The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  I turned and walked out. Demetriades started to shout petulant curses I didn’t understand. A steward was standing in the door and I told him to bring coffee to my room. Then I sat there and waited.

  Sure enough, as soon as second school began, I was summoned to the headmaster’s office. Besides the old man there was the deputy headmaster, the senior housemaster and the gym master; the latter, I presumed, in case I should cut up rough again. The senior housemaster, Androutsos, spoke French fluently and he was evidently there to be the translator at this court martial.

  As soon as I sat down I was handed a letter. I saw by the heading that it was from the School Board in Athens. It was in French officialese ; dated two days before.

  The Board of Governors of the Lord Byron School having considered the report submitted by the headmaster has regretfully decided that the said Board must terminate the contract with you under clause 7 of the said contract: Unsatisfactory conduct as teacher.

  As per the said clause your salary will be paid until the end of September and your fare home will be paid.

  There was to be no trying; only sentencing. I looked up at the four faces. If they showed anything it was embarrassment, and I could even detect a hint of regret on Androutsos’s; but no sign of complicity.

  I said, ‘I didn’t know the headmaster was in Mr Conchis’s pay.’ Androutsos was obviously puzzled. ‘A la solde de qui?’ He translated what I angrily repeated; but the headmaster too seemed nonplussed. He was in fact far too dignified a figurehead, more like an American college president than a real headmaster, to make it likely that he would connive in an unjust dismissal. Demetriades had deserved his black eye even more than I suspected. Demetriades, Conchis, some influential third person on the Board. A secret report…

  There was a swift conversation in Greek between the headmaster and his deputy. I heard the name Conchis twice, but I couldn’t follow what they said. Androutsos was told to translate.

  ‘The headmaster does not understand your remark.’

  ‘No?’

  I grimaced menacingly at the old man, but I was already more than half persuaded that his incomprehension was genuine.

  At a sign from the vice-master Androutsos raised a sheet of paper and read from it. ‘The following complaints were made against you. One: you have failed to enter the life of the school, absenting yourself almost every weekend during this last term.’ I began to grin. ‘Two: you have twice bribed prefects to take your supervision periods.’ This was true, though the bribery had been no worse than a letting them off compositions they owed me. Demetriades had suggested it; and only he could have reported it. ‘Three: you failed to mark your examination papers, a most serious scholastic duty. Four: you –’

  But I had had enough of the farce. I stood up. The headmaster spoke; a pursed mouth in a grave old face.

  ‘The headmaster also says,’ translated Androutsos, ‘that your insane assault on a colleague at breakfast this morning has done irreparable harm to the respect he has always entertained for the land of Byron and Shakespeare.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I laughed out loud, then I wagged my finger at Androutsos. The gym master got ready to spring at me. ‘Now listen. Tell him this. I am going to Athens. I am going to the British Embassy, I am going to the Ministry of Education, I am going to the newspapers, I am going to make such trouble that

  I didn’t finish. I raked them with a broadside of contempt, and walked out.

  I was not allowed to get very far with my packing, back in my room. Not five minutes afterwards there was a knock on the door. I smiled grimly, and opened it violently. But the member of the tribunal I had least expected was standing there: the deputy headmaster.

  His name was Mavromichalis. He ran the school administratively, and was the disciplinary dean also; a kind of camp adjutant, a lean, tense, balding man in his late forties, withdrawn even with other Greeks. I had had very little to do with him. The senior teacher of demotic, he was, in the historical tradition of his kind, a fanatical lover of his own country. He had run a famous underground news-sheet in Athens during the Occupation; and the classical pseudonym he had used then, o Bouplix, the oxgoad, had stuck. Though he always deferred to the headmaster in public, in many ways it was his spirit that most informed the school; he hated the Byzantine accidie that lingers in the Greek soul far more intensely than any foreigner could.

  He stood there, closely watching me, and I stood in the door, surprised out of my anger by something in his eyes. He managed to suggest that if matters had allowed he might have been smiling. He spoke quietly.

