The Magus

by John Robert Fowles

  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 ground-floor 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 cliff-tops 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 long-skirted, 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 filchée.” 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, but 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 naïvely fascinated look. The sun-wind 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.

  “How did you know that!”

  “Intuition.”

  “But June swore…” I was smiling. “Please. Really. This isn’t funny.”

  “Maurice told me.”

  It amazed her. “He told you our real names!”

  “Just yours.”

  “And what else?” She was propped on her right hand, staring suspiciously down at me as I lay on my side.

  “I thought I was going to ask the questions.”

  “What else? About who we really are?” I had never seen her so concerned; almost cross.

  “This schizo thing.”

  “Yes—and what else?”

  I shrugged. “That you were dangerous. Good at deceiving. And that if ever one day you told me your real name I was to be especially suspicious.” She went back to hugging her knees, staring out through the branches of the two or three pine trees that stood between us and the cliff-top. The sea came through them, deep azure merging into the sky’s deep azure. The sun-wind shook the branches, flowed round us like a current of warm water. She looked lost in doubts; in anxiety; gave me yet another quick probing look.

  “Do you trust us at all?”

  “‘And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.’”

  It was the wrong answer. She did not smile and killed the equivocal smile in my own eyes.

  “I want a friend. Not a tame lamb.”

  “I’m ready to be bought. By the right evidence.”

  She searched my eyes, hunting down the other, physical, price I implied. Then looked away. “You realize that Maurice’s aim is to destroy reality? To make trust between us impossible?”

  “I’m more interested in your aim.”

  “Questions?”

  “Questions.”

  She turned away again, then changed her mind and lay on her side, on her elbow, facing me; a small smile.

  “Go on. Anything.”

  “You’re an actress?”

  She shrugged, self-deprecating. “At Cambridge.”

  “What did you read?”

  “Classics. June did languages.”

  “When did you come down?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “You’ve known Maurice how long?”

  She opened her mouth, then changed her mind, and reached behind her for the bag, which she put between us. “I’ve brought all I could. Come a little closer. I’m so scared they’ll see what I’m doing.” I looked round, but we were in a position where they—whoever “they” were—would have had to be very close to see more than our heads. But I went nearer, shielding what she brought out of the bag. The first thing was the book.

  It was small, half bound in black leather, with green marbled paper sides; rubbed and worn. I looked at the title page; Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Parisiis.

  “It’s a Didot Ainé.”

  “Who’s he?” I saw the date 1800.

  “A famous French printer.” She turned me back to the flyleaf. On it was, in very neat writing, an inscription: From the ‘idiots’ of IVB to their lovely teacher, Miss Julie Holmes. Summer 1952. Underneath were fifteen or so signatures: Penny O’Brien, Susan Smith, Susan Mowbray, Jane Willings, Lea Gluckstein, Jean Ann Moffat… I looked up at her.

  “First of all explain how you were teaching last summer in England and—remember?—coping with Mitford here.”

  “I wasn’t here last summer. That’s the script.” She ignored my unspoken question. “Please look at these first.”

  Six or seven envelopes. Three were addressed to: Miss Julie and Miss June Holmes, do Maurice Conchis, Esquire, Bourani, Phraxos, Greece. They had English stamps and recent postmarks, all from Dorset.

  “Read one.”

  I took out a letter from the top envelope. It was on headed paper. ANSTY COTTAGE, CERNE ABBAS, DORSET. It began in a rapid scrawl:

  Darlings, I’ve been frantically busy with all the doodah for the Show, on top of that Mr. Arnold’s been in and he wants to do the painting as soon as possible. Also guess who—Roger rang up, he’s at Bovington now, and asked himself over for the weekend. He was so disappointed you were both abroad—hadn’t heard. I think he’s much nicer—not nearly so pompous. And a captain!! I didn’t know what on earth to do with him so I asked the Drayton girl and her brother round for supper and I think it went off rather well. Billy is getting so fat, old Tom says it’s all the grass, so I asked the D. girl if she’d like to give him a ride or two, I knew you wouldn’t mind…

  * * *

  I
turned to the end. The letter was signed Mummy. I looked up and she pulled a face. “Sorry.”

  She handed me three other letters. One was evidently from a former fellow teacher—news about people, school activities. Another from a friend who signed herself Claire. One from a bank in London, to June, advising her that “a remittance of £100 had been received” on May 31st.

  “Our salary.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “He pays you this every month?”

  “Each of us.”

  “Good God.”

  I looked at the letter from the bank again and memorized the address: Barclay’s Bank, Englands Lane, N.W.3. The manager’s name was P. J. Fearn.

  “And this.”

  It was her passport. Miss J. N. Holmes.

  “N.?”

  “Neilson. My mother’s family name.”

  I read the signalement opposite her photo. Profession: student. Date of birth: 16.12.1930. Place of birth: Cape Town, South Africa.