The Magus

by John Fowles

  She cocked the wrist and looked at it. ‘When I was ten. Playing hide-and-seek.’ She made a fleeting duck’s mouth, mocking herself. ‘I should have learnt my lesson. I hid in a garden shed and knocked this what looked like a long stick off a peg … and put up my arm to shield myself.’ She mimed it. ‘It was a scythe.’

  ‘You poor thing.’ I kissed the wrist again, then once more drew us close, but after a while left her mouth, kissed the eyes, the neck, the throat, along the curve of the dress above the breasts; then found the mouth again. We explored each other’s eyes. There was something still uncertain in hers; yet something melted as well. Suddenly they closed, and her mouth reached towards mine, as if she could speak better with lips now than in words. But just as we were becoming drowned in each other, unaware of anything but our joined mouths and close-pressed bodies, we were stopped.

  It was the bell from the house, a monotonous regular ringing, but insistent, like a tocsin. “We sat up and looked guiltily round: we seemed alone. Julie lifted my hand to see my wrist-watch.

  ‘It’s probably June. Lunch.’

  I leant and kissed her head. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

  ‘She’ll only come and look for us.’ She flicked me a would-be dry glance. ‘Most men find her more attractive than me.’

  ‘Then most men are idiots.’

  The bell stopped. She kept my hand, and looked at it as we sat side by side. ‘Perhaps they just want something she finds it easier to give than I do.’

  ‘Any girl can give you that.’ Still she examined my hand, as if it was some object dissociated from me. ‘Did you give it to this other man?’

  ‘I tried to.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  She shook her head, as if it was too complicated. But then she said, ‘I’m not a virgin, Nicholas. It’s not that.’

  ‘But being hurt again?’

  ‘Being … used again.’

  ‘How was he using you?’

  The bell started afresh. She smiled up at me. ‘It’s a long story. Not now.’

  She kissed me quickly, then stood and picked up her basket, while I folded the rug and put it over my arm. We set off back for the house. We had hardly gone a few steps into the pines when I caught a movement to the east in the corner of my eyes: a glimpse of a black shape drawing back behind intervening low branches some seventy or eighty yards away. I barely saw the man, but there was something unmistakable in the way he moved.

  ‘We are being watched. That Joe character.’

  We didn’t stop, though she glanced past me. ‘We can’t do anything about it. Except ignore him.’

  But the presence of that hidden pair of eyes in the trees behind us could not really be ignored. From then on we walked rather selfconsciously apart; almost guiltily. It was a guilt one part of me despised, since the better I knew the real girl beside me the more artificial became the situation that kept us apart; and yet which another side of me, the eternal deception-relishing child, tolerated. There is something erotic in all collusion. Perhaps I should have known a more real guilt and remembered a more deeply hidden pair of eyes in the forest of my unconscious; perhaps I did know them, for all my outward oblivion, and found an extra relish still. Long afterwards I realized why some men, racing drivers and their like, become addicted to speed. There are those of us who never see death ahead, but eternally behind: in any moment that stops and thinks.

  47

  As we approached the colonnade, a barelegged figure in a brick-red shirt stood from the steps in the sun where she had been sitting.

  ‘I nearly started without you. I’m hungry.’

  The shirt was unbuttoned, and underneath I could see a dark blue bikini. The word, like the fashion, was very new then: in fact it was the first bikini I had ever seen outside a newspaper photograph and it gave me something of a shock … the bare navel, the slender legs, brown-gold skin, a pair of amusedly questioning eyes. I caught Julie wrinkling her nose at this young Mediterranean goddess, who only widened her smile. As we followed her to the table set back in the shade beneath the arches, I remembered the story of Three Hearts … but banned the thought before it grew. June went to the corner of the colonnade and called for Maria, then turned to her sister.

  ‘She’s been trying to tell me something about the yacht. I couldn’t work it out.’

  We sat, and Maria appeared. She spoke to Julie. I followed well enough. The yacht was arriving at five, to take the girls away. Hermes was coming to take Maria herself back to the village for a night. She had to see the dentist there. The ‘young gentleman’ must return to the school, as the house would be locked up. I heard Julie ask where the yacht was going. Then xero, despoina. I don’t know, miss. She repeated, as if that was the nub of her message, At five o’clock? Then she bobbed in her usual way, and disappeared back to her cottage.

  Julie translated for June’s benefit.

  I said, ‘This wasn’t planned?’

  ‘I thought we were staying here.’ She looked doubtfully at her sister, who in turn eyed me, then drily queried Julie back.

  ‘Do we trust him? Does he trust us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  June gave me a little grin. ‘Then welcome, Pip.’

  I looked to Julie for help. She murmured, ‘I thought you claimed to have read English at Oxford.’

  There was suddenly a shadow of reawakened suspicion between us. Then I woke up, and took a breath. ‘All these literary references.’ I smiled. ‘Miss Havisham rides again?’

  ‘And Estella.’

  I looked from one to the other. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Just our little joke.’

  Julie regarded her sister. ‘Your little joke.’

