The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  The sky was very blue. A plane droned down to the airport on the other side of the Attic plain. Other visitors came, and the old man limped away.

  The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity. Before I went, I had some idea that I might tell them a little about Bourani; I saw a spellbound dinner-table. But the idea did not survive the first five minutes of conversation. There were eight of us, five from the Council, an Embassy secretary, and a little middle-aged queer, a critic, who had come to do some lectures. There was a good deal of literary chit-chat. The queer waited like a small vulture for names to be produced.

  ‘Has anyone read Henry Green’s latest?’ asked the Embassy man.

  ‘Couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Oh I rather enjoyed it.’

  The queer touched his bow-tie. ‘Of course you know what dear Henry said when he … ‘

  I looked round the other faces, after he had done this for the tenth time, hoping to see a flicker of fellow-feeling, someone else who wanted to shout at him that writing was about books, not the trivia of private lives. But they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdrew.

  Nobody said what they really wanted, what they really thought. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness; and finally it became pathetic. I could see that my host and his wife had a genuine love of Greece, but it lay choked in their throats. The critic made a perceptive little disquisition on Leavis, and then ruined it by a cheap squirt of malice. We were all the same; I said hardly anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.

  It was symptomatic that the ubiquitous person of speech was ‘one’ – it was one’s view, one’s friends, one’s servants, one’s favourite writer, one’s travelling in Greece, until the terrible faceless Avenging God of the Bourgeois British, One, was standing like a soot-blackened obelisk over the whole evening.

  I walked back to the hotel with the critic, thinking, in a kind of agonized panic, of the light-filled solitudes of Phraxos; of the losses I had suffered.

  ‘Dreadful bores, these Council people,’ he said. ‘But one has to live.’ He didn’t come in. He said he would stroll up to the Acropolis. But he strolled towards Zappeion, a park where the more desperate of the starving village boys who flock to Athens sell their thin bodies for the price of a meal.

  I went to Zonar’s in Panepistemiou and sat at the bar and had a large brandy. I felt upset, profoundly unable to face the return to England. I was in exile, and for ever, whether I lived there or not. The fact of exile I could stand; but the loneliness of exile was intolerable.

  It was about half past twelve when I got back to my room. There was the usual hot airlessness of nocturnal Athens in summer. I had just stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower when the telephone rang by the bed. I went naked to it. I had a grim idea that it would be the critic, unsuccessful at Zappeion and now looking for a target for his endless Christian names.

  ‘Hallo.’

  ‘Meester Ouf It was the night porter. ‘There is telephone for you.’

  There was a clicketing.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Oh. Is that Mr Urfe?’ It was a man’s voice I didn’t recognize. Greek, but with a good accent.

  ‘Speaking. Who are you?’

  ‘Would you look out of your window, please?’

  Click. Silence. I rattled the hook down, with no result. The man had hung up. I snatched my dressing-gown off the bed, switched out the light, and raced to the window.

  My third-floor room looked out on a side street.

  There was a yellow taxi parked on the opposite side with its back to me, a little down the hill. That was normal. Taxis for the hotel waited there. A man in a white shirt appeared and walked quickly up the far side of the street, past the taxi. He crossed the road just below me. There was nothing strange about him. Deserted pavements, street lights, closed shops, and darkened offices, the one taxi. The man disappeared. Only then was there a movement.

  Directly opposite and beneath my window was a street-light fixed on the wall over the entrance to an arcade of shops. Because of the angle I could not see to the back of the arcade.

  A girl came out.

  The taxi-engine broke into life.

  She knew where I was. She came out to the edge of the pavement, small, unchanged yet changed, and stared straight up at my window. The light shone down on her brown arms, but her face was in shadow. A black dress, black shoes, a small black evening handbag in her left hand. She came forward from the shadows as a prostitute might have done; as Robert Foulkes had done. No expression, simply the stare up and across at me. No duration. It was all over in fifteen seconds. The taxi suddenly reversed up the road to in front of her. Someone opened a door, and she got quickly in. The taxi jerked off very fast. Its wheels squealed scaldingly at the end of the street.

  A crystal lay shattered.

  And all betrayed.

  67

  At the last moment I had angrily cried her name. I thought at first that they had found some fantastic double; but no one could have imitated that walk. The way of standing.

  I leapt back to the phone and got the night porter.

  ‘That call – can you trace it?’ He didn’t understand ‘trace’. ‘Do you know where it came from?’

  No, he didn’t know.

  Had anyone strange been in the hotel lobby during the last hour? Anyone waiting for some time?

  No, Meester Ouf, nobody.

  I turned off the shower, tore back into my clothes and went out into Constitution Square. I went round all the cafes, peered into all the taxis, went back to Zonar’s, to Tom’s, to Zaporiti’s, to all the fashionable places in the area; unable to think, unable to do anything but say her name and crush it savagely between my teeth.

  Alison. Alison. Alison.

  I understood, how I understood. Once I had accepted, and I had to accept, the first incredible fact: that she must have agreed to join them. But how could she? And why? Again and again: why.

  I went back to the hotel.

