John Fowles - The Magus

“Passing through?” asked the landlord, as he drew me a pint.

“No. Been to see someone. Dinsford House.”

“Nice place she’s got there.”

“You know them?”

He wore a bow tie; had a queasy in-between accent.

“Know of them. I’ll take the sandwiches separate.” He rang up the till. “Used to see the children round the village.”

“I’ve just been out there on business.”

“Oh yes.”

A peroxided woman’s head appeared round the door. She held out a plate of sandwiches. As he handed me back my change, he said, “Singer in opera, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s what they say round here.”

I waited for him to go on, but he evidently wasn’t very interested. I finished half a sandwich. Thought.

“What’s her husband do?”

“Isn’t a husband.” He caught up my quick look. “Well we been here two years now and I never heard of one. There’re… gentlemen friends, I’m told.” He gave me a minute wink.

“Ah. I see.”

“Course they’re like me. London people.” There was a silence. He picked up a glass. “Good-looking woman. Never seen her daughters?” I shook my head. He polished the glass. “Real corkers.” Silence.

“How old are they?”

“Don’t ask me. I can’t tell twenty from thirty these days. The eldest are twins, you know.” If he hadn’t been so busy polishing the glass in the old buy-me-a-drink ploy he would have seen my face freeze into stone. “What they call identicals. Some are normals. And others are identicals.” He held the glass up high to the light. “They say the only way their own mother can tell them apart one’s got a scar or something on her wrist.”

I was out of the bar so fast that he didn’t even have time to shout.

I didn’t feel angry at first; I drove very fast, and nearly killed a man on a bicycle, but I was grinning most of the way. This time I didn’t park my car discreetly by the gate. I skidded it on the gravel in front of the black door; and I made the lion-headed knocker give the hardest banging it had sounded in years.

Mrs. de Seitas herself answered the door; she had changed, but only from her jodhpurs into a pair of pale fawn trousers. She looked past me at my car, as if that might explain why I had returned. I smiled.

“I see you’re not going out for lunch after all.”

“Yes, I made a stupid mistake over the day.” She gathered her shirt collar together. “Did you forget something?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” I said nothing and she went on brightly but a fraction too late, “What?”

“Your twin daughters.”

Her expression changed; she didn’t appear in the least guilty, but she gave me a look of concession and then the faintest smile. I wondered how I had not seen the similarity; the eyes, the long mouth. I had let that spurious snapshot Lily had shown me linger in my mind. A silly woman with fluffed-up hair. She stepped back for me to enter.

“Yes. You did.”

Benjie appeared at a door at the end of the hall. She spoke calmly to him as she closed the door behind me.

“Benjie, go and have your lunch.”

“Benjie.” I went quickly and bent a little in front of him. “Benjie, could you tell me something? The names of your twin sisters?”

He frowned and looked at his mother. She must have nodded.

“Lil' and Rose.”

“Thank you.”

He gave me one last doubtful look, and disappeared. I turned to Lily de Seitas.

She said, as she moved self-possessedly towards the drawing room, “We called them that to placate my mother. She was a hungry goddess.” Her manner had changed with her clothes; and a vague former disparity between her vocabulary and her looks was accounted for. It was suddenly credible that she was fifty; and incredible that I had thought her rather unintelligent. I followed her into the room.

“I’m interrupting your lunch.”

She gave me a dry backwards look. “I’ve been expecting an interruption for several weeks now.”

She sat in an armchair and gestured for me to sit on the huge sofa in the center of the room, but I shook my head. She glanced at a silver tray of drinks by the wall; I shook my head again. She was not nervous; even smiled.

“Well?”

“We start from the fact that you have two enterprising daughters. Let me hear you re-invent from there.”

“I’m afraid my invention’s at an end. I can only fall back on the truth now.” But she was still smiling as she said it; smiling at my not smiling. “Maurice is the twins’ godfather.”

“You do know who I am?” It was her calmness; I could not believe she knew what they had done at Bourani.

“Yes, Mr. Urfe. I know exactly who you are.” Her cool eyes warned me; and annoyed me.

“And what happened?”

“And what happened.” She looked down at her hands, then back at me. “My husband was killed in 1945. In the Far East. He never saw Benjie.” She saw the impatience on my face and checked it. “He was also the first English master at the Lord Byron School.”

“Oh no he wasn’t. I’ve looked up all the old prospectuses.”

“Then you remember the name Hughes.”

“Yes.”

She crossed her legs. She sat in an old wingchair covered in pale gold brocade; very erectly. All her “county” horsiness had disappeared.

“I wish you’d sit down.”

“No thank you.”

She accepted my bleakness with a little shrug, and looked me in the eyes; a shrewd, unabashed and even haughty stare. Then she began to speak.

“My father died when I was eighteen. Mainly to escape from home I made a disastrous—a very stupid—marriage. Then in 1929 I met my second husband. My first husband divorced me. We married. We wanted to be out of England for a time and we hadn’t much money. He applied for a teaching post in Greece. He was a classical scholar… loved Greece, We met Maurice. Lily and Rose were conceived on Phraxos. In a house that Maurice lent us to live in.

“I don’t believe a word. But go on.”

“I funked having twins in Greece and we had to come back to England.” She took a cigarette from a silver box on the tripod table beside her. I refused her offer of one; and let her light her cigarette herself. She was very calm; in her own house; mistress. “My mother’s maiden name was de Seitas.” She appraised me; her daughter’s look. “You can confirm that at Somerset House. She had a bachelor brother, my uncle, who was very well off and who treated me—especially after my father’s death—as much as a daughter as my mother would allow him to. She was a very domineering woman.”

“You’re saying now that you never met… Maurice before 1930?”

She smiled. “Of course not. But I supplied him with all the details of that part of his story to you.”

“And a sister called Rose?”

“Go to Somerset House.”

“I shall.”

She contemplated the tip of her cigarette; made me wait a moment.

“The twins arrived. A year later my uncle died. We found he had left me nearly all his money on condition that Bill changed his name by deed-poll to de Seitas. Not even de Seitas-Hughes. My mother was mainly responsible for that meanness.” She looked at the group of miniatures that hung beside her, beside the mantelpiece. “My uncle was the last male of the de Seitas family. My husband changed his name to mine. In the Japanese style. You can confirm that as well.” She added, “That is all.”

“It’s very far from all. My God.”

“May I, as I know so much about you, call you Nicholas?”

“No.”

She looked down, once again with that infuriating small smile that haunted all their faces—her daughters', Conchis’s, even Anton’s and Maria’s in their different ways, as if they had all been trained to give the same superior, enigmatic smiles; as perhaps they had. And I suspected that if anyone had done the training, it would be this woman.