John Fowles - The Magus

I got out of bed and sat in my pajama trousers and wrote a letter, quite a long letter, which I tore up at the first rereading. The second attempt was much shorter and hit off, I thought, the right balance between regretful practicality and yet sufficient affection and desire for her still to want to climb into bed if I got half a chance.

I said I was rather tied up at the school over most weekends; though the half-term holiday was the weekend after next and I might just be in Athens then—but I couldn’t be sure. But if I was, it would be fun to see her.

As soon as I could I got Méli on his own. I had decided that I had to have a confidant at the school. One did not have to attend school meals with the boys over the weekend if one was off duty, and the only master who might have noticed I had been away was Méli himself, but as it happened he’d been in Athens. We sat after lunch on Monday in his room; or rather he sat chubbily at his desk, living up to his nickname, spooning Hymettus honey out of a jar and telling me of the flesh and fleshpots he had bought himself in Athens; and I lay on his bed, only half listening.

“And you, Nicholas, you had a nice weekend?”

“I met Mr. Conchs.”

“You… no, you are joking.”

“You are not to tell the others.”

He raised his hands in protest. “Of course, but how… I can’t believe it.”

I gave him a very expurgated version of the visit the week before, and made Conchis and Bourani as dull as possible.

“He sounds as stupid as I thought. No girls?”

“Not a sign. Not even little boys.”

“Nor even a goat?”

I threw a box of matches at him. Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming. His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.

“He’s asked me over next week again. As a matter of fact, Méli, I wondered, if I do two preps for you… would you do my noon to six on Sunday?” Sunday duty was easy work. It meant only that one had to stay inside the school and stroll through the grounds a couple of times.

“Well. Yes. I will see.” He sucked the spoon.

“And tell me what to tell the others, if they ask. I want them to think I’m going somewhere else.”

He thought a minute, waved the spoon, then said, “Tell them you are going to Hydra.”

Hydra was a stop on the way to Athens, though one didn’t have to catch the Athens boat to go there, as there were often caiques doing the run. It had an embryonic artistic colony of sorts; the kind of place I might plausibly choose to go to. “Okay. And you won’t tell anyone?”

He crossed himself. “I am as silent as the… the what is it?”

“Where you ought to be, Méli. The bloody grave.”

I went to the village several times that week, to see if there were any strange faces about. There was no sign of the three people I was looking for, although there were a few strange faces: three or four wives with young children sent out to grass from Athens, and one or two old couples, dehydrated rentiers , who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia.

One evening I felt restless and walked down to the harbor. It was about eleven at night and the place, with its catalpas and its old black cannons of i8zi, was almost deserted. After a Turkish coffee and a nip of brandy in a kapheneion I started to walk back. Some way past the hotel, still on the few hundred yards of concrete “promenade,” I saw a very tall elderly man standing and bending in the middle of the road, apparently looking for something. He looked up as I approached—he was really remarkably tall and strikingly well dressed for Phraxos; evidently one of the summer visitors. He wore a pale fawn suit, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, an oldfashioned white Panama hat with a black band, and he had a small goatee beard. He was holding by its middle a cane with a meerschaum handle, and he looked gravely distressed, as well as naturally grave.

I asked in Greek if he had lost anything.

“ Ah pardon… est-ce que vous parlez francais, monsieur? ”

I said, yes, I spoke some French.

It seemed he had just lost the ferrule of his stick. He had heard it drop off and roll away. I struck a few matches and searched round, and after a little while found the small brass end.

“ Ah, très bien. Mille mercis, monsieur .”

He produced a pocketbook and I thought for a moment he was going to tip me. His face was as gloomy as an El Greco; insufferably bored, decades of boredom, and probably, I decided, insufferably boring. He didn’t tip me, but placed the ferrule carefully inside the wallet, and then politely asked me who I was, and, fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn’t French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos pittoresque, mais mains belle que Délos .

After a few moments more of this platitudinous chat we bowed and went our ways. He expressed a hope that we might meet again during the remaining two days of his stay and have a longer conversation. But I took very good care that we didn’t.

At last Saturday came. I had done the two extra duties during the week to clear my Sunday, and was thoroughly exhausted with the school. As soon as the morning lessons were over and I had snatched a quick lunch I headed towards the village with my bag. Yes I told the old man at the gate—a sure method of propagating the lie—I was off to Hydra for the weekend. As soon as I was out of sight of the school I cut up through the cottages and round the back of the school onto the path to Bourani. But I didn’t go straight there.

I had speculated endlessly during the week about Conchs, and as futilely as endlessly. I thought I could discern two elements in his “game"—one didactic, the other aesthetic. But whether his cunningly mounted fantasies hid ultimately a wisdom or a lunacy I could not decide. On the whole I suspected the latter. Mania made more sense than reason.

I had wondered more and more during the week about the little group of cottages at Agia Varvara, the bay east of Bourani. It was a wide sweep of shingle with a huge row of athanatos , or agaves, whose bizarre twelve-foot candelabra of flowers stood facing the sea. I lay on a thyme-covered slope above the bay, having come quietly through the trees, and watched the cottages below for any sign of unusual life. But a woman in black was the only person I saw. Now I examined it, it seemed an unlikely place for Conchis’s “assistants” to live. It was so open, so easy to watch. After a while I wound my way down to the cottages. A child in a doorway saw me coming through the olives and called, and then the entire populalion of the tiny hamlet appeared—four women and half a dozen children, unmistakably islanders. With the usual peasant hospitality they offered me a little saucer of quince jam and a thimbleful of raki as well as the glass of cistern water I requested. Their men were all away far to the south, fishing. I said I was going to see o kyrios Conchis, and their surprise seemed perfectly genuine. Did he ever visit them? Their heads all went back swiftly together, as if the idea was unheard of. I had to listen to the story of the execution again—at least the oldest woman launched out into a welter of words among which I heard “mayor” and “Germans"; and the children raised their arms like guns.

Maria, then? They saw her, of course? But no, they never saw her. She is not a Phraxiot, one of them said.

Then the music, the songs in the night? They looked at one another. What songs? I was not surprised, Veiy probably they went to bed and woke with the sun.