  ‘Je veux vous parler, Monsieur Urfe.’

  I had another surprise then, because he had never spoken to me before in anything but Greek; I had always assumed that he knew no other language. I let him come in. He glanced quickly down at the suitcases open on my bed, then invited me to sit behind the desk. He took a seat himself by the window and folded his arms: shrewd, incisive eyes. He very deliberately let the silence speak for him. I knew then. For the headmaster, I was simply a bad teacher; for this man, something else besides.

  I said coldly, ‘Eh bien?’

  ‘I regret these circumstances.’

  ‘You didn’t come here to tell me that.’

  He stared at me. ‘Do you think our school is a good school?’

  ‘My dear Mr Mavromichalis, if you imagine – ‘

  He raised his hands sharply but pacifyingly. ‘I am here simply as a colleague. My question is serious.’

  His French was ponderous, rusty, but far from elementary.

  ‘Colleague … or emissary?’

  He lanced a look at me. The boys had a joke about him: how even the cicadas stopped talking when he passed.

  ‘Please to answer my question. Is our school good?’

  I shrugged impatiently. ‘Academically. Yes. Obviously.’

  He watched me a moment more, then came to the point. ‘For our school’s sake, I do not want scandals.’

  I noted the implications of that first person singular.

  ‘You should have thought of that before.’

  Another silence. He said, ‘We have in Greece an old folksong that says, He who steals for bread is innocent, He who steals for gold is guilty.’ His eyes watched to see if I understood. ‘If you wish to resign … I can assure you that Monsieur le Directeur will accept. The other letter will be forgotten.’

  ‘Which Monsieur le Directeur?’

  He smiled very faintly, but said nothing; and would, I knew, never say anything. In an odd way, perhaps because I was behind the desk, I felt like the tyrannical interrogator. He was the brave patriot. Finally, he looked out of the window and said, as if irrelevantly, ‘We have an excellent science laboratory.’

  I knew that; I knew the equipment in it had been given by an anonymous donor when the school was re-opened after the war and I knew the staff-room ‘legend’ was that the money had been wrung out of some rich collaborationist.

  I said, ‘I see.’

  ‘ I have come to invite you to resign.’

  ‘As my predecessors did?’

  He didn’t answer. I shook my head.

  He tacked nearer the truth. ‘I do not know what has happened to you. I do not ask you to forgive that. I ask you to forgive this.’ He gestured: the school.

  ‘I hear you think I’m a bad teacher anyway.’

  He said, ‘We will give you a good recommandation.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  He shrugged. ‘If you insist…’

  ‘Am I so bad as that?’

  ‘We have no place here for any but the best.’

  Under his oxgoad eyes, I looked down. The suitcases waited on the bed. I wanted to get away, to Athens, anywhere, to non-identity and non-involvement. I knew I wasn’t a good teacher. But I was too flayed, too stripped elsewhere, to admit it.

  ‘You’re asking too much.’ He waited in silence, implacably. ‘I’ll keep quiet in Athens on one condition. That he meets me there.’
/>   ‘Pas possible.’

  Silence. I wondered how his monomaniacal sense of duty towards the school lived with whatever allegiance he owed Conchis. A hornet hovered threateningly in the window, then caroomed away; as my anger retreated before my desire to have it all over and done with.

  I said. ‘Why you?’

  He smiled then, a thin, small smile. ‘Avant la guerre.’

  I knew he had not been teaching at the school; it must have been at Bourani. I looked down at the desk. ‘I want to leave at once. Today.’

  ‘That is understood. But no more scandals?’ He meant, after that at breakfast.

  ‘I’ll see. If… ‘I gestured in my turn. ‘Only because of this.’

  ‘Bien.’ He said it almost warmly, and came round the desk to take my hand; and even shook my shoulder, as Conchis had sometimes done, as if to assure me that he took my word.

  Then, briskly and sparsely, he went.

