“Bah. One or two. The old ones. Why not. He has millions.” He made the corruption gesture, meaning conscience money.

Suddenly the old man said to me, “Mia phora… once there was a big pane yiri with many lights and music and fireworks. Many fireworks and many guests.”

I had an absurd vision of a garden party; hundreds of elegant women, and men in morning dress.

“When was that?”

“Three, five years before the war.”

“Why was this celebration?”

But he didn’t know.

“Were you there?”

“I was with my son. We were fishing. We saw it up in Bourani. Many lights, many voices. Kai ta pyrotechnimata.” And the fireworks.

Georgiou said, “Yah. You were drunk, Barba.”

“No. I was not drunk.”

Try as I did, I could get nothing more out of the old man. I was on lunch-and-afternoon duty; so in the end I shook them both by the hand, paid the small bill, tipped Georgiou heavily, and walked back to the school.

One thing was clear. There had been Leverrier, Mitford and myself; but then others whose names I did not yet know back in the thirties; a long line. It gave me the courage to face whatever new was being prepared in that now uncurtained theatre over on the far side.

I returned to the village that evening, and climbed up the narrow cobbled streets that led to the back of the village; past warrens of whitewashed walls, peasant interiors, tiny squares shaded by almond trees. Great magenta sprays of bougainvillea flamed in the sun or glowed in the pale evening shadows. It was a sort of kasbah area of the village, a very pretty kasbah, with its cross glimpses of the plunibago-blue six-o'clock sea below, and the gold-green pinecovered hills above. People sitting outside their cottages greeted me, and I collected the inevitable small Pied Piper chain of children, who subsided into giggles if I looked at them and waved them away. When I came to the church I went in. I wanted to justify my presence in the quarter. It was densely gloomy, with a miasma of incense over everything; a row of ikons, somber silhouettes set in smoky gold, stared down at me, as if they knew what an alien I was in their cryptlike Byzantine world.

After five minutes I came out. The children had mercifully disappeared, and I could take the alley to the right of the church. On one side there were the round cylinders of the church apses, on the other a wall eight or nine feet high. The alley turned and the wall continued. But halfway along it there was an arched gateway: a keystone with the date 1823 Ofl it, and above that a place where there had once been a coat of arms. I guessed that the house inside had been built by one of the pirate “admirals” of the War of Independence. There was a narrow door let into the right hand of the two gate doors, with a slit for letters. Above it, painted white on black on an old bit of sheet metal, was the name Hermes Ambelas. To the left the ground fell away behind the church. There was no way of looking over the wall from that side. I went to the small door and pushed it gently to see if it gave. But it was locked. The islanders were notoriously honest, thieves unknown; and I could not remember having seen an outer gate locked like that anywhere else on Phraxos.

I went on. The rocky lane dipped abruptly down between two cottages. The roof of the one on the right was below the wall of the house. At the bottom a cross alley took me back and around to the other side. There the ground fell away even more precipitously and I found myself looking up ten feet of vertical rock even before the wall foundation started. The house and its garden walls on this side continued the rockface, and I could see that in fact it was not a very big house, though still by village standards much too grandiose for a donkey driver.

Two ground-floor windows, three upstairs, all shuttered. They were still in the last sunlight and must have given a fine view west over the village and the straits to the Argolian mainland. Was it a view Julie knew well? I felt like Blondel beneath Richard Coeur de Lion’s window, but not even able to pass messages by song. Down in a small square below I could see two or three women interestedly watching me. I waved, strolled on, as if my look upwards had been idle curiosity. I came to yet another cross alley, and climbed up it to my starting point outside Agios Elias. The house was impregnable to passing eyes.

Later, down in front of the Hotel Philadelphia, I looked back. I could see over all the intervening roofs the church and the house to the right of it, the five windows staring out.

They seemed defiant, but blind.

Monday was a day of academic chores, catching up on the Sisyphean piles of marking that seemed always to roll down on my desk; finalizing—miserable word for a miserable prospect—the end-of-term examination papers; and trying all the time not to think about Julie.

I knew it was useless asking Demetriades to help me find out the names of the English masters at the school before the war. If he knew them he wouldn’t tell them; and very probably he genuinely did not know them. I went to the school bursar, but this time he could not help me; all the bursary records had gone with the wind of 1940. On Tuesday I tried the master who ran the school library. He went at once to a shelf and pulled down a bound volume of Founder’s Day programs—one for each year before the war. These programs were lavishly got up to impress visiting parents and in the back contained class lists—as well as a list of “professors.” In ten minutes I had the names of the six who had taught between 1930 and 1939. But I was still stuck for all their addresses.

The week ground slowly past. Each lunchtime I watched the village postman come in with letters and give them to the duty prefect, who then made a slow, slow tour of the tables. None came for me. I expected no mercy from Conchis; but I found it hard to forgive Julie.

The first and most obvious possibility was that she had taken her sister’s advice and flown back to England; in which case I couldn’t believe she would not have written at once—at least to tell me. The second was that she had had to accept the cancellation of the weekend; but she could still have written to console me, to explain why. The third was that she was being held prisoner, or at any rate incommunicado to the extent that she could not post a letter to me. I couldn’t really believe that, though I had angry moments when I thought of going to the police, or of hiring a caïque and going to Nauplia myself.

The days dragged on, redeemed only by one little piece of information that fell into my hands by chance. Looking through the books in the English bay in the library for a suitable “unseen” for the exams, I took down a Conrad. There was a name on the flyleaf: D. P. R. Nevinson. I knew he had been at the school before the war. Underneath was written Balliol College, 1930. I started looking through the other books. Nevinson had left a good number; but there was no other address besides Balliol. The name W. A. Hughes, another prewar master’s, appeared on two poetry volume flyleafs, without address.

I left lunch early on the Thursday, asking a boy to bring me any letters that might be distributed later. I had come not to expect any. But about ten minutes afterwards, when I was already in pajamas for the siesta, the boy knocked on my door. Two letters. One from London, a typewritten address, some educational publisher’s catalogue. But the other…

A Greek stamp. Indecipherable postmark. Neat italic handwriting. In English.

Siphnos, Monday

MY DEAR SWEET NICHOLAS,