had been real, not supernatural; what was not real was the absence of any visible machinery--no secret rooms, nowhere to disappear--or of any motive. And this new dimension, this suggestion that the "apparitions" were mounted for Conchs as well as myself, was the most baffling of all. I sat in the darkness, half hoping that someone, I hoped "Lily," would appear and explain. I felt once again like a child, like a child who walks into a room and is aware that everyone there knows something about him that he does not. I also felt deceived by Conchis's sadness. _The dead live by love_; and they could evidently also live by impersonation. But I waited most for whoever had acted Lily. I had to know the owner of that young, intelligent, amused, dazzlingly pretty North European face. I wanted to know what she was doing on Phraxos, where she came from, the reality behind all the mystery. I waited nearly an hour, and nothing happened. No one came, I heard no sounds. In the end I crept back up to my room. But I had a poor night's sleep. When Maria knocked on the door at half-past five I woke as if I had a hangover. Yet I enjoyed the walk back to the school. I enjoyed the cool air, the delicate pink sky that turned primrose, then blue, the still-sleeping grey and incorporeal sea, the long slopes of silent pines. In a sense I reentered reality as I walked. The events of the weekend seemed to recede, to become locked away, as if I had dreamt them; and yet as I walked I had the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth; a knowledge of what it was like physically, moment by moment, to have been young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny. I could not describe it. It was not in the least a literary feeling, but an intensely mysterious present and concrete feeling of excitement, of being in a situation where anything still might happen. As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, changed from being the discovered to the still undiscovered.
26
There was a letter for me. The Sunday boat had brought it. _DEAR NICHOLAS,_ _I thought you were dead. I'm on my own again. More or less. I've been trying to decide whether I want to see you again--the point is, I could. I come through Athens now. I mean I haven't decided whether you aren't such a pig that it's crazy to get involved with you again. I can't forget you, even when I'm with much nicer boys than you'll ever be. Nicko, I'm a little bit drunk and I shall probably tear this up anyway._ _Well, I may send a telegram if I can work a few days off at Atheus. If I go on like this you won't want to meet me. You probably don't now as it is. When I got your letter I knew you'd just written it because you were bored out there. lsn't it awful I still have to get boozed to write to you. It's raining, I've got the fire on it's so bloody cold. It's dusk, it's grey it's so bloody miserable. The wallpaper's muave or is it mauve hell with green plums. You'd be sick all down it._ _A._ _Write care of Ann._ Her letter came at the wrongest time. I realised that I didn't want to share Bourani with anyone. After the first knowledge of the place, and still after the first meeting with Conchis, even as late as the Foulkes incident, I had wanted to talk about it--and to Alison. Now it seemed fortunate that I hadn't, just as it seemed, though still obscurely, fortunate that I hadn't lost my head in other ways when I wrote to her. One doesn't fall in love in five seconds; but five seconds can set one dreaming of falling in love, especially in a community as unrelievedly masculine as that of the Lord Byron School. The more I thought of that midnight face, the more intelligent and charming it became; and it seemed too to have had a breeding, a fastidiousness, a delicacy, that attracted me as fatally as the local fishermen's lamps attracted fish on moonless nights. I reminded myself that if Conchs was rich enough to own Modiglianis and Bonnards,