“Teaching must be a very interesting profession.”
“Not for me. I find it rather dull.”
“All noble and honest things are dull. But someone has to do them.”
“Anyway, I forgive teaching. Since it’s brought me here.” She slipped a look at Conchis, who bowed imperceptibly. He was playing a kind of Talleyrand role. The gallant old fox.
“Maurice has told me that you are not completely happy in your work.” She pronounced Maurice in the French way.
“I don’t know if you know about the school, but—” I paused to give her a chance to answer. She simply shook her head, with a small smile. “I think they make the boys work too hard, you see, and I can’t do anything about it. It’s rather frustrating.”
“Could you not complain?” She gave me an earnest look; beautifully and convincingly earnest. I thought, she must be an actress. Not a model.
“You see…”
So it went on. We must have sat talking for nearly fifteen minutes, in this absurd stilted way. She questioned, I replied. Conchis said very little, leaving the conversation to us. I found myself formalizing my speech, as if I too was pretending to be in a drawing room of forty years before. After all, it was a masque, and I wanted, or after a very short while began to want, to play my part.
I found something a shade patronizing in her attitude, and I interpreted it as an attempt to upstage me; perhaps to test me, to see if I was worth playing against. I thought once or twice that I saw a touch of sardonic amusement in Conchis’s eyes, but I couldn’t be sure. In any case, I found her far too pretty, both in repose and in action (or acting), to care. I thought of myself as a connoisseur of girls’ good looks; and I knew that this was one to judge all others by.
There was a pause, and Conchis spoke.
“Shall I tell you now what happened after I left England?”
“Not if it would bore… Miss Montgomery.”
“No. Please. I like to listen to Maurice.”
He kept watching me, ignoring her.
“Lily always does exactly what I want.”
I glanced at her. “You’re very fortunate, then.”
He did not take his eyes off me. The furrows beside his nose caught shadow, deepening them.
“She is not the real Lily.”
This sudden dropping of the pretense took me, as once again he knew it would, off-balance.
“Well… of course.” I shrugged and smiled. She was staring down at her fan.
“Neither is she anyone impersonating the real Lily.”
“Mr. Conchis… I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Not to jump to conclusions.” He gave one of his rare wide smiles. “Now. Where was I? But first I must warn you that this evening I give you not a narrative. But a character.”
I looked at Lily. She seemed to me to be perceptibly hurt, and just as another wild idea was beginning to run through my mind, that she really was an amnesiac, some beautiful amnesiac he had, somehow, literally and metaphorically laid his hands on, she gave me what was beyond any doubt a contemporary look, a look out of role—a quick, questioning glance that flicked from me to Conchis’s averted head and back again. At once I had the impression that we were two actors with the same doubts about the director.
28
“Buenos Aires. I lived there for nearly four years, until the spring of 1919. I quarreled with my uncle Anastasios, I gave English lessons, I taught the piano. And I felt perpetually in exile from Europe. My father was never to speak or write to me again, but after a while I began to hear from my mother.”
I glanced at Lily, but now, back in role, she was watching Conchis with a politely interested expression on her face. Lamplight became her, infinitely.
“Only one thing of importance happened to me in the Argentine. A friend took me one summer on a tour of the Andean provinces. I learnt about the exploited conditions under which the peons and gauchos had to live. I urgently felt the need to sacrifice myself for the underprivileged. Various things we saw decided me to become a doctor. But the reality of my new career was harsh. The medical faculty at Buenos Aires would not accept me, and I had to work day and night for a year to learn enough science to be enrolled.
“But then the war ended. My father died soon after. Though he never forgave me, or my mother for having helped me both into his world and out of it, he was sufficiently my father to let sleeping dogs lie. So far as I know my disappearance was never discovered by the authorities. My mother was left a sufficient income. The result of all this was that I returned to Europe and settled in Paris with her. We lived in a huge old flat facing the Pantheon, and I began to study medicine seriously. Among the medical students a group formed. We all regarded medicine as a religion, and we called ourselves the Society of Reason. We saw the doctors of the world uniting to form a scientific and ethical elite. We should be in every land and in every government, moral supermen who would eradicate all demagogy, all self-seeking politicians, reaction, chauvinism. We published a manifesto. We held a public meeting in a cinema at Neuilly. But the Communists got to hear of it. They called us Fascists and wrecked the cinema. We tried another meeting in another place. That was attended by a group who called themselves the Militia of Christian Youth—Catholic ultras. Their manners, if not their faces, were identical with those of the Communists. Which was what they termed us. So our grand scheme for utopianizing the world was settled in two scuffles. And heavy bills for damages. I was secretary of the Society of Reason. Nothing could have been less reasonable than my fellow members when it came to paying their share of the bills. No doubt we deserved what we received. Any fool can invent a plan for a more reasonable world. In ten minutes. In five. But to expect people to live reasonably is like asking them to live on paregoric.” He turned to me. “Would you like to read our manifesto, Nicholas?”
“Very much.”
“I will go and get it. And fetch the brandy.”
And so, so soon, I was alone with Lily. But before I could phrase the right remark, the question that would show her I saw no reason why in Conchis’s absence she should maintain the pretending to believe, she stood up.
“Shall we walk up and down?”
I walked beside her. She was only an inch or two shorter than myself, and she walked slowly, slimly, with elegance, looking out to sea, avoiding my eyes, as if she now was shy. I looked around. Conchis was out of hearing.
“Have you been here long?”
“I have not been anywhere long.”
“I meant on the island.”
“So did I.”
She gave me a quick look, softened by a little smile. We had gone round the other arm of the terrace, into the shadow cast by the corner of the bedroom wall.
“An excellent return of service, Miss Montgomery.”
“If you play tennis, I must play tennis back.”
“Must?”
“Maurice must have asked you not to question me.”
“Oh come on. In front of him, okay. I mean, good God, we’re both English, aren’t we?”
“That gives us the freedom to be rude to each other?”
“To get to know each other.”
“Perhaps we are not equally interested in… getting to know each other.” She looked away out over the night. I was nettled.
“You do this thing very charmingly. But what exactly is the game?”
“Please.” Her voice was faintly sharp. “I really cannot stand this.” I guessed why she had brought me around into the shadow. I couldn’t see much of her face.
“Stand what?”
She turned and looked at me and said, in a quiet but fiercely precise voice, “Mr. Urfe.”
I was put in my place.