The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

‘You know I don’t believe you. And I think your sister’s mean to still doubt me.’

  She left a longer silence still.

  ‘We couldn’t both get away together.’ She added in a lower voice, ‘I wanted to be sure, too.’

  ‘Sure of what?’

  ‘That you are what you claim.’

  ‘I’ve told her the truth.’

  ‘As she keeps claiming. With a little too much enthusiasm to make me feel she’s in a fit state to judge.’ She added drily, ‘Which I now begin to understand. At least physically.’

  ‘You can easily check that I work at a school on the other side of the island.’

  ‘We know there’s a school. I don’t suppose you have any means of identification on you?’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Not so ridiculous, in present circumstances, as my not asking.’

  I had to grant some justice to that. ‘I haven’t got my passport. A Greek permis de séjour, if that’s any good.’

  ‘May I see it? Please?’

  I fished in my back pocket, then struck three or four matches while she examined the permis. It gave my name, address and profession. She handed it back.

  ‘Satisfied?’

  Her voice was serious. ‘You swear you’re not working for him?’

  ‘Only in the sense you know. That I’ve been told Julie is undergoing some kind of experimental cure for schizophrenia. Which I’ve never believed. Or never face-to-face with her.’

  ‘You never met Maurice before you came here a month ago?’

  ‘Categorically not.’

  ‘Or signed a contract of any sort with him?’

  I looked at her. ‘Meaning you have?’

  ‘Yes. But not for what’s happening.’

  She hesitated. ‘Julie will tell you tomorrow.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing some documentary evidence either.’

  ‘All right. That’s fair enough.’ She dropped her cigarette and screwed it out. Her next question came out of the blue. ‘Are there any police on the island?’

  ‘A sergeant, two men. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  I drew a breath. ‘Let me get this straight. First of all you were ghosts. Then you were schizophrenics. Now you’re next week’s consignment to the seraglio.’

  ‘Sometimes I almost wish we were. It would be simpler.’ She said quickly, ‘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 themselves into such deep waters these last two months that… ‘ she broke off, and there was a silence between us.

  ‘Do you share Julie’s fascination for Maurice?’

  She didn’t answer for a moment, and I looked at her. She had a wry smile.

  ‘I have a suspicion that you and I are going to understand each other.’

  ‘You don’t share it?’

  She looked down. ‘She’s academically much brighter than I am, but … I do have a sort of basic common-sense she lacks. I smell a rat if I don’t understand what’s going on. Julie tends to be all starry-eyed about it.’

  ‘Why did you bring up the police?’

  ‘Because we’re prisoners here. Oh, very subtle prisoners. No expense spared, there aren’t any bars – I gather she’s told you we’re constantly being assured we can go home whenever we like. Except that somehow we’re always being shepherded and watched.’

  ‘Are we safe at the moment?’

  ‘I hope so. But I must go soon.’

  ‘I can easily get the police. If you want.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘And what’s your theory about what’s going on?’

  She gave me a rueful smile. ‘I was going to ask you that.’

  ‘I accept he has been genuinely connected with psychiatry.’

  ‘He questions Julie for hours after you’ve been here. What you said, how you behaved, what lies she told you … all the rest of it. It’s as if he gets some vicarious thrill from knowing every detail.’

  ‘And he does hypnotize her?’

  ‘He’s done us both – me only once. That extraordinary … you had it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Julie several times. To help her learn her parts. All the facts about the Lily thing. Then a whole session on how a schizophrenic would behave.’

  ‘Does he question her while she’s under?’

  ‘To be fair, no. He’s always scrupulous about whichever one of us isn’t being hypnotized being present. I’ve always been there listening.’

  ‘But you have doubts?’

  She hesitated again. ‘There’s something that worries us. A sort of voyeuristic side. The feeling we have that he’s watching you two falling for each other.’ She looked at me. ‘Has Julie told you about three hearts?’ She must have seen by my face that the answer was no. ‘I’d rather she told you. Tomorrow.’

  ‘What three hearts?’

  ‘The original idea wasn’t that I should always stay in the background.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’d rather she told you.’

  I made a guess. ‘You and me?’

  She hesitated. ‘It has been dropped now. Because of what’s happened. But we suspect it was always meant to be dropped. Which leaves me wondering why I’m here at all.’

  ‘But it’s vile. We’re not just pawns on a chessboard.’

  ‘As he knows full well, Nicholas. It’s not just that he wants to be mysterious to us. He wants us to be mysterious to him.’ She smiled and murmured, ‘Anyway, speaking for myself, I’m not sure I don’t wish it hadn’t been dropped.’

  ‘Can I tell your sister that?’

  She grinned and looked down. ‘You mustn’t take me too seriously.’

  ‘I’ve already begun to realize that.’

