The Magus - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  "Contracts . . . contracts?" She leant forward and covered her face in her hands. "What the devil are you? Film stars?"

  Her head was shaking. "Please forget I said that." But after a moment she leant back and said, "Yes. Obviously we thought you must have guessed."

  "Film stars?" My voice was high with incredulity. She raised her finger, as if we must keep quiet.

  "No. But there's only one profession — isn't there? — where you do kiss strange men with apparent passion. Because it's part of your job." She suddenly grimaced. "I've just thought of another. I didn't mean that."

  "You're trying to tell me you're both actresses?"

  "We're not even that. Just two girls in desperate need of help."

  "Help?"

  "Are there any police on the island?"

  I clutched my hair.

  "Let me get this straight. First of all you were ghosts. Then you were schizophrenics. Now you are next week's consignment to Saudi Arabia."

  She smiled. "Sometimes I almost wish we were. It would be simpler." She turned and put her hand on my knee. "Nicholas, I'm notorious for never taking anything very seriously, and that's partly why we're here, and even now it's fun in a way — but we really are just two English girls who've got ourselves into such deep waters these last two or three months that . . ." she left an eloquent silence.

  "But how did he get hold of you? Where were you actresses?"

  "Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning we're all meeting. The three of us."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because nothing here happens by chance. It's all planned in advance." She touched my sleeve. "You must tell me the time."

  "Including this?"

  "Including my meeting you. But not what we've said." She pulled her cloak round her. "Or only some of what we've said." She took my hand and looked at the time. "I must go."

  She stood up.

  "I'll come with you now."

  "No."

  "She told me you live on a yacht."

  "She told me what a terribly good impromptu liar you were."

  I stood up and she put her hands on my shoulders and regarded me with a kind of anxious concern. "Nicholas, let's be friends. Now we've met, I do trust you."

  "That's hardly the question. Do I trust you?"

  I answered "no" in my mind, but I reached up and took her hands; the cloak was open. I could see the white dress, the white throat. What I suspected of Conchis, what she had accused me of, I gave myself to taste: the charms of a ménage a trois; that wild kissing. Who cared about real meaning? I pressed her hands.

  "At least tell me your name."

  "Rose."

  I pressed her hands again.

  "Come on. Friends."

  "Call me anything you like. You baptize me."

  "No."

  She smiled; a pressure back, the hands withdrawn.

  "I must go. I hate all this mystery. But just tonight."

  "I'm coming with you."

  "You can't." She had that same slightly desperate urgency Lily had had two weeks before. She moved away a step or two, as if to test me. I stood still.

  "I'll follow you."

  "Tomorrow morning."

  "Now."

  She eyed me, then shrugged, with regret.

  "Then I'm awfully sorry, but I'll have to use the emergency exit."

  With her eyes still on mine, she called. Not very loud; to carry thirty or forty yards; as if to a dog.

  "Anubis!"

  I whipped round. She came and put her arm on mine. "Actually this looks better. He won't hurt you if you stay here."

  Already I could hear someone coming swiftly down through the trees behind us. I saw a monstrous dark shape. "Rose" stood near me as if to protect me.

  "Who is it?"

  "Our dearly beloved watchdog." Her tone was dry; and when I looked at her, she confirmed its dryness.

  It was the figure from the death and the maiden scene of two weeks before. The jackal-head, the "nurse." Standing against us, in black from head to foot, the long ears pointing stiffly up, the muzzle waiting.

  She muttered quickly, "Don't be afraid." Then, in a very low whisper, "We had no choice tonight." I didn't know whether she meant "you and I," or "Lily and I."

  She started to walk down past the statue. I looked back up the hill. The figure had not moved. I began to walk after her. Immediately she heard me she stopped. When I came up with her, she gave me a wide-eyed look and then she said again, "Anubis." The figure came and stood some six feet away. I could see that behind the macabre disguise was a big, tall man. He moved like a very fit man, too. I would be no match for him physically. I shrugged.

