I am afraid my presence here will be essential for at least another week. However, I think it almost certain that I shall be back at Bourani by the following weekend. I hope you are enjoying the good weather.

Yours most sincerely,

MAURICE CONCHIS

I felt a bitter plunge of disappointment, of new and different anger with Conchis. The last sentence—when was the weather ever not good in the Aegean in summer?—stung especially. It was a deliberate taunt, a way of saying, I know you can enjoy nothing till I pretend to return. Or perhaps “good weather” was a hint that he knew about my meetings with Julie… and that bad weather was soon to come. I couldn’t believe that he would keep her from me for another week. He must know that I should rush over to Bourani whether he was there or not.

I decided that it was his way of saying, Your move. So I would move.

Soon after two o'clock on Saturday, I was on my way up into the hills. At three, I entered the clump of tamarisk. In the blazing heat—the weather remained windless, stagnant—it was difficult to believe that what I had seen had happened. But there were two or three recently broken twigs and branches; and where the “prisoner” had dived away there were several overturned stones, their bottoms stained ruddy from the island earth; and more broken sprays of tamarisk. A little higher I picked up several screwed-out cigarette ends. One was only half-smoked and had the beginnings of the same phrase: Leipzig da—

I stood on the bluff looking down over the other side of the island. A long way to the south I could see a big caïque of the kind that must have brought the “soldiers” to the island; there was nothing unusual in seeing it. Such caIques passed through the straits facing the school several times a week. But it reminded me how easy it was for Conchis’s cast to get on and off the island without my knowing. I stood some time on the bluff, because if anyone was watching I wanted them to know I was on my way. I had already told Demetriades I was going out for a long walk; and made sure that old Barba Vassili saw me going through the school gates, so that the information could be, if it usually was, wirelessed across.

I arrived at the gate and walked straight to the house. It lay with the cottage in the sun, closed and deserted.

I rattled the French window shutters hard, and tried the others. But none of them gave. All the time I kept looking around, not because I actually felt I was being watched so much as because I felt I ought to be feeling it. I must be meant to meet Lily again. They must be watching me; might even be inside the house, smiling in the darkness just behind the shutters, only four of five feet away. I went and gazed down at the private beach. It lay in the heat; the jetty, the pumphouse, the old balk, the shadowed mouth of the little cave; but no boat. Then to the Poseidon statue. Silent statue, silent trees. To the cliff, to where I had sat with Lily the Sunday before.

The lifeless sea was ruffled here and there by a lost zephyr, by a stippling shoal of sardines, dark ash-blue lines that snaked, broad then narrow, in slow motion across the shimmering mirageous surface, as if the water was breeding corruption.

I began to walk along towards the bay with the three cottages. The landscape to the east came into view, and then I came on the boundary wire of Bourani. As everywhere else it was rusty, a token barrier, not a real one; shortly beyond it the inland cliff fell sixty or seventy feet to lower ground. I bent through the wire and walked inland along the edge. There were one or two places where one could clamber down; but at the bottom there was an impenetrable jungle of scrub and thorn ivy. I came to where the fence turned west towards the gate. There were no telltale overturned stones, no obvious gaps in the wire. Following the cliff to where it leveled out, I eventually came on the seldom used path I had taken on my previous visit to the cottages.

Shortly afterwards I was walking through the small olive orchard that surrounded them. I watched the three whitewashed houses as I approached through the trees. Strange that there was not even a chicken or a donkey. Or a dog. There had been two or three dogs before. Two of the one-story cottages were adjoining. Both front doors were bolted, with bolt handles padlocked down. The third looked more openable, but it gave only an inch before coming up hard. There was a wooden bar inside. I went round the back. The door there was also padlocked. But on the last side I came to, over a hencoop, I found two of the shutters were loose. I peered in through the dirty windows. An old brass bed, a cube of folded bedclothes in the middle of it. A wall of photographs and ikons. Two canebottomed wooden chairs, a cot beneath the window, an old trunk. On the windowsill in front of me was a brown candle in a retsina bottle, a broken garland of immortelles, a rusty sprocket-wheel from some bit of machinery, and a month of dust. I closed the shutters.

The second cottage had another padlocked bolt on its back door; but though the last one had the bolt, it was simply tied down with a piece of fishing twine. I struck a match. Half a minute later I was standing inside the cottage, in another bedroom. Nothing in the darkened room looked in the least suspicious. I went through to the kitchen and living room in front. From it a door led straight through into the cottage next door; another kitchen; beyond it, another musty bedroom. I opened one or two drawers, a cupboard. The cottages were, beyond any possibility of faking, typical impoverished islanders’ homes. The one strange thing was that they were empty.

I came out and fastened the bolt handle with a bit of wire. Fifty yards or so away among the olives I saw a whitewashed privy. I went over to it. A spider’s web stretched across the hole in the ground. A collection of torn squares of yellowing Greek newspaper hung from a rusty nail.

Defeat.

I went to the cistern beside the double cottage, took off the wooden lid and let down an old bucket on a rope that stood beside the whitewashed neck. Cool air rushed up, like an imprisoned snake. I sat on the neck and swallowed great mouthfuls of the water. It had that living, stony freshness of cistern water, so incomparably sweeter than the neutral flavor of tap water.

A brilliant red and black jumping spider edged along the puteal towards me. I laid my hand in its path and it jumped onto it; holding it up close I could see its minute black eyes, like giglamps. It swiveled its massive square head from side to side in an arachnoidal parody of Conchis’s quizzing; and once again, as with the owl, I had an uncanny apprehension of a reality of witchcraft; Conchis’s haunting, brooding omnipresence. I flicked the spider onto the ground and looked up towards the distant central ridge. I was sure there were no buildings between it and where I was; that left only one alternative. Where they waited was somewhere in the pine forest; and why not? They might put up tents, a kind of ad hoc camp, as needed; so that I was looking, that afternoon, for nothing.

I caught myself thinking of Alison. I almost wished she was there, beside me, for companionship. To talk to, nothing more, like a man friend… though that was ingenuous. My mind slid to that empty bed in the shuttered cottage room. I had hardly given Alison a thought for days. Events had swept her into the past. But I remembered those moments on Parnassus: the sound of the waterfall, the sun on my back, her closed eyes, her neck stiffened back, her whole body arched to have me deeper—and that dream of two complementary, compliant women floated back through me. Both, both. But I stood up then and screwed my randiness out with my cigarette. All that was spilt milk. Or spilt semen.