  June spoke to me. ‘Which I’ve tried to get Maurice to share. With total unsuccess.’ She leant her elbows on the table. ‘But come on. Tell me what great conclusions you’ve reached.’

  ‘Nicholas has told me something extraordinary.’

  I was given one more chance to test a reaction; and found myself once more convinced, though June seemed more outraged than amused by the new evidence of the old man’s duplicity. As we went over it all again, I discovered (and might have already deduced from their names) that in terms of delivery June was the older twin. She also seemed it in other ways. I detected a protectiveness in her towards Julie, which sprang from a more open personality, greater experience of men. There was a shadow of reality in the casting of the masque: a more normal and a less normal sister, or one more assertive, the other more fragile. I sat between them, facing the sea, keeping an eye open for the hidden watcher – though he stayed hidden, if he was still spying on us. The girls started questioning me, my own background and past.

  So we talked about Nicholas: his family, his ambitions, his failings. The third person is apt, because I presented a sort of fictional self to them, a victim of circumstances, a mixture of attractive raffishness and essential inner decency. Alison came up again briefly. I put the main blame there on hazard, on fate, on elective affinity, one’s knowing one sought more; and let them feel, copying Julie, that I didn’t want to talk in detail about all that. It was over and done with, pale and sour beside the present.

  Something about that long lunch, the enjoyable food and the retsina, all the debating and speculating, the questions they asked, the being between the two of them, the dressed and the near-naked, feeling closer to them both all the time – we got on to their father, their having lived their childhood in the shadow of a boys’ boarding-school, then their mother, they kept capping each other’s affectionate stories about her silliness … it was like entering a deliriously warm room after a long, cold journey; an erotically warm room, as well. Towards the end of the meal June slipped out of her shirt. In return Julie slipped out a sisterly tongue, which was met by an impervious little smile. I began to have trouble keeping my eyes off that body. The bikini top barely covered the breasts; and the bottom half was tied at the hips by white laces that let the skin show through. I
knew I was being visually teased a little, innocently flirted with … some small revenge, perhaps, on June’s part for having been kept so long in the wings. If human beings could purr, I should have done so then. About half past two we decided to go out of Bourani and down to Moutsa to swim – partly to see whether we should be allowed to. If Joe blocked our way, I promised not to challenge him. The girls seemed to share my own view of his physical strength. So we strolled down the track, expecting to be stopped, as June had been once. But there was no one there; only the pines, the heat, the racket of the cicadas. We installed ourselves halfway down the beach, near the little chapel in the trees. I spread two rugs where the needled earth ran into the shingle. Julie, who had disappeared for a minute before we left the house, peeled off her schoolgirl stockings, then pulled her dress over her head. She was wearing a white one-piece bare-backed costume underneath, and she managed to look shyly ashamed at the weakness of her own tan.

  Her sister grinned. ‘If only Maurice could provide the seven dwarfs as well.’

  ‘Shut up. It’s not fair. I’ll never catch up now.’ She gave me what was almost a scowl. ‘Honestly I’ve been sitting on that wretched yacht under an awning while all she does is … ‘ she turned away and folded her dress.

  They both did up their hair, we went down the burning shingle and into the water, and swam a little way out. I looked down the beach towards Bourani, but saw no one. We were alone in the world, in the cool blue water, three heads; and again I felt a near-absolute happiness, a being poised, not sure how all this would turn out, but also not wanting to know, totally identified with the moment: with Greece, this lost place, these two real-life nymphs. We came back ashore, dried, lay on the rugs; myself beside Julie on one of them, she was anointing herself with sun-tan oil; June on the far side on the other rug, flat on her stomach, her head couched on her hands and turned towards us. I thought of the school, its repressed boys and sour masters, the unendurable lack of femininity and natural sexuality in its life. We began to talk about Maurice again. Julie put on sunglasses, lay on her back, while I still lay propped on an elbow.

  There came in the end a little silence; the wine at lunch, the soporific sun. June reached back and undid the hook at the back of her bikini top, then stretched up and eased it away to dry on the stones beside her. I glimpsed her bare breasts as she reached an arm to do it; and the long golden back, divided by the taut little strip of dark blue from the long golden legs. There was no white bar on her skin, the breasts were the same colour as the rest; she must have tanned a lot like that. It had been done casually and naturally, but I made sure my eyes were looking out to sea when she lay flat again, turned towards us as before. Once more I was shocked: this was not just the latest clothes fashion, but behaviour years ahead of its time. I was also uncomfortably aware that she was staring at me, that a comparison was being invited – or a reaction, observed. After a few moments she shifted a little and moved her head to face the other way. I looked at her brown figure, then down at Julie; then lay on my back myself and felt for the hand of the girl beside me. Her fingers curled through mine, played, contracted. I closed my eyes. Darkness, both; the old wickedness of Greece.