  "Force majeure."

  "Just stay here. Please just stay here." She turned to the figure. Her voice was cold. "And there is absolutely no need for violence. We all know you're very strong." She turned back to me, touched my arm one last time as if to reassure me; then she disappeared down through the trees towards the carob under which the man and the girl had stood.

  I spoke.

  "I suppose you're the Reverend Mr. Foulkes."

  He raised his arm and took off the headpiece. I was looking at a Negro. He had on black trousers, a black shirt, black gym shoes; even black gloves. He did not smile, but simply watched me. Poised yet coiled; an athlete, a boxer.

  I calculated whether I could risk a dash into the trees. But it was already too late. She had disappeared; and I felt sure that her real destination was in some very different direction.

  "Where you from? The West Indies?"

  No answer.

  "Well what are you supposed to be — the black eunuch or something?"

  No answer again; but I thought there was a tiny contraction of the eyes.

  "I'm going back to sit on the seat. All right?" He did not even nod. I said again "All right?" and then moved crabwise back up the hill, cautiously, watching him. He stayed where he was, and we remained like that for perhaps a minute. I lit a cigarette to try to counter the released adrenalin, and listened in vain for the sound of an engine down by the sea. Then, abruptly, the black figure came up towards me. He stood in front of me, blocking out the sky. The cigarette was snatched out of my mouth and flicked away. Then in the same movement I was jerked to my feet. I said, "Now wait a minute." But he was strong and as quick as a leopard. Sweating a little. I could smell his sweat. An absolutely humorless face, and an angry one. It was no good, I was frightened — there was something insanely violent about his eyes, and it flashed through my mind that he was a black surrogate of Henrik Nygaard. Without warning he spat full in my face and then palm-pushed me sharply back. The edge of the seat cut into my legs and I fell half across it. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him trotting away, carrying his mask, through the trees to the north. I opened my mouth to shout something at him, then said it in a whisper. I kept wiping my face with my handkerchief, but it was filthy, defiled.

  I went back to the gate and ran down the path to Moutsa. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea and rubbed my face in the salt water, then swam a hundred yards out. The sea was alive with phosphorescent diatoms that swirled in long trails from my hands and feet. I dived and seal-turned on my back and looked up through the water at the blurred white specks of the stars. The sea cooled, calmed, silked round my genitals. I felt safe out there, and sane, out of their reach, all their reaches.

  Contracts . . . actresses . . . I was now asked to believe that they were hired to play their roles; not only that, but so in the dark about Conchis's intentions that they didn't even know whether I was not deceiving them exactly as they were deceiving me; trying to vamp Lily as Lily vamped me. But when I thought back to various inexplicable things Lily had said, to inconsistent looks, tentative looks, those out-of-role looks, and other doubtfulnesses beyond any she might have been acting, I began to wonder, to waver . . . I had long suspected that there was some hidden significance in the story of de Deukans and his gallery of automata. What Conchis
had done, or was trying to do, was to turn Bourani into such a gallery, and real human beings into his puppets . . . but how could they be his puppets when they knew so much about him? Or did they know so much about him?

  And once again, did it matter?

  As I swam out there, with the dark slope of Bourani across the quiet water to the east, I could feel in me a complex and compound excitement, in which Lily was the strongest but not the only element. I thought, I am Theseus in the maze; let it all come, even the black minotaur, so long as it comes; so long as I may reach the center.

  I came ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house.

  46

  I woke feeling even more slugged, more beaten-steak — the heat does it in Greece — than usual. It was ten o'clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs. There was a note waiting for me on top of the muslin-mounded breakfast table under the colonnade.

  DEAR NICHOLAS,

  Alas, very urgent financial business connected with the "scare" of a fortnight ago obliges me to go at once to Geneva. I look forward to seeing you next Saturday, if you can dispose of your academic duties. Maria is leaving with me. She is taking advantage of my absence to visit relatives in Santorini. Hermes is returning to lock up the house this afternoon. Please enjoy your lunch, and accept my apologies for this unpardonable breach of hospitality.