  Conchis would have discovered about the quarrel, perhaps even overheard it; if he used cameras, he could use microphones and tape—recorders. Approached her during the night, or early the next morning … those messages in the Earth: Hirondelle. The people in the Piraeus hotel, who had watched me try to persuade her to let me back into the room. As soon I mentioned her name, Conchis must have pricked up his ears; as soon as he knew she was coming to Athens, envisaged new complications in his plans. He would have had us followed from the moment we met; then persuaded her, all his charm, perhaps half deceiving her to begin with … I had a strange moment of non-sexual jealousy, a vision of his telling her the truth: I wish to give this selfish young man of yours a lesson he will never forget. I remembered old spats with Alison over something not entirely unconnected: various contemporary “writers and painters. Pointing out their faults had always pleased me more than hearing her fall for their virtues; even there I had used to feel slighted personally … as she had been shrewd enough to tell me, often enough.

  Or had she always been working for him? Hadn’t he almost forced me to meet her by cancelling that half-term weekend? Even offered me the village house, if I wanted to bring her to the island? But I remembered something ‘June’ had said on that last night – how they improvized, how the ‘rat’ was granted parity with the experimenter in constructing the maze. I could believe that: so they must somehow, after her screaming at the Piraeus hotel, have found a way to buy Alison with their sick logic, their madness, their lies, their mo
ney … perhaps told her the great secret I was not allowed to know: why they had chosen me in the first place. I also remembered all the lies I had told them about Alison, over matters on which they must have had full knowledge. I growled out loud at the recall.

  Then too, on reflection, it had always been odd how little use had been made of ‘June’. There were all her costumes in the Earth. A much fuller role must have been planned for her before Alison’s unexpected ‘entry’. That very first face-to-face – mouth-to-mouth -meeting with her, with its implicit sneer at my inconstancy, that repeated nonsense about the Three Hearts story – they showed how things might have gone. Then the Sunday, on the beach, that flaunting of her bare body … perhaps Conchis had not been sure of Alison so soon after the first approach, other contingencies had to be allowed for. Then Alison must have been won, and ‘June’ withdrew from the action. That “was also why Lily’s character and part had changed and why she had to take on – and so rapidly – the Circe role.

  The sedan-coffin. It had not been empty; they would have wanted her to witness the success of their method. I writhed mentally under the mercilessness of it, the endless exposure. The trial: my ‘preying on young women’ – she must also have put them up to that. And the suicidal mood she had been in before I left London. All their knowledge of my past.

  I was mad with anger. I thought of that genuine and atrocious wave of sadness I had felt when the news about Alison came. All the time she would have been in Athens; perhaps in the house in the village; or over at Bourani. Watching me, even. Playing an invisible Maria to Lily’s Olivia and my Malvolio – always these echoes of Shakespearean situations.

  I walked up and down my room, imagining scenes where I had Alison at my mercy. Beating her black and blue, making her weep with remorse.

  And then again, it all went back to Conchis, to the mystery of his power, his ability to mould and wield girls as intelligent as Lily; as independent as Alison. As if he had some secret that he revealed to them, that put them under his orders; and once again I was the man in the dark, the excluded, the eternal butt.

  Not a Hamlet mourning Ophelia. But Malvolio.

  I couldn’t sleep, and I felt rather like going down to Ellenikon and wringing the neck of the girl at the airline counter. Both the man who had first answered and the girl herself had, I saw now, been a little too anxious to establish who I was; they must have been persuaded, perhaps by Alison herself, to co-operate. But I knew I would get nowhere there. Very probably they would produce the same forged cuttings.

  Meanwhile, I had to do something. I went down to the hotel foyer and found the night porter.

  ‘I want a line to London. This number.’ I wrote it down. A few minutes later he pointed to a box.

  I stood listening to the phone burr-burr in my old flat in Russell Square. It went on a long time. At last it was picked up.

  ‘For goodness’ sake … who’s that?’

  The operator said. ‘I have a long-distance call for you from Athens.’

  ‘From where!’

  I said, ‘Okay, operator. Hallo?’

  ‘Who is that?’

  She sounded a nice girl, but she was half asleep. Though the call cost me four pounds, it was worth it. I discovered that Ann Taylor had gone back to Australia, but six weeks before. No one had killed herself. A girl the girl on the other end didn’t know, but ‘I think she’s a friend of Ann’s’, had taken over the flat; she hadn’t seen her ‘for weeks’. Yes, she had blonde hair; actually she had only seen her twice; yes, she thought she was Australian. But who on earth …

  Back in my room I remembered the flower in the buttonhole of the coat I had worn that afternoon. It was very wilted, but I took it out and stuck it in a glass of water.

  I woke up late, having finally slept sounder than I expected. I lay in bed for a while, listening to the street-noises down below, thinking about Alison. I tried to recall exactly what her expression had been, whether there was any humour, any sympathy, an indication of anything, good or bad, in her small standing there. I could understand the timing of her resurrection. As soon as I got back to London I should have found out; so it had to be in Athens.

  And now I was to hunt for her.

