The Magus

by John Robert Fowles

  “If I ever caught the old bastard…”

  She folded her arms on her knees. “The thing is this. Do you really want us to come running to you? Which would mean everything here was finished?”

  “I’d love you to come running to me.” But she continued staring up, forcing me to answer. “I suppose not.”

  “Do you remember that speech he gave me—he did give it to me, as a sort of emergency speech—I said it down on the shingle that Sunday—about your having no poetry? No humor, and all the rest? I’m sure it was just as much for me as for you.”

  I sat down by her again.

  “This hypnosis?”

  “We wouldn’t have let him. But he’s never even asked us. That was the script again.” She wanted to know what it had been like for me. But as soon as I could I lied us back to the present.

  “Have you seen that cabinet of pottery in the music room?”

  “He begged us not to look at it. Which of course made sure that we did.”

  “Sometimes I feel it’s all a kind of teasing.”

  She turned quickly. “So do I! It’s exactly the word. I think you have to take certain things on trust about people. And I can’t believe Maurice is an evil man. Even perverted. But I don’t know.” She ran her hands through her hair. “There’s that beastly Negro.”

  “Yes, what about him?”

  “His real name’s Joe—we think. Only we’re supposed to call him Anubis in front of you. He’s a mute.”

  “A mute!” I began to understand why he had spat in my face. “You know what he did last night?” I told her. Her eyes dilated a little; at first not believing, then believing me.

  “But that’s horrible.”

  “Hardly teasing.”

  She looked back over her shoulder. “He’s always close to us. Maurice insists that it’s for our protection. But June and I discovered last week that he smokes marijuana. That’s yet another thing.”

  “You’ve told Maurice?”

  “He says it isn’t an addictive drug. Joe is a blind spot with him.”

  “You haven’t told me where you live here.”

  She turned on the rug and knelt. “Nicholas, now you know our side—do you want to go on? Do you think we ought to go on?” Her eyes searched mine, looking for a decision.

  “What do you feel?”

  “I feel braver now.”

  “We could go on just for a bit. Wait and see.”

  She leant schoolgirlishly forward on her hands for a moment. “If we do I don’t want to tell you where we disappear to.”

  “Why?”

  “In case you gave it away.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Please. Nothing else. Just that.” She sat back on her heels.

  “But supposing you were—”

  “It’s not as if we were prisoners. If we had to run, we could. One of us could.”

  I watched her eyes. “As you’re not in fact emotionally involved, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” I lay back on my elbow and still kneeling, she looked down at me; then gave a little smile.

  “Fronti nulla fides.”

  “Gloss, please.”

  “It hasn’t been the hardest role to play.”

  I began to think that the real girl she was excited me far more than her Lily self; was more tangible, and yet also retained more than a little of the part she had played. The shape of her breasts, her stockinged feet; a girl too intelligent to abuse her prettiness; and then too intelligent again not to admit it.

  “How did you get your scar?”

  She raised her left hand and looked at it. “When I was ten. Playing hide-and-seek.” Her eyes glanced from it at me. “I should have learnt my lesson. I was in a garden shed, and I knocked this long—what looked like a stick off a peg and put up my arm to shield myself.” She mimed it. “It was a scythe. I’m lucky not to be one-handed.”

  I took the wrist and kissed it. There was a silence between us; an infinitesimal pulling of the hand on my part, a resistance from hers. I let her have it back.

  She said, “What’s the time?”

  “Just before one.”

  “I’ve got to leave you for an hour. I’ll come back.”

  “Why?”

  “The script.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the place.”

  “But Maurice has gone to Geneva.”

  She shook her head. “He’s waiting. I always have to tell him everything.”

  “Have to?”

  She smiled, remembering that old dialogue. “Supposed to.” She reached out her hands and I stood. “I’ll be back soon after two.”

  “Promise?”

  Her eyes said yes. “Did you like the poems I picked for you?”

  “That was you?”

  “Maurice’s idea. My choice.”

  “‘Where love was innocent, being far from cities.’”

  She looked down, then up, and then down again. I still had hold of her hands. She murmured, “Please.”

  “As long as you know how much I want to.”

  She stared into my eyes for a moment, a look that was almost like the kiss she would not suffer, and that also managed to convey the reason she would not—a refusal to give anything until a fuller trust lay between us—and then almost roughly she pulled away, picked up her raffia bag, and was gone. She walked a few steps, then raising her skirt began to run; after a few yards, broke into a fast walk again. She went up the hill, towards the carob. I moved up the slope a little, to keep her in sight. Almost at once something in the heavy shade under the carob moved; as if a piece of the black trunk had detached itself. It was the Negro, Joe. He was in the same clothes I had seen the night before; in black from head to foot, the hideously sinister mask. He came lithely and stood in the sunlight at the edge of the carob, his arms folded, forbidding the way. I stared at him through the trees, then went back to where the rug was.

  I let a minute pass, jotting down the addresses she had shown me. The Negro had gone from the carob. But when I reached the statue I saw him standing beyond it among the trees, still watching to make sure that I returned to the house. It seemed clear that that was the real direction in which they had to go to reach their hiding place; and that it must be to the east, beyond the cottages. With a sarcastic wave I turned to the left over the gulley; and soon I was sitting down under the colonnade.

