The Magus - John Fowles [28]
his name?" His name was Hermes. I had become far too used to hearing not conspicuously brilliant boys called Socrates and Aristotle, and to addressing the ill-favoured old woman who did my room out as Aphrodite, to smile. The donkey driver sat down and rather grudgingly accepted a small tumbler of _retsina_. He fingered his _koumbologi_, his amber patience beads. He had a bad eye, fixed, with a sinister pallor. From him M�, who was much more interested in eating his lobster, extracted a little information. What did Mr. Conchis do? He lived alone--yes, alone--with a housekeeper, and he cultivated his garden, quite literally, it seemed. He read. He had many books. He had a piano. He spoke many languages. The _agoyatis_ did not know which--all, he thought. Where did he go in winter? Sometimes he went to Athens, and to other countries. Which? The man did not know. He knew nothing about Mitford visiting Bourani. No one ever visited. "Ask him if he thinks I might visit Mr. Conchis." No; it was impossible. Our curiosity was perfectly natural, in Greece--it was his reserve that was strange. He might have been picked for his sullenness. He stood up to go. "Are you sure he hasn't got a harem of pretty girls hidden there?" said M�. The _agoyatis_ raised his blue chin and eyebrows in a silent no, then turned contemptuously away. "What a villager!" Having muttered the worst insult in the Greek language at his back, M� touched my wrist moistly. "My dear fellow, did I ever tell you about the way two men and two ladies I once met on Mykonos made love?" "Yes. But never mind." I felt oddly disappointed. And it was not only because it was the third time I had heard precisely how that acrobatic quartet achieved congress. Back at the school I picked up, during the rest of the week, a little more. Only two of the masters had been at the school before the war. They had both met Conchis once or twice then, but not since the school had restarted in 1949. One said he was a retired musician. The other had found him a very cynical man, an atheist. But they both agreed that Conchis was a man who cherished his privacy. In the war the Germans had forced him to live in the village. They had one day captured some _andarte_--resistance fighters--from the mainland and ordered him to execute them. He had refused and had been put before a firing squad with a number of the villagers. But by a miracle he had not been killed outright, and was saved. This was evidently the story Sarantopoulos had told us. In the opinion of many of the villagers, and naturally of all those who'd had relatives massacred in the German reprisal, he should have done what they ordered. But that was all past. He had been wrong, but to the honour of Greece. However, he had never set foot in the village again. Then I discovered something small, but anomalous. I asked several people besides Demetriades, who had been at the school only a year, whether Leverrier, Mitford's predecessor, or Mitford himself had ever spoken about meeting Conchis. The answer was always no--understandably enough, it seemed, in Leverrier's case, because he was very reserved, "too serious" as one master put it, tapping his head. It so happened that the last person I asked, over coffee in his room, was the biology master. Karazoglou said in his aromatic broken French that he was sure Leverrier had never been there, as he would have told him. He'd known Leverrier rather better than the other masters; they had shared a common interest in botany. He rummaged about in a chest of drawers, and then produced a box of sheets of paper with dried flowers that Leverrier had collected and mounted. There were lengthy notes in an admirably clear handwriting and a highly technical vocabulary, and here and there professional-looking sketches in India ink and watercolour. As I sorted uninterestedly through the box I dropped one of the pages of dried flowers, to which was attached a sheet of paper with additional notes. This sheet slipped from the clip that was holding it. On the back was the beginning of a letter, which had been crossed