The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  ‘He used to give a famous lecture on art as institutionalized illusion.’ She grimaced. ‘One secret horror we always have is that someone like you will have read it. It’s one reason we could never do this to a young French intellectual.’

  ‘He is French?’

  ‘No. Greek. But he was born in Alexandria. Mostly brought up in France. His father was very rich. Cosmopolitan. At least I imagine. Maurice seems to have rebelled against the life he was supposed to lead. He claims he first went to England to escape from his parents. To study medicine.’

  ‘And obviously you admire him a lot.’

  She gave a little nod as she walked, then said quietly, ‘I think he’s the greatest teacher in the world. I don’t even think. I know.’

  ‘How did it go last year?’

  ‘Oh God. That dreadful man. We had to find another subject. Not from the school. Someone in Athens.’

  ‘And Leverrier?’

  She had a smile, unmistakably of affectionate memory. ‘John.’ Then she touched my arm. ‘That’s a very different story. Tomorrow? Now it’s your turn. Tell me a bit more about… you know.’

  So I told her a little about Alison. I hadn’t misled her in any way in Athens, of course. I simply hadn’t realized how much she had been hiding.

  ‘There was no previous record of suicide attempts?’

  ‘Absolutely none. She’d always seemed someone who could take things as they came.’

  ‘No depressive… ?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It does happen. With women. Out of the blue. The tragedy is, they often don’t really mean it.’

  ‘I’m afraid she did.’

  ‘It was probably always latent. Though there are usually signs.’ She said, ‘And usually there’s a better reason for it than just breaking offa relationship.’

  ‘I’ve tried to feel that.’

  ‘At least it’s not as if you lied to her in any way.’ She pressed my hand briefly. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself

  We had come to the house, and in high time, because the first sporadic but heavy drops of rain were beginning to splash down. The storm seemed to be heading straight for the island. June pushed the outer gate open and I followed her up the path. She took a key and unlocked the front door. The hall was lit, though the current kept wavering under the much greater currents of electricity being discharged in the sky. There she turned and kissed my cheek quickly, almost shyly.

  ‘Wait here. She may be asleep. I won’t be a second.’

  I watched her run up the stairs and disappear. There was a tap, and she called Julie’s name in a low voice. A door opened and closed. Then silence. The thunder and lightning outside, an abrupt squall of more consistent rain on the windowpanes, a gust of cool air from somewhere. Two minutes passed. Then the invisible door upstairs opened.

  Julie came first, barefooted, in a black kimono over a white nightdress. She paused a moment, a distressed face, staring down at me, then she came running down the stairs.

  ‘Oh Nicholas.’

  She fell into my arms. We didn’t kiss. June stayed at the top, smiling down. Julie held me away from her, searching my eyes.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She sank against me again, as if she was the one who needed comforting. I patted her back. June blew a light kiss, a benison, down at me from the top of the stairs, then disappeared.

  ‘June’s told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Some of it.’

  She held me a little closer still. ‘I’m so relieved it’s all over.’

  ‘I haven’t forgiven you for Sunday.’

  She looked up, with a good deal more seriousness in her face than there had been in my voice; beseeched me to believe her.

  ‘I hated it. Nicholas, I nearly didn’t do it. Honestly. It was so terrible, knowing it was going to happen.’

  ‘You hid it disgustingly well.’

  ‘Only because I knew it was all nearly over.’

  ‘I hear it’s your first year as well.’

  ‘And my last. I couldn’t do it again. Especially now … ‘ again she appealed for understanding, forgiveness. ‘June’s always been so mysterious about it. I had to see what it was like.’

  ‘I’m glad. Finally.’

  She came close against me again.

  ‘I haven’t lied about one thing.’

  ‘I wonder what that is.’

  My hand was found, gently pinched in reproach. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Anyway, you can’t go back to your school in this rain.’ She added, ‘And I hate being alone in thunder and lightning.’

  ‘So do I. Now you mention it.’

