my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back. The edge of the seat cut into my legs and I fell half across it. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him trotting away, carrying his mask, through the trees to the north. I opened my mouth to shout something at him, then said it in a whisper. I kept wiping my face with my handkerchief, but it was filthy, defiled. I went back to the gate and ran down the path to Moutsa. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea and rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches. _Contracts_... _actresses_... I was now asked to believe that they were hired to play their roles; not only that, but so in the dark about Conchis's intentions that they didn't even know whether I was not deceiving them exactly as they were deceiving me; trying to vamp Lily as Lily vamped me. But when I thought back to various inexplicable things Lily had said, to inconsistent looks, tentative looks, those out-of-role looks, and other doubtfulnesses beyond any she might have been acting, I began to wonder, to waver... I had long suspected that there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into _his_ puppets... but how could they be his puppets when they knew so much about him? Or did they know so much about him? And once again, did it matter? As I swam out there, with the dark slope of Bourani across the quiet water to the east, I could feel in me a complex and compound excitement, in which Lily was the strongest but not the only element. I thought, I am Theseus in the maze; let it all come, even the black minotaur, so long as it comes; so long as I may reach the centre. I came ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house.
46
I woke feeling even more slugged, more beaten-steak--the heat does it in Greece--than usual. It was ten o'clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs. There was a note waiting for me on top of the muslin-mounded breakfast table under the colonnade. _DEAR NICHOLAS,_ _Alas, very urgent financial business connected with the "scare" of a fortnight ago obliges me to go at once to Geneva. I look forward to seeing you next Saturday, if you can dispose of your academic duties. Maria is leaving with me. She is taking advantage of my absence to visit relatives in Santorini. Hermes is returning to lock up the house this afternoon. Please enjoy your lunch, and accept my apologies for this unpardonable breach of hospitality._ _MAURICE CONCHIS_ I looked under the muslin. There was my breakfast. The spirit stove to heat up the coffee. A carafe of water, another of _retsina_; and under a second muslin an ample cold lunch. My first thought was that he had funked meeting me after the incident with his Negro thug; my second, that at least I could make some detective use of the occasion. I carried the breakfast things round to Maria's cottage, as if to put them out of harm's way on her table, but the door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis's door, then tried it. It was also locked. Second failure. Then I went round all the groundfloor rooms in the house, and pulled up all the carpets to see if there were trapdoors to mysterious cellars. There were not. Ten minutes later I gave up; I knew I was not going to find any clue to the girls' true identity, and that was all that interested me. I went down to the private beach--the boat was gone--and swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high,