half of the untreated canvas were some illegible words with numbers beside them, added up at the bottom, by the stretcher.

‘Debts. That one there. “Toto.” Toto was the Algerian he bought his hashish from.’ He pointed. ‘“Zbo.” Zborowski.’

I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man; and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs, and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million. Conchis watched me.

‘This is the side the museums never show.’

‘Poor devil.’

‘He would say the same of us. With much more reason.’

I helped him put the frame back.

Then he made me look at the windows. They were rather small and narrow, arched, each one with a centre pillar and a capital of carved marble.

‘These come from Monemvasia. I found them built into a cottage. So I bought the cottage.’

‘Like an American.’

He did not smile. ‘They are Venetian. Of the fifteenth century.’ He turned to the bookshelves and pulled down an art book. ‘Here.’ I looked over his shoulder and saw Fra Angelico’s famous ‘Annunciation’ ; and at once knew why the colonnade outside had seemed so familiar. There was even the same white-edged floor of red tiles.

‘Now what else can I show you? My harpsichord is very rare. It is one of the original Pleyels. Not in fashion. But very beautiful.’ He stroked its shining black top, as if it were a cat. There was a music stand on the far side, by the wall. It seemed an unnecessary thing to have with a harpsichord.

‘You play some other instrument, Mr Conchis?’

He looked at it, shook his head. ‘No. It has sentimental value.’ But he sounded quite unsentimental.

‘Good. Well. Now I must leave you to your own devices for a while. I have some correspondence to deal with.’ He gestured. You will find newspapers and magazines over there. Or books – take what you want. You will excuse me? Your room is upstairs… if you wish?’

‘No, this is fine. Thank you.’

He went; and I stared again at the Modigliani, caressed the Rodin, surveyed the room. I felt rather like a man who has knocked on a cottage door and found himself in a palace; vaguely foolish. I took a pile of the French and American magazines that lay on a table in the corner and went out under the colonnade. After a while I did something else I hadn’t done for several months: I began to rough out a poem.

From this skull-rock strange golden roots throw

Ikons and incidents; the man in the mask

Manipulates. I am the fool that falls

And never learns to wait and watch,

Icarus eternally damned, the dupe of time …

He suggested we look over the rest of the house.

A door led into a bare, ugly hall. There was a dining-room, which he said he never used, on the north side of the house, and another room which resembled nothing so much as a second-hand bookshop; a chaos of books – shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of magazines and newspapers, and one large and evidently newly arrived parcel that lay unopened on a desk by the window.

He turned to me with a pair of calipers in his hand.

‘I am interested in anthropology. May I measure your skull?’ He took my permission for granted, and I bent my head. As he gently pinched it, he said, ‘You like books?’

He seemed to have forgotten, but perhaps he hadn’t, that I had read English at Oxford.

‘Of course.’

‘What do you read?’ He wrote down my measurements in a little notebook.

‘Oh … novels mainly. Poetry. And criticism.’

‘I have not a single novel here.’

‘No?’

‘The novel is no longer an art form.’

I grinned.

‘Why do you smile?’

‘It was a sort of joke when I was at Oxford. If you didn’t know what to say at a party, you used to ask a question like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘ “Do you think the novel is exhausted as an art form?” No serious answer was expected.’

‘I see. It was not serious.’

‘Not at all.’ I looked at the notebook. ‘Are my measurements interesting?’

‘No.’ He dismissed that. ‘Well – I am serious. The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.’ He cut out with his hands, with the calipers, dismissing that as well. ‘I realized that one day before the war. Do you know what I did? I burnt every novel I possessed. Dickens. Cervantes. Dostoievsky. Flaubert. All the great and all the small. I even burnt something I wrote myself when I was too young to know better. I burnt them out there. It took me all day. The sky took their smoke, the earth their ashes. It was a fumigation. I have been happier and healthier ever since.’ I remembered my own small destroying; and thought, grand gestures are splendid – if you can afford them. He picked up a book and slapped the dust off it. ‘Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?’

‘For fun?’

‘Fun!’ He pounced on the word. ‘Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.’

I see.

‘For this.’ A life of Franklin Roosevelt. ‘This.’ A French paperback on astrophysics. ‘This. Look at this.’ It was an old pamphlet –
An Alarme for Sinners, Containing the Last Words of the Murderer Robert Foulkes, 1679.
‘There, take that and read it over the weekend. See if it is not more real than all the historical novels ever written.’

His bedroom extended almost the seaward width of the house, like the music-room below. At one end was a bed – a double bed, I noticed – and a huge wardrobe; at the other, a closed door led through into what must have been a very small room, a dressing-room perhaps. Near that door stood a strange-looking table, the top of which he lifted. It was (I had to be told) a clavichord. The centre of the room was fitted out as a kind of sitting-room and study. There was another tiled stove, and a desk littered with the papers he must have been working on, and two armchairs upholstered in pale brown to match a chaise-longue. In a far corner, a triangular cabinet full of pale-blue and green Isnik ware. Flooded with evening light, it was altogether a more homely room than the one downstairs, and by contrast pleasantly free of books.

But its tone was really set by its two paintings: both nudes, girls in sunlit interiors, pinks, reds, greens, honeys, ambers; all light, warmth, glowing like yellow fires with life, humanity, domesticity, sexuality, Mediterraneity.

‘You know him?’ I shook my head. ‘Bonnard. He painted them both five or six years before he died.’ I stood in front of them. He said, behind me, ‘These, I paid for.’

‘They were worth it.’

‘Sunlight. A naked girl. A chair. A towel, a bidet. A tiled floor. A little dog. And he gives the whole of existence a reason.’

I stared at the one on the left, not the one he had inventoried. It showed a girl by a sunlit window with her back turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

Conchis moved out on to the terrace, and I followed him. By the westward of the two french doors stood a small Moorish ivory-inlaid table. It carried a bowl of flowers set, as if votively, before a photograph.

It was a large picture in an old-fashioned silver frame. A girl in an Edwardian dress stood by a vase of roses on an improbable Corinthian pedestal, while painted foliage drooped sentimentally across the background. It was one of those old photographs whose dark chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces; of a period when women had bosoms, not breasts. The young girl in the picture had a massed pile of light hair, and a sharp waist, and that plump-softness of skin and slightly heavy Gibson-girl handsomeness of feature that the age so much admired.

Conchis saw me giving it a lingering glance. ‘She was once my fiancée.’

I looked again. The photographer’s name was stamped floridly in gold across the bottom corner – a London address.

‘You never married her?’

‘She died.’

‘She looks English.’

‘Yes.’ He paused, surveying her. The girl seemed absurdly historical, standing by the pompous vase in front of the faded, painted grove. ‘Yes, she was English.’