  Our next lines were not spoken; and once they were exchanged, she took my hand and led me upstairs. We came to the door of the room I had searched three days before. But there she hesitated, then gave me a faintly self-mocking yet genuinely shy look.

  ‘What I said on Sunday?’

  ‘You long ago made me forget every other girl I’ve

  She looked down. ‘This is where my witchcraft stops.’

  ‘I always liked us better as Ferdinand and Miranda.’

  She smiled a moment, as if she had forgotten that; gave me an intense look, seemed about to say something else, changed her mind. She opened the door and Ave went in. There was a lamp on by the bed, the shutters were closed. The bed was as she had left it, the sheet and a folkweave bedspread thrown aside, the pillow crumpled; some open book of poetry beneath the lamp, I could see its broken lines of print; an abalone-shell used as an ashtray. “We stood a little at a loss, as people do when they have foreseen such moments too long. Her hair was down, the white hem of her nightdress reached almost to her ankles. She glanced round the room, as if with my eyes, as if I might be contemptuous of such domestic simplicity; made a little grimace. I smiled, but her shyness was contagious – and the changed reality between us, what she had really meant by no more ‘witchcraft’: no more games, evasions, tantalizings. For a bizarre few seconds those seemed, in retrospect, to hold a paradoxical innocence; Adam and Eve before the Fall.

  Mercifully the world outside came to our aid. There was a flash of lightning. The lamp shuddered, then went out. We were plunged into pitch darkness. Almost at once there was a tremendous peal of thunder overhead. Before it had died away she was in my arms and we were kissing hungrily. More lightning, even louder and closer thunder. She twisted against me, clinging like a child. I kissed the crown of her head, patted her back, murmured.

  ‘Shall I undress you and put you to bed and hold you?’

  ‘Let me sit on your lap a minute. It makes me so nervous.’

  I was led in the darkness to a chair opposite the bed, against the wall. I sat, she sat across my knees, and we kissed again. Then she nestled against me; found my free hand and laced her fingers through mine.

  ‘Tell me about your friend. What really happened.’

  I told her what I had told her sister a few minutes before. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I felt so fed up with Maurice. With you. I couldn’t face just hanging around here.’

  ‘Did you tell her about me?’

  ‘Only that I’d met someone on the island.’

  ‘Was she upset?’

  ‘That’s the absurd thing. If only she had been. Hadn’t buried it all so “well.’

  Her hand squeezed mine gently. ‘And you didn’t want her at all?’

  ‘I felt sorry for her. But she really didn’t seem too surprised.’

  ‘Not answering my question.’

  I smiled in the darkness at this not very well concealed battle between sympathy and feminine curiosity.

  ‘I kept thinking how much rather I’d be with you.’

  ‘Poor girl. At least I can imagine how she must have felt.’

  ‘She wasn’t like you. She never took anything seriously. Especially if it was male.’

  ‘But she must have taken you s
eriously. In the end.’

  I had anticipated that. ‘I think I was just a kind ot symbol, Julie. Of all sorts of other things that had gone wrong in her life. The last straw, I suppose.’

  ‘What did you do in Athens?’

  ‘A few sights. Had a meal. Sat and talked. Drank too much. It was all very civilized, really. Or seemed it.’

  Her nails dug gently into the back of my hand. ‘I bet you did go to bed.’

  ‘Would you be angry if we had?’

  Her head shook against mine. ‘No. I deserved it. I’d understand.’ She raised my hand and kissed it. ‘I wish you’d tell me.’

  ‘Why are you so curious?’

  ‘Because there’s so much I don’t know about you.’

  I took a breath.

  ‘Perhaps I should have. Then at least she might still be alive.’

  There was a little silence, then she kissed my cheek. ‘I’m only trying to find out if I’m spending the night with a callous swine or a bruised angel.’

  ‘There’s only one way to find that out.’

  ‘You think?’

