John Fowles - The Magus

I said, “And now?”

She sat up. Her hair hid her face from me; silk-pale strands on the navy-blue shirt. “June’s going to fly back to England.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Do you really need one?”

I smiled, stroked her hair, then pulled her to me; turned her head and kissed her. After a moment she sank back and I lay beside her. Her shirt had rucked up and I bent and kissed her stomach, then touched her navel with my tongue, and she pressed my head down against her bare skin.

The lunch stood on the table. Hermes picked up one of the roped crates as soon as he saw us, and began to carry it down to the beach. Four times he reappeared during the meal and went down with another crate. She went and changed out of her suit into pale blue trousers; dark blue, pale blue, changing before a walk… I remembered Alison. And looking at Julie, forgot her. We sat and ate; not very much. Neither of us was hungry.

“I went mad while you were away. Trying to find out where you hid here.”

“Maurice thought someone in the village would tell you.”

“In the village?”

She reached out and took a Kalamata olive; bit it, her amused eyes on mine. “I’ll show you. If you’re good.”

“I’ve just remembered. Some Latin poem Maurice asked me to ask you about. Nullos something? By Catullus.”

“ Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle …”

“That was it.”

“The last line says, 'What a woman tells a passionate lover should be written in wind and running water.”

“Should it?”

She dropped her eyes.

“Ask me tomorrow.”

“I love you.”

But Hermes came to fetch the last picture crate and we were silent. I reached out with my bare foot and touched hers. Our eyes were serious, our feet played, pressed; soles and souls.

We went up to my room to get my things. Julie stood in the door while I filled my dufflebag. I sat on the bed to tie up the strings round the neck. She came in and gently lifted the old photo of the house. The gecko clung to the wall.

I said, “You’ve slept in this room.”

She nodded. I reached out and caught her hand, and made her sit beside me. We sat in silence, in the silent house, as if there were ghosts that could be listened to and heard. I kept on thinking of the bare skin under the shirt; of her body; and then of how much more than bare skin and body she was.

Perhaps it was seeing her in contemporary clothes; but I was intensely aware of her in a new nonsexual way. As a companion, a partner in life; in some ways, as an innocent—a very intelligent innocent, but one that needed protecting, cherishing; and her innocense, living up to. I felt a new sort of ardor, an anxious desire to hide nothing from her, to have nothing of her hidden from me. I was longing to tell her about Alison, longing for her sympathy and understanding. But the lie I had told her a fortnight before stood like a black guard, like Joe, between me and the absolving sunlight. As soon as we had consummated the physical thing, I would go to confession; and even then I knew a little wave of relief at the thought that there was now only one witness of that weekend in Athens. Those moments on Parnassus need never he told.

As a substitute, to confess something, I told her about the letters I had written: to the bank, to her mother.

“I don’t mind. We’ve done the same.”

“The same!”

“June telephoned the British Council. From Nauplia. Years ago.”

We grinned. Silence. Hands.

“Julie.”

“Nicholas.”

Always those tenderly impenetrable eyes.

“I want to marry you.”

She withdrew her hands gently. I moved closer and put my arms round her shoulders.

“What’s wrong?”

“I want you to take me to bed with you first.”

“But I’m dying to. You know I am.”

She misinterpreted my movement. “Not here.”

“Of course not here.”

“I’m so frightened that you’ll be disappointed.”

I shook her. “You’re just a neurotic spinster.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be as patient and gentle as…”

She gave me a quick smile, then stood up and went to the door. We remained staring at each other. She murmured, “Not too gentle.”

I followed her fair head down the stairs. She went ahead of me into the music room, then whisked round, playful, a sudden idea. She said just one word.

“Encore?”

I knew what she meant. I stood back against the wall. She disappeared, a pause, the sound of a drawer opening, then she was standing in the doorway, with the recorder flue brush in her hand; with miraculously the same look at me, the same secret look back at the Conchis who now was not there, the same leaning forward to push me away.

But this time I caught her wrist and pulled her out of the music room into the little corridor; drew the door to, so that we stood in the cool darkness, watching, not playing, very close; and she came into my arms. I kissed her until she twisted her head away with a little gasp; then made her turn. I held her back against me, slipped my right hand inside her trousers, spread my fingers over her naked stomach. She held my wrist. I tenderly bit her neck, murmured her name over and over again, slipped my other hand under her shirt and up her bare back and unhooked the bra; then, unresisted, caressed my way under her warm arm to her breasts, small breasts that I could just span with one hand; and so held her against me; our hot nakednesses through the thin clothes. She made little movements; then surrendered. Minutes passed. I whispered.

“Promise I can hold you tonight like this.” She nodded. “Undress you and hold you like this.” She raised my right hand and kissed it.

We heard Hermes’s footsteps coming over the gravel outside. I refastened her bra, and she shook her hair straight. A moment in the shadows, shadowy eyes.

“You make me feel I’ve never touched a girl before.”

“You make me feel I’ve never been touched.”

Under the colonnade, Hermes stood waiting. He went and locked the music-room doors from the inside; let himself out by the front door. I said we would be at the house in the village about six, and then we watched him go down the path with Julie’s suitcase. We were alone. Silence, the cicadas. Her mouth looked bruised, her eyes almost violet; a heavy, emotion-laden look at me, as if she blamed me and forgave me, forgave me and blamed me… I reached out my hand.

“I’ve been good.”

She recovered herself then, laughed and remembered, and led me to the steps over the gulley; I heard the sound of the boat drawing out of the private cove. To my surprise Julie turned down past the carob. We came to the edge of the trees, between the small hummock where I had met the sisters and the place where we had lain on Julie’s rug and the whole story had been told. Twenty yards away the cliff dropped straight into the sea. The ground was rough. There were small boulders, some matted whinlike scrub, thyme and other aromatic plants; the huge dry brown bulbs of asphodels.

“Here. See if you can find it.”

She stood under a pine and watched me quarter the innocent ground. I searched for a raised neck, a cap of some sort; threw a sharp look back at her. She had her hand to her mouth, in suspense. I was near.

Just in front of me there was the stump of a pine that had been cut down many years before. Around it an area of about five feet by three was bare, apparently because of the stones, or because the dead stem had poisoned the ground in some way. It seemed perfectly natural, but Julie was smiling. The stones were, on a second examination, suspiciously thick around the stump. And as soon as I actually stood on the bare patch I realized something else. The stones did not budge under my feet; they were cemented in. Julie came down through the low undergrowth to beside me. Pointed.