The Magus - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  Lykeri, the highest peak, was too steep to be climbed quickly. We had to scramble up, using our hands, resting frequently. Near the top we came on beds of violets in bloom, huge purple flowers that had a delicate scent; and then at last, hand in hand, we struggled up the last few yards and stood on the little platform with its crowning cairn. Alison said, "Oh my God, oh my God."

  On the far side a huge chasm plunged down two thousand feet of shadowy air. The westering sun was still just above the horizon, but the clouds had vanished. The sky was a pale, absolutely dustless, absolutely pure, azure. There were no other mountains near to crowd the distance out. We seemed to stand immeasurably high, where land and substance drew up to a narrow zenith, remote from all towns, all society, all drought and defect. Purged.

  Below, for a hundred miles in each direction, there were other mountains, valleys, plains, islands, seas; Attica, Boeotia, Argolis, Achaia, Locris, Aetolia, all the old heart of Greece. The setting sun richened, softened, refined all the colors. There were deep blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-colored earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters phi omega — light. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light It didn't touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be.

  We took photographs of each other, of the view, and then sat down on the windward side of the cairn and smoked cigarettes, huddled together because of the cold. Alpine crows screeched overhead, torn in the wind; wind as cold as ice, as astringent as acid. There came back the memory of that mind-voyage Conchis had induced in me under hypnosis. They seemed almost parallel experiences; except that this had all the beauty of its immediacy, its uninducedness, its being-nowness.

  I looked covertly at Alison; the tip of her nose was bright red. But I was thinking that after all she had guts; that if it hadn't been for her we wouldn't have been there, this world at our feet, this sense of triumph; this transcendent crystallization of all I felt for Greece.

  "You must see things like this every day."

  "Never like this. Never even beginning to be like this." Two or three minutes later she said, "This is the first decent thing that's happened to me for months. Today. And this." After a pause, she added, "And you."

  "Don't say that. I'm just a mess. A defilement."

  "I still wouldn't want to be here with anyone else." She stared out towards Euboea; bruised face, being dispassionate for once. She turned and looked at me. "Would you?"

  "I can't think of any other girl I've ever known who could walk this far."

  She thought it over, then looked at me again. "What an evasive answer that was."

  "I'm glad we came. You're a trouper, Kelly."

  "And you're a bastard, Urfe."

  But I could see that she wasn't offended.

  41

  Almost at once tiredness, as we returned, attacked us. Alison discovered a blister on her left heel, where the new shoe had rubbed. We wasted ten minutes of the quick-dying light trying to improvise a bandage for it; and then, almost as abruptly as if a curtain had dropped, night was on us. With it came wind. The sky remained clear, the stars burned frantically, but somewhere we went down the wrong rocky slope and at the place I expected the refuge to be there was nothing. It was difficult to see footholds, increasingly difficult to think sensibly. We foolishly went on, coming into a vast volcanic bowl, a stark lunar landscape; snow-streaked cliffs, violent winds howling round the sides. Wolves became real, not an amusing reference in a casual conversation. Alison must have been far more frightened, and probably far colder, than I was. At the center of the bowl it became clear that it was impossible to get out except by going back, and we sat for a few minutes to rest in the lee of a huge boulder. I held her close against me for warmth's sake. She lay with her head buried in my sweater, in a completely unsexual embrace; and cradling her there, shivering in that extraordinary landscape, a million years and miles from the sweltering Athens night, I felt it meant nothing, it must mean nothing. I told myself I would have felt the same with anyone. But I looked out over the grim landscape, an accurate enough simile of my life, and remembered something the muleteer had said earlier; that wolves never hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

  I forced Alison to her feet and we stumbled back the way we had come. Along a ridge to the west another col and slope led down towards the black distant sea of trees. Eventually we saw contoured against the sky a tor-shaped hill I had noticed on the way up. The refuge was just the other side of it. Alison no longer seemed to care; I kept hold of her hand and dragged her along by main force. Bullying her, begging her, anything to keep her moving. Twenty minutes later the squat dark cube of the refuge appeared in its little combe.

  I looked at my watch. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach the peak; and over three hours to get back.

  * * *

  I groped my way in and sat Alison on a bunk. Then I struck a match, found the lamp and tried to light it; but it had no wick and no oil. I turned to the stove. That, thank God, had dry wood. I ripped up all the paper I could find: a Penguin novel of Alison's, the wrappings off the food we had bought; then lit it and prayed. There were backpuffs of papery, then resinous smoke, and the kindling caught. In a few minutes the hut grew full of flickering red light and sepia shadows, and even more welcome heat. I picked up a pail. Alison raised her head from her knees.

  "I'm going to get some water now."

  "Okay." She smiled wanly.

  "I should get under some blankets." She nodded.

  But when I came back from the stream five minutes later she was gingerly feeding logs through the upper door of the stove; barefooted, on a red blanket she had spread over the floor between the bunks and the fire. On a lower bunk she had laid out what was to be our meal: bread, chocolate, sardines, paximadia, oranges; and she had even found an old saucepan.

