I was silent. A primrose-and-black butterfly, a swallowtail, hovered over the bougainvillea around the Priapus arbor, found no honey, and glided away through the trees. I scuffed the gravel. “I suppose I don’t know what love is, really. If it isn’t all sex. And I don’t even really care a damn any more, anyway.”
“My dear young man, you are a disaster. So defeated. So pessimistic.”
“I was rather ambitious once. I ought to have been blind as well. Then perhaps I wouldn’t feel defeated.” I looked at him. “It’s not all me. It’s in the age. In all my generation. We all feel the same.”
“In the greatest age of enlightenment in the history of this earth? When we have destroyed more darkness in this last fifty years than in the last five million?”
“As at Neuve Chapelle? Hiroshima?”
“But you and I! We live, we are this wonderful age. We are not destroyed. We did not even destroy.”
“No man is an island.”
“Pah. Rubbish. Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, airplanes, telephones, television—what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear forever. You are an island that has not sunk. You cannot be such a pessimist. It is not possible.”
“It seems possible.”
“Come with me.” He stood up, as if time was vital. “Come. I will show you the innermost secret of life. Come.” He walked quickly round to the colonnade. I followed him upstairs. There he pushed me out onto the terrace.
“Go and sit at the table. With your back to the sun.”
In a minute he appeared, carrying something heavy draped in a white towel. He put it carefully on the center of the table. Then he paused, made sure I was looking, before gravely he removed the cloth. It was a stone head, whether of a man or a woman it was difficult to say. The nose had been broken short. The hair was done in a fillet, with two side-pieces. But the power of the fragment was in the face. It was set in a triumphant smile, a smile that would have been smug if it had not been so full of the purest metaphysical good humor. The eyes were faintly Oriental, long, and as I saw, for Conchis put a hand over the mouth, also smiling. The mouth was beautifully modeled, timelessly intelligent and timelessly amused.
“That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang. But the smile.”
“It’s Cycladic, isn’t it?”
“Never mind what it is. Look at it. Look into its eyes.”
He was right. The little sunlit thing had some numen—or not so much a divinity, as a having known divinity—in it; of being ultimately certain. But as I looked, I began to feel something else.
“There’s something implacable in that smile.”
“Implacable?” He came behind my chair and looked down over my head. “It is the truth. Truth is implacable. But the nature and meaning of this truth is not.”
“Tell me where it came from.”
“From Didyma in Asia Minor.”
“How old is it?”
“The sixth or seventh century before Christ.”
He sat on the parapet, his arms folded.
“I wonder if it would have that smile if it knew of Belsen.”
“Because they died, we know we still live. Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.” A long silence. Then he said, “When I die, I shall have this by my bedside. It is the last face I want to see.”
The little head watched our watching; bland, certain, and almost maliciously inscrutable. It flashed on me that it was also the smile that Conchis sometimes wore; as if he sat before the head and practiced it. At the same time I realized exactly what I disliked about it. It was above all the smile of dramatic irony, of those who have privileged information. I looked back up at Conchis’s face; and knew I was right.
24
A starry darkness over the house, the forest, the sea; the dinner cleared away, the lamp extinguished. I lay back in the long chair. He let the night silently envelop and possess us; time fall away; then began to draw me back down the decades.
“April, 1915. I returned without trouble to England. I did not know what I should do. Except that I had in some way to justify myself. At nineteen one is not content simply to do things. They have to be justified as well. My mother fainted when she saw me. For the first and last time in my life I saw my father in tears. Until that moment of confrontation I had determined that I would tell the truth. That I could not deceive them. Yet before them, I could not do anything but deceive. Perhaps it was pure cowardice, it is not for me to say. But there are some truths too cruel, before the faces one has to announce them to, to be told. So I said that I had been lucky in a draw for leave, and that now Montague was dead I was to rejoin my original battalion. A madness to deceive. Not economically, but with the utmost luxury. I invented a new battle of Neuve Chapelle, as if the original had not been bad enough. I even told them I had been recommended for a commission. At first fortune was on my side. Two days after I returned, official notification came that I was missing, believed killed in action. Such mistakes occurred frequently enough for my parents to suspect nothing. The letter was joyously torn up.
“And Lily. Perhaps that waiting before the knowledge came that I was safe had made her see more clearly her real feelings for me. Whatever it was, I could no longer complain that she treated me more like a brother than a lover. You know, Nicholas, that whatever miseries the Great War brought it destroyed a great deal that was unhealthy between the sexes. For the first time for a century women discovered that man wanted something more human from them than a nun-like chastity, a bien pensant idealism. I do not mean that Lily suddenly lost all reserve. Or gave herself to me. But she gave as much to me as she could. The time I spent alone with her… those hours allowed me to gather strength to go on with my deception. At the same time as they made it more terrible. Again and again I was possessed by a desire to tell her all, and before justice caught up with me. Every time I returned home I expected to find the police waiting. My father outraged. And worst of all, Lily’s eyes on mine. But when I was with her I refused to talk about the war. She misinterpreted my nervousness. It touched her deeply and brought out all her gentleness. Her warmth. I sucked on her love like a leech. A very sensual leech. She had become a very beautiful young woman.
“One day we went for a walk in woods to the north of London—near Barnet, I think, I no longer recall the name, except that they were in those days very pretty and lonely woods for a place so near London.
“We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.
“That afternoon Lily said she wanted to marry me. To marry by special license, and if necessary without her parents’ permission, so that before I went away again we should have become one in body as we were in—dare I say spirit?—at any rate, in mind. I longed to sleep with her, I longed to be joined to her. But always my dreadful secret lay between us. Like the sword between Tristan and Isolde. So I had to assume, among the flowers, the innocent birds and silent trees, an even falser nobility. How could I refuse her except by saying my death was so probable that I could not allow such a sacrifice? She argued. She cried. She took my faltering, my tortured refusals for something far finer than they really were. At the end of the afternoon, before we left the wood, and with a solemnity and sincerity, a complete dedication of herself that I cannot describe to you because such unconditional promising is another extinct mystery… she said, Whatever happens I shall never marry anyone but you.”