Julie’s cool, controlled eyes looked down into my wet, angry ones, and I couldn’t stand it. I had to shut them. I felt the lightest touch on my bare arm, and I knew it was her hand. A moment later, when I looked again, she was halfway to the door. She went out.
Conchis came forward from doing something by the table. He leant over me. “Nicholas, we shall not frighten you any more. But we want you to go to sleep. It will be convenient for us and less painful for you. Please do not struggle.”
The absurd memory of the pile of exam papers I had still to mark flicked through my mind. Joe and Anton held my left arm like a vice. I resisted for a moment, then gave in. A dab of wet. The needle pricked into my forearm. I felt the morphine, or whatever it was, enter. The needle was withdrawn, another dab of something wet. Conchis went back to his table. I lay for half a minute or so, then looked to see what he was doing. He was sitting by the table, his legs crossed. A black medical case lay on the table in front of him. Everyone was silent.
I tried to realize what I had got into: a world without limits.
A man with an arrow in his heart.
Mirabelle. La Maitresse-Machine.
Perhaps five minutes passed, then both sisters reappeared. They were dressed exactly like the others, in black trousers and black shirts. Julie’s—Lily’s?—hair was up, tied by a black chiffon bandana. She went and sat by Conchis without looking at me. June emptied the things in the wardrobe into a suitcase. My head began to swim, faces and objects, the ceiling, to recede from present reality; down and down a deep black mine of shock, rage, incomprehension and flailing depths of impossible revenge.
60
I was to have no sense of time for the next five days. When I first woke up I did not know how many hours had passed since I was in the hotel bed. I was very thirsty, and that must have been what woke me. I remember one or two things indistinctly. A sense of surprise that I was in my own pajamas but not in my room at school; then realizing I was in a bunk, at sea, but not in a caïque. It was the narrowing fore-cabin of a yacht. I was reluctant to leave my sleep, to think, to do anything but sink back into it. I was handed a glass of water by a young man with crew-cut blond hair, who had evidently been waiting for me to wake. Dimly I recognized him as the one who had closed the “lid” of the Earth on me. I was so thirsty that I had to drink the water, even though I could see it was suspiciously cloudy. Then I must have blurred into sleep again.
The same man made me go to the head in the bow of the yacht at some later point, and I remember he had to hold me upright, as if I was drunk; and I sat on the pan and just went to sleep again. There were portholes, but the metal shields were screwed down. I asked one or two questions, but he didn’t answer; and it didn’t seem to matter.
The same procedure happened again, once, twice, I don’t know, in different circumstances. This time I was in a room in a proper bed. It was always night, always if light an electric light; figures and voices; then darkness.
But one morning—it seemed like morning, though it might have been midnight for all I knew, because my watch had stopped—I was woken up by the blond-head, made to sit on my bed, to dress, to walk up and down the room twenty or thirty times. Another man stood by the door.
I became conscious of something I had hazily noticed before, an extraordinary mural that dominated the whitewashed wall opposite the bed. It was a huge black figure, larger than life-size, a kind of living skeleton, a Buchenwald figure, lying on its side on what might have been grass, or flames. A gaunt hand pointed down to a little mirror hanging on the wall; exhorting me, I supposed, to look at myself, to consider I must die. The skull face had a startled and startling intensity that made it uncomfortable to look at; and uncomfortable to think of the mind that had put it there for me. I could see it was newly painted.
There was a knock on the door. A third man appeared. He carried a tray with a jug of coffee on it. It had the most beautiful smell; of real coffee, something like Blue Mountain, not the monotonous “Turkish” powder they use in Greece. And there were rolls, butter, and quince marmalade; a plate of ham and eggs. I was left alone. In spite of the circumstances it was one of the best breakfasts of my life. Every flavor had a Proustian, mescalin intensity. I seemed to be starving, and I ate everything on the tray, I drank every drop of coffee and I could have done it all over again. There was even a pack of American cigarettes and a box of matches.
I took stock. I was wearing one of my own pullovers and whipcord trousers I hadn’t put on since the winter. The high curved ceiling was that of a cistern under a house; the windowless walls were dry, but subterranean. There was electric light. A suitcase, my own, full of my things, stood in a corner.
The wall against which the table stood was new-built of brick. It had a heavy wooden door in it. No handle, no spy-hole, no keyhole, not even a hinge. I gave it a push, but it was bolted or barred outside. There was another triangular table in the corner—an old-fashioned washbowl, with a sanitary bucket underneath. I rummaged in my suitcase; a clean shirt, a change of underclothes, a pair of summer trousers. I saw my razor and shaving brush, and that reminded me that I had a clock of sorts on my chin.
I went and looked in the memento mori mirror. At least two days’ stubble. My face was strange to me; degraded and yet peculiarly indifferent. I sat on the bed, and stared at the death figure. Death figure, death cell. A sinister reason for the wonderful breakfast struck me. A mock execution was about the only indignity left to undergo.
I began to walk up and down and to try to take command of the situation.
Behind and beneath everything there was the vile and unforgivable, the ultimate betrayal, of me, of all finer instincts, by Lily. I started to think of her as Lily again, perhaps because her first mask—the Lily mask—now seemed truer than the second one. I tried to imagine what she really was. Obviously a consummate young actress, and consummately immoral into the bargain; because only a prostitute could have behaved as she did. A pair of prostitutes, because I saw that her sister, June, Rose, might well have been prepared to carry out that final abominable seduction. Probably they would have liked me to be thus doubly humiliated.
All her story—her stories—had been lies; or ground-bait. Those letters, forgeries. They could not make it so easy for me to trace her. In a grim flash I guessed: none of my post left the island unintercepted. And from that I leapt to the realization that they must now know about Alison; because of course they would have intercepted letters coming to me as well. When Conchis had advised me to go back and marry Alison he must have known she was dead; Lily must have known she was dead.
Then my mind plunged sickeningly, as if I had walked off the edge of the world. Forged cuttings about the sisters, forged cuttings… forged cuttings.
Alison. I stared at my own dilated eyes in the mirror. Suddenly her honesty, her untreachery—her death—was the last anchor left. If she, if she… I was swept away. The whole of life became a conspiracy.
I strained back through time to seize Alison, to seize her and to be absolutely sure of her. To seize a quintessential Alison beyond all her powers of love or hate. For a while I let my mind wander into a bottomless madness. Supposing all my life that last year had been the very opposite of what Conchis so often said—so often, to trick me once again—about life in general. That is, the very opposite of hazard. The flat in Russell Square… but I had got it by answering a chance advertisement in the New Statesman. Meeting Alison that very first evening… but I might so easily have not gone to the party, not have waited those few minutes… and Margaret, Ann Taylor, all of them… the hypothesis became top-heavy, and crashed.