by John Fowles
She began to talk about being an air hostess; about herself.
"Oh Jesus, excitement. That lasts about a couple of duties. New faces, new cities, new romances with handsome pilots. Most of the pilots think we're part of the aircrew amenities. Just queueing up to be blessed by their miserable old Battle-of-Britain cocks."
I laughed.
"Nicko, it's not funny. It destroys you. That bloody tin pipe. And all that freedom, that space outside. Sometimes I just want to pull the safety handle and be sucked out. Just falling, a minute of wonderful lonely passengerless falling . . ."
"You're not serious."
She looked back. "More serious than you think. We call it charm depression. When you get so penny-in-the-slot charming that you stop being human any more. It's like . . . sometimes we're so busy after take-off we don't realize how far the plane's climbed and you look out and it's a shock . . . it's like that, you suddenly realize how far you are from what you really are. Or you were, or something. I don't explain it well."
"Yes you do. Very well."
"You begin to feel you don't belong anywhere any more. You know, as if I didn't have enough problems that way already. I mean England's impossible, it becomes more honi wit qui smelly pants every day, it's a graveyard. And Australia . . . Australia. God, how I hate my country. The meanest ugliest blindest . . ." she gave up.
We walked on a way, then she said, "It's just I haven't roots anywhere any more, I don't belong anywhere. They're all places I fly to or from. Or over. I just have people I like. Or love. They're the only homeland I have left."
She threw a look back, a shy one, as if she had been saving up this truth about herself, this rootlessness, homelandlessness, which she knew was also a truth about me.
"At least we've got rid of a lot of useless illusions as well."
"Clever us."
She fell silent and I swallowed her reproach. In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone — had only to be touched to adhere to what touched her.
She stopped. We both noticed it at the same time. Below us to our right, the sound of water, a lot of water.
"I'd love to bathe my feet. Could we get down?"
We struck off the path through the trees and after a while came on a faint trail. It led us down, down and finally out into a clearing. At one end was a waterfall some ten feet or so high. A pool of limpid water had formed beneath it. The clearing was dense with flowers and butterflies, a tiny trough of green-gold luxuriance after the dark forest we had been walking through. At the upper edge of the clearing there was a little cliff with a shallow cave, outside which some shepherd had pleached an arbor of fir branches. There were sheep droppings on the floor, but they were old. No one could have been there since summer began.
"Let's have a swim."
"It'll be like ice."
"Yah."
She pulled her shirt over her head, and unhooked her bra, grinning at me in the flecked shadow of the arbor; I was cornered again.
"The place is probably alive with snakes."
"Like Eden."
She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbor branches and held it out to me. I watched her run nakedly through the long grass to the pool, try the water, groan. Then she waded forwards and swanned in with a scream. The water was jade green, melted snow, and it made my heart jolt with shock when I plunged beside her. And yet it was beautiful, the shadow of the trees, the sunlight on the glade, the white roar of the little fall, the iciness, the solitude, the laughing, the nakedness; moments one knows only death can obliterate.
Sitting in the grass beside the arbor we let the sun and the small breeze dry us and ate the last of the chocolate. Then Alison lay on her back, her arms thrown out, her legs a little open, abandoned to the sun — and, I knew, to me. For a time I lay like her, with my eyes closed. Then she said, "I'm Queen of the May."
She was sitting up, turned to me, propped on one arm. She had woven a rough crown out of the oxeyes and wild pinks that grew in the grass around us. It sat lopsidedly on her uncombed hair; and she wore a smile of touching innocence. She did not know it, but it was at first for me an intensely literary moment. I could place it exactly: England's Helicon. I had forgotten that there are metaphors and metaphors, and that the greatest lyrics are very rarely anything but direct and unmetaphysical. Suddenly she was like such a poem and I felt a passionate wave of desire for her. It was not only lust, not only because she looked, as she did in her periodic fashion, disturbingly pretty, small breasted, small waisted, leaning on one hand, dimpled then grave; a child of sixteen, not a girl of twenty-four, but because I was seeing through all the ugly, the unpoetic accretions of modern life to the naked real self of her — a vision of her as naked in that way as she was in body; Eve glimpsed again through ten thousand generations.
It rushed on me, it was quite simple, I did love her, I wanted to keep her and I wanted to keep — or to find — Lily. It wasn't that I wanted one more than the other, I wanted both, I had to have both; there was no emotional dishonesty in it. The only dishonesty was in my feeling dishonest, concealing . . . it was love that finally drove me to confess, not cruelty, not a wish to be free, to be callous and clear, but simply love. I think, in those few long moments, that Alison saw that. She must have seen something torn and sad in my face, because she said, very gently, "What's wrong?"
"I haven't had syphilis. It's all a lie."
She gave me an intense look, then sank back on the grass.
"Oh Nicholas."
"I want to tell you what's really happened."
"Not now. Please not now. Whatever's happened, come and make love to me."
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.
