The shape of her breasts, her stockiriged feet; a girl too intelligent to abuse her prettiness; and then too intelligent again not to admit it. "How did you get your scar?" She raised her left hand and looked at it. 'When I was ten. Playing hide-and-seek." Her eyes glanced from it at me. "I should have learnt my lesson. I was in a garden shed, and I knocked this long--what looked like a stick off a peg and put up my arm to shield myself." She mimed it. "It was a scythe. I'm lucky not to be one-handed." I took the wrist and kissed it. There was a silence between us; an infinitesimal pulling of the hand on my part, a resistance from hers. I let her have it back. She said, 'What's the time?" "Just before one." "I've got to leave you for an hour. I'll come back." "Why?" "The script." "Where are you going?" "To the place." "But Maurice has gone to Geneva." She shook her head. "He's waiting. I always have to tell him everything." "Have to?" She smiled, remembering that old dialogue. "Supposed to." She reached out her hands and I stood. "I'll be back soon after two." "Promise?" Her eyes said yes. "Did you like the poems I picked for you?" "That was you?" "Maurice's idea. My choice." "'Where love was innocent, being far from cities.'" She looked down, then up, and then down again. I still had hold of her hands. She murmured, "Please." "As long as you know how much I want to." She stared into my eyes for a moment, a look that was almost like the kiss she would not suffer, and that also managed to convey the reason she would not--a refusal to give anything until a fuller trust lay between us--and then almost roughly she pulled away, picked up her raffia bag, and was gone. She walked a few steps, then raising her skirt began to run; after a few yards, broke into a fast walk again. She went up the hill, towards the carob. I moved up the slope a little, to keep her in sight. Almost at once something in the heavy shade under the carob moved; as if a piece of the black trunk had detached itself. It was the Negro, Joe. He was in the same clothes I had seen the night before; in black from head to foot, the hideously sinister mask. He came lithely and stood in the sunlight at the edge of the carob, his arms folded, forbidding the way. I stared at him through the trees, then went back to where the rug was. I let a minute pass, jotting down the addresses she had shown me. The Negro had gone from the carob. But when I reached the statue I saw him standing beyond it among the trees, still watching to make sure that I returned to the house. It seemed clear that that was the real direction in which they had to go to reach their hiding place; and that it must be to the east, beyond the cottages. With a sarcastic wave I turned to the left over the gulley; and soon I was sitting down under the colonnade.
47
I had a quick, abstemious lunch, pouring the _retsina_ into a pot with a tired-looking pelargonium in it; went upstairs, put my things in the dufflebag and brought it down. The beady-eyed Modigliani stared; but I went to the curiosa cabinet and examined Lily's photo, held it to the light, and now I looked at it very closely again I thought I could see that it had been faked--some subtly smudged outlines, an overdarkening of the shadows. I came to the statue. Once again the wretched Negro stood in my path. This time he was on the other side of the gulley, maskless, and when I came to the edge of it, on the house side, he waved his hand forbiddingly backwards and forwards a couple of times. He was some twenty yards away, and for the first time I realised he had a small moustache; and that he was younger and less brutish than I had thought before. I stood staring sulkily at him, the dufflebag hanging by my side. He put up both hands, fingers outstretched. I gave him the coldest look I could, then shrugged and sat down against a tree, where I could watch him. He folded his arms again over his chest as if he really were a scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem; slapped the side of his face when a fly landed on it. Occasionally he