Foulkes pamphlet. Is in the British Museum Catalogue. Conchis’s are not.
Theatre costumier’s. I tried Berman’s and one or two others, without the least success.
Earthquakes. There were earthquakes in 1884 and 1892 in the Ionian Islands. In a tragic way that part of Conchis’s story was confirmed just before I began my research. On August 9, 1953, 450 people died in the Ionian disaster.
Military history. Letter from Major Arthur Lee-Jones.
DEAR MR. URFE,
I’m afraid your letter does ask, as you say yourself, for the impossible. The units engaged in the Neuve Chapelle set piece were mostly regular ones. I think it most unlikely that any Princess Louise’s Kensington Regiment volunteers would have seen that engagement, even under the circumstances you suggest. But of course we have poor detailed records of that chaotic time, and I can’t hazard more than an opinion.
I can find no trace in the records of a captain called Montague. Usually one is on safer ground with officers. But perhaps he was seconded from one of the county regiments.
De Deukans. No family of this name in the Almanach de Gotha or any other likely source I looked at.
The fire at Givray-le-Duc on August 17, 1922. Unreported in The Times and the Telegraph. Perhaps not surprisingly, as I found Givray-le-Duc was absent from even the largest French gazetteers. The spider Theridion deukansii: doesn’t exist, though there is a genus Theridion.
Seidevarre. Letter from Johan Fredriksen.
DEAR SIR,
The mayor of Kirkenes has passed to me, who is the schoolmaster, your letter to answer. There is in Pasvikdal a place of the name Seidevarre and there was in that place many years from now a family of the name Nygaard. I am very sorry we do not know what is become with this family.
I am very pleased to help you.
Lily’s mother. I drove down to Cerne Abbas, not expecting to find either an Ansty Cottage or a Silver Street. I did not. I told the manageress at the little hotel where I had lunch that I’d once known two girls from Cerne Abbas—twins, very pretty, but I’d forgotten their surname. It left her deeply worried—she knew everyone in the village and couldn’t think who it could have been. The “headmaster” at the primary schooclass="underline" in reality a headmistress. Obviously the letters had been intercepted on Phraxos; and a reply sent to England for posting.
Charles-Victor Bruneau. Not in Grove. A man I spoke to at the Royal Academy of Music had never heard of him; or, needless to say, of Conchis.
Conchis’s costume at the “trial.” On my way back from Cerne Abbas I stopped for dinner in Hungerford, and passed an antique shop on my way to the hotel. Propped up in the window were five old Tarot cards. On one of them was a man dressed exactly as Conchis had been; even to the same emblems on his cloak. Underneath were the words Le Sorcier—the sorcerer. The shop was shut, but I took its address and later they sold me the card by post; a “nice eighteenth-century card.”
It gave me a sharp shock when I first saw it—I looked round, as if it had been planted there for me to notice; as if I was being watched.
The “psychologists” at the trial. I tried the Tavistock Clinic and the American Embassy. All the names totally unknown, though some of the institutes exist.
Nevinson. This was the man whose Oxford college was in a book in the school library. The Bursar’s Office at Balliol sent me an address in Japan. I wrote him a letter. Two weeks later I had a reply.
Faculty of English,
Osaka University
DEAR MR. URFE,
Thank you for your letter, it came, as it were, from the distant past, and gave me quite a surprise! But I was delighted to hear that the school has survived the war, and I trust you have enjoyed your stay there as much as I did.
I had forgotten about Bourani. I remember the place now, however, and (very vaguely!) the owner. Did I have a violent argument with him once about Racine and predestination? I have an intuition, no more, that I did. But so much has flowed under the bridges since those days.
Other “victims” before the war—alas, I can’t help you. The man before me I never met. I did know Geoffrey Sugden, who was there for three years after me. I never heard him refer especially to Bourani.
If you are ever in this part of the world, I should be delighted to talk over old times with you, and to offer you, if not an ouzo, at least a sake pou na pinete.
Yours sincerely,
The incident on the ridge. When the kapetan called me prodotis (traitor). Of course they knew one day I would know what treachery they meant.
Wimmel. In late August, a piece of luck. One of my teeth began to hurt and Kemp sent me to her dentist to have it seen to. While I was in the waiting room I picked up an old film magazine of the previous January. Halfway through I came on a picture of “Wimmel.” He was even dressed in Nazi uniform. Underneath there was a caption paragraph. Ignaz Pruszynski, who plays the fiendish Town Commandant in Poland’s much praised film of the Resistance, Black Ordeal, in real life played a very different role. He led a Polish underground group all through the Occupation, and was awarded the Polish equivalent of our own Victoria Cross.
Hypnotism. I read a couple of books on this. Conchis had evidently learnt the technique professionally. It was “virtually impossible” to get the person hypnotized to do acts that “run deeply counter to his moral beliefs.” But post-hypnotic suggestion, implanting commands that are carried out on a given signal after the subject has been woken from the hypnotic state and is in all other ways back to normal, was “perfectly feasible and frequently demonstrated.”
Raising both arms above the head. Conchis got this from ancient Egypt. It was the Ka sign, used by initiates “to gain possession of the cosmic forces of mystery.” In many tomb paintings. It meant: “I am master of the spells. Strength is mine. I impart strength.”
The wheel symbol. “The mandala, or wheel, is a universal symbol of existence.
The ribbon on my leg, the bare shoulder. From masonic ritual, but believed to descend from the Eleusinian mysteries. Associated with initiation.
Maria. Probably really was a peasant, though an intelligent one. She spoke only two or three words of French to me; sat silent all through the trial, rather conspicuously out of place. Unlike the others, she was what she first seemed.
Lily’s bank. I wrote another letter, and got back a reply from the manager of the real Barclay’s branch. His name was not P. J. Fearn; and the headed paper he wrote on was not like that I had received.
Her school. Julie Holmes—unknown.
Mitford. I wrote a card to the address in Northumberland I had had the year before and received a letter back from his mother. She said Alexander was now a courier, working in Spain. I got in touch with the travel firm he was working for, but they said he wouldn’t be back till September. I left a letter for him.
The paintings at Bourani. I started with the Bonnards. The first book of reproductions of his work I opened had the picture of the girl drying by the window. I turned to the attributions list at the back. It was in the Los Angeles County Museum. The book had been printed m 1950. Later I “found” the other Bonnard; at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Both had been copies. The Modigliani I never traced; but I suspect, remembering those curiously Conchis-like eyes, that it was not even a copy.