  But I was soon punished for my daydreaming. Out of nowhere, a minute or two later, there was an abrupt approaching roar. For a wild first second I thought it was something to do with Bourani. Then I realized it was a sound I had not heard since I had been on the island: a low-flying plane, a fighter by the sound of it. Julie and I sat up, June leant round on an elbow, her back to us. The plane was very low. It shot out from behind the Bourani cape, some four hundred yards to sea of it, and scorched like an angry hornet over the water towards the Peloponnesus. In a few seconds it had passed out of sight behind the headland to the west; but not before we had seen the American markings – or at least I had. Julie seemed more interested in her sister’s bare back.

  June said, ‘What a cheek.’

  ‘He’ll probably be back, now he’s seen you like that.’

  ‘Don’t be such a prude.’

  ‘Nicholas is perfectly well aware of what beautiful bodies we both have.’

  June turned to us then, on her elbows, a small pendant breast visible past the nearer bent arm. She was biting her lips. ‘I didn’t realize things had gone that far.’

  Julie stared fixedly out to sea. ‘We are not amused.’

  ‘Nicholas seems to be.’

  ‘You’re showing off.’

  ‘Since he’s already had the divine good luck to see me –’

  June.

  Through all this little spat Julie hadn’t looked at me. But now she did, and made it clear whose side I was to be on. It was delicious: she was both embarrassed and piqued, like still water ruffled. She surveyed me reproachfully, as if it was all my fault.

  ‘Let’s go and look at the chapel.’

  I glanced at June as I obediently stood, and received a sarcastic and impudent little cast skywards of her eyes. Now I had to bite my lips. Julie and I strolled away into the trees, the shade, in bare feet. There was a charming pinkness about her cheeks, and a setness of mouth.

  ‘She’s only teasing you.’

  ‘I could scratch her eyes out sometimes.’

  ‘A classicist shouldn’t be shocked by nakedness in Greece.’

  ‘I’m not a classicist at the moment. Just a girl who feels at a disadvantage.’

  I leant and kissed the side of her head. I was pushed away, but without force.

  We came to the whitewashed chapel. I thought it would be locked, as it had been when I had tried to get in before. But the primitive wooden latch gave – someone must have been there, and forgotten to relock the place. There was no window, only the light from the door. It was bare of chairs; an iron candle-holder with one or two ancient stumps on its spikes, a naively painted iconostasis spanning the far end, a very faint aroma of incense. We went and looked at the crudely figured saints on the worm-eaten wall of wood, but I knew we were both less aware of them than of the darkness and seclusion of the little place. I put an arm round her shoulders. A moment later she had turned and we were kissing. She twisted her mouth away and turned her cheek against my shoulder. I looked at the open door, then drew her back towards it; pushed it to, leant against the wall on the hinge side and coaxed her to me. I began to kiss her throat, her shoulder, then reached up to the straps of her costume.

  ‘No. You mustn’t.’

  But her voice had that peculiar feminine tone that invites you to go on as much as to stop. I gently eased the straps off her shoulders, then down, till she was bare to the waist; caressed the waist, then up, slowly, to the firm small breasts, still a little damp from the sea-water, but warm, excited. I bent and licked the salt from the nipples. Her hands began to stroke down my back, in my hair. I let my own wander down to the waist again, to where the costume hung, but then her hands were abruptly on mine.

  She whispered. ‘Please. Not yet.’

  I brushed my lips against her mouth. ‘I want you so much.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re so beautiful.’

  ‘But we can’t. Not here.’

  I moved my hands up to her breasts.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘You know I do. But not now.’

  Her arms slipped round my neck and we kissed again, crushing each other. I slid a hand down her back, slipped the fingers inside the edge of the costume, appled a curved cheek, pulled her closer still, against the hardness in my loins, made sure she could feel it and know she was wanted. Our mouths twisted, our tongues explored wildly, she began to rock against me and I could sense she was losing control, that this nakedness, darkness, pent-up emotion, repressed need …

  There was a sound. It was minute, and gave no indication of what had caused it. But it came beyond any doubt from the far end of, and inside, the chapel. We clung in petrified horror for a long second. Julie’s head twisted round to look where I was looking, but the few glints of light through the sid
es of the closed door made it difficult to see. Instinctively we both reached for her costume and slipped it back on over her arms. Then I gripped her hand, moved her against the wall beside me, and reached for the door. I jerked it open, light flooded in. The iconostasis stared at us, the black iron candlestand in front of it. There was nothing else. But I could see that the iconostasis, as in all such Greek chapels, stood some three or four feet off the back wall; and there was a narrow door at one end. Suddenly Julie was in front of me, mutely but violently shaking her head – she must have seen my instinct was to rush down there. I had guessed at once who it was: that accursed Negro. He could have sneaked in easily enough when we were swimming, and had probably assumed we would not leave the beach and the sea.

  Julie pulled my hand urgently, casting a quick look back at the far end. I hesitated, then let her drag me out into the open air. I slammed the door shut, then looked at her.

  ‘The bastard.’

  ‘He can’t have known we were going in there.’

  ‘But he could damn well have warned us earlier.’

  We spoke in whispers. She made me walk a few steps away. Beyond, in the sun, I could see June with her head raised, looking at us. She must have heard the sharp bang of the door.

  Julie said, ‘Maurice will know for sure now.’