The Magus - John Fowles [76]
�e of the kind that must have brought the "soldiers" to the island; there was nothing unusual in seeing it. Such caIques 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 pumphouse, the old baulk, 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 levelled out, I eventually came on the seldom used path I had taken on my previous visit to the cottages. Shortly afterwards I was walking through the small olive orchard that surrounded them. I watched the three whitewashed houses as I approached through the trees. Strange that there was not even a chicken or a donkey. Or a dog. There had been two or three dogs before. Two of the one-story cottages were adjoining. Both front doors were bolted, with bolt handles padlocked down. The third looked more openable, but it gave only an inch before coming up hard. There was a wooden bar inside. I went round the back. The door there was also padlocked. But on the last side I came to, over a hencoop, I found two of the shutters were loose. I peered in through the dirty windows. An old brass bed, a cube of folded bedclothes in the middle of it. A wall of photographs and ikons. Two canebottomed wooden chairs, a cot beneath the window, an old trunk. On the windowsill in front of me was a brown candle in a _retsina_ bottle, a broken garland of _immortelles_, a rusty sprocket-wheel from some bit of machinery, and a month of dust. I closed the shutters. The second cottage had another padlocked bolt on its back door; but though the last one had the bolt, it was simply tied down with a piece of fishing twine. I struck a match. Half a minute later I was standing inside the cottage, in another bedroom. Nothing in the darkened room looked in the least suspicious. I went through to the kitchen and living room in front. From it a door led straight through into the cottage next door; another kitchen; beyond it, another musty bedroom. I opened one or two drawers, a cupboard. The cottages were, beyond any possibility of faking, typical impoverished islanders' homes. The one strange thing was that they were empty. I came out and fastened the bolt handle with a bit of wire. Fifty yards or so away among the olives I saw a whitewashed privy. I went over to it. A spider's web stretched across the hole in the ground. A collection of torn squares of yellowing Greek newspaper hung from a rusty nail. Defeat. I went to the cistern beside the double cottage, took off the wooden lid and let down an old bucket on a rope that stood beside the whitewashed neck. Cool air rushed up, like an imprisoned snake. I sat on the neck and swallowed great mouthfuls of the water. It had that living, stony freshness of cistern water, so incomparably sweeter than the neutral flavour of tap water. A brilliant red and black jumping spider edged along the puteal towards me. I laid my hand in its path and it jumped onto it; holding it up close I could see its minute black eyes, like giglamps. It swivelled its massive square head from side to side in an arachnoidal parody of Conchis's quizzing; and once again, as with the owl, I had an uncanny apprehension of a reality of witchcraft; Conchis's haunting, brooding omnipresence. I flicked the spider onto the ground and looked up towards the distant central ridge. I was sure there were no buildings between it and where I was; that left only one alternative. Where they waited was somewhere in the pine forest; and why not? They might put up tents, a kind of _ad hoc_ camp, as needed; so that I was looking, that afternoon, for nothing. I caught myself thinking of Alison. I almost wished she was there, beside me, for companionship. To talk to, nothing more, like a man friend... though that was ingenuous. My mind slid to that empty bed in the shuttered cottage room. I had hardly given Alison a thought for days. Events had swept her into the past. But I remembered those moments on Parnassus: the sound of the waterfall, the sun on my back, her closed eyes, her neck stiffened back, her whole body arched to have me deeper--and that dream of two complementary, compliant women floated back through me. Both, both. But I stood up then and screwed my randiness out with my cigarette. All that was spilt milk. Or spilt semen. I spent all the rest of that afternoon searching the south coast of the island eastward beyond the three cottages, then back past them and into Bourani again, nicely timed for tea under the colonnade; but the colonnade was as deserted as ever. An hour searching for a note, a sign, anything; it became like the idiot ransacking of a drawer already ten times searched. At six I returned to the school, with nothing but a useless rage of disappointment. With Conchis; with Julie; with everything. On the far side of the village there was another harbour, used exelusively by the local fishermen. It was avoided by everyone from the school, and by everyone with any claim to social _ton_ in the village. Many of the houses had been ruthlessly dilapidated. Some were no more than the carious stumps of walls; and the ones that still stood along the broken quays had corrugated iron roofs, concrete patches and other unsightly evidences of frequent mending. There were three tavernas, but only one was of any size. It had a few rough wooden tables outside its doors. Once before, coming back from one of my solitary winter walks, I had gone there for a drink; I remembered the taverna keeper was loquacious and comparatively easy to understand. By island standards, and perhaps because he was Anatolian by birth, conversable. His name was Georgiou; rather foxy-faced, with a lick of grey-black hair and a small moustache that gave him a comic resemblance to Hitler. On Sunday morning I sat under a catalpa and he came up, obsequiously delighted to have caught a rich customer. Yes, he said, of course he would be honoured to have an _ouzo_ with me. He called one of his children to serve us... the best _ouzo_, the best olives. Did things go well at the school, did I like Greece... I let him ask the usual questions. Then I set to work. Twelve or so faded carmine and green caIques floated in the still blue water in front of us. I pointed to them. "It's a pity you do not have any foreign tourists here. Yachts." "_Ech_." He spat out an olivestone. "Phraxos is dead." "I thought Mr. Conchis from Bourani kept his yacht over here sometimes." "That man." I knew at once that Georgiou was one of the village enemies of Conchis. "You have met him?" I said, no, but I was thinking of visiting him. He did have a yacht then? Georgiou had heard so. But it never came to the island. Had _he_ ever met Conchis? "_Ochi_." No. "Does he have houses in the village?" Only the one where Hermes lived. It was near a church called St. Elias, at the back of the village. As if changing the subject I asked idly about the three cottages near Bourani. Where had the families gone? He shook his hand to the south. "To the mainland. For the summer." He explained that a minority of the island fishermen were seminomadic. In winter they fished in the protected waters off Phraxos; but in summer, taking their families with them, they wandered round the Peloponnesus, even as far as Crete, in search of better fishing. He returned to the cottages. He pointed down and then made drinking gestures. "The cisterns are bad. No good water in summer." "Really--no good water?" "No." "What a shame." "It is his fault. He of Bourani. He could make better cisterns. But he is too mean." "He owns the cottages then?" "_Vevaios_." Of course. "On that side of the island, all is his." "All the land?" He ticked off his stubby fingers: Korbi, Stremi, Bourani, Moutsa, Pigadi, Zastena... all names of bays and caps around Bourani; and apparently this was another complaint against Conchis. Various Athenians, "rich people," would have liked to build villas over there. But Conchis refused to sell one meter; deprived the island of badly needed wealth. A donkey loaded with wood tripped down the quay towards us; rubbing its legs together, picking its fastidious way like a model. This news proved Demetriades's complicity. It must have been common gossip. "I suppose you see his guests in the village?" He raised his head, negatively, uninterestedly; it was nothing to him whether there were guests or not. I persisted. Did he know if there were foreigners staying over there? But he shrugged. "_Isos_." Perhaps. He did not know. Then I had a piece of luck. A little old man appeared from a side alley and came behind Georgiou's back; a battered old seaman's cap, a blue canvas suit so faded with washing that it was almost white in the sunlight. Georgiou threw him a glance as he passed our tabib, then called. "_Eh, Barba Dimitraki! Ela._" Come. Come and speak with the English professor. The old man stopped. He must have been about eighty; very shaky, unshaven, but not totally senile. Georgiou turned to me. "Before the war. He was the same as Hermes. He took the mail to Bourani." I pressed the old man to take a seat, ordered more _ouzo_ and another _mez