  And so I was expelled. As soon as he had gone, I felt angry again, angry that once again I had not used the cat. I did not mind leaving the school; to have dragged through another year, pretending Bourani did not exist, brewing sourly in the past … it was unthinkable. But leaving the island, the light, the sea. I stared out over the olive-groves. It was suddenly a loss like that of a limb. It was not the meanness of making a scandal, it was the futility. Whatever happened, I was banned from ever living again on Phraxos.

  After a while I forced myself to go on packing. The bursar sent a clerk up with my pay cheque and the address of the travel agency I should go to in Athens about my journey home. Just after noon I walked out of the school gate for the last time.

  I went straight to Patarescu’s house. A peasant-woman came to the door; the doctor had gone to Rhodes for a month. Then I went to the house on the hill. I knocked on the gate. No one answered; it was locked. Then I went back down through the village to the old harbour, to the taverna where I had met old Barba Dimitraki. Georgiou, as I hoped, knew of a room for me in a cottage near by. I sent a boy back to the school with a fish-trolley to get my bags; then ate some bread and olives.

  At two, in the fierce afternoon sun, I started to toil up between the hedges of prickly pear towards the central ridge. I was carrying a hurricane lamp, a crowbar and a hacksaw. No scandal was one thing; but no investigation was another.

  65

  I came to Bourani about half past three. The gap beside and the top of the gate had been wired, while a new notice covered the Salle d’attente sign. It said in Greek, Private property, entrance strictly forbidden. It was still easy enough to climb over. But I had no sooner got inside than I heard a voice coming up through the trees from Moutsa. Hiding the tools and lamp behind a bush, I climbed back.

  I went cautiously down the path, tense as a stalking cat, until I could see the beach. A caïque was moored at the far end. There were five or six people – not islanders, people in gay swimming-costumes. As I watched, two of the men picked up a girl, who screamed, and carried her down the shingle and dumped her into the sea. There was the blare of a battery wireless. I walked a few yards inside the fringe of trees, half expecting at any moment to recognize them. But the girl was small and dark, very Greek; two plump women; a man of thirty and two older men. I had never seen any of them before.

  There was a sound behind me. A barefooted fisherman in ragged grey trousers, the owner of the caïque, came from the chapel. I asked him who the people were. They were from Athens, a Mr Sotiriades and his family, they came every summer to the island.

  Did many Athenian people come to the bay in August? Many, very many, he said. He pointed along the beach: In two weeks, ten, fifteen caïques, more people than sea.

  Bourani was pregnable: and I had my final reason to leave the island.

  The house was shuttered and closed, just as I had last seen it. I made my way round over the gulley to the Earth. I admired once again the cunning way its trapdoor was concealed, then raised it. The dark shaft stared up. I climbed down with the lamp and lit it; climbed back and got the tools. I had to saw halfway through the hasp of the padlock on the first side-room; then, under pressure from the crowbar, it snapped. I picked up the lamp, shot back the bolt, pulled open the massive door, and went in.

  I found myself in the north-west corner of a rectangular chamber. Facing me I could see two embrasures that had evidently been filled in, though little ventilator grilles showed they had some access to the air. Along the north wall opposite, a long built-in wardrobe. By the east wall, two beds, a double and a single. Tables and chairs. Three armchairs. The floor had some kind of rough folkweavc carpeting on top of felt, and three of the walls had been whitewashed, so that the place, though windowless, was less gloomy than the central room. On the west wall, above the bed, was a huge mural of Tyrolean peasants dancing; Lederhosen and a girl whose flying skirt showed her legs above her flower-clocked stockings. The colours were still good; or re-touched.

  There were a dozen or so changes of costume for Lily in the wardrobe, and at least eight of them were duplicated for her sister; several I had not seen. In a set of drawers there were period gloves, handbags, stockings, hats; even an antiquated linen swimming-costume with a lunatic ribboned Tarn o’Shanter cap to match.

