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By Root 10540 0

them. Beside, the Bonnards, the fianc� the book of breasts, all discounted it. Something much more bizarre was afoot. _Are you elect_... _Even here I am not alone_... _I am psychic_... it all pointed to spiritualism, to table tapping. Perhaps the lady of the glove was a medium of some kind. Certainly Conchis hadn't got the petty-bourgeois gentility and the woolly vocabulary I associated with s�ce holders; but he was equally certainly not a normal man. I lit a cigarette, and after a while I smiled. In that small bare room, it seemed not to matter, even if I was a shade scared. The truth was that I was full of a sort of green stir. Conchis was no more than the chance agent, the event that had come at the right time; just as in the old days, I might, after a celibate term at Oxford, have met a girl and begun an affaire with her; I had begun something exciting with him. It seemed linked in a way with my wanting to see Alison again. I wanted to live again. The house was as quiet as death, as the inside of a skull; but the year was 1953, I was an atheist and an absolute nonbeliever in spiritualism, ghosts and all that mumbo-jumbo. I lay there waiting for the half-hour to pass; and the silence of the house was still, that day, much more a silence of peace than one of fear.

17

When I went downstairs, the music room was lamplit but empty. There was a tray on the table in front of the stove with a bottle of _ouzo_, a jug of water, glasses and a bowl of fat blue-black Amphissa olives. I poured out some _ouzo_ and added enough water to make it go milkily opaque. Then, glass in hand, I began a tour of the bookshelves. The books were methodically arranged. There were two entire sections of medical works, mostly in French, and many--they hardly seemed to go with spiritualism--on psychiatry, and another two of scientific books of all kinds; several shelves of philosophical works, and also a fair number of botanical and ornithological books, mostly in English and German; but the great majority of all the rest were autobiographies and biographies. There must have been thousands of them. They appeared to have been collected without any method: Wordsworth, Mae West, Saint-Simon, geniuses, criminals, saints, nonentities. The collection had the eclectic impersonality of a public library. Behind the harpsichord and under the window there was a low glass cabinet which contained two or three classical pieces. There was a rhyton in the form of a human head, a black-figure kylix on one side, a small red-figure amphora on the other. On top of the cabinet were also three objects: a photo, an eighteenth-century clock and a white-enamelled snuffbox. I went behind the music stool to look at the Greek pottery. The painting on the flat inner bowl of the kylix gave me a shock. It involved two satyrs and a woman and was very obscene indeed. Nor were the paintings on the amphora of a kind any museum would dare put on display. Then I looked closer at the clock. It was mounted in ormolu with an enamelled face. In the middle was a rosy little naked cupid; the shaft of the one short hand came through his loins, and the rounded tip at its end made it very clear what it was meant to be. There were no hours marked round the dial, and the whole of the right-hand half was blacked out, with the word _Sleep_ in white upon it. On the other half, enamelled in white, were written in neat black script the following faded but still legible words: at six, _Exhaustion_; at eight, _Enchantment_; at ten, _Erection_; at twelve, _Ecstasy_. The cupid smiled; the clock was not going and his manhood hung permanently askew at eight. I opened the innocent white snuffbox. Beneath the lid was enacted, in Boucheresque eighteenth-century terms, exactly the same scene as some ancient Greek had painted in the kylix two thousand years before. It was between these two _objets_ that Conchis had chosen, whether with perversion, with humour, or with simple bad taste, I couldn't decide, to place another photo of the Edwardian girl, his dead fianc� She looked out of the oval silver frame with alert,