  I wanted to see her, I knew I wanted to see her desperately, to dig or beat the truth out of her, to let her know how vile her betrayal was. To let her know that even if she crawled round the equator on her knees I could never forgive her. That I was finished with her. Disgusted by her. As disintoxicated of her as I was of Lily. I thought, Christ, if I could only lay my hands on her. But the one thing I would not do was hunt for her.

  I only had to wait. They would bring her to me now. And this time I would use the cat.

  I went down to a noon breakfast; and the first thing I discovered was that I did not have to wait. For there was another letter by hand for me. This time it contained just one word: London. I remembered that order in the Earth: Termination by July for all except nucleus. Nucleus, Ashtaroth the Unseen, was Alison.

  I went to the travel agency and got a seat on the evening plane; and seeing a map of Italy on the wall, as I stood waiting for the ticket to be made out, I discovered where Subiaco was; and decided to take a gamble. The marionette would make the manipulators of strings wait a day, for a change.

  “When I came out I went into the biggest bookshop in Athens, on the corner of Stadiou, and asked for a book on the identification of flowers. My belated attempt at resuscitation had not been successful, and I had had to throw the buttonhole away. The assistant had nothing in English, but there was a good French flora, she said, which gave the names in several languages. I pretended to be impressed by the pictures, then turned to the index; to Alyssum, p.69.

  And there it was, facing page 69: thin green leaves, small white flowers, Alysson maritime … parfum de miel… from the Greek a (without), lyssa (madness). Called this in Italian, this in German. In English: Sweet Alison.

  3

  Le triomphe de la philosophie serait de Jeter du

  jour sur l’obscurité des voies dont la providence se

  sert pour parvenir auxfins qu’elle se propose sur

  l’homme, et de tracer d’après cela quelque plan de

  conduite qui pût faire connaitre à ce malheureux

  individu bipède, perpétuellement ballotté par les

  caprices de cet être qui dit—on le dirige aussi

  despotiquement, la manière dont ilfaut qu’il

  interprète les décrets de cette providence sur lui.

  De Sade, Les Infortunes de la Vertu

  68

  Rome.

  In my mind Greece lay weeks, not the real hours, behind. The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of luxury, a cosmetic of the overindulged senses, between the light, the truth, and their real selves. I couldn’t stand the loss of the beautiful nakedness, the humanity of Greece, and so I couldn’t stand the sight of the opulent, animal Romans; as one sometimes cannot stand one’s own face in a mirror.

  Early the morning after my arrival I caught a local train out towards Tivoli and the Alban hills. After a long bus-ride I had lunch at Subiaco and then walked up a road above a green chasm. A lane branched off into a deserted glen. I could hear the sound of running water far below, the singing of birds. The road came to an end, and a path led up through a cool grove of ilex, and then tapered out into a narrow flight of steps that twisted up round a wall of rock. The monastery came into sight, clinging like an Orthodox Greek monastery, like a martin’s nest, to the cliff. A Gothic loggia looked out prettily over the green ravine, over a little apron of cultivated terraces falling below. Fine frescoes on the inner wall: coolness, silence.

  There was an old monk in a black habit sitting behind the door through to an inner gallery. I asked if I could see John Leverrier. I said, an Englishman, on a retreat. Luckily I had his letter ready to sh
ow. The old man carefully deciphered the signature, then – to my surprise, I had decided I was on a wild-goose chase – nodded and silently disappeared down into some lower level of the monastery. I went on into a hall. A series of macabre murals; death pricking a young falconer with his longsword; a medieval strip-cartoon of a girl, first titivating herself in front of a glass, then fresh in her coffin, then with the bones beginning to erupt through the skin; then as a skeleton. There was the sound of someone laughing, an old monk with an amused face scolding a younger one in French as they passed through the hall behind me. ‘Oh, si tu penses que le football est un digne sujet de méditation …’

  Then another monk appeared; and I knew, with shock, that this was Leverrier.

  He was tall, very close-cut hair, with a thin-cheeked brown face, and glasses with ‘standard’ National Health frames; unmistakably English. He made a little gesture, asking if it was me who had asked for him.

  ‘I’m Nicholas Urfe. FromPhraxos.’

  He managed to look amazed, shy, and annoyed, all at the same time. After a long moment’s hesitation, he held out his hand. It seemed dry and cold; mine was stickily hot from the walk. He was a good four inches taller than I am, and as many years older, and spoke with a trace of the incisiveness that young dons sometimes affect.

  ‘You’ve come all this way?’

  ‘It was easy to stop off at Rome.’

  ‘I thought I’d made it clear that – ‘

  ‘Yes, you did, but

  We both smiled bleakly at the broken-ended sentences. He looked me in the eyes, affirming decision.

  ‘I’m afraid your visit must still be considered in vain.’

  ‘I honestly had no idea that you were…’ I waved vaguely at his habit. ‘I thought you signed your letters…’

  ‘Yours in Christ?’ He smiled thinly. ‘I am afraid that even here we are susceptible to the forces of anti-pretension.’

  He looked down, and we stood awkwardly. He came, as if impatient with our awkwardness, to a kinder decision; some mollification.