* * *
Lying beside her I began to try to describe what had happened at Bourani. The ancient Greeks said that if one slept a night on Parnassus either one became inspired or one went mad, and there was no doubt which happened to me; even as I spoke I knew it would have been better to say nothing, to have made something up . . . but love, that need to be naked. I had chosen the worst of all possible moments to be honest, and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring . . . but love, that need to be understood. And Parnassus was also to blame, for being so Greek; a place that made anything but the truth a mindsore.
Of course she wanted first to know the reason for the bizarre pretext I had hit on, but I wanted her to understand the strangeness of Bourani before I mentioned Lily. I didn't deliberately hide anything else about Conchis, but I still left great gaps.
"It's not that I believe any of these things in the way he tries to make me believe them. But even there . . . since he hypnotized me, I don't absolutely know. It's simply that when I'm with him I feel he does have access to some kind of power. Not occult. I can't explain."
"But it must be all faked."
"All right, the events are all faked. But why me? How did he know I would go there? I'm nothing to him, he obviously doesn't even think very much of me. As a person. He's always laughing at me."
"I still don't understand . . ."
The moment had come. I hesitated. She looked at me, and I could not hesitate anymore.
"There's a girl."
"I knew it." She sat up.
"Alison darling, for God's sake try to understand. Listen."
"I'm listening." But her face was averted.
So at last I told her about Lily; though not, except obliquely, by implication, what I felt about Lily. I made it out to be an asexual thing, a fascination of the mind.
"But she attracts you the other way."
"Allie, I can't tell you how much I've hated myself this weekend. And tried to tell you everything a dozen times before. I don't want to be
attracted by her. In any way. A month, three weeks ago I couldn't have believed it. I still don't know what it is about her. Honestly. I only know I'm haunted, possessed by everything over there. Not just her. Something so strange is going on. And I'm . . . involved." She looked unimpressed. "I've got to go back to the island. Because of the job. There are so many ways in which I'm not a free agent."
"But this girl." She was staring at the ground, picking seeds off grassheads.
"She's irrelevant. Really. Just a very small part of it."
"Then why all the performance?"
"You can't understand, I'm being pulled in two."
"She's very pretty, isn't she?"
"If I still didn't care like hell for you deep down it would all have been so easy."
"Is she pretty?"
"Yes."
"Very pretty."
"I suppose so."
She buried her face in her arms. I stroked her warm shoulder.
"She's totally unlike you. Unlike any modern girl. I can't explain." She turned her head away. "Alison."
"I must seem just like a lump of dirty old kitchen salt. And she's a beautiful cream jelly."
I sat up. We stared in opposite directions.
"Now you're being ridiculous."
"Am I?"
There was a tense silence.
"Look, I'm trying desperately, for once in my miserable life, to be honest. I have no excuses. If I met this girl tomorrow, okay, I could say, I love Alison, Alison loves me, nothing doing. But I met her a fortnight ago. And I've got to meet her again."
"And you don't love Alison."
I looked at her, trying to show her that, in my fashion . . . she stared away.
"Or you love me till you see a better bit of tail."
"Don't be crude."
"I am crude. I think crude. I talk crude. I am crude." She kneeled, took a breath. "So what now? I curtsey and withdraw?"
"I wish to God I wasn't so complicated
"Complicated!" She snorted.
"Selfish."
"That's better."
We were silent. Two coupled yellow butterflies flitted heavily, saggingly, past.
"All I wanted was that you should know what I am."
"I know what you are."
"If you did you'd have cut me out right at the beginning."
"I still know what you are."
"I want you to do now whatever seems best to you. Tell me to go to hell. For good. Hate me."
"Or wait for you?"
And her cold gray eyes went through me, cutting very deep. She stood up and went to wash. It was hopeless. I couldn't manage it, I couldn't explain, and she could never understand. I put my clothes on and turned my back while she dressed in silence.
When she was ready, she said, "Don't for God's sake say any more. I can't bear it."
* * *
We got to Arachova about five and after a quick meal set off to drive back to Athens. I twice tried to discuss everything with her, but she wouldn't allow it. We had said all that could be said; and she sat brooding, wordless, all the way. We came over the pass at Daphne at about eight-thirty, with the last light over the pink and amber city, the first neon signs round Syntagma and Omonia like distant jewels. I thought of where we had been that time the night before, and glanced at Alison. She was putting on lipstick. Perhaps after all there was a solution: to get her back into the hotel, make love to her, prove to her through the loins that I did love her . . . and why not, let her see that I might be worth suffering, just as I was and always would be. I began to talk a little, casually, about Athens; but her answers were so uninterested, so curt, that it sounded as ridiculous as it was, and I fell silent. The pink turned to violet, and soon it was night.
We arrived at the hotel in the Piraeus — I had reserved the same rooms. Alison went up while I took the car round to the garage. On the way back I saw a flower seller and bought a dozen carnations from him. I went straight to her room, and knocked on the door. I had to knock three times before she answered. She had been crying.
"I brought you some flowers."
"I don't want your bloody flowers."
"Look, Alison, it's not the end of the world."
"Just the end of the affaire."
