John Fowles - The Magus

He sat against the parapet with his back to the view.

“You have a girl. You are engaged?” In my turn I shook my head. “You must find life here very frustrating.”

“I was warned.” Some embarrassing proposition haunted the air.

“You have no girl. You have no family. You have no friends here. You are very alone.”

“Loneliness has its advantages.” I looked at him. “Hasn’t it?”

“I am lonely here. Not elsewhere.” He added, “And not even here.”

I looked out to sea. “Well there is a girl, but…”

“But?”

“I can’t explain.”

“Is she English?”

I thought of the Bonnard; that was the reality; such moments; not what one could tell. I smiled at him.

“May I ask you what you asked me last week? No questions?”

“Of course.”

We sat in silence then, that same peculiar silence he had imposed on the beach the Saturday before. At last he turned to the sea and spoke again.

“Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.”

“To live alone?”

“To live. With things as they are. A Swiss came to live here—many years ago now—in an isolated ruined cottage at the far end of the island. Over there, under Aquila. A man of my age now. He had spent all his life assembling watches and reading about Greece. He had even taught himself classical Greek. He repaired the cottage himself, cleared the cisterns, and made some terraces. His passion became—you cannot guess—goats. He kept one, then two. Then a small flock of them. They slept in the same room as he did. Always exquisite. Always combed and brushed, since he was Swiss. He used to call here sometimes in spring and we would have the utmost difficulty in keeping his seraglio out of the house. He learnt to make excellent cheeses—they fetched good prices in Athens. But he was absolutely alone. No one ever wrote to him. Visited him. Totally alone. And I believe the happiest man I have ever met.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died in 1937. A stroke. They did not discover him till a fortnight later. By then all his goats were dead too. It was winter, so you see the door was fastened.”

His eyes on mine, Conchis grimaced, as if he found death a joker. His skin clung very close to his skull. Only the eyes lived. I had the strange impression that he wanted me to believe he was death; that at any moment the leathery old skin and the eyes would fall, and I should find myself the guest of a skeleton.

Later we went back indoors. There were three other rooms on the north side of the first floor. One room he showed me only a glimpse of, a lumber room. I saw crates piled high, and some furniture with dustcovers on. Then there was a bathroom, and beside the bathroom, a small bedroom. The bed was made, and I saw my dufflebag lying on it. I had fully expected one locked room, the woman-of-the-glove’s room. Then I thought that she lived in the cottage—Maria looked after her, perhaps; or perhaps this room that was to be mine for the weekend was normally hers.

He handed me the seventeenth-century pamphlet, which I had left on a table on the landing.

“I usually have an aperitif downstairs in about half an hour. I will see you then?”

“Of course.”

“I must tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“You have heard some disagreeable things about me?”

“I only know one story about you and that seems very much to your credit.”

“The execution?”

“I told you last week.”

“I have a feeling that you have heard something else. From Captain Mitford?”

“Absolutely nothing. I assure you.”

He was standing in the doorway, giving me his intensest look. He seemed to gather strength; to decide that the mystery must be cleared up; then spoke.

“I am psychic.”

The house seemed full of silence; and suddenly everything that had happened earlier led to this.

“I’m afraid I’m not psychic. At all.”

We seemed drowned in dusk; two men staring at each other. I could hear a clock ticking in his room.

“That is unimportant.” He moved away. “In half an hour?”

“Of course. But why did you tell me that?”

He turned to a small table by the door, and struck a match to light the oil lamp, and then carefully adjusted it. In the doorway he stopped a moment.

“In half an hour?” he said again.

Then he went down the passage and across the landing into his room. I heard his door shut. The house was very still. I had a sensation that I couldn’t define; except that it was new.

The bed was a cheap iron one. Besides a second table, a carpet, and an armchair, there was only an old, locked cassone , of a kind to be found in every cottage on the island. It was the least likely millionaire’s spare room imaginable. The walls were bare except for a photograph of a number of village men standing in front of a house—the house. I could make out a younger Conchis in the center, wearing a straw hat and shorts, and there was one woman, a peasant woman, though not Maria, because she was Maria’s age in the photo and it was plainly twenty or thirty years old. I held up the lamp and turned the picture round to see if there was anything written on the back. But the only thing there was a fragile gecko, which clung splayfooted to the wall and watched me with cloudy eyes. Geckos like seldom-used rooms.

On the table by the head of the bed there was a flat shell to serve as an ashtray, and three books; a collection of ghost stories, an old Bible and a large thin volume entitled The Beauties of Nature . The ghost stories purported to be true, “authenticated by at least two reliable witnesses.” The list of contents— Borley Rectory , The Isle of Man Polecat , No. 18 Dennington Road , The Man with the Limp —reminded me of being ill at boarding school. I opened The Beauties of Nature . The nature was all female, and the beauty all pectoral. There were long shots of breasts, shots of breasts of every material from every angle, and against all sorts of background, closer and closer, until the final picture was of nothing but breast, with one dark and much larger than natural nipple staring from the center of the glossy page. It was much too obsessive to be erotic.

I picked up the lamp and went into the bathroom. It was well fitted out, with a formidable medicine chest. I looked for some sign of a woman’s occupation, and found none. There was running water, but it was cold and salt; for men only.

I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The sky in the open window was a pale night blue and one or two first faint northerly stars blinked over the trees. Outside, the crickets chirped monotonously, with a Webern-like inconsistency yet precision of rhythm. I heard small noises from the cottage below my window, and I could smell cooking. In the house was a great stillness.

I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so Germanically dogmatic that I wanted to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me, and not only as a rich man with some enviable works of art in his house. And now he quite definitely frightened me. It was the kind of illogical fear of the supernatural that in others made me sneer; but all along I had felt that I was invited not out of hospitality, but for some other reason. He wanted to use me in some way. I now discounted homosexuality; he had had his chances and ignored them. Beside, the Bonnards, the fiancée, the book of breasts, all discounted it.

Something much more bizarre was afoot. Are you elect … Even here I am not alone … I am psychic … it all pointed to spiritualism, to table tapping. Perhaps the lady of the glove was a medium of some kind. Certainly Conchis hadn’t got the petty-bourgeois gentility and the woolly vocabulary I associated with séance holders; but he was equally certainly not a normal man.