The Magus

by John Fowles

  She moved a little farther away, and twirled her sunshade. I slipped into my beach-shoes and, towelling my back, caught up with her. She smiled with a sort of innocent sideways slyness; then sat down on a flat rock overshadowed by a solitary pine-tree, where the precipitous gulley ran down to the shingle. She closed her sunshade and pointed with it to a stone beside the rock, in the sun, where I was to sit. But I spread my towel on the rock and perched close beside her. The moist mouth, the down on the bare forearms, a scar above her left wrist, the loose hair: the grave young creature of the previous night had completely disappeared.

  ‘You’re the most deliciously pretty ghost I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Ami?’

  I had meant it; and I had also meant to embarrass her. But she simply widened her smile.

  ‘Who are the other girls?’

  ‘Which other girls?’

  ‘Come on. A joke’s a joke.’

  ‘Then pray do not spoil it.’

  ‘At least you admit it is a joke?’

  ‘I admit nothing.’

  She was avoiding my eyes – and also biting her lips. I took a breath. She was so patently waiting to parry whatever next thrust I made. She shifted a pebble with the tip of her shoe. It was elegant, buttoned, of grey kid, over a white silk stocking with little open clocks, tiny petals of bare skin that ran up her ankles and disappeared under the hem of the dress some four inches higher. I had a feeling the foot was held out so that I should not miss this charming period detail. Her hair blew forward, clouding her face a little. I wanted to brush it back, or to shake her hard; I wasn’t quite sure which. In the end I stared out to sea, a little on the same principle as Ulysses when he tied himself to the mast.

  ‘You keep suggesting you’re playing this pretend game to please the old man. If you want me to join in, I think you’d better explain why. Especially why I should believe that he doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.’

  She hesitated, and for a moment I thought I had broken through.

  ‘Give me your hand. I will read your fortune. You may little nearer, but you must not wet my dress.’

  I took another breath, but I gave her my hand. Perhaps this a at least to be some sort of indirect admission. She held the ha __ lightly by the wrist and traced the palmistry lines with a forefinger. I was able to see the shape of her breasts at the bottom of the opening in her dress; very pale skin, the seductive beginning of soft curves. She managed to suggest that this hackneyed sex-gambit was rather daring, mama-defying. The fingertip ran innocently yet suggestively over my palm. She began to read.

  ‘You will have a long life. You will have three children. At forty years old you will nearly die. You are stronger in mind than in heart. Your mind betrays your heart. There are … I see many treacheries in your life. Sometimes you betray your true self. Sometimes you betray those who love you.’

  ‘Now will you answer my question?’

  ‘The palm says what is. Never why it is.’

  ‘Can I read yours?’

  ‘I have not finished. You will never be rich. Beware of black dogs, strong drink and old women. You will make love to many girls, but you will love truly only one – her you will marry … and be very happy.’

  ‘In spite of nearly dying at forty.’

  ‘Perhaps because you nearly die at forty. Here is where you nearly die. The happiness line is most strong after that.’

  She let go of my hand, and folded her own primly on her lap.

  ‘Now can I read yours?’

  ‘Can is not may.’

  She played coy a moment after this little lesson in correct English usage, but then suddenly held her hand out. I pretended to read it, did the same tracing of the lines; and tried to read it quite seriously in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. But even that great master at detecting in a second Irish maidservants from Brixton with a mania for boating and bullseyes would have been baffled. However, Lily’s hands were smooth and unblemished; whatever else she was, she was not a maidservant from anywhere.

  ‘You are taking a long time, Mr Urfe.’

  ‘Nicholas.’

  ‘You may call me Lily, Nicholas. But you may not sit for hours canoodling.’

  ‘I see only one thing clearly.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘A great deal more intelligence than you’re showing at the moment.’

  She snatched her hand away, and contemplated it with a sort of pout. But she wasn’t the sort of girl who went in for pouting. A wisp of hair blew across her cheek; the wind kindled in her clothes a wantonness, a coquettishness, aiding her impersonation of someone younger than I knew she must be. I remembered what Conchis had said about the original Lily. The girl beside me was making a brave effort – or perhaps casting had preceded narrating. But all the acting skill in the world couldn’t carry off this present role. She tilted the palm a little towards me again.