  Blankets were piled on each mattress. I smelt one of the pillows, but couldn’t detect Lily’s characteristic scent. Over a table between the old gunslits, there was a bookshelf. I pulled down one of the books. The Perfect Hostess. A Little Symposium on the Principles and Laws of Etiquette as Observed and Practised in the Best Society. London. 1901. There were a dozen or so Edwardian novels. Someone had pencilled notes on the flyleaves. Good dialogue, or Useful clichés at 98 and 164. See scene at 203, said one. ‘Are you asking me to commit osculation ?’ laughed the ever-playful Fanny.

  A chest, but it was empty. In fact the whole room was disappointingly empty of anything personal. I went back and sawed through the other padlock. The room behind was similarly furnished; another mural, this time of snow-covered mountains. In a wardrobe there I found the horn that the ‘Apollo’ figure had called with; the Robert Foulkes costume; a chef’s white overall and drum hat; a Lapp smock; and the entire uniform of a First World War captain with Rifle Brigade badges.

  At last I returned to the shelf of books. In irritation I pulled down the whole lot and out of one of the books, an old bound copy of Punch 1914 (in which various pictures had been ticked in red crayon), spilled a little folded pile of what I thought at first were letters. But they were not. They were pieces of roneographed paper. They had apparently conveyed some kind of orders. None was dated.

  1. The Drowned Italian Airman

  We have decided to omit this episode.

  2. Norway

  We have decided to omit the visits with this episode.

  3. Hirondelle

  Treat with caution. Still tender.

  4. If subject discovers Earth

  Please be sure you know the new procedure for this eventuality by next weekend. Lily considers the subject likely to force such a situation on us.

  I noted that ‘Lily’.

  5. Hirondelle

  Avoid all mention with the subject from now on.

  6. Final Phase

  Termination by end of July for all except nucleus.

  7. State of subject

  Maurice considers that the subject has now reached the malleable stage. Remember that for the subject any play is now better than no play. Change modes, intensify withdrawals.

  The eighth sheet was a typewritten copy of the Tempest passage Lily had recited to me. Finally, on different paper, a scrawled message:

  Tell Bo not to forget the unmentionables and the books. Oh and tissues, please.

  Each of these pieces of paper had writing on the back, obviously (or 548 obviously intended to look like) Lily’s rough drafts. There were crossings-out, revisions. They all seemed to be in her hand.

  1. What is it?

  If you were told its name

  You would not u
nderstand.

  Why is it?

  If you were told its reasons

  You would not understand.

  Is it?

  You are not even sure of that,

  Poor footsteps in an empty room.

  2. Love is the course of the experiment.

  Is to the limit of imagination.

  Love is your manhood in my orchards. Love is your dark face reading this. Your dark, your gentle face and hands. Did Desdemona

  This was evidently unfinished.

  3. The Choice

  Spare him till he dies.

  Torment him till he lives.

  4. ominus dominus

  Nicholas

  homullus est

  ridiculus

  igitur mcus parvus pediculus multo vult dare sine morari

  in cuius illius ridiculus Nicholas colossicus ciculns

  5. Baron von Masoch sat on a pin;

  Then sat again, to push it in.

  ‘How exquisite,’ cried Plato, ‘The idea of a baked potato.’ But exquisiter to some Is potato in the turn.

  ‘My dear, you must often be frightened,’ Said a friend to Madame de Sade. ‘Oh not exactly frightened, But just a little bit scarred.’

  Give me my cardigan, Let me think hardigan.

  That must have been some game between the sisters; alternate different handwritings.

  6. Mystery enough at noon.

  The blinding unfrequented paths

  Above the too frequented sea

  Hold labyrinth and mask enough.

  No need to twist beneath the moon.

  Here on the rising secret cliff In this white fury of the light

  Is mystery enough at noon.

  The last three sheets had a fairy story on them.

  THE PRINCE AND THE MAGICIAN

  Once upon a time there was a young prince, who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domaines, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.