  47

  I had a quick, abstemious lunch, pouring the retsina into a pot with a tired-looking pelargonium in it; went upstairs, put my things in the duffle-bag and brought it down. The beady-eyed Modigliani stared; but I went to the curiosa cabinet and examined Lily’s photo, held it to the light, and now I looked at it very closely again I thought I could see that it had been faked—some subtly smudged outlines, an overdarkening of the shadows.

  I came to the statue. Once again the wretched Negro stood in my path. This time he was on the other side of the gulley, maskless, and when I came to the edge of it, on the house side, he waved his hand forbiddingly backwards and forwards a couple of times. He was some twenty yards away, and for the first time I realized he had a small moustache; and that he was younger and less brutish than I had thought before. I stood staring sulkily at him, the duffle-bag hanging by my side. He put up both hands, fingers outstretched.

  I gave him the coldest look I could, then shrugged and sat down against a tree, where I could watch him. He folded his arms again over his chest as if he really were a scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem; slapped the side of his face when a fly landed on it. Occasionally he looked at me, expressionlessly, but most of the time he watched down the hill.

  Suddenly there was a whistle, a blown whistle, from the direction of the cliffs. The Negro waited a minute more, then walked away up past the statue and out of sight.

  I crossed the gulley and went fast down the hill to the place where we had sat. I had been reduced to the state when it was no longer a question of whether any story at Bourani coul
d be absolutely believed, but of whether it could be absolutely disbelieved. I knew I wanted this one to be true, and that was dangerous. I still had some questions, and I was going to still watch her like a lynx. But my instinct told me I was a lynx moving into a landscape where the mists were rapidly thinning.

  Finding her at the rug again seemed a test of her truth. I came over the small rise, and there she was. She made a little concealed praying movement, gladness that I had come. She hadn’t changed her clothes, but her hair was tied loosely back at the nape with a blue ribbon.

  “What was the whistle?”

  She whispered. “Maurice. He is here. He’s gone now.” She jumped up. “Come and look.”

  She led me through the trees to the cliff-top. I thought for a mad moment that she was going to show me Conchis’s retreating back. But she stopped under the branches of the last pine and pointed. Right in the south, almost hull down, a line of ships steamed east across the Aegean between Malea and Skyli: a carrier, a cruiser, four destroyers, another ship, intent on some new Troy.

  I glanced down at her long pink skirt, her ridiculously old-fashioned shoes, and then back at those pale gray shapes on the world’s blue rim. Thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men, more thirty or forty years away than thirty or forty miles, as if we were looking into the future, not into the south.

  She said, “Our being here. Their being there.”

  I looked again at her profile; then to the distant fleet, and weighed them in the balance; made her the victress.

  “Tell me what’s happened.”

  We walked back through the trees. “I’ve told him that you’re almost convinced now that I am in some way in his sinister power… that you don’t really know whether it’s hypnosis or schizophrenia or what. And that you’re falling in love with me. All according to the script.”

  “What did he say?”

  She sat down on the rug and looked up.

  “He wants us to meet during the week. Secretly. As if secretly.” But she seemed worried. “The only thing is—he assured me that it was the last time I’d have to play a ‘love’ scene with you.” A moment of silence. “The end of act one. His words.”

  “And act two?”

  “I think next weekend he will want me to turn against you.”

  “This meeting?”

  “He told me to try Wednesday. Do you know Moutsa? The little chapel?”

  “What time?”

  “Dusk. Half-past eight?” I nodded. She turned, a sudden vivacity. “I forgot to tell you. I think there’s someone at your school who spies on you for Maurice. Another master?”

  “Oh?”

  “Maurice told us one day you were very standoffish with the other masters. That they didn’t like you.”

  I thought at once of Demetriades; of how, when I reflected, it was peculiar that such a gossip should have kept my trips to Bourani so secret. Besides, I was standoffish, and he was the only other master I was ever frequently with, or spoke to.

  I began my supplementary cross-examination. What did the sisters do during the week? They went to Athens or to Nauplia, to the yacht. Maurice left them very much to their own devices. What about Foulkes and the girl? But I found that she knew nothing about them, though she had guessed from my face that evening that I had seen de Deukans. I asked what would have happened if I had gone into the music room that first Sunday. They had expected I would; she had had all her speeches, variations of those she had used the next weekend, ready. Where had June worked in England? At a publisher’s. Had they discovered anything from “Apollo” and the other actor? Only that “they must not be frightened”—the man had left her as soon as they entered the trees. Who had held the torches? She thought Maria and Hermes. Maria? As ungiving as a stone. What did she think of the story of Conchis’s life? Like me, she could only half believe it. What did her mother think? They’d told her they were still rehearsing… “she’d only get into a useless tizzy.” How long did the contracts last? Till the end of October. I suddenly saw a new possibility—that when term ended Conchis might invite me to spend my holidays at Bourani, a limitless black-and-gold stretch of masque.