  Another light kiss, then she slipped gently free of my arm and moved away a little beside the bed. It was very dark in the room, and I could see nothing. But then lightning shivered through the shutters. For a brief flash I saw her by the cassone, peeling her nightdress over her head. Then it was sound, her feeling her way back towards me, a crack of thunder, a little shocked outbreath. I reached and found her groping hand and pulled her back naked to my lap.

  Our mouths met, and I explored her body: the breasts, the smooth stomach, the little thatch of hair, the thighs. I could have used a dozen hands, not one … to have her surrendered at last, compliant, mine. She shifted, stood a moment, then straddled my lap and began to unbutton my shirt. In another flash of lightning I glimpsed the expression on her face – a kind of intent seriousness, like a child undressing a doll. She forced the shirt, and the jacket I was still wearing, back away from my body. Then she clasped her hands behind my neck, as she had in the sea at Moutsa, and sat away a little.

  ‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You can’t see me.’

  ‘Felt.’

  I bent and kissed her breasts, then pulled her against me and found her mouth again. She was wearing some strange scent, musky and faintly orange, like cowslips; and it seemed to match something both sensual and innocent in her, a growing abandon to passion that was also a willed attempt to be what she felt I must want: feverish, strained, not playful at all. In the end she tore her mouth away, as if she was exhausted. After a few moments, she whispered.

  ‘Let’s open the shutters. I love the smell of the rain.’

  She slipped away and went to open them. I got quickly out of my remaining clothes, and caught her as she turned back from the window; made her turn, held her close from behind, so that we stood with the rain teeming down three feet away, the cool wall of dark air. All the lights in the village were out, the generator fuse must have blown. Lightning split the sky over towards the mainland and for a moment or two the crowded houses below us, all the walls and the roofs, even the sea below, were illuminated with an uncanny pale-violet light. But the thunder took longer to arrive; the short centre of the storm had already passed on.

  Julie leant back against me, abandoning the front of her body to the night and my encircling hands. I smoothed down the little belly, ruffled the pubic hair. Her head turned against me, then she raised her right leg and rested it on a stool below the window, so that the hand could caress more easily. She took my other hand, led it to her breasts; then stood absolutely passive, letting me excite her – as if the rain was her real lover, and the outside night; as if I was now to do to her what she had done to me in the sea. Little splashes of the downpour bounced from the sill against my lower hand and her skin, but she seemed oblivious of them.

  I whispered, ‘I wish we could go outside.’

  Her mouth twisted to kiss me in quick assent, but then her hands found mine again and pressed to keep them where they were. She preferred this now: to be gently abused, slowly coaxed … there was still lightning, but it began to seem from another world, the only real world was her body and my own … the curves of her back, the warmth there, the pods of silken skin with their aroused tips, the indulged, solicited, caress below. It was a little as I had imagined it in the beginning, the Lily Montgomery phase: this delicate, elusive creature half-swooning, succumbed to the animal part of herself; and not quite adult yet – beneath her airs and graces, something of the innocent perversity of a little girl playing at sex with little boys.

  Suddenly, half a minute later, she caught my hands and made them lie on her stomach; imprisoned them.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You’re being wicked.’

  ‘That was the idea.’

  She turned against me, her face buried.

  ‘Tell me what you liked her doing to you best.’

  I remembered an old Urfe law: that girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. But I saw some delicious instruction ahead in this case.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because I want to do it to you.’

  I held her a little closer. ‘I like you as you are.’

  She whispered, ‘You’re so big.’

  Her hands stole down between us. We stood apart a little. There seemed something virginal about her; yet wanting to be corrupted, led further. She whispered again.

  ‘Have you got a thing?’

  ‘In my coat.’

  ‘Shall I put it on for you?’

  I went and found the contraceptive, and Julie moved beside the bed. There was a little more light now, the clouds must have thinned slightly, I could just see her silhouette. She took the sheath, made me sit on the end of the bed, knelt on the island rug, leant forward and rolled the sheath on; bent and gave it a little kiss. Then sat back on her heels, hands folded across her loins, demure. I could just see her smile.

  ‘Liar. I don’t think you’re shy at all.’