  ‘And death?’

  ‘You’re forgetting your part. You’re already dead.’

  She folded her arms and stared out to sea.

  ‘Perhaps I have no choice.’

  This was a new tack. I thought I heard a faint note of regret, something obscurely mutinous; a note of the real year we were in, from behind her disguise. I searched her face.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Everything we say, he hears. He knows.’

  ‘You have to reveal it to him?’ I sounded incredulous. She nodded, and I knew she was not unmasking at all. ‘Don’t tell me. Telepathy?’

  ‘Telepathy and –’ she looked down.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I cannot say more.’

  She picked up the sunshade and opened it, as if she were thinking of going away. It had little black tassels that hung from the ends of the ribs.

  ‘Are you his mistress?’ She flashed a look at me, and I had the impression that for once I had shocked her out of acting. I said, ‘In view of last night’s strip show.’ Then, ‘I just want to know where lam.’

  She stood up and began to walk quickly away over the shingle towards the path that led up to the house. I ran after her and blocked her way. She stopped, her eyes down, then she looked up at me with a sharp blend of petulance and reproach. There was almost a passion in her voice.

  ‘Why must you always know where you are? Have you never heard of imagination?’

  ‘Nice shot. But it won’t work.’

  She stared coldly at my grin, then looked down again.

  ‘Now I know why you cannot write good poetry.’

  It was my turn to feel shocked. I had mentioned my failed literary aspirations to Conchis during that first weekend.

  ‘What a pity I haven’t lost an arm. Then you could all make fun of that as well.’

  This provoked what I felt was a look out of her real self: quick, yet very direct, for a brief moment almost … she turned a little to one side.

  ‘I should not have said that. I apologize.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I am not his mistress.’

  ‘Or anyone else’s, I hope.’

  She turned her back on me and faced the sea.

  ‘That is a very impertinent remark.’

  ‘But not half so impertinent as your expecting me to swallow all this nonsense.’

  She was holding the sunshade so that it hid her face, but I craned round its edge; and once again her expression contradicted what she had just said. I saw far less a prim mouth than one trying not very successfully to conceal its amusement. Her eyes half slipped to meet mine, then she nodded towards the jetty.

  ‘Shall we walk out there?’

  ‘If that’s what the script says.’

  She turned to face me, and raised an admonitory finger. ‘But since it is clear that we are incapable of speaking the same language, we shall just walk.’

  I smiled and shrugged: a truce, if she must.

  There was more wind on the jetty, and she kept on having trouble with her hair; delicious trouble. The ends of it floated up
in the sunshine, silky wings of light. In the end I held her closed shade for her, and she tried to tame the mischievous skeins. Her mood had veered abruptly again. She kept on laughing, fine white teeth catching the sunlight, skipping, swaying back when a wave hit the jetty-end and sent up a little spray. Once or twice she caught my arm, but she seemed absorbed in this game with the wind and the sea … a pretty, rather skittish schoolgirl in a gay striped dress.

  I stole looks at the sunshade. It was newly made. I supposed a ghost from 1915 would have been carrying a new sunshade; but somehow it would have been more authentic, though less logical, if it had been old and faded.

  Then the bell rang, from the house. It was that same ring I had heard the weekend before, in the rhythm of my own name. Lily stood still, and listened. Wind-distorted, the bell rang again.

  ‘Nich-o-las.’ She looked mock-grave. ‘It tolls for thee.’

  I looked up through the trees.

  ‘I can’t think why.’

  ‘You must go.’

  ‘Will you come with me?’ She shook her head. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it did not toll for me.’

  ‘I think we ought to show that we’re friends again.’

  She was standing close to me, holding her hair from blowing across her face. She gave me a severe look.

  ‘Mr Urfe!’ She said it exactly as she had the night before, the same chilly over-precise pronunciation. ‘Are you asking me to commit osculation?’