  MAURICE CONCHIS

  I looked under the muslin. There was my breakfast. The spirit stove to heat up the coffee. A carafe of water, another of retsina; and under a second muslin an ample cold lunch. My first thought was that he had funked meeting me after the incident with his Negro thug; my second, that at least I could make some detective use of the occasion.

  I carried the breakfast things round to Maria's cottage, as if to put them out of harm's way on her table, but the door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis's door, then tried it. It was also locked. Second failure. Then I went round all the groundfloor rooms in the house, and pulled up all the carpets to see if there were trapdoors to mysterious cellars. There were not. Ten minutes later I gave up; I knew I was not going to find any clue to the girls' true identity, and that was all that interested me.

  I went down to the private beach — the boat was gone — and swam out of the little cove and round its eastern headland. There some of the tallest cliffs on the island, a hundred feet or more high, fell into the sea among a litter of boulders and broken rocks. The cliffs curved in a very flat concave arc half a mile eastwards, not really making a bay, but jutting out from the coast just enough to hide the beach where the three cottages were. I examined every yard of the cliffs. No way down, no place where even a small boat could land. Yet this was the area Lily and Rose supposedly headed for when they went "home." There was dense low scrub on the abrupt-sloping clifftops before the pines started, just enough to hide in, but manifestly impossible to live in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages.

  A vein of colder water made me twist on my front again, and as I turned I saw. A girl in a pale pink dress was standing under the seawardest pines on top of the cliff, some hundred yards to the east of where I was; in shadow, but brilliantly, exuberantly conspicuous. She waved down and I waved back. She walked a few yards along the edge of the trees, the sunlight between the pines dappling the pink dress, and then, with an inner leap of exultation, I saw another flash of pink, a second girl. They stood, each replica of each, some twenty yards apart, and the closer waved again. Then both disappeared back together into the trees.

  Five minutes later I arrived, very out of breath, at the deserted Poseidon statue. I suffered a moment's angry suspicion that I was being teased again — shown them only to lose them. But I went down the far side of the ravine, past the carob; and soon I could see their two pink figures. They were sitting on a shaded hummock of rock and earth, wearing identical summer dresses, loose-topped and longskirted, of some cottony material with thin pink and white, rose and lily, stripes. A glimpse of pale blue stockings. Rose stood as soon as she saw me coming and came idly and Edwardianly down the hummock and a little way towards me. She had her hair up, two curved wings that framed her face and ended in a chignon. I glanced at her wrist, though I was sure. It had no scar. And I glanced beyond her at the girl whose hair was down her back, as loose as on the Sunday morning a fortnight before; who looked so much younger, yet sat and unsmilingly watched us meet. Rose made a face; a modern face that denied her costume.

  "Elle est fâchée." She looked round. Lily had presented her back to us, as if in a pique. "I told her you said you didn't care which of us you met this morning."

  "That was kind of you."

  She grinned. "Bored of me."

  "And what have you decided?"

  She hesitated, then took my hand and led me to the foot of the hummock. Lily must have heard us, hut she would not turn. So Rose led me round the foot of the little knoll until we came into her line of vision.

  "Here's your knight in shining armor."

  Lily looked coolly down at me and said, even more coolly, "Hello." Rose, who still held my hand, forced it down. I found myself bowing beside her curtsey.

  Lily smiled faintly, and said, "Oh June. Stop it."

  I looked quickly at the girl beside me.

  "June?"

  She gave a dip of acknowledgment. I glanced back at Lily. Rose-June said, "That's my twin sister Julie."

  A jolt of shock: Conchis had already told me this name. I quickly suppressed any sign of surprise. But I was on guard; all prickles erect.

