“Can you command people’s emotions so easily?”

He smiled. “When you know the plot.”

I felt myself getting irritated then. That was probably his intention. A little bat’s wing of fear flickered through my mind. There were so many things he could do at Bourani, so many surprises he could spring besides whatever Julie believed was to come.

He reached out his hand for me to come round the table. “Nicholas. Go back to England and make it up with this girl you spoke of. Marry her and have a family and learn to be what you really are.” I had my eyes on the ground. I wanted to shout at him that Alison was dead; and largely because he had woven Julie’s life through mine. I trembled on the brink of telling him I wanted no more deceptions, no more comedy, rose ou noir. Perhaps I really wanted to squeeze some sympathy out of that dry heart.

“Is that how you learn what you are? Marrying and having a family?”

“Why not?”

“A steady job and a house in the suburbs?”

“Excellent.”

“I’d rather die.”

He gave a shrug of regret, but as if he didn’t really care.

“Come. You have never heard me play my clavichord.”

I followed him indoors and upstairs. He went to the little table and lifted the lid revealing the keyboard underneath. I sat by his closed desk, watching the Bonnards. He began to play.

Those Bonnards, their eternal outpouring of a golden happiness, haunted me; they were like windows on a world I had tried to reach all my life, and failed; they had reminded me of Alison, or rather of the best of my relationship with Alison, before; and now they bred a kind of Watteau-like melancholy in me, the forevergoneness of pictures like L'Embarcation pour Cythere. As if Bonnard had captured a reality so real that it could not exist; or only as a dream, a looking back and seeing where the way was lost and if it had not been lost but it had been lost… then I thought of Julie. One day I should see her so, naked at a sunlit window; my naked wife.

I turned to glance at her photo by the window, and realized that it wasn’t there; or anywhere else in the room. It hadn’t just been moved, but removed.

The small muted notes of the clavichord barely filled the room. It was clipped, fluttering, with whimpering vibratos, remotely plangent. He played a series of little Elizabethan almans and voltas. Then a Bach-like gigue. Finally, a small set of variations; each variation ended in the same chanting silvery chorus. He came to an end and looked round at me.

“I liked that last one.”

Without a word he played the chorus again.

“Byrd. But the tune is much older. It is called Rosasolis. The English archers sang it at Agincourt.” He shut the clavichord, and turned with a smile that was of dismissal; once again manipulating my exits and entries.

“Nicholas, I have much to attend to. I must ask you to leave me in peace for an hour or so.”

I stood up. “No work?”

“You wish to work?”

“No.”

“Then we will meet for ouzo.”

I thought that perhaps he wanted me to go out of doors, that Julie would be waiting there. So I went down. In the music room I saw that the other photo of Lily had also disappeared.

I strolled idly all round the domaine, in the windless air; I waited in all the likely places; I kept on turning, looking backwards, sideways, listening. But the landscape seemed dead. Nothing and no one appeared. The theatre was empty; and, like all empty theatres, it became in the end frightening.

We silently toasted each other, across the lamplit table with the ouzo and the olives, under the colonnade. Apparently we were to have dinner there that night, for the other table, laid for two, had been placed at the western end of the colonnade, looking out over the trees. I stood beside Conchis at the front steps. A breath of dead air washed over us.

“I hoped you would tell me more about previous years here.”

He smiled. “In the middle of a performance?”

“I thought this was a sort of interval.”

“There are no intervals here, Nicholas.” He took my arm. “After dinner I am going to tell you the story of the execution. And now I am going to tell you what happened when I returned to France. After Seidevarre. If you are interested?”

“Of course.”

He gestured with his glass. “Let us stroll as far as the seat. It will be cooler.” We went down the steps and across the gravel into the trees. As we walked, he talked. “It took me many months to learn how much I had changed. As one learns of a distant earthquake by the imperceptible shakings of a needle on a seismograph. I gradually came to understand that I was really by nature a very different person from what I had previously imagined. I had, you remember, many new notes on bird sounds to collate and work through. But I found that I had no real interest in the subject after all. That in fact I preferred the mystery of birds’ voices to any scientific explanation of them. Something analogous happened in every department of my life. When I looked back I saw that there had always been a discord in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued the latter, worshipped the latter, as a doctor, and as a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and classify it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove all the air from atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum. All this change in me came just when I unexpectedly found myself presented with the money and the leisure to do what I wanted in life. At that time I interpreted that last question of de Deukans as a warning. I was to look for the water, not the wave. So.”

We came to the seat overlooking the dark sea.

“And you came to Greece?”

“I did not come to Greece to… look for water. I came because my mother was dying of cancer. Like myself, she had always resisted any idea of coming here. Or rather, I learnt my unwillingness to face Greece from her. But when she knew she was dying she suddenly wanted to see it one last time. So we took a boat from Marseilles. This was in 1928. I shall never forget seeing her come on deck one morning. In brilliant sunshine. And finding herself in the Gulf of Corinth, which we had entered during the night. She stood gripping the rail. Facing the mountains of Achaia with the tears streaming down her face. Lacerated with joy. I could not feel it then. But later I did. By the end of the holiday I knew that I too had gained a homeland. Perhaps I should say a motherland. My mother died four months after we returned to Paris.”

“And you came here.”

“I came here. I told you why. But it also reminded me very much of Norway. Like Henrik Nygaard, like de Deukans, in their different ways, I have always craved for territory. I use the word in the technical ornithological sense. A fixed domaine on which no other of my species may trespass.” He stared to sea. “I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover—that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.”

“When did you start your theatre here?”

“Friends used to come. They were bored. Very often they bored me, because an amusing person in Paris can become insufferable on an Aegean island. We had a little fixed theatre, a stage. Where the Priapus is now. We began to write our own plays.” He turned. “Et voilà.”