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this place."
I was at a loss. Did she know what she said? "Frankly then, I romantically hoped there might
be."
"Unromantically, there is not. No shrine. No temple. My father bought the faun in a shop, in
Athens. A tourist shop. He had vulgar tastes, but he knew it, and that has a certain charm,
does it not?"
"Yes, I suppose it does. Your father "
She cut me short again.
"The woods cover all the island. Except for an area behind the house. We grow things
there, and we keep goats and chickens. We are very domesticated. Very sufficient for our-
selves. There is a spring of fresh water, but no votary. No . genius loci. I am so sony to dash
your dreams to pieces." 'r '. It suggested itself to me, from her tone of amusement, from little
inflections in her shoulders, that she might be enjoying this, enjoying, if you like, putting me
down as an idiot. Presumably visitors were rare. Perhaps it was even fun for her to talk to a
man, youngish and unknown, though admittedly never likely to qualify for anyone's centrefold.
"But you have no objections to my being here," I pur- sued. "And your father?"
"My parents are dead," she informed me. "When I em- ployed the plural, I referred to him,"
she gestured, a broad sweep of her hand, to the monster on the lawn, "arid a woman who
attends to the house. My servants, my unpaid servants. I have no money anymore. Do you
see this dress? It is my mother's dress. How lucky I am the same fitting as my mother, do
you not think?"
THE GORGON 101
"Yes. . . ."
I was put in mind, suddenly, of myself as an ambassador at the court of some notorious
female potentate, Cleopatra, say, or Catherine de Medici.
"You are very polite," she said, as if telepathically privy to my fantasies.
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"I have every reason to be."
"What reason?"
"I'm trepassing. You treat me like a guest."
"And how," she said, vainglorious all at once, "do you rate my English?"
"It's wonderful."
"I speak eleven languages fluently," she said, with off- handed boastfulness- "Three more I
can read very well."
I liked her. This display, touching and magnificent at once, her angular theatrical gesturings,
which now came more and more often, her hair, her flat-waisted figure in its 1940's dress,
her large, well-made hands, and her challenging me with the mask, saying nothing to explain
it, all this hypno- tised me.
I said something to express admiration, and she barked again, throwing back her blonde
head and irresistibly, though only for a moment, conjuring Garbo's Queen Christina.
Then she walked down the steps, straight to me, demon- strating something else I had
deduced, that she was only about an inch shorter than I.
"I," she said, "will show you the island. Come."
She showed me the island. Unsurprisingly, it was small. To go directly round it would maybe
have taken less than thirty minutes. But we lingered, over a particular tree, a view, and once
we sat down on the ground near the gushing milk-white spring. The basin under the spring,
she informed me, had been added in 1910. A little bronze nymph presided over the spot,
dating from me same year, which you could tell in any case from the way her classical
costume and her filletted hair had been adapted to the fashions of hobble skirt and
Edwardian coiffeur. Each age imposes its own overlay on the past.
102 Tanith Lee
Behind the house was a scatter of the meagre white dwell- ings that make up such places
as the village on Daphaeu, now plainly unoccupied and put to other uses. Sheltered from the
sun by a colossal cypress, six goats played about in the grass. Chickens, and an
assortment of other fowl, strutted up and down, while a pig, or pigs, grunted somewhere out
of sight. Things grew in strips and patches, and fruit trees and vines ended the miniature
plantation before the woods resumed. Self-sufficiency of a tolerable kind, I suppose. But
there seemed, from what she said, no contact maintained with any other area, as if the world
did not exist. Postulate that a blight, or harsh weather, intervened, what then? And me old
satyr, how long would he last to tend the plots? He looked two hundred now. which on the
islands probably meant sixty. 1 did not ask her what contingency plans she had for these
emergencies and inevitabilities- What good, after all, are most plans? We could be invaded
from Andromeda tomor- row, and what help for us all then? Either it is in your nature to
survive, somehow, anyhow, or it is not.
She had well and truly hooked me. of course. If I had met her in Athens, some sun-baked
afternoon, I would have felt decidedly out of my depth, taken her for cocktails, and foundered
before we had even reached the dinner hour. But here. in this pulsing green bubble of light
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and leaves straight out of one's most irrational visions of the glades of Arcadia,
conversation, however erratic, communication, however ec- centric, was happening. The
most inexplicable thing of all was that the mask had ceased, almost immediately, to bother
me. 1 cannot, as I look back, properly account for this, for to spend a morning, a noon. an
afternoon, allowing yourself to become fundamentally engaged by a woman whose face you [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]