  “Mitford. You know he’s a mess, you said so. But you never met him.”

  “Maurice. He described him to us.” All through the questions she kept her eyes solemnly on mine.

  “And what happened last year?”

  “No. Except that it was a failure of some kind.” I produced my last and key question.

  “That theatre at Canonbury.”

  “The Tower?”

  “Yes. Isn’t there a little pub round the corner where people go afterwards? I’ve forgotten its name.” I had; but I knew if she told it to me, I would remember.

  “The Beggar’s Broom?” She seemed delighted. “Do you know it?” I thought of a warm-armed Danish girl called Kirsten; a brown bar with people’s signatures scrawled on the ceiling.

  “Not really. But I’m so glad you do.”

  Our eyes met, amused and relieved that the test was passed.

  “You were beginning to frighten me as much as Maurice.”

  I lay back. The hot wind fretted the branches.

  “Don’t you want to frighten me now?”

  She shook her head; lay back as well, and we stared up at the sky through a long silence. Then she said, “Tell me about Nicholas.”

  So we talked about Nicholas: his family, his ambitions and his failings. The third person was right, because I presented a sort of ideal self to her, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner decency. I wanted to kill Alison off in her mind, and confessed to a “rather messy affaire” that had made me leave England.

  “The girl you were going to meet?”

  “It was cowardice. You know, letters… being lonely here. I told you. I ought never to have let it drag on so long. It could never have come to anything.”

  I gave her an edited version of the relationship; one in which Alison got less than her due and I got a good deal more; but in which the main blame was put on hazard, on fate, on elective affinity, the feeling one had that one liked some people and loved others.

  “If I hadn’t been here… would you have gone and met her?”

  “Probably.” She looked pensive. “Shouldn’t I have said that?”

  She nodded. “It’s just that I can’t stand dishonesty in personal relationships.”

  “Nor can I. That’s why I’ve broken off this other thing.”

  She sat up and smoothed down her skirt. “I think I shall go wild sometimes. All this sun and sea and never being able to really enjoy it. How women lived fifty years ago in these miserable…” But she looked at me, saw by my eyes I wasn’t listening, and stopped.

  I said, “How long have we got?”

  “Till four.”

  “What happens then?”

  “You must go.”

  “I want to kiss you.”

  She was silent. Then she said quietly, “Don’t you want to know about the real me?”

  “If you lie back.”

  So she turned and lay flat on her stomach again, with her head pillowed on her arms. She talked about her mother, their life in Dorset, her own boredom with it; about her scholarship to Cambridge, acting, and finally, about the man in the photograph. He had been a don, a mathematician, at Sidney Sussex. Fifteen years older than Julie; married and separated; and they had had not an affaire, but a relationship “too peculiar and too sad to talk about.”

  I asked what made it so sad.

  “Physical things.” She stared into the ground, chin on arms. “Being too similar. One day I realized we were driving each other mad. Torturing each other instead of helping each other.”

  “Was he cut up?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you?”

  “Of course.” She looked sideways. “I loved him.” Her tone made me feel crass, and I let the silence come before I spoke again.

  “No one else?”
>
  “No one who matters.” After a moment or two she turned round on her back, and spoke at the sky. “I think intelligence is terrible. It magnifies all one’s faults. Complicates things that ought to be simple.”

  “One can learn to simplify.”

  She said nothing. I moved a little closer, and began to caress, with a timidity I felt but would in any case have simulated, the side of her face, her cheek. She closed her eyes, and I traced the lines of the eyelids with my forefingers; then the mouth, then kissed the unresponding mouth, then the side of the neck and the top of the shoulder where the white-trimmed collar gaped a little; then remained looking down. It seemed to me a face one could never tire of, an eternal source of desire, of love, of the will to protect; without physical or psychological flaw. She opened her eyes and I could see in them something still reserved, unsure, not giving.

  So we lay side by side, our faces only two feet apart, staring at each other. She reached out her hand and took mine, and we interlocked fingers, twisted them, wrestled gently, mock-coupled. Some of her reserve melted away, and I could see that she took this thing, this exchange of trivial caress, with a seriousness no other girl I had ever met had felt—or had the independence of mind to show. I saw in Julie fear of man and something that hinted at craving for him. Her natural aloofness and coolness suddenly seemed rather pitiable, a mere social equivalent of some neurosis about frigidity. I kissed her hand.

  She allowed it, and then, withdrawing her hand, suddenly turned her back on me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She spoke in a whisper. “When I was thirteen I was—well the stock euphemism is…” her voice sank lower than the wind “…interfered with.”

  It was like hitting an air-pocket; my mind plunged—some terrible wound, some physical incapacity… I stared at the back of her head. She kept her face averted. “I’ve rationalized it and rationalized it, I know it’s just biology. Mechanism. But I’ve…” her voice trailed away.

  I kissed her shoulder through the fabric.

  “It’s as if—with even the nicest men, men like you—I can’t help suspecting that they’re just using me. As if everyone else was born able to distinguish love and lust. But I wasn’t.” She lay curled up, head on hand. “I’m so sorry. I’m not abnormal. If you could just be patient with me.”