John Fowles - The Magus

I noticed the twoness of the tea table, and stood by the corner, embarrassed, aware of a trite English desire to sneak away. Then, without warning, a figure appeared in the doorway.

It was Conchis.

Before anything else, I knew I was expected. He saw me without surprise, with a small smile, almost a grimace, on his face.

He was nearly completely bald, brown as old leather, short and spare, a man whose age was impossible to tell; perhaps sixty, perhaps seventy; dressed in a navy-blue shirt, knee-length shorts, and a pair of salt-stained gymshoes. The most striking thing about him was the intensity of his eyes; very dark brown, staring, with a simian penetration emphasized by the remarkably clear whites; eyes that seemed not quite human.

He raised his left hand briefly in a kind of silent salutation, then strode to the corner of the colonnade, leaving me with my formed words unspoken, and called back to the cottage.

“Maria!”

I heard a faint wail of answer.

“You…” I began, as he turned.

But he raised his left hand again, this time to silence me; took my arm and led me to the edge of the colonnade. He had an authority, an abrupt decisiveness, that caught me off-balance. He surveyed the landscape, then me. The sweet saffronlike smell of some flowers that grew below, at the edge of the gravel, wafted up into the shade.

“I chose well?”

His English sounded perfect.

“Wonderfully. But you must let me—”

Once again his arm, brown and corded, swept silencingly towards the sea and the mountains and the south, as if I might not have properly appreciated it. I looked sideways at him. He was obviously a man who rarely smiled. There was something masklike, emotionpurged, about his face. Deep furrows ran from beside his nose to the corners of his mouth; they suggested experience, command, impatience with fools. He was slightly mad, no doubt harmlessly so, but mad. I had an idea that he thought I was someone else. He kept his apelike eyes on me. The silence and the stare were alarming, and faintly comic, as if he was trying to hypnotize a bird.

Suddenly he gave a curious little rapid shake of the head; quizzical, rhetorical, not expecting an answer. Then he changed, as if what had happened between us till then was a joke, a charade, that had been rehearsed and gone according to plan, but could now be ended. And I was completely off-balance again. He wasn’t mad after all. He even smiled, and the ape eyes became almost squirrel eyes.

He turned back to the table. “Let us have tea.”

“I only came for a glass of water. This is…

“You came here to meet me. Please. Life is short.”

I sat down. The second place was mine. An old woman appeared, in black, a black gray with age, her face as lined as an Indian squaw’s. She was incongruously carrying a tray with an elegant silver teapot, a kettle, a bowl of sugar, a saucer with sliced lemon.

“This is my housekeeper. Maria.”

He spoke to her in very precise Greek, and I heard my own name and the name of the school. The old woman bobbed at me, her eyes on the ground, unsmiling, and then unloaded her tray. Conchis plucked the muslin away from one of the plates with the quick aplomb of a conjurer. I saw cucumber sandwiches. He poured the tea, and indicated the lemon.

“How do you know who I am, Mr. Conchis?”

“Anglicize my name. I prefer the ch soft.” He sipped his tea. “If you interrogate Hermes, Zeus will know.”

“I’m afraid my colleague was tactless.”

“You no doubt found out all about me.”

“I found out very little. But that makes this even kinder of you.”

He looked out to sea. “There is a poem of the Tang dynasty.” He sounded the precious little glottal stop. “Here at the frontier, there are falling leaves. Although my neighbors are all barbarians, and you, you are a thousand miles away, there are always two cups on my table.”

I smiled. “Always?”

“I saw you last Sunday.”

“They were your things down there?”

He bowed his head. “And I also saw you this afternoon.”

“I hope I haven’t kept you from your beach.”

“Not at all. My private beach is down there.” He pointed over the gravel. “But I always like a beach to myself. And I presume the same of you. Now. Eat the sandwiches.”

He poured me more tea. It had huge torn leaves and a tarry China fragrance. On the other plate were kourabiêdes , conical buttercakes rolled in icing sugar. I’d forgotten what a delicious meal tea could be; and sitting there I felt invaded by the envy of the man who lives in an institution, and has to put up with the institution meals and institution everything else, for the rich private life of the established. I remembered having tea with one of my tutors, an old bachelor don at Magdalen; and the same envy for his rooms, his books, his calm, precise, ticking peace.

I bit into my first kourabiè , and gave an appreciative nod.

“You are not the first English person to have admired Maria’s cooking.”

“Mitford?” His eyes fixed me sharply again. “I met him in London.”

He poured more tea. “How did you like Captain Mitford?”

“Not my type.”

“He told you about me?”

“Not at all. That is…” his eyes flicked at me. “He just said you’d had a row.”

“Captain Mitford made me ashamed to have English blood.”

Till then I had felt I was beginning to get his measure; first of all, his English, though excellent, was somehow not contemporary, more that of someone who hadn’t been in England for many years; and then his whole appearance was foreign. He had a bizarre family resemblance to Picasso; saurian as well as simian, decades of living in the sun, the quintessential Mediterranean man, who had discarded everything that lay between him and his vitality. A monkey-glander, essence of queen bees; and intense by choice and exercise as much as by nature. He was plainly not a dandy about clothes; but there are other sorts of narcissism.

“I didn’t realize you were English.”

“I spent the first nineteen years of my life in England. Now I have Greek nationality and my mother’s name. My mother was Greek.”

“You go back to England?”

“Never.” He jumped swiftly on. “Do you like my house? I designed and built it myself.”

I looked around. “I envy you.”

“And I envy you.”

“Not much to envy.”

“You have the one thing that matters. You have all your discoveries before you.” His face was without the offensively avuncular smile that usually accompanies such trite statements; and something intent about the look he gave me made it clear he did not think it trite; that it did not carry its usual meaning. He stood up. “Well. Now I will leave you for a few minutes. Then we shall have a look round.” I stood up with him, but he gestured me down again. “Finish the cakes. Maria will be honored. Please.”

He walked into the sunlight at the edge of the colonnade, stretched his arms and fingers, and with another gesture to me to help myself passed back inside the room. From where I was sitting I could see one end of a cretonne-covered sofa, a table with a bowl of milky flowers on it. The wall behind was covered by bookshelves, from the ceiling to the floor. I stole another kourabiè . The sun was beginning to float down on the mountains, and the sea glittered lazily at the foot of their ashy, opaque shadows. Then there was an unannounced shock of antique sound, a rapid arpeggio, far too real to come from a radio or record. I stood up, wondering what new surprise I was being presented with.

There was a moment’s silence, perhaps to leave me guessing. Then came the quiet plangent sound of a harpsichord. I hesitated, then decided that two could play the independence game, and sat down again. He played quickly, and then tranquilly; once or twice he stopped and retook a phrase. The old woman came and silently cleared away, without once looking at me, even when I pointed at the few cakes left and praised them in my stilted Greek; the hermit master evidently liked silent servants. The music came clearly out of the room, and flowed around me and out through the colonnade into the light. He broke off, repeated a passage, and then stopped as abruptly as he had begun. A door closed, there was a silence. Five minutes passed, then ten. The sun crept towards me over the red tiles.