John Fowles - The Magus

“But there was so much misunderstanding between us. It was not that even then I believed myself to have been wrong to run away. But it is possible, even normal, to feel right in front of history and very wrong in front of those one loves. And as for Lily, after a while she began to talk, and I realized that she understood nothing of what I had said about the war. That she saw herself not as I so much wanted, as my angel of forgiveness, but as my angel of salvation. She begged me to go back. She thought I would be spiritually dead until I did. Again and again she used the word ’resurrected.' And again and again, on my side, I wanted to know what would happen to us. And finally she said, this was her judgment, that the price of her love was that I should return to the front—not for her, but for myself. To find my true self again. And that the reality of her love was as it had been in the wood: she should never marry anyone else, whatever happened.

“In the end we were silent. You will have understood. Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. And I was free, I was Peter three times to renounce—determined to survive, whatever the cost. I still see her face. Her face staring, staring into the darkness as if she was trying to gaze herself into another world. It was as if we were locked in a torture chamber. Still in love, yet chained to opposite walls, facing each other for eternity and for eternity unable to touch.

“Of course, as men always will, I tried to extract some hope from her. That she would wait for me, not judge me too quickly… such things. But she stopped me with a look. A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgin Mary’s. It reversed the entire order of nature.

“I walked back beside her, in silence. I said goodbye to her under a streetlamp. By a garden full of lilac trees. We did not touch. Not a single word. Two young faces, suddenly old, facing each other. The moment that endures when all the other noises, objects, all that dull street, have sunk into dust and oblivion. Two white faces. The scent of lilac. And bottomless darkness.”

He paused. There was no emotion in his voice; but I was thinking of Alison, of that last look she had given me.

“And that is all. Four days later I spent a very disagreeable twelve hours crouched in the bilges of a Greek cargo boat in Liverpool docks.”

There was a silence.

“And did you ever see her again?”

A bat squeaked over our heads.

“She died.”

I had to prompt him.

“Soon after?”

“In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916.” I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. “There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital.”

“Poor girl.”

“All past. All under the sea.”

“You make it seem present.”

“I do not wish to make you sad.”

“The scent of lilac.”

“Old man’s sentiment. Forgive me.”

There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.

“Is this why you never married?”

“The dead live.”

The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.

“How do they live?”

And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.

“By love.”

It was as if he said it not to me, but equally to everything around us; as if she stood listening, in the dark shadows by the doors; as if the telling of his past had reminded him of some great principle he was seeing freshly again. I found myself touched, and touched to silence.

Some time later, he stood up.

“You must leave early in the morning?”

“At six, I’m afraid.”

“I should like you to come next week.”

“If you invite me nothing could keep me away.”

“I shall not see you in the morning. But Maria will have some breakfast ready.”

“I shall never forget this weekend.”

He moved towards the doors to his room.

“Good. I am glad.” But his gladness now sounded merely polite. His peremptoriness had regained command.

“There are so many things I’d like to ask you. Would have liked to ask you.”

He stood at the doors for me to pass, smiled. “The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“But I am trying to show you what I mean.”

He led me through to my room, where he lit the lamp. He stood in the doorway and held out his hand.

“I do not want my life discussed over there.”

“Of course not.”

“I shall see you next Saturday?”

“You will indeed.”

He reached out and gripped my shoulder, as if I needed encouragement, gave me one last piercing stare, then left me alone. I went to the bathroom, closed my door, turned the lamp out. But I didn’t undress. I stood by the window and waited.

For at least twenty minutes there was no sound. Conchis went to the bathroom and back to his room. Then there was silence. It went on so long that I undressed and started to give in to the sleep I could feel coming on me. But the silence was broken. His door opened and closed, quietly, but not secretively, and I heard him going down the stairs. A minute, two minutes passed; then I sat up and swung out of bed.

It was music again, but from downstairs, the harpsichord. It echoed, percussive but dim, through the stone house. For a few moments I felt disappointment. It seemed merely that Conchis was sleepless, or sad, and playing to himself. But then there was a sound that sent me swiftly to the door. I cautiously opened it. The downstairs door must also have been open, because I could hear the clatter of the harpsichord mechanism. But the thing that sent a shiver up my back was the thin, haunted piping of a recorder. I knew it was not on a gramophone; someone was playing it. The music stopped and went on in a brisker six-eight rhythm. The recorder piped solemnly along, made a mistake, then another; though the player was evidently quite skilled, and executed professional-sounding trills and ornaments.

I went out naked onto the landing and looked over the banisters. There was a faint radiance on the floor outside the music room. I was probably meant to listen, not to go down; but this was too much. I pulled on a sweater and trousers and crept down the stairs in my rubber-soled beachshoes. The recorder stopped and I heard the rustle of paper being turned—the music stand. The harpsichord began a long lute-stop passage, a new movement, as gentle as rain, the sounds stealing through the house, mysterious, remote-sounding harmonies. The recorder came in with an adagiolike slowness and gravity, momentarily wobbled off-key, then recovered. I tiptoed to the open door of the music room, but there something held me back—an odd childlike feeling, of misbehaving after bedtime. The door was wide open, but it opened towards the harpsichord, and the edge of one of the bookshelves blocked the view through the crack.

The music came to an end. A chair shifted, my heart raced, Conchis spoke a single indistinguishable word in a low voice. I flattened myself against the wall. There was a rustle. Someone was standing at the door of the music room.

It was a slim girl of about my own height, in her early twenties. In one hand she held a recorder, in the other a small crimson fluebrush for it. She was wearing a wide-collared, blue-and-white-striped dress that left her arms bare. There was a bracelet above one elbow, and the skirt came down narrow-bottomed almost to her ankles. She had a ravishingly pretty face, but completely untanned, without any makeup, and her hair, her outline, the upright way she held herself, everything about her was of forty years before.