Snarling with rage, I remembered Conchis's fairy-godfather smiles. The great farewell. Our revels now are ended. He must have hugged himself with joy when I called his bluff and produced my letter. I saw why he had taunted me. He _wanted_ me to tell him I loved Julie. His plan was always to be ruined. Her false departure was always to be cancelled. And Julie? I was flooded with old doubts about her. But had she tried to delay me at the bottom of the ladder? No. And she could easily have dropped something. Had she enticed me into the place? No, I had brought the subject up myself, both times. He had tricked her as well. Perhaps he was jealous of us--not only sexually jealous, but jealous of us as rebellious puppets. I thought of how near I had been to having her. To teaching her that there were things in which I was skilled, wise, both passionate and patient. I swore aloud with frustrated rage and went up the ladder again to bang on the lid with one of the counterweights. But it was a waste of time. So I sat at the foot of the ladder and seethed, trying to plumb Conchis's duplicities; to read his palimpsest. His "theatre without an audience" made no sense, it couldn't be the explanation. The one thing all actors and actresses craved was an audience. Perhaps what he was doing sprang from some theory about the theatre--he had said it himself: _The masque is only a metaphor_. A strange and incomprehensible new philosophy? Metaphorism? Perhaps he saw himself as a professor in an impossible faculty of ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. I thought and thought, and thought again, and arrived at nothing. Half an hour and five attempts later the lid smoothly gave. I ran up into the trees to where I could see inland, but the landscape was empty. Behind the lid stood my dufflebag, where I had left it, untouched. The house too was as we had left it, shuttered blind. And then, standing under the colonnade, I recalled that first plan: how Julie would have been waiting in my room while I raged as I was raging then over at Bourani. I began to suspect her again, but only of having played this last trick, this doubly false _coda_, for Conchis. I started walking fast down the track to the gate. And there, just as on that very first visit, I found that I had been left a clue.
57
Or rather, two clues. They were hanging from the branch of a pine tree near the gate down into the centre of the path, some six feet from the ground, swinging a little in the wind, innocent and idle, touched by sunlight. One was a doll. The other was a human skull. The skull hung from a black cord, which passed through a neat hole drilled in the top, and the doll from a white one. Its neck was in a noose. It was hanging in both senses. About eighteen inches high, clumsily carved in wood and painted black, with a smiling mouth and eyes na�ly whitened in. Around its ankles were its only "clothes"--two wisps of rag, one ivory, the other indigo. I recognised them as the fabrics "Lily" had worn the second weekend. The doll was her, and said that she was evil, she was black, under the white she so often wore. I twisted the skull and made it spin. Shadows haunted the sockets, the mouth grinned grimly. Alas, poor Yorick. Disembowelled corpses? Or Frazer... _The Golden Bough_? I tried to remember. What was it? Hanging dolls in sacred woods. I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved, the dry trees lay in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical. In the light, in the alley between the trees. And everywhere, a darkness beneath. _What it is, has no name_. The skull and his wife swayed in a rift of the wind from the sea. Leaving them there, in their mysterious communion, I walked fast away. Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians. All I knew was that I ached for Julie, I was mad for her, the world that day had no