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 like the diesel of a large coastal caïque. The cast had re-embarked. As soon as they heard it, the two men stood up. The elder one held something up, a table knife. He put it down where he had been sitting. Then without a word they started to walk away, away from the north coast, up the path.
As soon as I was sure they had gone I crawled over the stones to where they had left the knife. It was blunt, the rope was new, and I wasn’t free for another exasperating twenty minutes.
I climbed back to the ridge, to where I could look down over the south side of the island. Of course it was quiet, serene, a landscape tilted to the stars, an Aegean island lying in its classical nocturnal peace. But as I went back down to the school, I could still hear, miles from the island by then, the sound of a caïque on its way back to Athens.
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 color was burnt out of the land, what few remaining greens there were looked tired, 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 German 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.
But I had cooled down enough to know that I wasn’t going to write the angry and sarcastic letter I had been phrasing on the way down from the ridge. Conchis had the enormous advantage of giving the entertainment—and such entertainment; it seemed ridiculous to get angry about the way the thing was done when the staggering fact was that the thing had been done.
I floated on my back with my arms out and my eyes shut, crucified in the water. A course of action: the paramount thing was that I should go on seeing Julie. I would make that absolutely clear to her over the weekend; if it meant ruining the masque, so much the worse for the masque; and if it meant going on with the masque, and finding myself in the middle of such unpleasant entertainments as the one on the ridge, so much the worse for me.
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 was postmarked Geneva and I had a premonition about its contents, so that I didn’t open it until I had escaped from the dining room.
Geneva, Monday
DEAR NICHOLAS,
I am afraid my presence here will be essential for at least another week. However, I think it almost certain that I shall be back at Bourani by the following weekend. I hope you are enjoying the good weather.
Yours most sincerely,
I felt a bitter plunge of disappointment, of new and different anger with Conchis. The last sentence—when was the weather ever not good in the Aegean in summer?—stung especially. It was a deliberate taunt, a way of saying, I know you can enjoy nothing till I pretend to return. Or perhaps “good weather” was a hint that he knew about my meetings with Julie… and that bad weather was soon to come. I couldn’t believe that he would keep her from me for another week. He must know that I should rush over to Bourani whether he was there or not.
I decided that it was his way of saying, Your move. So I would move.
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. A long way to the south I could see a big caïque of the kind that must have brought the “soldiers” to the island; there was nothing unusual in seeing it. Such caïques passed through the straits facing the school several times a week. But it reminded me how easy it was for Conchis’s cast to get on and off the island without my knowing. I stood some time on the bluff, because if anyone was watching I wanted them to know I was on my way. I had already told Demetriades I was going out for a long walk; and made sure that old Barba Vassili saw me going through the school gates, so that the information could be, if it usually was, wirelessed across.
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 around, not because I actually felt I was being watched so much as because I felt I ought to be feeling it. I must be meant to meet Lily again. They must be watching me; might even be inside the house, smiling in the darkness just behind the shutters, only four of five feet away. I went and gazed down at the private beach. It lay in the heat; the jetty, the pump-house, the old balk, 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 Lily 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 leveled out, I eventually came on the seldom used path I had taken on my previous visit to the cottages.