  And that was perfect; a mischievous girl of 1915 poking fun at a feeble Victorian joke; a lovely double remove; and she looked absurd and lovely as she did it. She closed her eyes and pushed her cheek forward, and I hardly had time to touch it with my lips before she had skipped back. I stood and watched her bent head.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  I handed her back her sunshade with what I trusted was both a hopelessly attracted and a totally unduped look, then set off. Turning every so often, I climbed up the path. Twice she waved from the jetty. I came over the steep rise and started through the last of the thinned trees towards the house. I could see Maria standing by the music-room door, at the bell. But I hadn’t taken two steps across the gravel before the world split in half. Or so it seemed.

  A figure had appeared on the terrace, not fifty feet away, facing and above me. It was Lily. It couldn’t be her, but it was her. The same hair blew about in the wind; the dress, the sunshade, the figure, the face, everything was the same. She was staring out to sea, over my head, totally ignoring me.

  It was a wild, dislocating, disactualizing shock. Yet I knew within the first few seconds that although I was obviously meant to believe that this was the same girl as the one I had just left down on the beach, it was not. But it was so like her that it could be only one thing – a twin sister. There were two Lilies in the field. I had no time to think. Another figure appeared beside the Lily on the terrace.

  It was a man, much too tall to be Conchis. At least, I presumed it was a man; perhaps ‘Apollo’, or ‘Robert Foulkes’ – or even ‘de Deukans’. I couldn’t see, because the figure was all in black, shrouded in the sun, and wearing the most sinister mask I had ever seen: the head of an enormous black jackal, with a long muzzle and high pointed ears. They stood there, the possessor and the possessed, looming death and the frail maiden. There was almost immediately, after the first visual shock, something vaguely grotesque about it; it had the overdone macabreness of a horror-magazine illustration. It certainly touched on some terrifying archetype, but it shocked common sense as well as the unconscious.

  Again, I had no feeling of the supernatural, no belief that this was more than another nasty twist in the masque, a black inversion of the scene on the beach. That does not mean I was not frightened. I was, and very frightened; but my fear came from a knowledge that anything might happen. That there were no limits in this masque, no normal social laws or conventions.

  I had stood frozen for perhaps ten seconds. Now Maria came towards me; and the two figures withdrew, as if to avoid any chance of her seeing them. Lily’s Doppelgänger was pulled back imperiously by the black hand on her shoulder. At the very last moment she looked down at me, but her face was expressionless.

  Beware of black dogs.

  I began to run back towards the path. I flung a look over my shoulder. The figures on the terrace had disappeared. I came to the bend from which I could see down, from where, not half a minute before, I had last watched the Lily on the beach wave. The jetty was deserted; that end of the small cove was empty. I ran farther down, to the little flat space with the bench, from where I could see almost all the beach and most of the path up. I waited in vain for the mounting bright dress to appear. I thought, she must be hiding in the little cave, or among the rocks. Then, I must not react as they will expect. I turned and began to climb back towards the house.

  Maria was still waiting for me at the edge of the colonnade. She had been joined by a man. I recognized Hermes, the taciturn donkey-driver. He could have been the man in black, he had the right height; but he looked unruffled, a mere bystander. I said quickly in Greek, ‘Mia stigmi,’ one second, and walked indoors past them. Maria was holding out an envelope, but I took no notice. Once inside I raced up the stairs to Conchis’s room. I knocked on the door. No sound. I knocked again. Then I tried the handle. It was locked.

  I went back down, and paused in the music-room to light a cigarette; and to take a grip on myself.

  ‘Where is Mr Conchis?’

  ‘Then eine mesa.’ He’s not in. Maria raised the envelope again, but I still ignored it.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Ephyge me ti varca.’ Gone with the boat.

  ‘Where?’

  She didn’t know. I took the envelope. It had Nicholas written on it. Two folded papers.

  One was a note from Conchis.

  Dear Nicholas, I am obliged to ask you to entertain yourself until this evening. Unexpected business requires my presence urgently in Nauplia.

  M.C.