  Lily-Julie got to her feet. She stood on a ledge of rock a foot or so above us, and looked down at me with a wary unforgivingness.

  "Who you did not meet last night."

  Her skin was milky, but her cheeks were red.

  "I believed it was you."

  "June, go away."

  But Rose-June hopped up beside her and put her arm round her and whispered something in her ear. Once again, as always when I looked at Lily, I had to dismiss the idea of schizophrenia. Giving me her real name was another Conchis "cod"; a mine for me to one day tread on. The two of them stood a moment, Rose-June's arm round her sister's shoulders. Whatever she had said had brought a modified forgiveness. They smiled down at me in their different ways, one mischievous, the other shy, presenting their charming twinness to me, perhaps laughing a little at my naϊvely fascinated look. The sunwind touched their clothes, stroked the ends of Julie's hair; and then the tableau disintegrated, Rose-June's arm fell.

  Lily-Julie said, "We have to keep to a kind of script. And we're being watched." Like them I did not look round; but colluded.

  "Script?"

  Rose-June said, "She'll explain."

  She jumped down and held out her hand.

  "Goodbye, Nicholas."

  "And where on earth are you going?"

  She looked again at Lily-Julie, who shook her head; Rose-June raised her eyebrows near-mutinously. "I'm not allowed to say." She stared at her sister. "You are going to tell him everything?" Her voice was suddenly adult, without humor.

  "Everything except . . ."

  "But everything else."

  "You must go. They'll suspect." She turned her back and Rose-June leant forward and squeezed my arm.

  "Make her tell you everything." Her eyes looked levelly, no longer playing, into mine. "We count on you. More than you can imagine."

  Then with one last glance at her sister she was walking back towards the Poseidon statue. I smiled to myself; my plan of action was clear — to follow where Lily-Julie led . . . until I could pin her down. She had moved away towards the sea cliff. I went up behind her.

  "I was furious. I was so disappointed."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Yes it does."

  She gave me a quick, shy smile then, but said nothing; as if, after all, we really didn't know
each other, and a new intimacy had to be established; and something more serious to be discussed. We came to a place where there was a naturally scalloped-out bank under a pine tree, facing the sea. I saw a white raffia bag there, and a large green rug with a book on It. She kicked off her pale gray shoes, stood on the rug and sat down with her legs curled under her; then patted the rug beside her. A cautious, muted look up at me.

  I stooped before I sat, to pick up the book. But she reached first.

  "Later."

  I sat.

  She put the book into the bag behind her and as she turned the fabric tightened over her breasts; her small waist. She faced back and our eyes met; those fine gray-hyacinth eyes, tilted corners, lingering a moment in mine.

  "Why did you do that last night?"

  "Not come?" She sat with her knees drawn up, staring out to sea. "The script said I was to promise to meet you, the matchsticks, but June was really to meet you. You were to discover who she is. She was to tell you that I like you. Then we were all three to meet this morning. Just as we have. And then . . . you and I were to discover that we were falling in love. The only thing is that June was to have convinced you last night that I, I mean Lily, really is a schizophrenic. Or under hypnosis. And it's mad. We knew we couldn't do it. Just one final madness too much." She had spoken quickly, with a completely new matter-of-factness, a complete abandonment of role. She threw me a look as if to say, I am sorry I tricked you earlier, and that my real self is going to be a disappointment; a tentative, uncertain look, turned off towards the sea. Suddenly she seemed more distant, as actresses one has been moved by onstage so often are offstage; a disconcerting alienation effect.

  I offered her a Papastratos.

  "No thanks. I don't."

  "Like Lily."

  "Like Lily."

  There was silence; her old self had drained away, like water between stones.

  "Well?"

  "Either you ask me questions, or I ask you. I don't mind. You did produce credentials to my sister. So I suppose I should go first."

  I lit my cigarette. "Let me guess your real surname . . . Holmes?"

  Her head shot round. There was no mistaking her shock.