John Fowles - The Magus

“Why should they be similar? Are you a Catholic?” I shook my head. “A Christian even?” I shook my head again. He shrugged. He had dark shadows under his eyes, as if he was tired.

“But I do believe in… charity?”

“My dear man, you don’t want charity from me. You want confessions I am not prepared to make. In my view I am being charitable in not making them. In my position you would understand.” He added, “And at my remove you will understand.”

His voice was set cold; there was a silence.

He said, “I’m sorry. You force me to be more brusque than I wish.”

“I’d better go.”

He seized his chance, and stood up.

“I intend nothing personal.”

“Of course.”

“Let me see you to the gate.”

We walked back; into the whitewashed door carved through the rock, up past doors that were like prison cells, and out into the hall with the death murals.

He said, “I meant to ask you about the school. There was a boy called Aphendakis, very promising. I coached him.”

We lingered a little in the loggia, beside the Peruginos, exchanging sentences about the school. I could see that he was not really interested, was merely making an effort to be pleasant; to humiliate his pride. But even in that he was self-conscious.

We shook hands.

He said, “This is a great European shrine. And we are told that our visitors—whatever their beliefs—should leave it feeling… I think the words are ’refreshed and consoled.” He paused as if I might want to object, to sneer, but I said nothing. “I must ask you once again to believe that I am silent for your sake as well as mine.”

“I’ll try to believe it.”

He gave a formal sort of bow, more Italian than English; and I went down the rock staircase to the path through the ilexes.

I had to wait till evening in Subiaco for a bus back. It ran through long green valleys, under hilltop villages, past aspens already yellowing into autumn. The sky turned through the softest blues to a vesperal amber-pink. Old peasants sat at their doorways; some of them had Greek faces, inscrutable, noble, at peace. I felt, perhaps because I had drunk almost a whole bottle of Verdicchio while I waited, that I belonged, and would forever belong, to an older world than Leverrier’s. I didn’t like him, or his religion. And this not liking him, this halfdrunken love of the ancient, unchangeable Greco-Latin world seemed to merge. I was a pagan, at best a stoic, at worst a voluptuary, and would remain forever so.

Waiting for the train, I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo-blue hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten thousand Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realized that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem.

If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a gray-blue sky; and I could hear people saying “Lovely day, isn’t it?” But all those tired greens, grays, browns… they seemed to compress the movements of the Londoners we passed into a ubiquitous uniformity. It was something I had become too familiar with to notice in the Greeks—how each face there springs unique and sharp from its background. No Greek is like any other Greek; and every English face seemed, that day, like every other English face.

I got into a hotel near the air terminal about four o'clock and tried to decide what to do. Within ten minutes I picked up the phone and dialed Ann Taylor’s number. There was no answer. Half an hour later I tried again, and again there was no answer. I forced myself to read a magazine for an hour; then I failed a third time to get an answer. I found a taxi and drove round to Russell Square. I was intensely excited; the idea that Alison would be waiting for me. Some clue. Something would happen. Without knowing why I went into a pub, had a Scotch, and waited another quarter of an hour.

At last I was walking up to the house. The street door was on the latch, as it always had been. There was no card against the third-floor bell. I climbed the stairs; stood outside the door and waited, listened, heard nothing, then knocked. No answer. I knocked again, and then again. Music, but it came from above. I tried Ann Taylor’s flat one last time, then went on up the stairs. I remembered that evening I had climbed them with Alison, taking her to have her bath. How many worlds had died since then? And yet Alison was somehow still there, so close. I decided she really was close; in the flat above. I did not know what would happen. Emotions exploded decisions.

I shut my eyes, counted ten, and knocked.

Footsteps.

A girl of nineteen or so opened the door; spectacles, rather fat, too much lipstick. I could see through another door into the sitting room beyond her. There was a young man there and another girl, arrested in the act of demonstrating some dance; jazz, the room full of evening sunlight; three interrupted figures, still for an instant, like a contemporary Vermeer. I was unable to hide my disappointment. The girl at the door gave an encouraging smile.

I backed.

“Terribly sorry. Wrong flat.” I began to go down the stairs. She called after me, who did I want, but I said, “It’s all right. Second floor.” I was out of sight before she could put two and two together; my tan, my retreat, peculiar telephone calls from Athens.

I walked back to the pub, and later I went to an Italian restaurant Alison and myself had used to go to. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers’ staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occurred to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless… speciesless.

I went and had one more look at the fiat in Russell Square, but there was no light on the third floor. So I returned to the hotel, defeated. An old, old man.

The next morning I went round to the estate agents who looked after the house. They had a shabby string of green-painted rooms above a shop in Southampton Row. I recognized the adenoidal clerk who came to the counter to look after me as the one I had dealt with the previous year; he remembered me, and I soon extracted from him what little information he had to give. The fiat had been assigned to Alison at the beginning of July—ten days or a fortnight after Parnassus. He had no idea whether Alison had been living there or not. He looked at a copy of the new lease. The assignee’s address was the same as the assigner’s.