  The other was a radiogram. There was no telephone or cable line to the island, but the Greek coastguard service ran a small radio station.

  It had been sent from Athens the evening before. I assumed that it would explain why Conchis had had to go. But then I had the third shock in three minutes. I saw the name at the end. It read:

  BACK NEXT FRIDAY STOP THREE DAYS FREE STOP AIRPORT

  SIX EVENING STOP PLEASE COME ALISON.

  It had been sent on Saturday afternoon. I looked up at Maria and Hermes. Their eyes were blank, simply watching.

  ‘When did you bring this?’

  Hermes answered. ‘Proi proi.’ Early that morning.

  ‘Who gave it to you to bring?’

  A professor. At Sarantopoulos’s, the last evening.

  ‘Why didn’t you give it to me before?’

  He shrugged and looked at Maria, and she shrugged. They seemed to imply that it had been given to Conchis. It was his fault. I read it again.

  Hermes asked me if I wanted to send an answer; he was going back to the village. I said, no, no reply.

  I stared at Hermes. His wall eye gave little hope. But I demanded, ‘Have you seen the two young ladies this morning?’

  He looked at Maria. She said, ‘What young ladies?’

  I looked at Hermes again. ‘You?’

  ‘Ochi.’ His head went back.

  I returned to the beach. All the time I had been watching the place where the path came up. Down there I went straight to the cave. No sign of Lily. A couple of minutes convinced me that she was not hiding anywhere on the beach. I looked up the little gulley. It might have been just possible to scramble up it and to get away to the east, but I found it difficult to believe. I climbed up some way to see if she was crouching behind a rock. But there was no one.

  32

  Sitting under the little pine, I stared out to sea and tried to gather my shaken wits. One twin came close to me, talked to me. She had a scar on her left
wrist. The other did the Doppelgdnger effects. I would never get close to her. I would see her on the terrace, in the starlight; but always at a distance. Twins – it was extraordinary, but I had begun to realize enough about Conchis to see that it was predictable. If one was very rich … why not the rarest? Why anything but the strangest and the rarest?

  I concentrated on the Lily I knew, the scar-Lily. This morning, even last night, she had set out to make herself attractive to me; and if she really was Conchis’s mistress, I couldn’t imagine why he should allow it, and so obviously leave us alone together, unless he was much more profoundly perverted than I could bring myself seriously to suspect. She gave strongly the impression that she was playing with me – amusing herself as much as acting a role at Conchis’s command. But all games, even the most literal, between a man and a woman are implicitly sexual; and here on the beach she had almost ingenuously set out to captivate me. It must have been on the old man’s orders, yet behind the flirtatiousness, the mischief, I had glimpsed a different sort of amusement – and one not compatible with that of a mere actress for hire. Besides, her ‘performance’ had been much closer to inspired amateurishness than to the professional. Everything beneath the surface hinted at a girl from a world and background very like my own: a girl with both an inborn sense of decency and an inborn sense of English irony. In theatrical terms, the effect, despite the elaboration of the mounting, was much more of a family charade than of the wished-for total illusion of the true theatre; in her every glance and humour hung the suggestion that of course my leg was being pulled. Indeed, I knew already that this was what attracted me to her, beyond the physical. In a way the flirting had been over-kill. I had been set to chase from the moment I saw her ambiguous smile, the week before. In short, if it was her role in the charade to seduce me, I should be seduced. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was both a sensualist and an adventurer; a failed poet, still seeking resurrection in events, if not in lines. I had to drink the wave, once offered.

  Which led me to Alison. Her radiogram was like grit in the eye when one particularly wants to see clearly. I could guess what had happened. My letter of the Monday before would have arrived on Friday or Saturday in London, she would have been on a flight out of England that day, perhaps feeling fed up, half an hour to kill at Ellenikon – on impulse, a cable. But it came like an intrusion – of dispensable reality into pleasure, of now artificial duty into instinct. I couldn’t leave the island, I couldn’t waste three days in Athens. I read the wretched thing again. Conchis must have read it too – there was no envelope. Demetriades would have opened it when it was first delivered at the school.