Lily glanced at him, then at me, as if it was for me to say something. I half expected to hear a voice calling in Norwegian from Moutsa, or to see some brilliantly contrived pillar of fire rise out of the trees. But there was a long silence: only the crickets cheeping.

“You never went back there?”

“Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.”

“But you must have been curious to know how it all ended?”

“Not at all. Perhaps one day, Nicholas, you will have an experience that means a great deal to you.” I could hear no irony in his voice, but it was implicit. “You will then realize what I mean when I say that some experiences so possess you that the one thing you cannot tolerate is the thought of their not being in some way forever present. Seidevarre is a place I do not want time to touch. So I am not interested in what it is now. Or what they are now. If they still are.”

“But you said you would write to Gustav?”

“So I did. He wrote to me. He wrote for two years with regularity, at least once a season. But he never referred to what interests you—except to say that the situation was unchanged. His letters were full of ornithological notes. They became very dull reading, because I no longer took any interest in the classifying aspects of natural history. Our letters became very infrequent. I think I had a Christmas card from him in 1926 or 1927. Since then, no sound. He is dead now. Henrik is dead, Ragnar is dead. Multa docet fames.”

It was Lily who translated. “Hunger teaches many things.”

“Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

“What happened to you when you got back to France?”

“Something you will not believe. I saw Henrik meet his pillar of fire at about midnight on August 17, 1922. The fire at Givray-le-Duc began at the same hour of the same night.”

“Heavens!”

“Good Lord.”

Lily and I spoke together, though her voice sounded far more convincingly amazed than mine.

I said, “You’re not suggesting…”

“I am suggesting nothing. There was no connection between the events. No connection is possible. Or rather, I am the connection, I am whatever meaning the coincidence has.”

There was an unusual shade of vanity in his voice, as if in fact he believed he had in some way precipitated both events and their common timing. I sensed that the coincidence was not literally true, but something he had invented, which held another, metaphorical, meaning: that the two episodes were linked in significance, that I was to use both to interpret him. Just as the story of de Deukans had thrown light on Conchis himself, this threw light on the hypnosis—that image he had used, “reality breaking through the thin net of science”… I had myself recalled something too similar from the hypnosis for it to be coincidence. Everywhere in the masque, these interrelationships, threads between circumstance.

He turned parentally to Lily. “My dear, I think it is your bedtime.” I looked at my watch. It was eleven twenty-five. Lily gave a little shrug, as if the matter of bedtime was unimportant.

She said, “Do you feel possessed by them? I know I feel some people possess me.”

She looked to me for confirmation, though the question was to Conchis; and the question seemed, oddly, to come out of her real self, reinforcing the impression I had had throughout: that the story of Seidevarre was as new to her as it was to me. It was as if she had become another guest, an older friend of the house than myself, but still a guest; and was trying, just as I was, to assess the meaning of the parable.

“All that is past possesses our present. Seidevarre possesses Bourani. Whatever happens here now, whatever governs what happens, is partly, no, is essentially, what happened thirty years ago in that Norwegian forest.”

He spoke to her then as he so often spoke to me; he was commencing another shift in our relationships, or the pretenses that ruled them. In some way we were now both his students, his disciples. I remembered that favorite Victorian picture of the bearded Elizabethan seaman pointing to sea and telling a story to two little goggleeyed boys. A look passed between Lily and myself, and I could have sworn that she was feeling slightly the same as I was—that any clandestine meeting between us now involved a fresh element of betrayal.

“Well. I must go.” She slipped the mask of formality back on. We all stood. “Maurice, that was so remarkable and so interesting.”

Conchis kissed her hand, and then she reached it to me, but with the wrist turned, and I shook it. One shadow of conspiracy in her eyes, one minute pressure of her fingers, told me that she was still, in spite of the higher price, prepared to betray. She turned to go; then stopped.

“Oh, I am sorry. I did not replace your matches.”

“That’s all right. Please.”

Conchis and I were silent. I heard footsteps going rapidly across the gravel towards the sea, and I strained to glimpse her, but without success. I thought, if they put some trick on me now, it will be a proof that she is playing for Conchis and against me; a proof beyond doubt. I smiled across the table at his shadowed face; the pupils of his eyes seemed black in their clear whites; a mask that watched me, watched me.

“No illustrations to the text tonight?”

“Does it need illustrations?”

“No. You told it… very well.”

He shrugged dismissively; then waved his arm briefly round: at home, at trees, at sea.

“This is the illustration. Things as they are. In my small domaine.”

“The masque.”

“The masque is a metaphor. I told you that.” His unshifting eyes read mine. “You are never quite sure whether you are my guest or victim. You are neither. You are something else.”

I looked down under his eyes, then up. “What?”

“If you must speculate, explore other possibilities. But remember. What it is, has no name.”

He stood up, as if he had really only been waiting for a certain time, I presumed the time for Lily to “disappear,” to pass.

As I stood as well I said, “Thank you. Once again. For possessing me.

He grinned then, his monkey grin, and took my elbow as we walked towards the door of his room. The Bonnards glowed gently from the inner wall. On the landing outside, I came to a decision.

“I think I’ll go for a stroll, Mr. Conchis. I don’t feel very sleepy. Just down to Moutsa.”

I knew he might say that he would come with me and so make it impossible to be at the statue at midnight; but it was a countertrap for him, an insurance for me. If he let me go out alone, then it would be that he wanted me to walk into the trap, if there was a trap; and if he was genuinely innocent of the assignation, I could still—if discovered and then accused—pretend that I had assumed he was not.

“As you wish.”

He put out his hand in his foreign way and clasped mine with unusual warmth, and watched me for a moment as I went downstairs. But before I had reached the bottom I heard his door close. He might be out on the terrace listening, so I crunched noisily over the gravel to the track out of Bourani. But at the gate instead of turning down to Moutsa I went on up the hill for fifty yards or so and sat down against a tree trunk, from where I could watch the entrance and the track. It was a dark night, no moon, but the stars diffused a very faint luminescence over everything, a light like the softest sound, touch of fur on ebony.

My heart was beating faster than it should. It was partly at the thought of meeting Lily, partly at something far more mysterious, the sense that I was now deep in the strangest maze in Europe. I remembered the feeling I had had one morning walking back to the school; of being Odysseus or Theseus. Now I was Theseus in the maze; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne waited; and the Minotaur.