  ‘I did spend five years in a convent dormitory. Where nothing was left to the imagination.’

  The rain was easing, but the freshness of it, the smell of cistern, water on stone, pervaded the room. I saw it secretly streaming down the walls of hundreds of cisterns; the excited eels at the bottom.

  ‘All that talk of running away.’

  Her smile deepened, but she said nothing. I reached for her, and she rose, let herself be drawn down on top of me. Silence then, a retreat from everything but the conversation of bodies. She pretended to possess me, mocked and consoled me with her mouth; then a silence even of movement, as if in time she would melt down into me; but that began to seem a waiting in her. I broke the spell, and she shifted, lay back on the rough bedspread, her head on the pillow. I knelt and kissed down her body to the ankles, surveyed her a moment from the bottom of the bed. She lay a little twisted to one side, an arm flung out, her head sideways. But as I moved forward, she turned fully on her back. A few moments later I was deep inside her. It was not like any other such moment of first entry I had ever gained; something well beyond the sexual, there was such a fraught, frustrated past, such a future inherent in it; such a possession. I knew I had won far more than her body. I lay suspended on my arms over her. She was staring up in the darkness.

  I said, ‘I adore you.’

  ‘I want you to.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Always.’

  I began to thrust slowly – but then something strange happened. Without warning, the lamp beside the bed came on again. They must have mended the generator, down in the village. I stopped my movement, for a second or two we were comically like two shocked strangers, our eyes locked in embarrassment; so much so that we had to smile. I looked down her slim body to where we were joined, then back to her face. I sensed something troubled and shy in her look, but then she closed her eyes and let her head fall sidew
ays in profile. If I wanted it so …

  I began to drive. Her arms bent back behind her head, as if she was defenceless, doubly naked, completely at my mercy; that lovely slavelike limpness in everything but the loins. There was a tiny rhythmic creaking somewhere in the bedframe. She seemed so small, fragile, asking for the brutality she had said she had felt in the chapel at Moutsa. Her hands clenched, as if I was really hurting her. I came, it was too soon, but irresistible. I thought it was much too soon for her, but just as I was dying, about to give up, she suddenly raised her arms and urged me on: a brief but convulsive little thrusting against me. Then I was pulled violently down to meet her mouth.

  We lay still joined for a little time, in the profound silence of the house; then we were separate, and I moved beside her. She reached out for the lamp-switch and we were in darkness again. She turned on her stomach, her face turned away. I stroked down her back, patted the small bottom, kept caressing its curves. Already, despite the traditional nature of the moment, I felt a marvellous surge of euphoria. I hadn’t expected it to be so shared, so full of promise, like the skin beneath my hand; that she could be so warm, capable of giving. I told myself I ought to have guessed, there was that feeling about June of a girl who enjoyed it, and the same need must have lain buried in the less extravert sister beside me. At last our bodies had expressed themselves; and I knew it would be much better still … subtler, longer, infinite variations. That appled bottom, the tangled hair against my mouth. A distant, receding roll of thunder. Already, outside, there was more light, the moon must have broken partially from behind the clouds. All storms were past, and we lay in the silence of Eden regained.

  It was some five minutes later. We had lain in total silence, no words were needed. But then she pushed herself up, leant over me for a moment, stooped and quickly kissed me. She leant back, her face above mine in a hanging cloud of hair, a faint smile, her eyes on mine.

  ‘Nicholas, will you always remember something about tonight?’

  I grinned. ‘What?’

  ‘That it’s also how, not why.’

  Still I smiled. ‘How was beautiful.’

  ‘As I wanted it to be.’

  For the briefest moment she hesitated, almost as if it were some formula she expected me to repeat. Then suddenly she knelt back, turned and was off the bed, and reaching for her kimono. I should have reacted more quickly, at least to the briskness with which she reached for the garment, if not to something in her voice and face when she was looking down at me – a seriousness that had nothing to do with the naivety I first took it for. I leant up on an elbow.