  She let a little silence pass. ‘Julie’s only just got over a particularly messy affaire, Nicholas. That’s one reason she wanted to be out of England.’

  ‘She has my sympathies.’

  ‘So I understand. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to see her hurt again.’

  ‘She won’t be hurt by me.’

  She leant forward. ‘She has a kind of genius for picking the wrong men. I don’t know you, so that’s not meant personally at all. Simply that her past record doesn’t give me much confidence.’ She said, ‘I’m being over-protective.’

  ‘She doesn’t need protecting from me.’

  ‘I just mean that she’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.’

  ‘Prose and pudding?’

  ‘I don’t expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.’

  She said it with a dryness tinged with wistfulness that I liked. I looked secretly at her profiled face; and had a glimpse of a world where they did both play the same part, where I had both, the dark and the pale; Renaissance bawdy stories about girls who changed places in the night. I saw a future where, all right, of course, I married Julie, but this equally attractive and evidently rather different sister-in-law accompanied, if only aesthetically, the marriage. With twins there must always be nuances, suggestions, blendings of identity, souls and bodies that became indistinguishable and reciprocally haunting.

  She murmured, ‘I must go now.’

  ‘Have I convinced you?’

  ‘As much as you can.’

  ‘Can’t I walk back with you to wherever you hide?’

  ‘You can’t come in.’

  ‘All right. But I need reassurance, too.’

  She hesitated. ‘If you’ll promise to turn back when I say.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  We stood up and went down towards the statue of Poseidon in the starlight. We had hardly reached it when we saw we hadn’t been alone. We both froze. A white figure had stood out, some twenty-five yards away, from among the bushes at the bottom, seawar
d side of the clearing round the statue. We had spoken in voices too low to be overheard, but it was still a shock.

  June whispered, ‘Oh God. Damn.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  She caught my hand and made me turn away.

  ‘It’s our beloved watchdog. Don’t do anything. I’ll have to leave you here.’

  I looked over my shoulder and made him out better – a man in a white medical coat, a would-be male nurse with some kind of dark mask over his face, whose features I couldn’t distinguish. June pressed my hand and sought my eyes, a look as direct as her sister’s.

  ‘I do trust you. Please trust us.’

  ‘What’s going to happen now?’

  ‘I don’t know. But don’t start arguing. Just go back to the house.’

  She leant quickly forward, pulling me a little towards her, and kissed my cheek. Then she was walking down towards the white coat. When she was near the man, I followed her. He stood silently aside to let her pass into the deeper darkness between the trees, but then blocked the opening between the bushes again. With a shock, almost greater than seeing him in the first place, I suddenly realized as I came down to him that he wasn’t wearing a mask. He was a Negro: a big, tall man, perhaps five years older than myself. He stared at me without expression. I came to within some ten feet of him. He extended his arms, warning, forbidding the way. I could see he was lighter-skinned than some black men, a smooth face, intent eyes, somehow liquid and animal, concentrated purely on the physical problem of my next move. He stood poised yet coiled, like an athlete, a boxer.

  I stopped and said, ‘You look prettier with your jackal mask on.’

  He did not move. But June’s face reappeared behind him. It was anxious, beseeching.

  ‘Nicholas. Go back to the house. Please.’ I looked from her concerned eyes to his. She said, ‘He can’t speak. He’s a mute.’

  ‘I thought black eunuchs went out with the Ottoman Empire.’

  His expression did not change a millimetre, and I had the impression that he hadn’t even understood my words. But after a moment he folded his arms and widened his stance. I could see a black polo-neck jumper under the medical coat. I knew he wanted me to come at him, and I was tempted to take him on.

  I let June decide. I looked past him at her. ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes. Please go.’

  ‘I’ll wait by the statue.’

  She nodded and turned away. I went back to the sea-god, and sat on the rock he stood on; for some reason, I don’t know why, reached out a hand and grasped his bronze ankle. The Negro stood with folded arms, like a bored attendant in a museum – or perhaps indeed like some scimitared janissary at the gates of the imperial harem. I relinquished the ankle and lit a cigarette to counter the released adrenalin. A minute passed, two. I listened, despite the sisters’ talk of a hiding-place, for a boat engine. But there was silence. I felt, beyond the insult to my virility before an attractive girl, ill-at-ease and guilty. The news of the clandestine meeting would obviously go straight back to Conchis now. Perhaps he would appear. It wasn’t so much that I was frightened of having a show-down over the schizophrenia nonsense; but that having broken his rules so signally, I would be sent off the field for good. I contemplated trying to suborn the Negro in some way, argue with him, plead. But he simply waited in the shadows, a doubly, both racially and personally, anonymous face.

  From somewhere down by the sea there was a whistle. Things happened very fast then.