  "Kelly, I ordered you to bed."

  "I suddenly remembered I'm meant to be an air hostess. The life and soul of the crash." She took the pail of water and began to wash the saucepan out. As she crouched, I could see the sore red spots on her heels. "Do you wish we hadn't done it?"

  "No."

  She looked back up at me. "Just no?"

  "I'm delighted we did it."

  Satisfied, she went back to the saucepan, filled it with water, began to crumble the chocolate. I sat on the edge of the bunk and took my own shoes and socks off. I wanted to be natural, and I couldn't; and she couldn't. The heat, the tiny room, the two of us, in all that cold desolation.

  "Sorry I went all womany. It'll never happen again."

  There was a ghost of sarcasm in her voice, but I couldn't see her face. She had begun to stir the chocolate over the stove.

  "Don't be silly."

  A squall of wind battered against the iron roof, and the door groaned half open. She said, "Saved from the storm."

  I looked at her from the door, after I had propped it to with one of the skis. She was stirring the melting chocolate with a twig, standing sideways to avoid the heat, watching me. She pulled a flushed face, and swiveled her eyes round the dirty walls.

  "Romantic, isn't it?"

  "As long as they keep the wind out." She smiled secretly at me and looked down at her saucepan. "Why do you smile?"

  "Because it is romantic."

  I sat down on the bunk again. She pulled off her jumper and shook her hair free. I invoked the image of Lily; but somehow it was a situation that Lily could never have got into; so could not be very absent-present in. I tried to sound at ease.

  "You look fine. In your element."

  "So I should. I spend most of my life slavi
ng in a four-by-two galley." She stood with one hand on her hips; a minute of silence; old domestic memories from Russell Square; watching her cook. "What was that Sartre play we saw?"

  "Huis Clos."

  "This is Huis even closer."

  "Why?"

  She kept her back turned. "Being tired always makes me feel sexy." I breathed in. She said softly, "One more risk."

  "Just because the first tests are negative, it doesn't mean

  She flashed a look round, a shy smile. "All right. Only . . . if you . . . you know."

  I stared at her. "You're sweet."

  "Not very good at saying it."

  "I'm so absolutely fucked up. In all ways."

  She lifted a blackbrown dob from the saucepan. "I think this delicious consommé a la reine is ready."

  She came and bent beside me with that peculiar downwards look and automatic smile of air hostesses.

  "Something to drink before dinner, sir?"

  She thrust the saucepan under my nose, mocking herself and my seriousness, and I grinned; but she didn't grin back, she gave me one of her gentlest smiles. I took the saucepan. She went to the bunks at the far end of the little hut; began to unbutton her shirt.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Undressing."

  I looked away. A few seconds later she was standing by me with one of the blankets wrapped sarong fashion around her; then quietly sat on another folded blanket, on the floor, a careful two feet away from me. As she turned to reach for the food behind her, the blanket fell apart over her legs. She readjusted it when she turned back; but somewhere in the recesses of my mind that little Priapus threw up his hands, and that other member of his body, and leered wildly. We ate. The paximadia, rusks fried in olive oil, were as uninteresting as always, the hot chocolate watery and the sardines inappropriate, but we were too hungry to care. Finally we sat — I had slipped onto the floor as well — satiated, backs against the edge of the bunk, adding more smoke to that from the stove. We were both silent, both waiting. I felt like a boy with his first girl, at the moment when the thing has to stop, or to go on to the end. Frightened to make any move. Her bare shoulders were small, round, delicate. The end of the blanket she had tucked in under her armpit had become loose. I could see the top of her breasts.

  The silence grew acutely embarrassing, at least to me; a sort of endurance test, to see which of us would have to break it first. Her hand lay on the blanket between us, for me to reach out and touch. I began to feel that she had exploited the whole situation, engineered everything to place me in this predicament: this silence in which it was only too clear that she was in command, not myself; only too clear that I wanted her — not Alison in particular, hut the girl she was, any girl who might have been beside me at that moment. In the end I threw my cigarette into the stove and lay back against the bunk and shut my eyes, as if I was very tired, as if sleep was all I wanted — as indeed, bar Alison, it was. Suddenly she moved. I opened my eyes. She was naked beside me, the blanket thrown back.

  "Alison. No." But she knelt and began to undress me.

  "Poor little boy."

  She straddled my legs and unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it out. I shut my eyes and let her make me barechested.

  "It's so unfair."

  "You're so brown."

  She ran her hands up the side of my body, my shoulders, my neck, my lips; playing with me, examining me, like a child with a new toy. She knelt and kissed the side of my neck and the ends of her breasts brushed my skin.

  I said, "I'd never forgive myself if . . ."

  "Don't talk. Just lie still."

