John Fowles: The Magus

Downstairs I lost her for a time. A group formed round her. I went and got a drink and passed it over someone’s shoulder; talk about Cannes, about Collioure and Valencia. Jazz had started in the back room and I went into the doorway to watch. Outside the window, past the dark dancers, were dusk trees, a pale amber sky. I had a sharp sense of alienation from everyone around me. A girl with spectacles, myopic eyes in an insipidly pretty face, one of those soulful-intellectual creatures born to be preyed on and exploited by artistic phonies, smiled coyly from the other side of the room. She was standing alone and I guessed that she was the “nice English girl” Margaret had picked for me. Her lipstick was too red, and she was as familiar as a species of bird. I turned away from her as from a cliff-edge, and went and sat on the floor by a bookshelf. There I pretended to read a paperback.

Alison knelt beside me. “I’m sloshed. That whisky. Hey, have some of this.” It was gin. She sat beside me. “Well?” I thought of that white-faced English girl with the red smudged mouth. At least this girl was alive; brown, crude, but alive.

“I’m so glad you returned tonight.”

“Yes?” She sipped her gin and gave me a small gray look.

“Ever read this?”

“Let’s cut corners. To hell with literature. You’re clever and I’m beautiful. Now let’s talk about what we really are.”

The gray eyes teased; or dared.

“Who’s Pete?”

“He’s a pilot.” She mentioned a famous airline. “We live together. Off and on. That’s all.”

“Ah.”

“He’s doing a conversion course. In the States.” She turned and gave me that incongruously sincere look. “I’m free. And I’m going to stay free.” It wasn’t clear whether she was talking about her fiancé or for my benefit; or whether freedom was her pose or her truth.

“What do you do?”

“Things. Reception mostly.”

“Hotels?”

“Anything.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve applied for a new job. Air hostess. That’s why I went off polishing French and Spanish these last weeks.”

“Can I take you out tomorrow?”

A heavy Australian came and leant on a door opposite. “Oh Charlie,” she cried across the room. “He’s just lent me his bath. It’s nothing.”

Charlie nodded his head slowly, then pointed an admonitory stubby finger. He pushed himself off the doorjamb and went unsteadily away.

“Charming.”

She turned over her hand and looked at the palm.

“Did you spend two and a half years in a Jap prisoner-of-war camp?”

“No. Why?”

“Charlie did.”

“Poor Charlie.”

There was a silence.

“Australians are boors, and Englishmen are prigs.”

“If you—”

“I make fun of him because he’s in love with me and he likes it. But no one else ever makes fun of him. If I’m around.”

There was a silence.

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

“About tomorrow.”

“No. About you.”

Gradually—I was offended at having been taught a lesson in the art of not condescending—she made me talk about myself. She did it by asking blunt questions, and by brushing aside empty answers. I began to talk about being a brigadier’s son, about loneliness, and for once mostly not to glamorize myself but simply to explain. I discovered two things about A]ison: that behind her bluntness she was an expert coaxer, a handler of men, a sexual diplomat, and that her attraction lay as much in her candor as in her having a pretty body, an interesting face, and knowing it. She had a very un-English ability to suddenly flash out some truth, some seriousness, some quick surge of interest. I fell silent. I knew she was watching me. After a moment I looked at her. She had a shy, thoughtful expression; a new self.

“Alison, I like you.”

“I think I like you. You’ve got a nice mouth.”

“You’re the first Australian girl I’ve ever met.”

“Poor Pom.”

All the lights except one dim one had long ago been put out, and there were the usual surrendered couples on all available furniture and floor space. The party had paired off. Maggie seemed to have disappeared, and Charlie lay fast asleep on the bedroom floor. We danced. We began close, and became closer. I kissed her hair, and then her neck, and she pressed my hand, and moved a little closer still.

“Shall we go upstairs?”

“You go first. I’ll come in five minutes.” She slipped away. I went up. Ten minutes passed, and then she was in the doorway, a faintly apprehensive smile on her face. She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice.

She came in, I shut the door, and we were kissing at once, for a minute, two minutes, pressed back against the door in the darkness. There were steps outside, and a sharp double rap. Alison put her hand over my mouth. Another double rap; and then another. Hesitation, heartbeats. The footsteps went away.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on, come on.”

It was late the next morning when I woke. She was still asleep, with her creole-brown back turned to me. I went and made some coffee and took it into the bedroom. She was awake then, staring at me over the top of the bedclothes. It was a long expressionless look that rejected my smile and my greeting and ended abruptly in her turning and pulling the bedclothes over her head. She began to cry. I sat beside her and tried rather amateurishly to comfort her, but she kept the sheet pulled tight over her head; so I gave up patting and making noises and went back to my coffee. After a while she sat up and asked for a cigarette. And then if I would lend her a shirt. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes. She pulled on the shirt, went to the bathroom, and brushed me aside with a shake of her hair when she came and got back into bed again. I sat at the foot of the bed and watched her drink her coffee.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m a whore. Do you know how many men I’ve slept with the last two months?”

“Fifty?”

She didn’t smile.

“If I’d slept with fifty I’d just be an honest professional.”

“Have some more coffee.”

“Half an hour after I first saw you last night I thought, if I was really vicious I’d get into bed with him.”

“Thank you very much.”

“I could tell about you from the way you talked.”

“Tell what?”

“You’re the affaire de peau type. You’re already thinking, how the hell am I going to get rid of this stupid Australian slut.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t blame you.”

A silence.

“I was sloshed,” she said. “So tired.”

A possibility occurred to me. “Catholic?”

She gave me a long look, then shook her head and shut her eyes.

“I’m sorry. You’re nice. You’re terribly nice in bed. Only now what?”

“I’m not used to this.”

“I know, I know. I’m impossible.”

“It’s not a crime. You’re just proving you can’t marry this chap.”

“What I’m proving is that I can’t marry.”

“That’s absurd. Good God, at your age.”

“I’m twenty-three. How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Don’t you begin to feel things about yourself you know are you? Are going to be you forever? That’s what I feel. I’m going to be a whore forever.”

“Come on.”

“I tell you what Pete’s doing right now. You know, he writes and tells me. 'I took a piece out last Friday and we had a wuzzamaroo.'”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means 'and you sleep with anyone you like, too.” She stared out of the window. “We lived together, all this spring. You know, we get on, we’re like brother and sister when we’re out of bed.” She gave me a slanting look through the cigarette smoke. “You don’t know what it’s like waking up with a man you didn’t even know this time yesterday. It’s losing something. Not just what all girls lose.”