The Magus - John Fowles [246]
"A month ago. In London. I thought everyone knew. She took an overd --" I put the receiver down. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It was a long time before I found the will to go down and start drinking. The next morning I went to the British Council. I told the man who looked after me that I had resigned for "personal reasons," but I managed to suggest, without breaking my half-promise to Mavromichalis, that the Council had no business sending people to such isolated posts. He jumped quickly towards the wrong conclusions. I said, "I didn't chase the boys. That's not it." "My dear fellow, heaven forbid, I didn't meant that." He offered me a cigarette in dismay. We talked vaguely about isolation, and the Aegean, and the absolute hell of having to teach the Embassy that the Council was not just another chancellery annex. I asked him casually at the end if he had heard of someone called Conchis. He hadn't. "Who is he?" "Oh just a man I met on the island. Seemed to have it in for the English." "It's becoming the new national hobby. Playing us off against the Yanks." He closed the file smartly. "Well thanks awfully, Urfe. Most useful chat. Only sorry it's turned out like this. But don't worry. We'll bear everything you've said very much in mind." On the way to the door he must have felt even sorrier for me, because he invited me to dinner that evening. But I was no sooner crossing the Kolonaki square outside the Council than I wondered why I had bothered. The stiflingly English atmosphere of the place had never seemed more alien; and yet to my horror I had detected myself trying to fit in acceptably, to conform, to get their approval. What had they said in the trial? _He seeks situations in which he knows he will be forced to rebel_. I refused to be the victim of a repetition compulsion; but if I refused that, I had to find courage to refuse all my social past, all my background. I had not only to be ready to empty dustbins rather than teach, but to empty them rather than ever have to live and work with the middle-class English again. The people in the Council were the total foreigners; and the anonymous Greeks around me in the streets the familiar compatriots. I had, when I checked in at the Grande Bretagne, asked whether there had been two English twins, fair-haired, early twenties... recently staying at the hotel. But the reception clerk was sure there had not; I hadn't expected there to be, and I didn't insist. When I left the British Council, I went to the Ministry of the Interior. On the pretext that I was writing a travel book, I got to the department where the war crimes records were filed; and within fifteen minutes I had in my hands a copy of the report the real Anton had written. I sat down and read it; it was all, in every detail, as Conchis had said. I asked the official who had helped me if Conchis was still alive. He flicked through the file from which he had taken the report. There was nothing there except the address on Phraxos. He did not know. He had never heard of Conchis, he was new in this department. I went back in the sweltering midday heat to the hotel. The reception clerk turned to give me my key; and with it came a letter. It had my name only, and was marked Urgent. I tore open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with a number and a name. _184 Syngrou_. "Who brought this?" "A boy. A messenger." "Where from?" He opened his hands. He did not know. I knew where Syngrou was: a wide boulevard that ran from Athens down to the Piraeus. I went straight out and jumped into a taxi. We swung past the three columns of the temple of Olympic Zeus and down towards the Piraeus, and in a minute the taxi drew up outside a house standing back in a fair-sized garden. A chipped enamel number announced that it was No. 184. The garden was thoroughly disreputable, the windows boarded up. A lottery-ticket seller sitting on a chair under a pepper tree nearby asked what I wanted, but I took no notice of him. I walked to the front door, then round the back. The house was a shell. There had been a fire, evidently