The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  I woke up some time 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, all woman.

  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. 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 for ever.’

  ‘I’ve got to get the car back.’

  ‘Just wishing.’ She looked at me. ‘Come and sit here.’ She patted the rock by her side. Her grey 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 her 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. 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 moment, 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 shit like me.’

  ‘That reminds me. A crossword clue. I saw it months ago. Ready?’ I nodded, ‘“She’s 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.’

  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, it occurred to me, 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 irrelevant, the differences in taste or feeling.

  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 lovely passengerless falling

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘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 soit qui smelly pants every day, it’s a graveyard. And Australia … Australia. God, how I hate my country. The meanest stupidest 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 rush 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 arbour 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 arbour.<
br />
  ‘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 arbour 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 will obliterate.

  Sitting in the grass beside the arbour 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 -Julie. 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 – ‘

  ‘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 far 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 its deepest attraction. 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. 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 … ‘ but then she did. She looked at me. ‘There’s someone else there.’

  ‘Alison darling, for God’s sake try to understand. Listen.’

  ‘I’m listening.’ But her face was averted.

  So at last I told her. 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.’

  ‘Is she pretty?’

  ‘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 said nothing. 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 … ‘ but she didn’t finish.

  ‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’

  ‘Ami?’

  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.’ 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 knelt, took a breath. ‘So what now? I curtsy 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.’

  And her cold grey eyes went through me, till I had to look down. 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 set off to drive back to Athens. I twice tried to discuss everything again 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 Daphni at about eight-thirty, with the last light over the pink and amber city, the first neon signs round Syntagma and Ommonia 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 unlocked it. 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 cafe loudspeaker; but we sat and stood in a strange cocoon of remoteness from even the nearest outside things.