I broke the silence.
"Aren't you going to let me in?"
"Why the hell should I?"
She stood holding the door half shut, the room in darkness behind her. Her face was terrible; puffed and unforgiving; nakedly hurt.
"Just let me come in and talk to you."
"No."
"Please."
"Go away."
I pushed in past her and closed the door. She stood against the wall, staring at me. Light came up from the street, and I could see her eyes. I offered the flowers. She snatched them from my hand, went to the window and hurled them, pink heads, green stems, out into the night; remained there with her back to me.
"This experience. It's like being halfway through a book. I can't just throw it in the dustbin." "So you throw me instead."
I went behind her to try to put my hands on her shoulders, but she jerked angrily away.
"Fuck off. Just fuck off."
I sat on the bed and lit a cigarette. Down in the street monotonous Macedonian folk music skirled from some café loudspeaker; but we sat and stood in a strange cocoon of remoteness from even the nearest outside things.
"I came to Athens knowing I ought not to meet you. I did my damnedest that first evening and yesterday to prove to myself that I don't have any special feeling for you any more. But it didn't work. That's why I talked. So ineptly. So at the wrong time." She gave no sign of listening; I produced my trump. "Talked when I could have kept quiet. Could still be deceiving you."
"I'm not the one who's deceived."
"Look —"
"And what the hell does 'special feeling' mean?" I was silent. "Christ, you're not just afraid of the thing love. You're even afraid of using the bloody word now."
"I don't know what love is."
She spun round. "Well let me tell you. Love isn't just what I said it was in that letter. Not turning back to look. Love is pretending to go to work but going to Victoria. To give you one last surprise, one last kiss, one last . . . it doesn't matter, I saw you buying magazines. That morning I couldn't have laughed with anyone in the world. And yet you laughed. You fucking well stood with a porter and laughed about something. That's when I found out what love was. Seeing the one person you want to live with happy to have escaped from you."
"But why didn't you —"
"You know what I did? I crept away. And spent the whole godawful day curled up on our bed. Not because I loved you. Because I was so mad with rage and shame that I loved you."
"I wasn't to know."
She turned away. "I wasn't to know. Christ!" Silence hung in the air like static electricity. "Another thing. You think love is sex. Let me tell you something. If I'd wanted you just for that, I'd have left you straight after that first night."
"My apologies."
She looked at me, took a breath, gave a bitter little smile. "Oh God, now he's hurt. I'm trying to tell you that I loved you for you. Not for your blasted prick." She stared back out into the night. "Of course you're all right in bed. But you're not the . . ." she couldn't find the words.
"Best you've had."
"If that was what mattered."
"One lives and learns." I bent forward and stared at the ground. To avoid her eyes. She came to the end of the bed and leant against it, looking down at me.
"I think you're so blind you probably don't even know you don't love me. You don't even know you're a filthy selfish bastard who can't, can't like being impotent, can't ever think of anything except number one. Because nothing can hurt you, Nicko. Deep down, where it counts. You've built your life so that nothing can ever reach you. So whatever you do you can say, I couldn't help it. You can't lose. You can always have your next adventure. Your next bloody affaire."
"
You always twist —"
"Twist! Holy Jesus, don't you talk of twisting. You can't even tell a simple fact straight." I looked round at her. "Meaning?"
"All that mystery balls. You think I fall for that? There's some girl on your island and you want to lay her. That's all. But of course that's nasty, that's crude. So you tart it up. As usual. Tart it up so it makes you seem the innocent one, the great intellectual who must have his experience. Always both ways. Always cake and eat it. Always —"
"I swear . . ." but her impatient jerk away silenced me. She walked up and down the room. I tried another excuse. "Because I don't want to marry you — or anyone — it doesn't mean I don't love you."
"That reminds me. That child. You thought I didn't notice. That little girl with the boil. It made you furious. Alison showing how good she is with kids. Doing the mother act. And shall I tell you something? I was doing the mother act. Just for a moment, when she smiled, I did think that. I did think how I'd like to have your children and . . . have my arm round them and have you near me. Isn't that terrible? I have this filthy disgusting stinking-taste thing called love . . . God, syphilis is nice compared to love . . . and I'm so depraved, so colonial, so degenerate that I actually dare show you . . ."
"Alison."
She took a shuddery breath; near tears.
"I realized as soon as we met on Friday. For you I'll always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and she'll always come back for another weekend of cheap knock."
"That's a long way below the belt."
She lit a cigarette. I went and stood by the window and she spoke at my back, across the bed and the room, from the door. "All that time, last autumn . . . I didn't realize then. I didn't realize you can get softer. I thought you went on getting harder. God only knows why, I felt closer to you than I've ever felt to any other man. God only knows why. In spite of all your smart-aleck Pommie ways. Your bloody class mania. So I never really got over your going. I tried Pete, I tried another man, but it didn't work. Always this stupid, pathetic little dream. That one day you'd write . . . so I went mad trying to organize these three days. Betting everything on them. Even though I could see, God how I could see you were just bored."
