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By Root 8680 0

�ly, "Anyway, I'm an atheist." His voice was gentle and dry. "If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence. But I am not talking about God. I am talking about science." I said nothing. His voice became much drier. "Very well. I accept that you believe that you are..." he mimicked my emphasis "... _not_ psychic." "You can't refuse to tell me what you promised now." "I wanted only to warn you." "You have." "Excuse me for one minute." He disappeared into his bedroom. I got up and went to the corner of the parapet, from where I could see in three directions. All around the house lay the silent pine trees, dim in the starlight. Absolute peace. High and very far to the north I could just hear a plane, only the third or fourth I had heard at night since coming to the island. I thcught of an Alison on it, moving down the aisle with a trolley of drinks. Like the ship the faint drone accentuated, rather than diminished, the remoteness of Bourani. I had an acute sense of the absence of Alison, of the probably permanent loss of her; I could imagine her beside me, her hand in mine; and she was human warmth, normality, standard to go by. I had always seen myself as potentially a sort of protector of her; and for the first time, that evening at Bourani, I saw that perhaps she had been, or could have been, a protector of me. A few seconds later Conchis returned. He went to the parapet, and breathed deeply. The sky and the sea and the stars, half the universe, stretched out before us. I could still just hear the plane. I lit a cigarette, as Alison, at such a moment, would have lit a cigarette.

18

"I think we should be more comfortable in the lounging chairs." I helped him pull the two long wicker chairs from the far end of the terrace. Then we both put our feet up and lay back, so that we looked into the stars. And at once I could smell it on the tied-on headcushion--that same elusive, old-fashioned perfume of the towel, of the glove. I was sure it did not belong to Conchis or old Maria. I should have smelt it by then. There was a woman, and she often used this chair. "It will take me a long time to define what I mean. It will take me the story of my life." "I've spent the last seven months among people who can speak only the most rudimentary English." "My French is better than my English now. But no matter. _Comprendre, c'est tout_." "'Only connect.'" "Who said that?" "An English novelist." "He should not have said it. Fiction is the worst form of connection." I smiled in the darkness. There was silence. The stars gave signals. He began. "I told you my father was English. But his business, importing tobacco and currants, lay mainly in the Levant. One of his competitors was a Greek living in London. In 1892 this Greek had tragic news. His eldest brother and his wife had been killed in an earthquake over the mountains there on the other side of the Peloponnesus. Three children survived. The two youngest, two boys, were sent out to South America, to a third brother. And the eldest child, a girl of seventeen, was brought to London to keep house for her uncle, my father's competitor. He had long been a widower. She had the prettiness that is characteristic of Greek women who have some Italian blood. My father met her. He was much older, but quite good-looking, I suppose, and he spoke some demotic Greek. There were business interests which could be profitably merged. In short, they married. and I exist. "The first thing I remember clearly is my mother's singing. She always sang, whether she was happy or sad. She could sing classical music quite well, and play the piano, but it was the Greek folk tunes I remember best. Those she always sang when she was sad. I remember her telling me--much later in life--of that standing on a distant hillside and seeing the ochre dust float slowly up into the azure sky. When the news about her parents came, she was filled with a black hatred of Greece. She wanted to leave it then, never to return. Like so many Greeks. And like so many Greeks she never accepted her exile. That is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world. "My mother sang--and music was the most important thing in my life, from as far back as I can remember. I was something of a child prodigy. I gave my first concert at the age of nine, and people were very kind. But I was a bad pupil at all the other subjects at school. I was not stupid, but I was very lazy. I knew only one obligation: to play the piano well. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. And I was never accomplished at that. "I was fortunate, I had a very remarkable music teacher--Charles Victor Bruneau. He had many of the traditional faults of his kind. Vain of his methods and vain of his pupils. A sarcastic agony if one was not talented, and a painstaking angel if one was. But he was a very learned man musicologically. In those days that meant he was _rarissima avis_. Most executants then wanted only to express themselves. And so they developed accomplishments like enormous velocity and great skill at expressive rubato. No one today plays like that. Or could play like it, even if they wanted to. The Rosenthals and Godowskys are gone forever. But Bruneau was far in advance of his time and there are still many Haydn and Mozart sonatas I can hear only as he played them. "However, his most remarkable acquirement--I speak of before 1914--was the then almost unknown one of being as good a harpsichordist as a pianist. I first came under him at a period in his life when he was abandoning the piano. You know the harpsichord requires a very different finger technique from the piano. It is not easy to change. He dreamed of a school of harpsichord players who were trained as early as possible as pure harpsichordists. And not, as he used to say, _des pianistes en costume de bal masqu