  She undressed me completely, then led my hands all over her body, to know it all again, soft skin, small curves, slimness, her always natural nakedness. Her hands. As she caressed me, I thought, it's like being with a prostitute, hands as adept as a prostitute's, nothing but a matter of pleasure . . . and I gave way to the pleasure she gave me. After a while she lay on top of me, her head on my chest. A long silence. The fire crackled, burnt our legs a little. I stroked her back, her hair, her small neck, surrendered to the nerve-ends in my flesh. I imagined lying in the same position with Lily, and I thought I knew it would be infinitely disturbing and infinitely more passionate; not familiar, not aching with fatigue, hot, a bit sweaty . . . some cheapened word like randy; but white-hot, mysterious, overwhelming passion.

  Alison murmured, shifted, bit me, swayed over me in a caress she called the pasha caress, that she knew I liked, all men liked; my mistress and my slave. I remember our dropping into the bunk, a coarse straw mattress, the harsh blankets, holding me a moment, kissing me once on the mouth before I could pull away, then turning her back; my hand on the wet breasts, and her hand holding it there, the small smooth belly, the faint washed and rainwashed smell of her hair; and then, in seconds, too soon to analyze anything, sleep.

  * * *

  I woke up sometime in the night, and went and drank some water from the pail. Small pencils of late-risen moon came through the old bullet holes. I went back and leant over Alison. She had thrown back the blanket a little and her skin was a deep shadowed red in the ember light; one breast bare and slightly slumped, her mouth half open, a slight snore. Young and ancient; innocent and corrupt; in every woman, a mystery.

  The wave of affection and tenderness I felt made me determine, with that sort of revelationary shock ideas about courses of action sometimes have when one wakes up drugged with sleep, that tomorrow I must tell her the truth; and not as a confession, but as a means of letting her see the truth, that my real disease was not something curable like syphilis, but far more banal and far more terrible, a congenital promiscuity. I stood over her, almost touching her, almost tearing the blanket back and sinking on her, entering her, making love to her as she wanted me to; but not. I gently covered the bare breast, then picked up some blankets and went to the next bunk.

  42

  We were woken by someone knocking on the door, then half opening it. Sunlight slashed through. He withdrew when he saw we were still in the bunks. I looked at my watch. It was ten o'clock. I pulled on my clothes and went out. A shepherd. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the bells of his flock. He struck back with his crook the two enormous dogs that bared their teeth at me and produced from the pockets of his greatcoat a cheese wrapped in sorrel leaves, which he had brought for our breakfast. After a few minutes Alison came out, tucking her shirt into her jeans and screwing up her eyes against the sun. We shared what was left of the rusks and the oranges with the shepherd; used up the last of the film. I was glad he was there. I could see, as clear as printed words in Alison's eyes, that she thought we had crossed back into the old relationship. At the same time she left it to me to make the next move. She had broken the ice; but it was for me to jump into the water.

  The shepherd stood up, shook hands and strode off with his two savage dogs and left us alone. Alison stretched back in the sun across the great slab of rock we had used as a table. It was a much less windy day, April-warm, a dazzling blue sky. The sheep bells sounded in the distance and some bird like a lark sang high up the slope above us.

  "I wish we could stay here forever."

  "I've got to get the car back by tomorrow morning."

  "Just wishing." She looked at me. "Come and sit here." She patted the rock by her side. Her gray eyes stared up at me, at their most candid. "Do you forgive me?"

  I bent and kissed her cheek and she put her arms round me so that I lay half across her, and we had a whispered conversation, mouths to each other's left ears.

  "Say you wanted to."

  "I wanted to."

  "Say you love me a little still."

  "I love you a little still." She pinched my back. "A lot still."

  "And you'll get better."

  "Mm."

  "And never go with those nasty women again."

  "Never."

  "It's silly when you can have it for free. With love."

  "I know."

  I was staring
at the ends of hair against the rock, an inch or two from my eyes, and trying to bring myself to the point of confession. But it seemed like treading on a flower because one can't be bothered to step aside.

  "You're killing my back."

  I pushed up, but she held me by the shoulders, so that I had to stare down at her. I sustained her look, its honesty, for a while, then I turned and sat with my back to her.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. I just wondered what malicious god made a nice kid like you see anything in a bastard like me."

  "That reminds me. A crossword clue. I saw it months ago. Ready?" I nodded. "'All mixed up, but the better part of Nicholas' . . . six letters."

  I worked it out, smiled at her. "Did the clue end in a full stop or a question mark?"

  "It ended in my crying. As usual."

  I said, "If only life was as simple as an anagram."

  And the bird above us sang in the silence.

  * * *

  We set off down. As we came lower, it grew warmer and warmer. Summer rose to meet us. Alison led the way, and so she could rarely see my face. I tried to sort out my feelings about her. It irritated me still that she put so much reliance on the body thing, the shared orgasm. Her mistaking that for love, her not seeing that love was something other the mystery of withdrawal, reserve, walking away through the trees, turning the mouth away at the last moment. On Parnassus of all mountains, I thought, her unsubtlety, her inability to hide behind metaphor, ought to offend me; to bore me as uncomplex poetry normally bored me. And yet in some way I couldn't define she had, had always had, this secret trick of slipping through all the obstacles I put between us; as if she were really my sister, had access to unfair pressures and could always evoke deep similarities to annul, or to make seem shallow, the differences in taste or feeling.