John Fowles - The Magus

He seemed a more human person, a much more human person, than he had before; yet there was a kind of professionalism, an air of having rehearsed the narrative, or at any rate, of having told it before—to Leverrier and Mitford?—that took away a little from the frankness and impact of the confession. I knew that I must be getting close to his real purpose in inviting me. For some reason he wanted me to hear these things, to be impressed by them. They were not casual reminiscings. That was why the good night had followed so abruptly on the end of the story-telling; he had wanted to create a feeling of to-be-continued; to leave me in doubt about him, speculating.

And then there were the footsteps, a whole tangle of unrelated ikons and incidents, the photo on the curiosa cabinet, oblique looks, Alison, the little girl called Lily with her head in sunlight

I was about to go to sleep.

At first hallucinatorily faint, impossible to pinpoint, it began. I thought it must be coming through the walls from a gramophone in Conchs’s bedroom. I sat up, put my ear to the wall, listened. And then I leapt out of bed and went to the window. It was coming from outside, from somewhere far to the north, well up in the hills a mile or more away. There was no light, no sound except the crickets nearby. Only, beyond, this faintest sound of men, a lot of men, singing. I thought—fishermen. But why should they be in the hills? Then shepherds—but shepherds are solitaries.

It grew imperceptibly clearer, as if on a gust of wind—but there was no wind—swelling, then fading away. I thought for an incredible moment that I caught something familiar in the sound—but it couldn’t be. And it sank away, almost to complete silence.

And then—unimaginable the strangeness of it, the shock of it—the sound swelled again and I knew beyond doubt what was being sung up there. It was “Tipperary.” Whether it was the distance, whether the record, because it must have been a record, had been deliberately slowed—there seemed to be some tonal distortion as well—I couldn’t tell, but the song came with a dreamlike slowness, almost as if it was being sung out of the stars and had had to cross all that night and space to reach me.

I went to the door of my room and opened it. I had some idea that the record player must be in Conchis’s room. Somehow he had had the sound relayed to a speaker, or speakers, in the hills—perhaps that was what was in the little room, relaying equipment, a generator. But there was absolute silence in the house. I closed the door and leant back against it. The voices and the song washed dimly down out of the night, through the pine forest, over the house and out to sea. Suddenly the humor, the absurd, tender, touching incongruity of the whole thing, made me smile. I realized that it must be some elaborate joke of Conchis’s, mounted for my exclusive benefit. There was no need to rush about trying to discover how it was done. I should find that out in the morning. Meanwhile, I was to enjoy it. I went back to the window.

The voices had become very dim, barely audible; but something else had grown penetratingly strong. It was the cesspool smell I had noticed earlier. Now it was an atrocious stench that infested the windless air, a nauseating compound of decomposing flesh and excrement, so revolting that I had to hold my nose and breathe through my mouth.

Below my room there was a narrow passage between the cottage and the house. I craned down, trying to see what it was, because the source of the smell seemed so close. It was clear to me that the smell was connected with the singing. I remembered that corpse in the shell hole.

The sound faded, went completely. After a few minutes, the smell too was fainter. I stood another ten or fifteen minutes, straining eyes and ears for the faintest sound or movement. But there was none. And there was no sound inside the house. No creeping up the stairs, no doors gently closed, nothing. The crickets chirped, the stars pulsed, the experience was wiped clean. I sniffed at the window. The foul odor still lingered, but under the normal antiseptic smell of the pines and the sea, not over it.

Soon it was as if I had imagined everything. I lay awake for at least another hour. Nothing more happened; and no hypothesis made sense.

I had entered the domaine.

Someone was knocking at the door. Through the shadowy air of the open window, the burning sky. A fly crawled across the wall above the bed. I looked at my watch. It was half-past ten. I went to the door, and heard the slap of Maria’s slippers going downstairs.

In the glaring light, the racket of cicadas, the events of the night seemed in some way fictional; as if I must have been slightly drugged. But my mind didn’t seem fuzzled; I felt fit and clearheaded. I dressed and shaved and went down to breakfast under the colonnade. The taciturn Maria appeared with coffee.

“ O kyrios? ” I asked.

“ Ephage . Eine epano .” Has eaten; is upstairs. Like the villagers, with foreigners she made no attempt to speak more comprehensibly, but uttered her usual fast slur of vowel sounds.

I had my breakfast and carried the tray back along the side colonnade and down the steps to the open door of her cottage. The front room was fitted out as a kitchen. With its old calendars, its lurid cardboard ikons, its bunches of herbs and shallots and its bluepainted meatsafe hanging from the ceiling, it was like any other cottage living-kitchen of Phraxos. Only the utensils were rather more ambitious, and the stove larger. I went in and put the tray on the table.

Maria appeared out of the back room; I glimpsed a large brass bed, more ikons, photographs. A shadow of a smile creased her mouth; but it was circumstantial, not genuine. It would have been difficult enough in English to ask questions without appearing to be prying; in my Greek it was impossible. I hesitated a moment, then saw her face, as blank as the door behind her, and gave up.

I went through the passage between house and cottage to the vegetable garden. On the western side of the house a shuttered window corresponded to the door at the end of Conchis’s bedroom. It appeared as if there was something more than a cupboard there. Then I looked up at the north-facing back of the house, at my own room. It was easy to hide behind the rear wall of the cottage, but the ground was hard and bare; showed nothing. I strolled on into the arbor. The little Priapus threw up his arms at me, jeering his pagan smile at my English face.

No entry.

Ten minutes later I was down on the private beach. The water, blue and green glass, was for a moment cold, then deliciously cool; I swam out between the steep rocks to the open sea. After a hundred yards or so I could see behind me the whole cliffed extent of the headland, and the house. I could even see Conchis, who was sitting where we had sat on the terrace the night before, apparently reading. After a while he stood up, and I waved. He raised both his arms in his peculiar hieratic way, a way in which I knew now that there was something deliberately, not fortuitously, symbolic. The dark figure on the raised white terrace; legate of the sun facing the sun; the most ancient royal power. He appeared, wished to appear, to survey, to bless, to command; dominus and domaine. And once again I thought of Prospero; even if he had not said it first, I should have thought of it then. I dived, but the salt stung my eyes and I surfaced. Conchis had turned away—to talk with Ariel, who put records on; or with Caliban, who carried a bucket of rotting entrails; or perhaps with… but I turned on my back. It was ridiculous to build so much on the sound of quick footsteps, the merest glimpse of a white shape.

When I got back to the beach ten minutes later he was sitting on the balk. As I came out of the water he stood and said, “We will take the boat and go to Petrocaravi.” Petrocaravi, the “ship of stone,” was a deserted islet half a mile off the tip of Phraxos. He was dressed in swimming shorts and a garish red-and-white water-polo player’s cap, and in his hand he had the blue rubber flippers and a pair of underwater masks and snorkels. I followed his brown old back over the hot stones.