  The white figure strode swiftly up towards me. I stood and said, ‘Now wait a minute.’ But he was strong and quick as a leopard, two inches taller than I am. An obviously humourless 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 on to the rock pedestal of the statue. The edge caught the back of my knees and I had to sit. As I wiped the spittle off my nose and cheek I saw him already walking away down the slope. I opened my mouth to shout something after him, then swallowed it. I pulled out a handkerchief, kept wiping my face. It was filthy, defiled. I would have murdered Conchis if he had stood in front of me then.

  But in fact I went back to the gate and down the path to Moutsa; I had to be outside the domaine. There I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the sea; 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.

  I had long suspected 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… and I was not going to stand much more of it. June had impressed me, her common-sense view of the situation. I was clearly the only male around that they could trust; and quite apart from anything else, they needed my help, my strength. I knew it would be no good storming into the house and having it out with the old man – he would only feed me more lies. He was like some animal in a den, he had to be coaxed out a little more before he could be trapped and destroyed.

  I slowly trod water, with the dark slope of Bourani across the silent water to the east; and gradually I quietened down. It might have been worse than just that spit; and I had insulted the man. I possessed a lot of faults, but racialism wasn’t one of them … or at least I liked to think racialism wasn’t one of them. Besides, the ball was now firmly in the old man’s court; however he reacted, I would discover something about him. I must wait to sec what change this brought to tomorrow’s ‘script’. There returned that old excitement -let it all come, even the black Minotaur, so long as it came; so long as I might reach the centre, and have the final prize I coveted.

  I went ashore and dried myself with my shirt. Then I pulled on the rest of my clothes and walked back to the house. It was silent. I listened, without bothering to conceal it from anyone who might have been listening in return, outside Conchis’s bedroom door. There was no sound.

  46

  I woke up feeling more slugged, more beaten-steak – the heat does it in Greece – than usual. It was nearly ten o’clock. I soaked my head in cold water, dragged on my clothes, and went downstairs under the colonnade. I looked under the muslin on the table; my breakfast, the spirit-stove to heat up the usual brass vriki of coffee. I waited a moment, but no one appeared. There was a deserted silence about the house that puzzled me. I had expected Conchis, more comedy; not an empty stage. I sat down and ate my breakfast.

  Afterwards I carried the breakfast things round to Maria’s cottage, on the pretext of being helpful; but her door was locked. First failure. I went upstairs, knocked on Conchis’s door, tried it: second failure. Then I went round all the ground-floor rooms in the house. I even cursorily searched the book-cases in the music-room for his psychiatric papers, also without success. I knew a sudden fear: because of last night, it was all over. They were all vanished for good.

  I walked to the statue, all round the domaine, like a man searching for a lost key – then back to the house, nearly an hour had passed. It remained as deserted as before. I began to feel desperate and at a loss – what should I do now? Go to the village, tell the police? In the end I went down to the private beach. The boat was gone. I 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 finally jutting sufficiently from the coast 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 boa
t could land. Yet this was the area the two sisters supposedly headed for when they went ‘home’. There was only low scrub on the abrupt-sloping cliff-tops after the pines ended, manifestly impossible to hide in. That left only one solution. They made their way along the top of the cliffs, then circled inland and down past the cottages.

  I swam a little further out to sea, but then a colder vein of water made me turn back. I saw at once. A girl in a pale pink summer dress was standing under the edge of the 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 under the green wall of trees, the sunlight between the pines dappling the pale rose of the dress; and then, with a leap of surprise, I saw another flash of pink, a second girl. They stood, each replica of each, and the closer waved again, beckoning me ashore. They both turned and disappeared, as if they were setting off to meet me halfway.

  Five or six minutes later I arrived, very out of breath, with a shirt pulled over my wet trunks, at the far side of the gulley. They weren’t by the statue, and I had a few moments’ angry suspicion that I was being teased again – shown them only to lose them. But I went down towards the cliffs, past the carob. The sea seared blue through the furthermost pines. Suddenly I saw their two figures. They were sitting on a shaded hummock of earth and rock, to the east. I walked more slowly, sure of them now. The identical dresses were very simple, with short faintly puffed sleeves, scalloped deep above the breast; they wore powder-blue stockings, pale grey shoes. They looked very feminine, pretty, a pair of nineteen-year-olds in their Summer Sunday best … yet to my mind vaguely over-dressed, towny – even, weirdly, there was a rush basket beside June, as if they were still students at Cambridge.

  June stood as I got near and came to meet me. She had her hair down, like her sister; golden skin, an even deeper tan than I had realized the previous night; and there was a facial difference at close range, a greater openness, even a touch of impudent tomboyishness. Behind her Julie watched us meet. She was noticeably unsmiling and holding herself aloof. June grinned.

  ‘I told her you said you didn’t care which of us you met this morning.’