to understand why Conchis had told me I was psychic. It was a sort of softening-up process, in preparation for the no doubt even stranger scene that would take place in the masque that next night... the "experiment." The masque, the masque: it fascinated and irritated me, like an obscure poem--more than that, for it was not only obscure in itself, but doubly obscure in why it had even been "written." During the evening a new theory had occurred to me: that Conchis was trying to recreate some lost world of his own and for some reason I was cast as the _jeune premier_ in it, his younger self. I was well aware that during that day our relationship had changed. I was less a guest; and he was far less a host. A different kind of tension had arisen, mainly because there were things in him that I could not relate (and which he knew and intended I could not); things like the humanity in his playing of Bach, in certain elements in his autobiography, which were spoilt, undermined, by his perversity and malice elsewhere; his aggressive defence of his wealth, the "curious" books and objects that he put in my way--another parallel with de Deukans--and now the myth figures in the night, with all their abnormal undertones. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected the authenticity of that Belgian count--or at any rate of Conchis's account of him. He was no more than a stalking-horse for Conchis himself. De Deukans had a symbolic truth, perhaps, but far less than a literal one. Meanwhile, the masque was letting me down. Silence still reigned. I looked at my watch. Nearly half an hour had passed. I could not sleep. After some hesitation, I crept downstairs and out through the music room under the colonnade. There I made my way round the gravel along the route that Lily must have taken. I walked a little way into the trees in the direction the two had disappeared; then turned back and went down to the beach. The sea lapped slowly, dragging down a few small pebbles now and again, making them rattle drily, though there was no wind, no air. The cliffs and trees and the little boat lay drenched in starlight, in a million indecipherable thoughts from other worlds. The mysterious southern sea, luminous, waited; alive yet empty. I smoked a cigarette, and then climbed back to the fraught house and my bedroom.
31
I had my breakfast alone again. It was a day of wind, the sky as blue as ever, but the breeze tore boisterously off the sea, typhooning the fronds of the two palms that stood like sentinels in front of the house. Further south, off Cape Matapan, the _meltemi_, the tough summer gale from the Ionian islands, was blowing. I went down to the beach. The boat was not there. It confirmed my half-formed theory about the "visitors"--that they were on a yacht in one of the many deserted coves round the west and south sides of the island, or anchored among the group of deserted islets some five miles to the east. I swam out some way to see if Conchis was visible on the terrace. But it was empty. I lay on my back and floated for a while, feeling the cool chop of the waves over my sunwarmed face, thinking of Lily. Then I looked toward the beach. She was standing on it, a brilliant figure on the salt-grey shingle, with the ochre of the cliff and the green plants behind her. I began to swim towards the shore, as fast as I could. She moved a few steps along the stones and then stopped and watched me. At last I stood up, dripping, panting, and looked at her. She was about ten yards away, in an exquisitely pretty First World War summer dress. It was striped mussel-blue, white and pink, and she carried a fringed sunshade of the same cloth. She wore the sea wind like a jewel. It caught her dress, moulded it against her body. Every so often she had a little struggle with the sunshade. And all the time fingers of wind teased and skeined her long, silky-blond hair around her neck or across her mouth. She showed a little _moue_, half mocking herself, half mocking me as I stood knee-deep in the water. I don't know why silence descended on us, why we were